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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Burn the Floor — Hot Feat
By Harry Haun
04 Aug 2009
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Burn the Floor stars Karina Smirnoff and Maksim Chmerkovskiy; director Jason Gilkison, Susan Lucci, and Jack Noseworthy with Sergio Trujillo
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Five, six, seven, eight! The Broadway season kicked in with a ferocious wake-up call Aug. 2 as Burn the Floor hit the Longacre dancin' — dancin' up a heat wave.
Once upon a time, ballroom dancing had the image of a couple in formal attire gliding with slow, deliberate grace around a room on elegant black-and-white tile.
But no more. Perish the thought. Stomp on it. Ballroom, as practiced now aboard (and, in this case, Down Under), has made a down-and-dirty descent into a competitive dancesport. Very competitive: A full-blown battle of the sexes blazes and rages in Burn the Floor, rather resembling rough sex, choreographed.
All-dance shows have visited Jerome Robbins' Broadway before — thank you, Mr. Fosse and Ms. Tharp as well — but this is the first to hit the Main Stem since ballroom, in the "international style," became a popular La-Z Boy inactivity via reality-TV shows like "Dancing With the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance."
It came from Peter Allen's Oz — Australia — surfacing first for Elton John's 50th birthday party in 1997, then a year later becoming a movable feast that dropped anchor in major ports of call the world over (including a brief 2000 brush with Radio City Music Hall), finally hitting Broadway as a decade-old overnight success.
"40 Feet 40" is the dance-card here: ten couples tearing through the ten styles that comprise international competitive dancing — evenly divided between Standard Dances (waltz, foxtrot, Viennese waltz, tango, quickstep) and Latin Dances (cha cha, samba, paso doble, rumba, jive). All of these are executed by champion dancers.
The show's director and choreographer, 43-year-old Jason Gilkison, is championship stock himself and has been at it since age seven. His first dance partner, Peta Roby, is, in fact, his associate producer on the show. "We've danced together 36 years. It has been a wonderful thing to share this journey with her," he said on opening night.
Then, there's the no-small-matter of upholding the family honor. "My grandfather was a bit of a pioneer in ballroom in Australia," Gilkison beamed a little wistfully. "He came from Scotland and opened the first dance school in Australia in 1931."
Burn the Floor has "existed as a show for ten years, and this version of the show probably for four years now. The original director was Anthony van Laast" [which sounds like "Lust" if an Aussie says it] "and I was choreographer. He passed the reins to me a year later, and I've been director and choreographer ever since. It's always been a dream of mine to bring ballroom back on Broadway."
About a third of the company, he estimates, is Australian, and the rest is an international smorgasbord. All are hard-charging and determined. "They're nonstop, these guys," Gilkison said, "and, yet, they give 120 percent on stage. They love what they do so that makes my job very easy when they're that passionate."
And they are that passionate, coming at each other with eyes flared and teeth bared. How, one can't help but ask, do you direct that level of intensity?
"This is a really interesting bunch," he admitted. "I want them to be playing themselves in the choreography that I give them so it's very important that they bring their own instincts to the dance styles that I do. That's how the ballroom dancers exist. They obviously have to have a very high level of the ballroom technique to be able to feel comfortable enough to play themselves in this type of show. The traffic is just incredible. They've got a very strong feeling about showing ballroom dancing now how it is, and I think they've very passionate about showing how it has changed over the years. This is an art form that was popular when their grandparents were alive, and this is the way they now interpret these dances."
The verdict is in with at least two professional ballroom judges. Nigel Lythgoe of "SYTYCD" and Carrie Ann Inaba of "Dancing With the Stars" have momentarily defected from the judiciary ranks and, betraying some profoundly partisan feelings, joined the moneybags who are producing the show.
"I'd seen the show in London, back in 1999," Lythgoe recalled, "and I'm just really pleased and confident enough to produce it for Broadway. I know Jason very well, and I think he has done something new to ballroom dancing — made it much more accessible to the general public — so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for it."
Inaba's extreme prejudice in favor of Burn the Floor dates back even farther. "I saw a video of it when it came out in '97, and I fell in love with it," she said. "I was already a fan of the show for ten years when they invited me to be a producer.
"We stripped it down to the bare minimum so that dance is the essence of the show — the dance and the dancers. It's a show unlike any other because it really puts the dancers in the foreground. We have two beautifully talented singers [Ricky Rojas and Rebecca Tapia], we got musicians, but it's really all about the dancing, and the visceral reaction that the audience will get when they see it." Continued...
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