Fabulous feet, indeed.
City Center Encores! begins a new season (following five lost installments), and a new regime (under the artistic direction of Lear deBessonet), with all feet on deck. The Tap Dance Kid is brimful of tap dancing, as implied by the title. Also distinctly implied is the notion that the show is likely to be at its strongest when and only when the stage is filled with step-heel, heel-step, and shuffle off to Buffalo. The plot culminates with that tap dance kid—freed from a father who is as domineering as a non-humorous Miss Hannigan—literally shuffling off to Buffalo.
When the characters are otherwise engaged—with dialogue, non-dance numbers, that sort of stuff—the temperature is tepid, to say the least. There is one exception named Shahadi Wright Joseph, and we’ll get to her later. But as the entertainment world well knows, an awful lot of flaws are obscured when you let your audience hear the beat of dancing feet.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Especially when there is a master choreographer in the hall, which is the present case. Jared Grimes has impressed us as a performer—most notably in the Encores!-originated Broadway musical After Midnight. He here demonstrates that he can not only tap and choreograph tap; he also creates several extraordinary ensemble numbers for his corps of 14 dancers.
Leading the cast is not one but two tap dance kids. Thirteen-year-old Alexander Bello, most recently seen singing that “Roosevelt Petrucius Coleslaw” song in Caroline, or Change, taps up a storm while radiating charm to City Center’s vast auditorium. Trevor Jackson, as the tap-dancing choreographer Uncle Dipsy, dances as much or more than Bello, with equal facility. (While now a 20-something television actor, he spent three pre-teen years trouping the country as Young Simba in The Lion King.) The third tops-in-taps performer of the evening is DeWitt Fleming Jr., as the ghostly Daddy Bates. There’s stage magic when any one of them is dancing, with the enchantment often multiplied.
The Tap Dance Kid was a 1983 musical with a mission: to create a contemporary Broadway musical comedy in which the characters are a normal, upper-middle-class family of accomplished New Yorkers who happen to be Black. (The author of the book was Charles Blackwell, Broadway’s most beloved and most excellent stage manager of musical shows—capable of successfully handling perfectionists like Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, and Jerome Robbins—and also, as best we can tell, Broadway’s first Black stage manager.) The show did indeed fulfill this mission; but, as suggested by the title, the emotional struggles of this accomplished family was only going to be resolved when the title character was allowed to lace up those tap shoes.
The contemporary aims of the score were suggested by the presence of composer Henry Krieger, whose Dreamgirls was still selling out at the Imperial when The Tap Dance Kid moved into the Broadhurst. The undistinguished lyrics came from a one-time-only Broadway visitor, Robert Lorick. The results, as can be heard this weekend at City Center, are fine when everyone is dancing; otherwise, they seem to be playing the same song with the same rhythmic beat over and over. The original orchestrations by Harold Wheeler, also of Dreamgirls, amplify the excitement. Guest music director Joseph Joubert, of Caroline, or Change, expertly whips up the Encores! Orchestra.
The original production was poorly received in 1983, struggling through an unsuccessful 20-month run. Significant rewrites were made for the 1985 post-Broadway tour, with a new director (Jerry Zaks) brought in; some of these, including several new songs, are used in the Encores! production. For the record, the role of the title tapper was originated by 12-year-old Alfonso Ribeiro. He was replaced during the run by 11-year-old Savion Glover, while the tour was headed by 10-year-old Dulé Hill.
Director Kenny Leon (a Tony winner whose most recent stint was the exciting A Soldier’s Play) and adaptor Lydia R. Diamond (author of Stick Fly and the excellent Toni Stone) have done some surgery on the book. While the original was never a masterpiece of dramaturgy, some of the present changes are logistically questionable. The time has been changed from 1983 to 1956, which raises all types of questions. This striving family originally lived in the recently completed middle-class utopia called Roosevelt Island. Now they live—well, it’s unclear where they live, although the skeletal windows in the set suggest some type of Park Avenue mansion. In 1956, mind you. There are jokes about Thurgood Marshall, who joined the Supreme Court in 1967; and the 1970 Sidney Poitier film They Call Me Mister Tibbs! The children in question are said to go to the best schools on the Upper East Side, and there is dialogue about girls wearing pants to school. In 1956? The entire dance plot, for that matter, is built around an industrial show for designer sneakers. Designer sneakers?
More harmful to the writing is a significant plot change. The father in question—played here by Joshua Henry (of Violet and Carousel), who despite his considerable talents can’t do much with this thankless role—is especially vile toward his 14-year-old daughter. Not simply because she is a girl, eager to follow his career path into the law; but because she is ungainly and overweight, stuffing down Mallomars. (Look them up, if you must.) In “Four Strikes Against Me,” she complains that she’s “young, female, black and fat” and demonstrates her determination by singing, and I quote, “the game isn’t over ’til the fat lady sings.” This was powerful stuff, especially given that Jennifer Holliday was just then torching Broadway with Krieger’s “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” around the corner.
At Encores!, Emma is played by 16-year-old Shahadi Wright Joseph, who altogether shares the honors with the Messrs. Bello and Jackson even though she doesn’t have a pair of Capezios. She is dynamite, and the opposite of ungainly. Some helpful adapter has changed the frequent self-critical lyrics—when the mother sings that Emma is “pretty special,” Emma now sings “and I’m pretty loud” instead of the original “and I’m pretty fat”—but this bariatric surgery does dissipate the intended family dynamic. “The game isn’t over until the smart lady sings,” she now sings.
That said, Joseph’s performance is just about the highlight of the show. Next to the dancing of Bello and Jackson, and that spectacular ensemble, and those wonderful numbers (beginning with “Fabulous Feet”) from choreographer Grimes. So while The Tap Dance Kid is not a Broadway classic nor an Encores! classic, the entertainment value at City Center this weekend is mighty high.
The Tap Dance Kid opened February 2, 2022, at City Center and runs through February 6. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
