Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

Come Fly Away to Close September 5th

 
This past Broadway season was unusual in at least one respect: there wasn't a flurry of closing notices immediately following the Tony Awards, at least with respect to musicals. Which was pretty surprising considering the middling quality of the new-musical offerings this year, as well as the disappointing sales most of those shows have been experiencing.

But the first shoe has officially dropped. The Tony-less Come Fly Away will end its run at the Marquis Theater on September 5th. At that time the show will have played 187 performances and 26 previews.

Regular readers may recall that I virtually loathed the Come Fly Away when I saw it in March. (Read my review here.) I found the show beyond tedious, and not because it was a jukebox musical, nor because there was not one word spoken throughout the show. (Apart from some Spanish extemporizing from one of the dancers.)

I just didn't see any differentiation among the faceless dancers on stage, which made it hard for me to care about what happened to them on the seemingly endless night at a dance club that the show depicts. I'm normally a huge modern-dance enthusiast, and I've enjoyed much of Twyla Tharp's work in the past, but here even her energetic eclecticism wasn't doing it for me. Perhaps if I were a bigger fan of Frank Sinatra and his music, I might have been more predisposed to enjoying the proceedings, but in truth I really shouldn't need to be a fan to appreciate a well-crafted show. And, in my most humble opinion, Come Fly Away was anything but.

The closing notices for Come Fly Away promise (as these notices always do) that the show will have a national tour, which I suppose could actually materialize given the respective fan bases for Sinatra and, to a far lesser extent, Twyla Tharp. Lately, we've been witnessing a succession of tours from shows that didn't succeed on Broadway, but have enough of a built-in brand to fill touring houses, at least for a week or two. Young Frankenstein and Shrek are currently making their mediocre way across the country, and word has started to leak out about casting for a 9 to 5 tour.

Will these tours tip the financial scales for these shows toward profitability? For Young Frankenstein and Shrek, it's highly doubtful, given the profuse amounts of money the producers poured into the them. For 9 to 5 and Come Fly Away, finishing in the black may be slightly more attainable, but certainly not a guarantee.

Review - Come Fly Away at the Marquis Theatre

I love modern dance. I genuinely do. I'm not a big fan of traditional ballet, which I find a bit staid and predictable. But I thrill to the work of the modern masters, such as Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, and I try to catch Pilobolus and Alvin Ailey whenever they're in town.

So when I say that I found Twyla Tharp' s new Broadway dance show Come Fly Away beyond tedious, it's not that I'm some musical-theater purist who resolutely demands words and singing in order to find a show entertaining, or accept something as a musical. I've said many times that, if the creators of a particular show are calling it a musical, then I'm all for calling it a musical. The question is: is the show itself any good? 

And, as far as I'm concerned, Come Fly Away is about as far away from good as any show I've seen since Lestat. Between acts at Come Fly Away last weekend, I couldn't resist the urge to vent my frustration on Twitter. "I've never walked out of a show at intermission," I tweeted. "Come Fly Away is making me want to." One of my Twitter followers responded, asking "Well, did you like Movin' Out?"

I may be reading too much into this, but the implication that I took from the question was that one has to appreciate this particular type of storytelling to "get" Twyla's shows. Well, I didn't like Movin' Out. (Read my Movin' Out review) But it wasn't that I don't appreciate dance as a storytelling medium. It's that I didn't like the show itself. Movin' Out didn't tell me enough about these characters as people to really make me care about their stories. And the dance, I felt, reflected precious little of Tharp's trademark eclecticism. There was only one sequence that I found genuinely stirring: that of the soldier's plight in Vietnam. Otherwise. Movin' Out left me cold and bored.

Likewise Come Fly Away. The show centers around four interchangeable couples spending an eternity...er, night at a particular nightclub. And therein lies the two central problems with the show: the characters are characterless and the setting is stagnant. The entire show seems to consist of a never-ending succession of characters meeting up, splitting up, making each other jealous, and reconciling. Again and again. Pas de deux after pas de deux. Tharp hasn't included enough of a distinction among the four couples to make us care who they are or bother to make the effort to create such distinctions ourselves. Could she possibly be making some trenchant social comment about the interchangeable nature of relationships and the mind-numbing tedium of serial monogamy? If so, she's succeeded admirably.

