Class and Sex Appeal at Cleveland Play House
We’ve spent many happy hours on the couch watching the ten movies that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire made together. So it was with misgivings that we went to see Backwards in High Heels, the Ginger Rogers musical at Cleveland Play House. “How could anything live up to Ginger and Fred on the silver screen?” we wondered.
But having seen BiHH, we find ourselves asking a different question. “Why would any Ginger and Fred fan sit home watching old DVD’s when a loving, skillfully produced homage, a fresh, live show like BiHH is in town?”
BiHH focuses on a slice of Rogers’ life, from the Texas talent contest she won at age 14 to her Oscar for Kitty Foyle. As presented in BiHH, it’s a backstage biopic with hardly a bump as our Ginger rises through vaudeville’s Orpheum circuit and Broadway’s Girl Crazy to a Hollywood audition and a long string of movies before she deigns to partner with “Fred somebody.” The rest is show biz history.
Fortunately for the dramatic arc, BiHH acknowledges the close but turbulent relationship between Rogers and her mother. Another theme in the show was Rogers’ fight for personal respect and pay equity in what was then very much a man’s world. Nor was Rogers’ life lacking in personal folly. We’re referring to the 5 highly temporary husbands, a biographical detail BiHH sets to the song Change Partners. Our vote for the funniest ex-husband revealed below.
Any life is about playing the hand you’re dealt, but in retelling Rogers’ life story, BiHH gave itself a fistfull of aces – killer standards from the Great American Songbook – perennially popular songs strongly identified with Ginger and Fred. All these songs were cleverly worked into the BiHH telling of its story. Four original songs serve additional plot points.
Propelled by very good arrangements by Christopher McGovern and a live band in the pit directed and conducted by Tim Robertson, BiHH did not stint on the dancing. Act One Scene 1 began when Ginger entered wearing tap shoes and ended with an applause getting a cappella tap number by Ginger and the 3 men in the company.
Other than Ginger and her mother, the other performers take on multiple roles. It’s a small cast, consisting of only 3 women and 3 men, but it’s hard to imagine a more appealing bunch of triple threat hams. Anna Aimee White as Ginger was so cute, so pretty that we hardly noticed her awesome professionalism as she nailed every assignment – acting, singing, and especially dancing – in a way that was absolutely appropriate to this show. We liked her, felt comfortable with her; she carried the show.
Heather Lee as Ginger’s mother, Lela, came to BiHH from a Broadway run of Gypsy and her performance, we’ve read, was informed by her view of BiHH as “Gypsy-lite.” She saw stage mother Lela Rogers as more balanced than Mama Rose, never a frustrated performer but a writer, a working single mother, and a survivor. The fact that Lee doesn’t get to dance in BiHH perhaps emphasized her down to earth quality among a cast that sang and danced at the drop of a (top) hat.
The 3rd woman in the show, Christianne Tisdale, played a plethora of roles, both female and male, some minor — a script girl, a personal assistant – and some anything but minor – including a string of excruciatingly (in a good sense) priceless parodies of Ethel Merman, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich. We found Tisdale’s portrayal of Roger’s French husband, Jacques Bergerac, particularly choice (listen for the vibrato inevitable in francophone singers). Watch out for this girl; one minute she’s part of the scenery, the next minute she’s stealing the show.The 3 guys in the chorus, Matthew LaBanca, Benjie Randall, and James Patterson, seemed to be having a ball with Choreographer Patti Colombo’s pitch and period perfect choreography. Among their other duties, they too delivered parodies of Hollywood icons.
And who stepped into the tap shoes, white tie and tails of Fred Astaire? With balls of steel, Matthew LaBanca strode forth from his place in the chorus to portray the lighter than air, most-admired dancer of the 20th century. Can he dance and sing and charm like Fred Astaire? Can anyone? Not quite, but like any good performer LaBanca did what he could and let the audience’s imagination fill in the rest. Those who wish LaBanca’s Astaire danced just a little bit better should remember that in both concept and script, BiHH makes the Astaire character secondary to Rogers. She’s the one who can do everything he does… only backwards in high heels.
Regrets? We had a few. We kept looking (hoping) in vain for Matthew LaBanca’s Fred and Anna Aimee White’s Ginger to go flowing and whirling around the Bolton in a smaller scale version of what the real Ginger and Fred did on the gigantic sound stages of RKO Studios. That would have really shown off BiHH beautiful, period perfect costumes and sets. What if Choreographer Patti Colombo had said, “Matt, Anna, it’s wonderful. Now, can you add horizontal space to the equation? And use those stairs; the audience loves it when you dance on the stairs.”
It was nice, too, to see and hear it all up close and personal from everywhere in the house. We’re hoping the new venue at Playhouse Square is comparable in scale. Even though the Bolton was packed, we enjoyed the theater’s decent sightlines for dance.
BiHH has been touring since its 2007 premiere at Florida Stage where it sold out, breaking box office records before previews. Critical reception was more mixed, though, and the show went through various revisions and personnel changes until, reviews notwithstanding, we didn’t really know what to expect.
Whether we’d gone to see BiHH at the Bolton or not, the mere mention of live contemporary performances referencing Ginger and Fred would have set us searching for more. The Cleveland Play House website alerted us to a number of possibilities, notably the Tri-C musical theater project, which features a concert of songs associated with Astaire on Sun 1/23. Visit AstaireSongs for more info.
At the very least, we find ourselves dusting off those ballroom shoes and those tap shoes, taking another crack at dancing like Ginger and Fred as we watch those terrific films again.
[Photos by Tim Fuller.]
Catch a performance of Backwards in High Heels @ the Cleveland Play House now through Sun 1/30. Tickets are $65 and down. Students $10. Go to http://ClevelandPlayHouse.com or call 216-797-7000.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.