Although he has seen to it that the production flows smoothly and even handsomely from scene to scene, the scenes themselves are summarily staged, with little concern for the emotional dynamics that propel a live musical forward. They include, regrettably, Stanley Donen, a legendary director of film musicals ("Singin' in the Rain," "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"), who is making his Broadway directorial debut. But her unsentimental intelligence is hard to detect in such simple-minded lyrics as "You must never stop/Till you reach the top/Of the sky" or in such thundering declarations as "Tonight you shall dance as you were meant to dance, as no one has ever danced before."Īt some point, the soul of "The Red Shoes" appears to have been captured by cliche makers. Norman, who has a darker, more ambiguous sensibility, as her book and lyrics for "The Secret Garden" illustrated a few seasons ago, might have been of some help here. There are no hidden agendas in his best work: songs like "Don't Rain on My Parade," "I Gotta Crow" or "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." The world of a Russian ballet company in Europe in the 1920's, with its artistic intrigues and its tortured psyches, just isn't his natural element, and the basically upbeat tone of his current score seems at odds with the moody story. Since "High Button Shoes" in 1947, he has been a valuable keeper of the Broadway flame, a writer of catchy, brassy show tunes that declare themselves openly and unequivocally. Styne at the age of 87 needn't fear for his laurels, even if "The Red Shoes" adds nothing to them. Having given us such memorable musicals as "Gypsy," "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and "Bells Are Ringing," Mr. Norman's book now hews closely to the dated film script and its hoary "dance is my religion" dialogue.
But instead of rethinking the tale from a contemporary perspective, the original aim of this project, Ms.
The movie is pure hokum, a teary melodrama wrapped in soggy platitudes, and the passage of time has merely heightened its intrinsic campiness. Its inspiration is the lush and schmaltzy 1948 film of the same name that made a star of Moira Shearer and has since convinced generations of impressionable young dancers that there is no greater, nobler profession than theirs.
Except for the toe shoes of the women in the corps de ballet, the show is pointless. But months of troubled rehearsals and previews, during which the original director, the leading man and two supporting players all got their walking papers, seem to have robbed the creators of their passion. The composer Jule Styne, the playwright Marsha Norman and her co-lyricist Bob Merrill (working under the pseudonym Paul Stryker) may once have experienced a burning desire to tell the story of Victoria Page, rising ballerina, caught between the demands of love and stardom. Throughout most of its two acts it lies there on the stage of the Gershwin Theater, where it opened last night, making grandiose pronouncements on the artist's calling, looking pretty and going no place slowly. FOR a musical that wants to celebrate the urge to dance - a compulsion, apparently, as strong as life itself - "The Red Shoes" is confoundingly inert.