On the ‘Swing!’ Shift

Broadway Trivia Quiz: What song figures prominently in three currently running, Tony-nominated dance musicals? Answer: “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the driving jazz standard by Louis Prima, Andy Razaf and Leon Berry that helps sum up the creative stance of “Fosse,” “Contact” and “Swing!”

In “Fosse” (restaged from “Dancin’ ”), the song holds together a recapitulation of all the dance idioms and techniques that formed Bob Fosse’s complex style. In “Contact,” it serves director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s ambitious dramatic purposes, interweaving illusion, reality, character issues and pure flash.

But in “Swing!,” which opened a seven-week run on Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre, it’s simply one final opportunity for the show’s cadre of inexhaustible virtuosi to grind their expertise in your face.

As directed and choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, with production supervision by Jerry Zaks, this plotless show rides the current craze for swing-dancing with great surety and flair as long as dance remains dominant and the mood bright. The high-energy group choreography is invariably sensational, with such numbers as “Sing, Sing, Sing” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (both credited to Lindy specialist Ryan Francois) featuring high gymnastic throws: jitterbug with wings.

The highest throws, however, occur in “Bill’s Bounce,” a novelty quartet that finds Dana Solimando and Carrie Helms wearing elastic aerial harnesses that allow them to rebound off the floor and soar toward the top of the proscenium, partnered from below by the show’s two finest males: the brilliant Scott Fowler and the powerful Warren Adams.

The only dancing that actually stops the show, however, needs no special effects but simply displays international Western-style champions Gary and Lisa McIntyre in amazingly fast, intricate turning combinations to “Boogie Woogie Country.” You may have seen the McIntyres on TNN cable, and here they are in the flesh: authentic contemporary swing icons who offer a brand of endearingly relaxed bravura that nobody else in the cast dares emulate.

With nearly all the dancing aggressively pumped up, it’s the song stagings that provide the show’s most intimate moments. These interludes range from the seduction-by-trombone depicted in “Cry Me a River” by Sarah Jane Nelson and Jonathan Arons to the recurring wooing duets for Ann Crumb and Alan H. Green that often deftly incorporate fragments of several songs in imaginative stream-of-consciousness arrangements--”I Won’t Dance” and “Here Comes the Bride” in the middle of Duke Ellington’s “Bli-Blip,” for instance.

Even when overly cute conceptually, these song stagings sustain “Swing!” through its weakest moments: the singing itself, which in this new touring production never sounds more than passable and often descends to painfully toneless or off-pitch or tremulous renditions of jazz and pop classics.

Set designer Thomas Lynch makes “Swing!” a ballroom musical, with most of its 30 segments performed in front of a bandstand holding the tight, tireless eight-member Gotham City Gates led by Boko Suzuki. But, starting from the very beginning, when the likable Charlie Marcus revisits “Sophisticated Ladies’ ” turf without the pipes of a Gregory Hines or the late Harold Nicholas, that bandstand launches one vocal disappointment after another--especially when the mood grows serious.

Beyond Nelson’s unfeeling “Skylark” and Crumbs’ squally “Blues in the Night,” an ill-focused World War II-era USO sequence proves particularly problematic, with nearly everyone except Fowler out of their depth in trying to show servicemen enjoying one last stateside dance before departure to who knows what.

When Fowler remembers his girlfriend back home and Helms materializes for a dream duet, we’re suddenly on territory that choreographer Paul Taylor definitively explored in “Company B,” a 1991 suite to Andrews Sisters records that has been performed by nine American dance companies and in two TV versions.

Taylor’s dream lovers danced to relive their relationship; Taylor-Corbett’s begin with the same intention but get lost in cheesy showpiece-lifts. So it’s a relief when the show returns to upbeat, presentational choreography: the one thing it does really well.

Be warned: When “Swing!” celebrates the dance impulse that fueled much of American pop culture for more than two decades, it jumps, jives and wails. But whenever it tries to say, or sing, something about human emotions, it don’t mean a thing.

* “Swing!” continues through Jan. 14 at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Today, 8 p.m. Also Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Additional performances: Sunday, Dec. 17 and 31, 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, Dec. 21, Jan. 4 and 11, 2 p.m. $35 to $70. (213) 628-2772.