Contact

From the moment the curtain goes up on a playfully erotic divertissement to an electrifying curtain call finale, danced to Van Morrison’s “Moondance”, two hours later, there’s no smarter, sexier or more surprising evening in London than Contact.

This Broadway import won the Tony Award for Best Musical two years ago. Though naysayers are right to doubt its billing as a musical – there’s no original score, nothing’s sung live and even the music is pre-recorded – it has the kind of sheen and style that owes its progeny to such previous Broadway dance revues as Dancin’ and Fosse.

It’s no coincidence that both of those previous shows, of course, celebrated the work of the late, great Bob Fosse, one of Broadway’s leading director/choreographers, whose mantle as a hit maker – if not quite in the same league as an innovator – Susan Stroman has lately inherited.

Having followed Stro (as everyone in the business calls her) from her 1991 off-Broadway hit of Kander and Ebb songs And the World Goes Round, I’ve seen her evolution and elevation in just over a decade to the top rank of Broadway’s creative personnel that has climaxed in her direction and choreography of The Producers.

There is, now, no one better at making dance illuminate character, getting props to come to life as part of a dance, or sending the audience themselves home dancing on air. But could an evening of her dance be the evening, rather than a mere component part of illuminating one?

Rather than making Contact the abstract kind of evening beloved of modern dance companies, Stroman wisely teamed up with writer John Weidman to create a series of snappy narratives for the dance to dramatise. These aren’t so much plots as scenarios, but they provide an essential framework.

The first and slightest piece brings ‘The Swing’, an 18th-century painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard that hangs in London’s Wallace Collection, to life, and provides an effervescently erotic display of courtship on a swing.

Then, in ‘Did You Move?, set in New York in the 1950s, a tale of domestic violence disturbingly emerges as we observe a couple out for a buffet dinner in an Italian restaurant. Exerting total control over his wife (ex-Royal Ballet star Sarah Wildor), the husband (a hulking Craig Urbani, late of Buddy) orders her to not to talk, smile or even move as he goes to get more cannelloni. But he can’t stop her from dreaming, and it’s in her dreams that she escapes. Wildor is simply stunning: touching and true in her vulnerability, chilling in her eventual explosion of anger and resentment.

For the most substantial part of the evening, the title ballet ‘Contact’ recalls the milieu of lonely Manhattan bachelorhood of Sondheim’s Company and the dark, painful night of the soul that the character Bobby undergoes in that show is mirrored here by a suicidal advertising executive (Michael Praed) who finds release and the human contact he so craves in a downtown dance club. There, he’s drawn to a mesmerising figure, a girl in a yellow dress who – as danced by Leigh Zimmerman – is so slick, sleek and sensational that you, like him, cannot avert your eyes from her for a second.

While the Queen’s with its barely raked stalls isn’t the ideal home for Contact – make sure you sit upstairs in one of the circles for the best views – it’s wonderful to have this exciting, exhilarating evening in town.

– Mark Shenton