Gorgeous Fun, but Not Funky

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

BLACK AND BLUE Conceived by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli

Infuse a 1940s Harlem nightclub act with a Busby Berkeley film's lavish budget, elbow room and staging style, restrain the raunch and remove the racial bitterness. The result: Black and Blue, the sumptuously spectacular $5 million revue that opened last week on Broadway. If Fred and Ginger had been black and still able to live in that elegant fantasy world, their shows might have looked a lot like this: rows of tap dancers in tailcoats or scarlet evening gowns; vast sets like lacquered jewel boxes gliding across the floor and opening to reveal a kick line; a singer in a swing, wearing a cloak that billows 18 ft. down to the floor.

Is the experience authentic? Can the blues be legitimately sung for 2 1/2 hours with barely a glimmer of rage or pain? Would W.C. Handy and Fats Waller recognize anything except their own music? In truth, not much that is funky survives the onslaught of feathers and sequins. During I Can't Give You Anything but Love, a song about poverty, the stage is aswirl with what looks like gold and diamonds. The title number, which was wrenchingly performed this season in Ain't Misbehavin', is used here to bring on a choral stomp. Almost perversely, the blues, an art rooted in specific American history, is methodically detached from its context, as if the past were so much soil to be brushed from the roots of an ornamental shrub destined for transplant.

Yet as a showcase for remarkable performers and the visual panache of its creators, Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli (Tango Argentino, Flamenco Puro), this is gorgeous and joyous entertainment. And in its reverence for veteran talents, the kind who have bounced from headlining to working as kitchen help and back again, the show is faithful to the folkloric traditions of tap, jazz and blues.

Ruth Brown, who can still shout down the rafters in St. Louis Blues, shows her kittenish side and trademark mock anger in the double entendre If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on It. Her husky, lisping Body and Soul, however, comes off as a Carol Channing impersonation. Linda Hopkins, a 1972 Tony winner (Inner City), finds dignity in Come Sunday but loses it in her gleeful giggling about wife beating in T'aint Nobody's Bizness if I Do. While Carrie Smith displays a howitzer voice in I Want a Big Butter and Egg Man, she overdecorates the end of Am I Blue and dissipates the emotional payoff. All three, given their ample proportions, should have questioned the white feathered dresses for the finale that make them look like ostriches with glandular problems.

% The dancing opens with a traditional tap challenge, each man showing his best stuff in turn. Savion Glover, 15, who enacted The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway in 1983, is predictably upstaged by such snowy-haired hoofers as Bunny Briggs, Lon Chaney and Ralph Brown. Glover reappears in a breakneck gymnastic number, hopping up and down stairs, while his elders return in slow, sentimental sequences to demonstrate the traditional tap presumption that less can be more. That is in contrast to the basic notion of Black and Blue, which seems to be that more is more. Yet in the understated moments when the stage is all but bare save for a performer at home with his craft, the show attains magic that could satisfy the haut monde and Harlem alike.