Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
✭✭✭✩✩
choreographed by Susan Strohman, book by John Weidman
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
November 5-December 15, 2002
In a year of very slim pickings, Contact won 2000 Tony Award for Best New Musical. It is not a musical. Yes, there is dancing and some dialogue. But there is no singing, no original music, no live band, no full-length story. What Contact really is is a mixed programme of dance-mime telling three thematically related stories to an eclectic mix of pre-recorded music ranging from Bizet to the Squirrel Nut Zippers. While the first two pieces that make up the first half of the evening are not fully successful, the third and longest piece that gives the show its name is so fabulous it completely eclipses what came before.
All three stories concern the fantasy of a woman desired by several men.
In the first characters from Fragonard's painting "The Swing" shed gentility and devolve with little finesse into a kind of sexual circus act. The second shows the fantasies of the mentally brutalized wife (Meg Howry) of dangerously possessive husband (Adam Dennheisser). The tone is so ill-focussed the piece seems, until the last moment, to make light of a disturbing relationship.
The final piece starts with the clichéd scenario of the materially successful, personally unhappy male, Michael Wiley, played as likeably inept by Daniel McDonald. Wiley, a non-dancer, is smitten by the reigning queen of a swing club (Colleen Dunn) and yearns for "contact". Dunn is truly dazzling, at rest or in fluid motion, perfectly embodying the smouldering beneath her icy cool. Here, at last, where dancers, dance, story and tone connect the effect is electric.
Stroman's endlessly inventive choreography seamlessly blends many forms of dance from ballroom to jazz to ballet into an idiom both witty and muscular. She is so adept at conveying tensions building between characters through movement that Weidman's uninteresting words clunk and distract.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2002-10-21.
Photo: Sean Martin Hingston and Colleen Dunn. ©2002 Paul Kolnick.
2002-11-14
Contact