Six Dance Lessons: Broadway
Karen M's "SDLISW Scene by Scene"
November 2003
In a creative work designed to move and entertain people, sometimes the most important elements are what you don't see: the structure and artistry that are essential to creating the experience, but which blend in so seamlessly that they're not consciously noted. In the case of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, there was a great deal going on that has not been mentioned in any reviews or online discussions of the play, and which I suspect very few people (if any) in the audience consciously registered. Even though I saw the play several times, I didn't notice these things until later, and the first time I thought there might be something there, I dismissed the thought as 'reaching'. After all, I told myself, only a truly rabid fan would think that a light comedy like Six Dance Lessons might involve some very interesting and imaginative artistic choices in the acting and direction. As it turns out, what I thought might be 'reaching' was actually a case of making a mountain out of the tip of an iceberg.
Everyone knows that Mark Hamill portrayed Michael Minetti as an outrageous clown and/or an outrageous jerk much of the time, especially in the first act. People who saw the play could also feel that his behavior was somehow different in different scenes, and they got very clearly that he becomes much more down-to-earth and nicer in Act II. What was clear only intuitively, not consciously, was that in the seven different scenes, to varying extents, Mark was doing different styles of movement and comedy -- complete with different gestures, body language and facial expressions --, and that to a large extent, each style thematically echoed the dance the scene centered around, or the period with which the dance was associated. I truly doubt that anyone saw this on a conscious level. Numerous reviewers have commented on the different costumes that were clearly designed to be appropriate for each scene, but no one has commented on the fact that Mark's acting was actually different in some very interesting ways (few, in fact, have commented on Michael in any substantive way). I think it's worthwhile to go scene by scene and take a closer look at some of the interesting things that Mark was doing in his portrayal of Michael, as well as some things that were done with the placement of the characters on the stage to help convey the essence of Michael Minetti and the changes he goes through over the course of the play.
Quick orientation for those who didn't see it: Despite the title, the play actually covers 10 weeks. Act I consists of four dance lessons: Swing, Tango, Viennese Waltz and Foxtrot. Act II has three: Cha-cha and Contemporary (things like the Twist, the Swim, the Pony, etc.), plus the Bonus Lesson which occurs four weeks after Contemporary Dance, and which doesn't have a specific style of dance associated with it. (You can see pictures from most of these scenes here on Sienn's site, though for Waltz you have to look at the picture from the Florida production, and there don't seem to be any pictures of the Bonus Lesson available. If anyone finds one, please send it to Sienn.) Each scene begins with a song playing in the background, which sets the mood for the scene.
Week 1 - Swing
The Swing lesson is thematically associated with the 1940s, starting with the song "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" by the Andrews Sisters. Michael explicitly links the Swing to the era of World War II in his explanation of the dance, and later as he makes frequent references to GIs, waking up in the barracks, etc. Even before he mentions World War II, though, the 1940s are evoked in his body language, from the moment he strolls in the door saying, "Ya sure?" once Lily has finally decided to let him in. The way he enters the room, and then the way he stands at the large picture window looking out at the view - legs apart, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet - are very reminiscent of the body language we see in musical comedies of the 1940s starring Gene Kelly, films like "Anchors Aweigh" and "On The Town". His goofy tone and the way he mugs and says "Yeah!" out of the side of his mouth (when Lily asks if he lives with his wife) especially strikes me as similar to some of Gene Kelly's delivery. But I should emphasize that it doesn't come across as if he's doing an impression of Gene Kelly or any other specific person; rather his delivery just incorporates elements of that style. The effect is that it's immediately clear he's doing comedy in a certain classic style which feels very familiar and which, as things progress, feels very appropriate to the scene, even if you don't consciously know why.
