Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, starring savvy veterans of stage, screen and tube Rue (Golden Girl) McClanahan and Mark (Luke Skywalker) Hamill and now nearing the end of a successful run at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, might well be subtitled "Two Old Pros Playing the Crowd Like a Violin." Like a polished score by a popular composer who really knows how to win you over and push your emotional buttons, the script by Richard Alfieri heaps the laughs and heart tugs on a silver platter for them, and they deliver with panache.
The plot follows the burgeoning of an, at first, seemingly unlikely friendship between Lily, an elderly, widowed schoolteacher from South Carolina, now retired and living in a St. Petersburg Beach condo and her house-calling dance instructor Michael, former New York chorus boy, now self-described "angry middle-aged man" and "passive-aggressive queen with a bad attitude." Both have been through the wringer, he via painful affairs, she with the death of a beloved daughter, and both have become reclusive and isolated emotionally. They clash hilariously initially, then gradually -- surprise! -- bond, ultimately providing each other with much-needed sustenance and support. The play's chock full of acerbic, raunchy humor and genuinely witty one-liners in a Neil Simon mode, including a complaining downstairs neighbor as a running gag. There's old time music and jokes about the vicissitudes of old age to elicit nostalgia and chortles from the mostly elderly crowds our regional theaters now largely depend on, and funny sexual repartee rendered innocuous by Lili's age and Michael's gender orientation. Unlike your typical Simon effort, however, in Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks Alfieri goes a ways beyond merely skillful painting by the comedic numbers to attain some appreciable depth in the play's depiction of the human need for mutual honesty, acceptance and unconditional love.
Hamill works the house like a wily sketch comic, setting up and milking gags, plot points and emotional effects with aplomb, telegraphing yuks with one eye on the audience lest they stray and miss a guffaw, laying on his character's eccentric wit and pathos with considerable relish, if not always wholly engaged emotion. McClanahan is hardly less crafty -- and rather more heartfelt with her Lily. As the plot unfolds, though, and the characters' layers of lies and protective defenses are stripped away exposing raw hurts and vulnerabilities, both Hamill and McClanahan edge considerably beyond the broad TV sitcom humor of characters defined by foibles and eccentricities, attaining some genuine depth and affecting authenticity together towards the end.
This production's appeal is also considerably enhanced by set designer Roy Christopher's hyper-realistic, meticulously detailed realization of the interior of a Florida Gulf Coast high-rise condo. He and lighting designer Tom Ruzika have fashioned what is veritably the third star of this show: an amazing picture window regaling us with views of sky and sea ranging from night skies with stars over swirling whitecaps, mottled russet sunsets and amber dawns over billowing waves. There's even a shooting star as the lights dim at the end!The Miami Sun Post :: March 2003