As you may know, Come Fly Away features the song catalog -- and recorded vocal stylings -- of Frank Sinatra. There's a live orchestra onstage, as well as a female vocalist, presumably to lend an authentic big-band-era air to the proceedings. One might say, "Well, that's the problem with these songbook shows. You can't tell a good story with a series of preexisting songs." I don't buy that. I think Come Fly Away could have worked. I was told that, during previews, the show's producers knew that major changes needed to be made, but everyone was too scared of Twyla to sit her down and spell things out. Since I saw the show the weekend before it opened, I'm going to have to assume that, if any changes finally came, they were of no avail.

So, couldn't one see Come Fly Away and simply enjoy the dancing? Alas, for the most part the dance isn't interesting or distinctive enough to justify a trip to the Marquis on its own merit. There were a few numbers that, for me, almost made the show worth seeing. "That's Life" had a rough-and-tumble athleticism. "My Way" brought the various couples together into an almost fugue-like morass of energetic flow and punctuation. The highlight of the show for me was the segment with Dave Brubeck's "Take Five." It was the one number that seemed like dance for dance's sake, and didn't seem to get bogged down in conveying some labored point about the participants, which is ironic given the overall intended narrative impulse of the piece. (I'm still not exactly sure what "Take Five" has to do with Frank Sinatra. Anyone?) 

I've been toying recently with instituting some kind of rating system for my reviews. This was something that I did when I started this blog back in 2006, but for some reason I stopped. The fabulous West End Whingers have recently created their own delightfully appropriate system. A number of my blogger colleagues use a star-rating system, including Gratuitous Violins and Steve on Broadway. But since I'm an academic, it seems rather fitting that I should use the good old reliable letter-grade system. So, by way of reintroduction, I hereby bestow the following grade upon Come Fly Away: 

GRADE: D minus (Not an abject failure, but perilously close to being held back a semester)

Come Fly Away Will Play the Marquis

As closing announcements proliferate, and the remaining Broadway shows face the prospect of a bleak midwinter, we're also hearing about new musicals to step in and fill the void.

The new Twyla Tharp dance show, formerly titled Come Fly With Me, now bearing the moniker Come Fly Away, will begin performances at the Marquis Theater in March. Similar to Tharp's previous two efforts -- the successful Movin' Out and the disastrous The Times They Are a-Changin' -- Come Fly Away is a songbook show, this time featuring the music of Frank Sinatra.

Although the show itself is relatively new, Tharp actually has a long history with the music of Frank Sinatra, having created numerous pieces set to Sinatra recordings in the early 1980s, including Nine Sinatra Songs and Sinatra Suite, the latter with Mikhail Baryshnikov. But have no fear, musicians' union, for this won't be another Contact, a show that came under fire for eschewing an orchestra in favor of a piped-in jukebox soundtrack. Come Fly Away does indeed utilize recordings of the late Sinatra's voice, but the vocal tracks are backed by a live on-stage band playing some newly created orchestrations.

The show received some fairly solid reviews during its recent engagement at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, at which time it was still known as Come Fly With Me. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times called the show "exhilarating." Wendell Brock of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said "dazzling." And Frank Rizzo of Variety wrote that "even at this early stage" the show is "vibrant, engaging and, at times, thrilling." With notices like that, the producers would be fools not to bring the show to New York. Right?

Not so fast. As my friend Ken Davenport recently wrote about on his blog, The Producer's Perspective, out-of-town raves do not a Broadway blockbuster make. Ragtime got very strong reviews when it played DC, and now the Broadway production is closing at a significant loss. Finian's Rainbow got terrific notices during its Encores run last season, only to meet a similar fate to Ragtime. Perhaps the most extreme example is the now-legendary Glory Days, which came to New York almost entirely on the strength of Peter Marks' gushing review in The Washington Post. During previews, Glory Days struggled to garner an audience larger than 25% of the house, and then promptly folded on opening night. Whoops. 

Will Come Fly Away deliver on the promise of its advance notices? Will the new Twyla Tharp show be another Movin' Out or another The Times They Are a-Changin'? If it's the former, expect to see more from Twyla on Broadway. If it's the latter, well, it's probably back to the barre.