Everyone who has helped Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” video rack up 1.5 billion views knows that Keone and Mari Madrid can dance. And charm. Unlike some performers married to each other, they have plenty of onscreen chemistry — his happy-go-lucky manner rubbing against her more sober guardedness. They exhibit masterly ease in the style they call West Coast urban dance, with the quick precision to register a pop song’s every beat. As choreographers, they are clever and inventive but also sweet and sincere in their storytelling.
The question raised by “Beyond Babel,” which just opened an ambitious 10-week run at the Gym at Judson Church, is whether they can sustain a 100-minute dance drama.
The answer, with qualifications, is yes.
The story is a “Romeo and Juliet” update. Mr. and Ms. Madrid meet at a dance club and fall in love during one of those everyone-else-disappears, time-stands-still moments. He has a cocky, loyal, hot-tempered friend (the agile, rascally Mikey Ruiz). Rather than a nurse, she has a devoted sister (Selene Haro). Less easily identifiable is an initially masked character (the forceful yet decent-seeming Fabian Tucker), a tortured authority figure who hands out armbands in red and blue.
By the end of the first act, the stage is divided by a fence, those with red armbands on one side, those with blue on the other. This vaguely topical obstacle is what keeps these lovers apart.
The story is pretty simple, and it needs to be, because it’s told exclusively through a series of dance numbers set to borrowed pop songs. The show, conceived and directed by the Madrids along with Josh and Lyndsay Aviner of the production company Hideaway Circus, is a kind of jukebox musical without dialogue. Tracks by dozens of artists — mostly recent stuff by the likes of Billie Eilish, Chance the Rapper and Mumford & Sons, with a few throwbacks (A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes) to make Gen Xers feel at home — are shoehorned into the narrative.
Many of the numbers seem stuck between advancing story or character development and delivering a knockout routine that could ace a TV dance competition. The choreography is engaging and extremely detailed; it keeps showing new ways of hitting the beat, irresistibly, while tossing off astonishing moves. But part of the detail is an acting out of lyrics, and the Madrids habitually rely on the words of the songs to put across their meanings, to both cute and clunky effect. The production has the feel of a pop concert, with the ingratiating performers dancing up the aisles and exhorting the audience to respond. (The young audience surrounding me responded enthusiastically.)
Yet, despite a textbook trough at the start of the second act, the show mostly flows — sometimes in advanced patterns, pausing to enter a character’s mind for a number, then rewinding to pick up the tale. Although the story tilts tragic (as in the Shakespeare template, people die), it’s least convincing when reaching for darkness. The guns look like toys, and characters and creators alike seem not to know what to do with them. The emotions, as well as the humor and politics, are all adolescent; they would not be out of place on a Disney teen program. But unpretentious innocence is the core of the Madrids’ appeal, and that kind of love triumphs here.
As the shapes crocheted (yes, crocheted!) around the proscenium frame by London Kaye unsubtly declare, this show has lots of heart. That spirit, channeled through dancing of high talent and skill, is enough to make it a winner.
Beyond Babel
Through March 25 at the Gym at Judson Theater, Manhattan; beyondbabelshow.com.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
