'Savor After Hours' delights when dance takes centerstage
If you’re a fan of “Dancing with the Stars,” you’ll be positively thrilled with “Savor After Hours.” If you aren’t a fan, you’ll definitely be reconsidering that after watching the extraordinary dancers on stage at the Broadway Playhouse through Aug. 18.
The ensemble features a host of past "DWTS" mirrorball trophy winners, fan-favorite Valentin Chmerkovskiy and his wife Jenna Johnson-Chmerkovskiy dominant among them. (Chmerkovskiy’s brother/"DWTS" alum Maksim joins the 75-minute production Aug. 6 - 18.).
Minus a few misguided projection designs and a lot of wholly annoying and unnecessary narration, “Savor” offers a dazzling roster of dance numbers that range from tango, rhumba and waltz to disco and burlesque.
Choreographed by KC Monnie, “Savor” is worth savoring when the stage is filled with bodies in motion.
Alas, the show’s non-dance elements are cumbersome and awkward. When the dancing stops to make room for director/creator/writer Mark Swanhart’s clunky, wine-centric verbiage, “Savor” stalls. There’s more fromage in the narration than you’ll find at a Mars Cheese Castle clearance sale.
Our narrator, who introduces herself as “Som Ley” (played by Allie Meixner), opens the show promising a “unique wine experience,” and a “wine pairing” with each dance, before describing white wine by quoting a Billy Joel stanza that ends with “she’s always a woman to me.”
Other moments in the narration run the gamut from eye-rollingly obvious (“every dream begins with a dreamer”) to just plain ridiculous (“If a picture is worth one thousand words, a glass of wine is worth a thousand pictures.”)
The heavy-handed wine theme — dancers often brandish wine glasses and encourage the audience to toast and savor their wine throughout — feels incongruous. No wine is actually served during the show and on opening night, only a few people in the audience were actually enjoying a beverage.
Garish, flashing projections of wine glasses, wine bottles and flowing wine (graphic design and visual design by Scotty Nguyen) threaten to overpower the dancers at times, and don't enhance so much as they distract and detract. The projections are also laughably unimaginative throughout: Images of red hands appear during a number set to Nick Cave’s “Right Red Hand.” An hourglass flashes during “Time in a Bottle.” On “Big Spender,” lyrics light up the screens like karaoke prompts.
But when the ensemble gets moving, the flaws fade and the show becomes unstoppable. Chmerkovskiy has both impeccable technique and sizzling charisma. Pirouetting in mid-air, delivering a sizzling pasodoble with a partner, or shablamming into a death drop, his movements are gorgeously precise, athletic and graceful. He’s mesmerizing, full-stop. He also plays a mean violin, notably as the company flies and whirls through a pile-driving rendition of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
Johnson-Chmerkovskiy is featured on “Big Spender,” a number often associated with Bob Fosse and the taxi dancers of “Sweet Charity.” The women on stage here deliver an alternately slinky and angularly aggressive performance that adds up to pure enticement, a seduction grounded in an insistent, percussive rhythm that the dancers manifest to irresistible effect.
Also memorable is the “Magic Artem,” sequence, which gives "DWTS" champ Artem Chigvintsev the spotlight. His gleefully licentious dance follows a “bachelorette party” bit that has the cast’s women cavorting tipsily in the aisles and hanging from the railings while toting wine glasses the size of soup bowls. Chigvintsev uses the dance vocabulary of the stripper gents in the “Magic Mike” movies, but delivers the moves with a balletic, at times acrobatic fluidity that transcends the trope. “Greased Lightning” and “Low Rider” provide the perfect musical backdrop.
More contemplative is the ensemble’s bittersweet, balletic waltz to “Time in a Bottle,” the dancers flying apart and coming back together with a fervor that evokes the sorrow of farewells and the euphoria of reunions.
Projections notwithstanding, the ensemble kills it during “Red Right Hand,” Cave’s murder ballad tale of warning and retribution. The cast brings the intensity and a sense of looming peril to the fast-flying music, the stage bathed in shades of strobing crimson (effective lighting design throughout from Ryan Healey) while the dancers move as if the devil’s in the wings.
With Michael Buble’s joyous “Sway,” the cast goes into rhumba mode, the music’s polyrhythms snapping and the off-beats providing a syncopation that the cast matches with blistering, celebratory fervor.
If you’re a fan of dance, this is a show you’ll love. If you’re not, it will make you one. “Savor” offers an eye-popping kaleidoscope of bodies in gloriously dynamic motion.