Conceived by: Mark Robin and Aaron Thielen
At: Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre, 10 Marriott Dr., Lincolnshire
Contact: (847) 634-0200; $42 – $45
Runs through: Feb. 11
How huge is Marriott Theatre’s All Night Strut? It’s not just a musical-within-the-musical that showcases the roaring fine dance revue that required a whopping five choreographers. There’s a musical within the musical that’s within the musical.
As dance shows goes, Marc Robin rarely does less than razzle-dazzle, neon-bright work. With the non-stop All Night Strut, the dazzle takes on the intensity of sunspots.
Consider, for just one example, the moment in the Lullaby of Broadway, segment, wherein two fresh-faced young hoofers in a Busby Berkeley-era spectacle learn that they must go on for the stars. ‘You! Chorus boy! You! Chorus girl! Can you do it?’ barks the megalomaniac, beret-topped director. The milk-fed, can-do, let’s-go-out-there-unknowns-and-come-back-stars earnestness of the chorus kids is hilarious. And once the ensemble starts dancing, it’s clear: Everyone in this show is a megawatt star.
Director Robin, with Marriott Co-Artistic Director Aaron Thielen, crafted the All Night Strut from a tiny, four-person musical that ran in 1998 in south suburban Evergreen Park. Now, the show has a cast of 23. The music —classic tunes from the 1930s and ’40s as well as an extended hip-hop section—has been revised and re-orchestrated (with terrific musical direction by Doug Peck) to provide a showcase for a powerhouse vocal quartet (Susan Moniz, Susie McMonagle, Stephen Schellhardt and Jim Weitzer), and a dance extravaganza that showcases styles from Latin to ballroom to hip-hop to lindy hop. There’s even a New Age-y, black-lit aerial ballet, wherein a pair of ethereal sylphs leap and tumble aloft to the gently haunting strains of White Cliffs of Dover.
The songs are eminently familiar, yet re-fashioned to reverberate anew. And how they reverberate. A brow-mopping Minnie the Moocher (sung by Moniz and McMonagle and danced by Allison Stodola with Tucker Ty and Ian Liberto) is steamy enough to fog up the windows of a stadium-sized solarium. Nightmare—a number depicting combat in World War II—is darkly brutal, the all-male dance corps moving like West Side Story’s Jets stranded in hell.
The bar for all seven segments of the production is set in the opening swing dancing movement (choreographed by Mark Stuart Eckstein and Beverly Durand), a foot-flying display of breathtaking grace and athleticism.
Then there’s Moniz’ heart-searing rendition of As Time Goes By. If you’ve got a heart, it will break in all the old familiar places before she reaches the final measures.
What doesn’t work here is a distracting, irksome character named Coda, a mime who shows up between each of the dance numbers and does shtick involving lighting and sound effects. He doesn’t provide segues between the numbers; he merely destroys the momentum of the production.