Dancing in the Dark
Old Globe Theatre, San Diego
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“They sure don’t remake ’em like they used to,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Vincente Minnelli’s classic 1953 film, The Band Wagon, was a musical about putting on a musical, pieced together using songs (but not the plot) from an earlier stage musical. Dancing in the Dark gives the material a further update. “As often happens with radical cosmetic surgery, the outcome isn’t born-again youthfulness but flagrant artificiality.” The Band Wagon was about as good as movie musicals get. Fred Astaire’s
performance as a “light-footed Hollywood has-been trying to regain Broadway glory” stands with best, and Cyd Charisse made a striking dance partner. Scott Bakula and Mara Davi, needless to say, are no match. Their lackluster romance “gets lost in the shuffle” here as production numbers, in-jokes, and plot complications multiply.
The thin story that Betty Comden and Adolph Green dreamed up for the film didn’t make much sense, either, said Bob Verini in Variety. But it had several strong characters and plenty of good numbers for each—all a musical really needs. In Dancing in the Dark, classic songs from the film “aren’t always used to best effect.” The corniest numbers get the biggest treatment while the film’s showstopper, “That’s Entertainment!”, “makes little impression.” Earlier this season, playwright Douglas Carter Beane turned a truly awful movie, Xanadu, into a pretty thrilling Broadway musical. Here he’s transformed a perfectly good movie musical into a stage show that ”sends you out scratching your head.”
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