His performance throughout the scene is loaded with this 1940s-style mugging and physical comedy, such as his facial expression towards the end of the speech, "Now the Swing, though free-form, does have definite steps and patterns - and thank god, because otherwise, who needs me?!" followed by the way his face falls and he halfway stumbles forward in exaggerated despair when Lily doesn't laugh. The moment when the style truly stands out, however, comes somewhat earlier than that, in the speech that I referred to in my last report; I'm going to make another point with it in a different section below, though, so I'll hold it till then. At other points the style was less blatant, but you can easily detect bits of it if you think about it (look at the way he's hanging up the phone in the picture in Sienn's gallery, for example, and just before that, he crossed the distance to the phone in a couple of high leaps, again like the exaggerated comic language of one of those films). The overall feel of the style is also in some ways similar to the feel of the Swing itself, so everything goes together smoothly, but it seems clear that the theme he's carrying out in a lot of this scene isn't based just on the dance, but on the period. The performance style goes together with his outfit, the music and the way his hair is slicked back to give an overall feeling of a 1940s musical comedy.
Week 2 - Tango
For the Tango lesson, he comes in pretending to be a great Latin lover, complete with phony Spanish accent. He does a whole routine at the outset, ending with him dropping into a dramatic kneeling pose as he talks about how Lily perhaps "needs the seduction of the dance to open her heart!" He keeps going in and out of the character of the Latin lover, adopting the accent and striking tango poses near the front of the stage; at the end of the scene, he's doing that bit again and Lily is playing along with him. Many of his movements even when he's not doing the full-on act seem at least congruent with the overall movement style or posture of the tango - the specific way he stalks out the door at one point, for example. He does another, looser type of comedy as well, imitating Lily's Southern accent and making a very funny face, so it's not as if everything plays off of the Tango/Latin-lover theme, but a great deal of it does. In all these scenes, there were typically other bits of comedy that weren't necessarily done in the predominant style of the scene, and at the least, as he would gradually become more authentic with Lily he would also typically drop part or all of the act. So he wasn't carrying out a theme or doing an identifiable act every single minute; if he had been, maybe it would've been more obvious that there were these patterns. But instead, you could just see these themes recurring throughout the scene at various times, like a recurrent echo -- just enough that when you look back, it's obvious that the themes were there, though it wasn't obvious at the time. In a more subtle way, it also often seemed as if the way he held his face and body was at least congruent with the style of the full-on act that Michael was putting on -- in other words, even when his body language was more naturalistic, there often didn't seem to be a sharp break (in terms of how he was holding himself, etc.) from the more stylized act he was doing, but instead there was a subtle sense of things fitting together.
Week 3 - Viennese Waltz
For the Viennese Waltz, he comes in wearing a tuxedo, speaking with a German accent and pretending to be a stiff and formal Viennese dance instructor named
Helmut. This act isn't maintained as long as many of the others -- probably because it isn't the kind of act that lends itself to blending smoothly with the rest of the
scene, the way the others do -- but there does seem to be some congruence between the Helmut act and his body language as he's interrogating Lily about
her husband -- he's doing things like leaning forward slightly from the waist with his hands clasped behind his back, and being a bit more theatrical in his delivery, though
not with the Viennese accent. Without having pictures to look at, I couldn't say for sure, but I also think that the way he held his face during those parts of the
scene had some elements in common with the Helmut routine. There's also a comic bit (where they squabble over whether he'll plug in the boombox) that had
a style that I couldn't identify, or perhaps it wasn't based on a specific style; Moriah mentioned that it did feel like a specific style to her, one that felt
even older than the other classic styles (maybe Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or somebody), but I couldn't identify it. He briefly goes back into the stiff body
language and the very formal facial expression with which he entered the scene, though, when they actually begin to dance (if you have the "Broadway Beat" clip,
you can see this moment at the end of the clip, and you can also see it in the still of him dancing with Rue, from the Florida production). In this scene, the
unifying theme was carried out more through other elements -- the costumes, the music ("Adele's Laughing Song" from "Die Fledermaus") and dialogue about Vienna -- than
through the acting style, but the scene did begin and end with Michael putting on a distinct kind of act. This is also the scene where we see Michael
beginning to connect with Lily, when he tells her (after she talks about the way that an old woman becomes completely invisible to other people), "I see
you, Lily, in all three dimensions -- you're right here." Afterwards he seems possibly pleased but maybe also a bit startled by what he's just said, as
if he's unsure what to make of that moment himself.
