danceviewtimes

Vive le Fromage!

Radio City Christmas Spectacular
Radio City Music Hall, New York
December 14, 2006

By Tom Phillips
copyright 2006 by Tom Phillips

Most of our readers have probably never thought much about America’s longest-running, most popular Christmas show, dismissing the Radio City Christmas Spectacular as a cheesy production for tourists.  I was in that category too, until my curiosity was piqued by an article in The New York Times about the show’s new director and choreographer, Linda Haberman.  Now I say if this is cheese, then vive le fromage.

The Christmas Spectacular offers its audience a heady combination of technologies, old and new:  an elevator that orbits the orchestra from the pit to the rear of the stage and back; two mighty Wurlitzer organs; a mobile skating rink; a 3-D movie that flies us from the North Pole to Rockefeller Center; and the world’s largest LED screen, which provides a backdrop vivid as a state-of-the-art planetarium.  It also has some traditional elements drawn from the stage and the circus: camels, horses, dwarves, and a story line so thin that it can disappear anytime and never be missed.  But what this show is really all about is dancing—and the sensibility that puts dancing at the center is what makes it, under all the cheese, a class act. 

Haberman is an SAB alumna, by way of Broadway, and her aesthetic is Balanchine by way of Bob Fosse—the combination of classic lines and sexy polish that made both men masters of showbiz choreography.  Here she is working with a radical abstraction of Balanchine’s ideas  What are the Rockettes?  A ballet company made up entirely of beautiful young American women, with no principals or soloists at all. The corps is not just the star, the corps is everything. 

 The show begins with a new Haberman routine—the Rockettes as Santa’s reindeer, hitched up just like the dance-hall girls in “Western Symphony.” That segues seamlessly into the 3-D movie that takes us to New York for Haberman’s delectable new jazz number, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  This is where the Rockettes appear to take off in a new direction.  Instead of just dancing in a long line, they break into sub-groups, turned out in croise and efface in addition to their familiar kicks en face. We start to see individuals as well as the mass: one’s super-clean lines, another’s malleable torso, another’s smile. This is what Haberman means by dancing within a style but still being yourself, and it’s what Balanchine wanted from his corps dancers, too. As for the steps, at various times they looked like “Swan Lake,” “The Four Temperaments,” and “All That Jazz.”  There was also some horizontal action of the rib cage that looked like African dancing. The piece took seven and a half minutes, but it went by so fast — with a speeded-up reprise at the end — that I really want to see it again.

The rest of the choreography has been around for many years, but Haberman has reportedly sharpened and clarified the execution. That was evident in “The March of the Wooden Soldiers,” a masterful piece of minimalism where the dancers move shoulder to shoulder and aren’t even allowed to bend their knees. It’s a ballet without a plie, fascinating in the Busby Berkeley-like effects of the moving, revolving lines. Eerily, the dance ends by deconstructing itself into a pile of soldiers on the floor. Somehow it remains fun even as the Rockettes go down like dominos in slow motion and the music melts down into cacophony.  

For pure glamour in the style of the 1940s, you can’t beat the department store number, where the ladies start out as dummies in the window, then pop out to flash their gams and jiggle their platinum-blonde wigs. And for good clean sexy fun, they shake it all out as rag dolls in the final scene at Santa’s.

What’s not to like in this show?  Well, Santa’s lines are gratingly dumb. (I winced when he said he was “in the Christmas business.”) There’s the teddy-bear version of the Nutcracker, mercifully not too long. The Nativity pageant at the end is full of grace as long as the script sticks to the Gospel of Matthew, but not when it veers off into Christian triumphalism, in a swelling climax that ought to be retired. It was also a little hard to see past the people in front of me, who kept holding up their cell-phones to take flash photographs.

Still, the Christmas Spectacular should not be confused with the typical tourist spectacle—empty multi-media bombast designed to dull your senses and leave you craving a coke.  There’s tremendous amount to see on stage, but the focal point is always clear, and the transitions are smooth and sometimes breathtaking.  My favorite was when the orchestra flew away and the skating rink rose out of the pit, with an ice-dancing pair already in the middle of a whirling spin. Later, when Santa is looking for the rascally Ragdoll Rockettes, they’re all crowded into boxes looking down on the audience from the side — but the light doesn’t hit them until the exact moment we’re meant to look. That’s entertainment, folks. 

Because this show is for everyone, it is not for everyone. Militant atheists, strict Muslims and art purists should beware. Still, a word to the crowds flocking to Balanchine’s "Nutcracker" at Lincoln Center:  If one of the things you have loved about NYCB over the years is the sight of multiple beautiful girls dancing in lines—e.g. “Symphony in C,” “Symphony in Three Movements,” flowers and snowflakes—the Rockettes might just be a Christmas surprise.

The Radio City Christmas Spectacular continues through December 30.

Photos courtesy Radio City Music Hall.

Volume 4, No. 45
December 18, 2006

copyright ©2006 Tom Phillips
www.danceviewtimes.com

 

 

©2006 DanceView