Swayze hoofs it
A great deal, as it happens. His nicely rumpled, down-on-his-luck Nathan Detroit is a terrific fit with Michael Grandage's splendid, sepia-style production. But then, when it comes to hoofing, the guy has serious form: Having trained with Harkness and Joffrey ballets, he was a principal dancer with the Eliot Feld company.
That's a serious bonus in a production where direction and choreography are so thrillingly indivisible. Choreographers will argue their work isn't just showy dance, it's about character, but Rob Ashford really does use dance to express, develop and drive drama. Swayze's physical finesse thus lends spin and buoyancy to Nathan's wheeling-dealing.
He's not the only replacement with serious dance chops. Adam Cooper, erstwhile Royal Ballet star and original lead of Matthew Bourne's erotically charged "Swan Lake," has an alluringly light touch as Sky Masterson and even sings the score more strongly than his predecessor, Ewan McGregor.
Fifteen months into a run, another production might have tapped such dance potential for added pizzazz. Grandage's seriously strong revival impressively has refused to succumb to expectation. This team has held tightly to its winning formula: revealing the dramatic essence of the show rather than showing off.
Indeed, the only novelty is the unexpected return of the old-fashioned principle of promoting someone from the chorus to the lead.
That famously happened to Shirley MacLaine when she took over from injured Carol Haney in "The Pajama Game." Now Kelly Price, formerly one of Miss Adelaide's Hot Box girls, is an amusingly erect yet fragile Sarah Brown. Her comic, touching transition from naive self-satisfaction to true understanding, via hilariously drunken jealousy in Ashford's joyous Havana sequence, is worth the price of admission.
'Bent' on newbies
Song 'n' dance isn't the genre that immediately springs to mind when you consider "Bent," Martin Sherman's 1979 drama about personal defiance under the Nazis. Yet the character of drag performer Greta does sing a nightclub number, "Streets of Berlin." The composer for Daniel Kramer's forthcoming revival will be Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe. More intriguingly still, Kramer is playing a casting gamble. Opposite the previously announced Alan Cumming will be Chris New. If you haven't heard of him there's a damn good reason: This is his first job straight out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
This isn't the first time this has happened to Sherman. When his play about Isadora Duncan "When She Danced" opened in the West End in 1989, an unknown left RADA to take one of the leading roles. That was Michael Sheen, now in rehearsal playing David Frost opposite Frank Langella's Nixon for Grandage at the Donmar and starring as Tony Blair in Stephen Frears' forthcoming movie "The Queen."
Beckett on Broadway?
The prize, meanwhile, for Rialto rumor of the week goes to the whisper that, of all people, Samuel Beckett might be making it to Broadway via Michael Gambon and Lee Evans. They made a mesmerizing, vaudeville-style double-act in Matthew Warchus' hit production of Beckett's "Endgame" in London. Its producer Sonia Friedman, in Gotham to wrap "Faith Healer," is believed to be in discussion with managements including the Shuberts to mount the show there.
