Tap

We went to see a new musical tonight and since it was about Josephine Baker we were expecting tap dancing in a series of great routines whereas what we got for the most part was a series of tableaux in which shapely ladies in see through body suits with appropriate pasties at the proper places moved about langorously.  I suppose that if you wanted to call it dancing you could.  At one point two young men broke out into tap dancing, and our hearts leapt up.  But that moment was short lived.  What has happened to tap dancing?  I hope to see "Shuffle Along" in New York.  They have to do tap dancing in that if there is any attempt at historical accuracy.  Several years ago there was a magnificent musical pretty much devoted to tap dancing "Black and Blue" which opened at the end of 1989 and ran for six or seven hundred performances and garnered a host of awards.  It suggests that tap is a form of dancing for which there is an audience, and it is artistry which the gyrations we were treated to tonight could hardly really pass muster as choreography.  Two or three years ago we had one of the treats of a lifetime in London watching a staged musical version of the film "Top Hat," a concoction from decades ago starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.  As one would imagine there was a chorus doing the kind of precision tap that one so rarely sees anymore, and the principals tapped their way through number after number just like Fred and Ginger.  What made this musical especially intriguing was for those members of the audience, like myself, who had seen the film enough times to have memorized more or less the routines, the choreography, the angles of the shots, every bit of paraphernalia trivial or serious that made the film.  There was a frisson to see this in three dimensions.  The film of course presented a flat two dimensional view of the action, and here the exact same maneuvers were extended into the third dimension, an aesthetic epiphany that was absolutely thrilling.  I have never understood why the show never came to the United States, but then it is true that the revivals of great musicals seem in the last decades all to come from England.  One thinks of "Oklahoma" or"Carousel", or "Guys and Dolls" to name some of the more outstanding.  I guess it is not the tap dancing per se, although that is awfully compelling, but in the case of these last three it was the incredible precision of performance together with the rethinking of the plots, bringing them along from their origins to what their potential for meaning is nowadays.  Ah, shuffle, ball, change, shuffle, ball, change.  I cannot ever get enough of that.  When I was in my forties a friend suggested we all learn to tap.  He had spend a like more entwined with the American musical, so it is fair to say he had lots of rhythm. I was totally enthusiastic and we build a wooden tap floor in our recreation room, recruited students--two of my children took it up--, mostly various gay friends.  I guess that was predictable. Once or twice a week our delightful tap teacher put us through our paces.  Forty years on it is another delicate bond between parent and child: we can stand in a row and do shuffle off to buffalo