Week 4 - Foxtrot
The theme for the Foxtrot scene seems to echo the 1950s, with movements, poses and facial expressions that appear to be drawn from a number of musical comedies of the '50s such as the ones that starred Bing Crosby and/or Frank Sinatra, such as "High Society" or "Say One for Me" (thanks to Moriah for pointing out the latter reference), probably a lot of "Guys and Dolls" and possibly some "Singin' in the Rain" (I haven't seen the latter two in a while and at first dismissed them because they're set much earlier than the 1950s, and the scene didn't feel 1930s-ish to me or Moriah; on the other hand, from what I do remember, these two feel like very likely sources, and they were made in the 1950s), and possibly some reference to the style of "The Rat Pack". In other words, a style that seemed reminiscent of a number of musicals of the 1950s, whether they were actually set in the 1950s or not (if anyone who saw it thinks of other important references I missed, I'd be curious to hear). Here the stylized body language occurred quite a bit in the scene and really helped to create a distinctive feel. You can see a bit of the style in the little video feature on the "www.broadway.com" site, and in Sienn's play pictures on this site (the one of Mark alone is a publicity shot, but it's similar to a pose he struck during that scene); those who have the tape from "Broadway Beat" can see a larger sample of it, such as where Mark says, "Think back, Lily - that is the charm!" as he brings his left hand up to the right side of his mouth, simultaneously leaning left. Again, the way he was moving his body looked as if they reflected both the Foxtrot itself and the style of those 1950s comedies, blended together. The acting style goes along with the costumes, the music by Tony Bennett ("The Best is Yet to Come"), dialogue references like the mention of the Stork Club and lines like, "Thanks, babe," (after Lily refers to him as "a normal-sized man") to convey the 1950s feel (though I'm reasonably sure Frank Sinatra would not have accompanied the "Thanks, babe!" line with the particular bit of physical comedy Mark did at that point to clarify what he thought she meant by normal-sized *g*). In fact, there are so many examples of this style that I could write for another page to list them all. If you have access to the online clips, just look; it's just about everywhere in the clips, except when he's delivering the line, "I can just see you out in the tobacco shed with your hoop skirt over your head." As in the other cases, he didn't maintain this style without let-up throughout the entire scene; rather it came and went (and seemed to be dropped more or less completely when Michael was being more authentic with Lily, as when he's telling her about his mother), but it re-occurred frequently enough to give this scene a very distinctive feel. His use of facial expressions was also very distinctive in this scene -- his face looked somewhat different in each of the seven scenes, but in this one his face was especially animated with stylized facial expressions that fit with the overall comic style (you can see a glimpse of this if you look at the clip where they're dancing together and he's saying, "That's it -- beautiful!", and you can also get a little sense of how he held his face just from the stills here on the page).
Week 5 - Cha-Cha
The Cha-Cha lesson, the first scene of Act II, has the least distinctive style of any of the six scenes that are associated with specific dances (even the Waltz scene, which doesn't seem to use a specific theme very prominently throughout, begins and ends with Michael putting on a very specific, identifiable act). In the Cha-Cha scene, he's allegedly being himself, and I briefly wondered whether Cha-Cha was just like the Bonus Lesson, in which Michael acts most natural and unguarded towards Lily (I don't think it is). The Cha-Cha was also the scene with the least emphasis on the actual dance, and in this one, Michael didn't do a lecture about the history of the dance or perform one of his fits of manic clowning (which is where we'd often see him most clearly putting on an act); also, at least some of the time he seems to be actually connecting with Lily. However, it still feels quite different from the Bonus Lesson, as there were several moments in the scene which were performed with greater theatricality than anything in the Bonus Lesson, especially when Michael is spinning his tales of love gone wrong to Lily, attempting to justify his jaded view of reality -- you can see one such moment in the pics on the site, the shot where Lily is looking at him. So we get the clear feeling that Michael is loosening up part of the time but is not quite ready to stop putting on acts and be authentic all the time. If there were any more specific correspondences between the style of acting and the dance, they weren't anything I could identify. There was just a general sense that the way he held his body, the way he moved and the way he delivered his lines were all different than in the Bonus Lesson -- he used a lot more theatrical gestures and his delivery was a bit more strident, not all the time but at certain moments. Finally, he didn't do any of the gestures that were part of the styles of the other scenes.
