Ten Cents a Dance
Conceived and directed by John Doyle, Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart; Scenic Design, Scott Pask; Costume Design, Ann Hould-Ward; Lighting Design, Jane Cox; Sound Design, Dan Moses-Schreier; Wig Designer, Paul Huntley; Movement Consultant, Dontee Kiehn; Production Stage Manager, Eileen Ryan Kelly; Musical Director & Orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell
CAST: Diana DiMarzio (Miss Jones 4), Malcolm Gets (Johnny), Donna McKechnie (Miss Jones 5), Lauren Molina (Miss Jones 1), Jane Pfitsch (Miss Jones 2), Jessica Tyler Wright (Miss Jones 3)
Performances through August 28 at Williamstown Theatre Festival/Main Stage; Box Office 413-597-3400 or www.wtfestival.org
Williamstown Theatre Festival is doing something daring and increasingly rare these days - presenting a new musical on the Main Stage for the first time in its history. The American premiere of Ten Cents a Dance, conceived and directed by Tony Award-winner John Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company), features more than three dozen songs from the canon of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart performed by six actor-musicians in Doyle's signature style, telling the romantic story with their musical instruments as well as their voices. Divided into five episodes, the songs connect to each other thematically, despite their origins from a variety of source material.
The music of Rodgers and Hart is extraordinary, but it does not have the capacity to lift Ten Cents a Dance above the artistic level of a taxi dancer who can merely dream of twirling and leaping like a ballerina. Or, as in the case of the taxi dancer Miss Jones, represented by the five spitfire actresses here, she may dream of the man who got away, piano-playing crooner Johnny. Either way, my lament is that there is no dancing to speak of in Ten Cents a Dance, and with Tony Award-winner Donna McKechnie as Miss Jones Five, it seems a downright shame not to see her do more than a few steps with Malcolm Gets or the other women in the ensemble. The show never feels static as there is continual movement around the stage (even the piano is on a turntable), but - hello - the story is about this girl who was a dancer.
As for the story, Johnny (Gets) sits at the piano wistfully recalling his lifelong love of Miss Jones, singing with the five women who portray her at different stages of her life. Lauren Molina is sweet, infatuated Miss Jones One; Jane Pfitsch is a little less innocent as Miss Jones Two; a little older and wiser is Jessica Tyler Wright's Miss Jones Three; Diana DiMarzio is the hard-boiled Miss Jones Four; and McKechnie's Five has seen it all. The conceit is that the women exist in Johnny's imagination, so he spends more than a little time appearing deep in thought or woeful between songs, and he often seems freaked out when they engage with him. However, they don't converse (this is not a book musical), so thoughts and emotions are telegraphed by longing looks and piercing gazes. This grows tedious and is sometimes kind of creepy, especially when a song ends and the women freeze like mannequins, implying that Johnny is either losing his mind or is in love with an inanimate object (shades of the film "Lars and The Real Girl").
