Step Aside, Fosse

IRVINE —  For UC Irvine dance professor Donald McKayle, a five-time Tony Award nominee, Broadway choreography ought to have some splash and sizzle.

But when it comes to “Sweet Charity,” which opens tonight in a UCI production at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, it can never have too much.

“I’m working with the talent that I have,” McKayle, who’s directing and choreographing, says of this revival. “What you want to do is explode on the stage what’s good in the talent. The girl I’ve got is fabulous. I wouldn’t do this show if I didn’t feel I had a Charity I could work with. She’s a triple threat.”

McKayle, 67, has worked with triple threats before--Chita Rivera and Sammy Davis Jr., for instance--so he’s not just blowing kisses, he says. And Rebecca Russell, the gamin-like UCI grad student who has the title role, does more than sing, dance and act.

“She bubbles too,” he says. “She’s effervescent. If we could only bottle her, she’d put Moet Chandon out of business. I think she’s a real find. She’s got the goods.”

With a buildup like that, Russell has to pop the cork--doubly so, given McKayle’s previous finds (Debbie Allen, Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch), let alone the shoes she has to fill as Charity.

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Gwen Verdon originated the title role of the taxi dancer who works at the Fan-Dango Ballroom in the 1966 Broadway premiere, which was choreographed and directed by her then-husband, Bob Fosse. Juliet Prowse played the role in London’s West End in 1967, and Allen did it on Broadway in a 1986 revival.

“I saw each of them,” McKayle says. “Gwen was absolutely sensational. Bob made the show a vehicle for her. She had a rare vulnerable quality, this sort of quavering voice, and yet she was steely strong and had all these angles the way her body moved.

“Juliet was quite different. She had this attenuated length of line to her body. She couldn’t hit a pose that wasn’t wonderful to look at. Debbie can hit some scrunchy poses, but they’re a lot of fun. I’ve known her since she was a kid. She has kind of a hard quality, very sharp and brassy.”

“Sweet Charity” has a story by Neil Simon, based on Federico Fellini’s 1956 movie “Le Notti di Cabiria,” and some terrific songs (music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Dorothy Fields). Still, the show has gained a reputation as a dance musical because of Fosse.

“The original production was a blast of a show,” McKayle remembers, “but we’re not doing Fosse’s choreography. He did it already. I thought it would be more fun to come up with our own stuff. What’s wonderful about the show is that a lot of the numbers have variety.”

The closest McKayle will come to offering anything resembling the legendary Fosse style, he says, is a hat-and-cane routine for Russell in “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” because the song “is sort of programmed for that.”

In fact, McKayle says, “Bob had certain landmarks that kept coming up in every one of his shows. Take ‘The Rich Man’s Frug.’ It was ‘The Rich Kid’s Frug’ in ‘Little Me’ and ‘The Uncle Sam Rag’ in ‘Redhead.’ He took the frug, which is a vernacular dance, set it in high society and made a signature piece out of it.”

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Fosse’s choreography often had what McKayle terms a purposeful “two-dimensional quality,” meaning that his dancers moved in a horizontal line across the stage with their bodies “seen in outline, almost like they were etched figures in a kind of bas-relief.”

He says his staging, though different from Fosse’s, will be “in absolutely high style.” It will be “like a couturier’s over-the-top version,” with costumes “in a riot of color. That I guarantee.”

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* “Sweet Charity” opens tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Saturday, 8 p.m.; Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m.; Nov. 21, 8 p.m.; Nov. 22, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 22. $14-$16; $13 (seniors); $6 students. (714) 824-2787.