So as far as I could see, Cha-Cha had a different feel than the Bonus Lesson, but was distinguished from the others only by the fact that it didn't recycle elements from the other scenes, rather than by having specific elements all its own.
Week 6 - Contemporary Dance
The Contemporary Dance lesson had an obviously distinctive style of movement, very similar to the loose, free-form dances of the 1960s that the lesson centers around. The scene opens with the song "Surfin' USA" by the Beach Boys, and Michael shows up in a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, loose pants, sneakers and sunglasses. This one is a fascinating example, because the differences between this scene and the others are so obvious once you think about it - and yet again, at the time it just felt very smooth and natural, so much so that you wouldn't consciously think about why everything was so different, you'd just be drawn into the mood of the scene. Once you see it, you look back and wonder how they managed to slip such obvious thematic differences right under your nose.
For the first time, Michael sat on the floor (or sometimes even rolled partly onto his back on the floor), sometimes with his legs crossed and his shoulders rolled forward, a completely different posture than anything we'd seen before. Even the way he held his body when he was standing, and the way he walked across the room, were visibly different than what we'd seen before, conveying a feeling of puppyish clumsiness. The style of comedy was also very different than in the other lessons, involving very energetic but deliberately less graceful movements, as when he bounces around as he yells at Lily (who's sitting exhausted in a chair) to, "Wake up!!" or when he dances around at the front of the stage while refusing to tell Lily the date (as she's making out a check), or when he does a goofy walk on his way back towards the shelf, his arms hanging down and wiggling in a funny-clumsy way.
The most outrageous part is when he tells her that the only way she can give him a check is to, "stuff it in my G-string like you're tipping a stripper!" and he swings his hips around two or three times, bends over and sticks his butt out, doing a sort of bump and grind move until Lily is thoroughly embarrassed.
For anyone who's seen the play, thinking about Contemporary Dance in contrast with Foxtrot gives a particularly dramatic illustration of how different the entire feeling of the scenes could be. The movement style Mark used in Contemporary Dance was all about rounded and (seemingly) unrestrained movements, with a lot of bouncing around, while the stylized body language in Foxtrot was all about angular, restrained, clearly theatrical movements with a lot of gliding smoothly across the floor (you can probably get a little feel of this just from the pictures Sienn has collected; although the pictures of Contemporary Dance are only of the dancing itself, I think they give you some inkling of the feel of the scene). His face in the Contemporary Dance lesson was entirely different than in the previous lessons, too, seeming much younger. As Susan observed recently, he looked about 30 years old in that scene. You can see some of the difference in the pictures in the Play Gallery, but of course the pictures of the dancing show him making a goofy expression; his face throughout the scene was visibly younger than in other scenes, though, even when he wasn't making goofy expressions -- he just looked completely different than he had before. I don't know any particular movie references for the type of movement used in Contemporary Dance, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were some specific 1960s movies (maybe involving go-go dancing) providing inspiration for the style of the scene, in keeping with the fact that Swing was 1940s and Foxtrot was 1950s.
Contemporary Dance is also the lesson where Michael learns a lot more about Lily and truly opens up to understand her pain. These are the moments I described in my last report, in which Mark expressed empathy for Lily in a very moving and authentic way. In those moments, in the way he's sitting on the floor leaning forward, his posture and body language are congruent with the overall feel of the scene even as you see greater authenticity and openness. The body language here is in some ways getting closer to that of the Bonus Lesson, and there are much longer stretches where he seems fully authentic and natural (not only when he's listening to Lily, but also when he gets angry at her -- in the moment I described in my last report), but nevertheless, there is clearly a specific "movement theme" that echoes throughout the scene and gives the scene a distinctive feel.