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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Rockettes an easy match for their hype
At least one hyped event of the season besides Thanksgiving dinner has turned out to be as advertised: “The Radio City Music Hall Spectacular.”
Starring the high-kicking, but also toe-tapping, Santa-impersonating, manger-visiting, tour bus-riding and soldier-marching Rockettes, the touring version of New York City’s winter tradition had its local premiere Tuesday, Nov. 25, at Wright State University’s Nutter Center.
The first of three performances — there were two more on Wednesday — featured the famed dance corps as expected. If a first-rate cast of 24 is a smaller contingent than in New York, their dancing and personality as the centerpiece of a wonderfully staged, beautifully dressed variety show lived up to their reputation.
The 90 non-stop minutes opened with the Rockettes as reindeer. Topped with flashing antlers and hitched to a never more understandably jolly Santa’s sleigh, they led a trip to the North Pole, a journey suggested by projected images on a screen stretching the width of the stage behind them.
The screen was used to more convincing effect to during a tour of New York on a double-decker bus with the Rockettes as passengers whose every move had been choreographed, and as the sky over Bethlehem.
The holiday production also incorporated an orchestra of musicians arranged above and at both sides of the main stage, six singers who helped fill the time for major costume and set changes, live animals including a camel for the living nativity scene near the end of the show, ice skaters, an extra contingent of male and female dancers, a girl in pointe shoes who portrayed Clara during a “Nutcracker” scene brimming with dancing bears, and a subplot featuring two young brothers whose skepticism about Santa evaporated following a traditional lesson about giving.
They and Santa flew high over the audience, as did streamers fired from cannons. But it was the Rockettes’ combination of grace, precision, happiness and sex appeal that earned top billing.
They displayed several variations of their trademark kick line, but their best number was the one in which they marched stiff legged as toy soldiers, only to be felled like slow-motion dominoes by a gunner who had the consideration to hurry behind the last woman in line and place a pillow there for her to land on.
If not the equal of what you can see at Radio City, it had to be close.
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