‘Songs’ doesn’t remain the same; ‘Flashdance’ is more like ‘Silly Elliot’
BALLS IN THE AIR | A song about hoop dreams becomes a metaphor for gays in sports in ‘Songs for a New World.’ “(Photo by Mike Morgan)
Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of song cycles, the theatrical equivalent of rock concept albums. Typically, they are songs linked only because they come from the same composer, sometimes loosely connected with a common theme. If I wanna see that, I can go to a cabaret and listen to a single artist interpret whichever songs he or she wants. The idea of stringing together an author’s work seems more like a resume builder than a piece of theater. (Its value is mostly a question of whether the composer is one worth listening to.)
But we have to acknowledge that Uptown Players — from its Broadway Our Way fundraiser to shows like last year’s Hello Again and the prior season’s Forbidden Broadway — has proven itself the major exponent of the revue structure, and the best at making it work. And making is work is just what they do with Songs from a New World.
In Jason Robert Brown, you have a man with his feet firmly in the theater world, given a Tony Award for Parade. He knows his way around a song, which can rival Sondheim for complexity, but most of the time they seem to rely on predictable internal rhymes and changes in time signature. And they go on too long.
The pop song is really a 3½ minute miracle: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, coda. Brown often doubles that length, and songs go on way too long.
But something special happens in between the words: The images. Director Coy Covington and multimedia engineer H. Bart McGeehon have pulled together a video component that underscores all the songs, turning a song (sung by Walter Cunningham) about an inner-city basketball player determined to make it into a metaphor for Jason Collins’ coming out; Cunningham also takes the lead on the penultimate number, which makes the story of the AIDS quilt all the more relevant.
There are many such moments in this quick (less than 90 minutes) and evocative show, with great music direction by Kevin Gunter and a surprisingly simple yet versatile set from Rodney Dobbs. It gives life to the song cycle format as only Uptown Players can.
When it comes down to it, all any stage adaptation of the 1983 cheesefest Flashdance needs are legwarmers, the “Maniac” scene and a curly-haired welder who takes her bra off under her blouse. If they added unicorns and a laser fight on the moon, I probably couldn’t say with authority they got that wrong.
That’s because the film, for all its iconic imagery, is not a classic by any stretch; gay folks have long since associated Jennifer Beals more for The L Word than that.
The stage musical of Flashdance, now at Fair Park, has all of those images, plus Irene Cara’s Oscar-winning song, and still fails to resonate. Probably that’s because it has no sense of humor about itself, like The Wedding Singer or Xanadu. One line like, “Those legwarmers are so hot! They will never go out of fashion” would wink to the audience that this is a trifle, a time capsule meant to be joyously cheesy, not serious theater. Alack! No such luck.
In part, Flashdance can’t decide if it wants to be Gypsy (strippers with hearts of gold!), Burlesque or Billy Elliot — more like Silly Elliot, with an awkward subplot about one of the dancers named Gloria (and the equally awkward shoehorning in of the Laura Brannigan song) and a predictability even if you haven’t seen the film.
On the plus side, the young cast has the energy of a fusion reactor, and the men are all hot-bodied muscle hunks. Maybe that will distract you from songs so interchangeable, they might have been composed by Lego. But I doubt it.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition June 28, 2013.
