AFTER MIDNIGHT celebrates the music and movement of a thrilling Harlem evening (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through August 31, $60-$147
877-250-2929
www.aftermidnightbroadway.com
Initially conceived for New York City Center’s Encores! by series artistic director Jack Viertel, After Midnight is now lighting up Broadway, bringing Harlem to the Great White Way in a dazzling display of music and dance. The Brooks Atkinson Theatre has been transformed into the famed jazz clubs of the Golden Age, the Savoy, the Cotton Club, and the Sugar Cane, as a talented cast of more than two dozen singers and dancers shimmy the night away to the tunes of Duke Ellington. The show is hosted by Dulé Hill (Stick Fly, Psych), who is first seen in a too-cool white suit, leaning against a lamppost, poetically introducing the audience to a Harlem night to remember. Backed by the sixteen-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars, the performers strut their stuff for ninety glorious, uninterrupted minutes, playing directly to the audience as if in an intimate nightclub. Carmen Ruby Floyd, Rosena M. Hill Jackson, and Bryonha Marie Parham are caught “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Adriane Lenox warns that “Women Be Wise” and later declares “Go Back to Where You Stayed Last Night,” and Julius “iGlide” Chisolm and Virgil “Lil’ O” Gadson slide their way through “Hottentot Tot.” Hill carries a red balloon in “I’ve Got the World on a String,” while he joins Daye, Cedric Neal, Monroe Kent III, and T. Oliver Reid for “Ain’t It de Truth?” highlighted by playful vertical and horizontal group shuffles.
Flashy Broadway musical honors the legacy of Duke Ellington and the nightlife of Harlem (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Director and choreographer Warren Carlyle (Chaplin, Finian’s Rainbow) channels Alvin Ailey’s classic “Night Creature” throughout the evening, the moves and grooves often made bigger than life with Isabel Toledo’s stunning costumes. Among the standout dancers are Karine Plantadit (Come Fly Away), who solos on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and Phillip Attmore and Daniel J. Watts, who have a heated tap-off. The show features several spots for a special guest; through February 9, Fantasia Barrino (American Idol, The Color Purple) makes a star turn singing such sultry numbers as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Stormy Weather,” with k. d. lang taking over February 11 and Babyface and Toni Braxton on March 18. While other current Broadway jukebox musicals — Beautiful, Motown, and A Night with Janis Joplin — struggle when they focus on the narrative, the story of After Midnight is the grandeur of the music itself, resulting in a hot evening of jumping, jiving, and wailing, Harlem style.
“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (
In 1982, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman followed Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal on a five-week tour of Europe as the cutting-edge troupe traveled to Milan, Venice, and Avignon. “I was deeply touched by her lengthy performances that mingle in your head,” Akerman says at the beginning of the resulting documentary, “One Day Pina Asked…,” continuing, “I have the feeling that the images we brought back do not convey this very much and often betray it.” Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Je tu il elle) needn’t have worried; her fifty-seven-minute film, made for the Repères sur la Modern Dance French television series, is filled with memorable moments that more than do justice to Bausch’s unique form of dance theater. From 1973 up to her death in 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, Bausch created compelling works that examined the male-female dynamic and the concepts of love and connection with revolutionary stagings that included spoken word, unusual costuming, an unpredictable movement vocabulary, and performers of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Akerman captures the troupe, consisting of twenty-six dancers from thirteen countries, in run-throughs, rehearsals, and live presentations of Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me), Nelken (Carnations), 1980, Kontakthof, and Walzer, often focusing in on individual dancers in extreme close-ups that reveal their relationship with their performance. Although Bausch, forty at the time, is seen only at the beginning and end of the documentary, her creative process is always at center stage. At one point, dancer Lutz Förster tells a story of performing Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” in sign language in response to Bausch’s asking the troupe to name something they’re proud of. Förster, who took over as artistic director in April 2013, first performs the song for Akerman, then later is shown performing it in Nelken. (Bausch fans will also recognize such longtime company members as Héléna Pikon, Nazareth Panadero, and Dominique Mercy.)
