Bandstand, a new musical that opened this week at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, had a lot going for it, from my point of view. It has jazz; I love jazz. It has a nostalgic, post-World War II, high-waisted slacks, hipster kind of ambiance; I love that stuff. It has a ton of swing dancing; I love swing dancing. It has choreography (and direction) by Andy Blankenbuehler, who choreographed Hamilton so brilliantly; I love Andy Blankenbuehler.
So why is Bandstand such a drag?
I believe I can answer that. In each instance, the problem is a matter of mismatched appendages grafted onto a body that inherently rejects them. The jazz in Bandstand, for example, tells a story of pain in a musical mode I would characterize, on the whole, as downright perky and substantially pain-free. Bandstand’s focus is a homegrown jazz band in postwar Cleveland composed of ex-GIs who saw traumatizing combat duty but love to make music. Despite deploying actors who play their own instruments (a nice touch), Bandstand relegates jazz to a largely expository role that is very preachy, often screechy, and never deep. Real jazz actually goes deep by its very nature, but no one attached to Bandstand seems to really get jazz. It is mostly present as a story-telling adornment.
Then there is Bandstand’s postwar ambiance. It often looks nice, scenically and costume-wise. The words and attitudes, however, emanating from the show’s returned GI Joes smack, to me, of bibulous Gen X, Y or Z diaper angst. None of the cute wisenhimers pretending to be war-ravaged veterans on that Bandstand stage look or sound like they’ve seen much at all. When one brags, “I liberated Dachau,” this audience member had a fervent urge to go slap him hard.
As for the dancing, this is actually a double Blankenbuehler whammy. In Hamilton, Mr. Blankenbuehler gave us the glorious sense of a show that is always in motion. The dancing isn’t just integral to the action, it is the action, flowing breathlessly. Hamilton’s story-telling is marvelously unconventional, a fever dream of our nation building narrative retold and repurposed through hip-hop, with Alexander Hamilton biographical flashes. Constant movement gives Lin-Manuel Miranda’s free-flowing epic its stage coherence.
Bandstand, conversely, is a very conventional, even cornball, story of a young battle-scarred veteran with a bitter battlefield secret finding salvation through music and a good old-fashioned American gal who happens to be his deceased Army buddy’s widow. Lots of plot there, lots of Hollywood cliches. I love Hollywood cliches. Mr. Blankenbuehler, though, has chosen to inject this very straight-up story with movement that often just obscures it — a lot of twitchy, disembodied Lindy-Hop-styled non sequiturs. Thus, a character just walking down the street is suddenly accosted and escorted to his next appointment by jitterbugging strangers he cannot see, or by vamping, butt-twitching chorus cuties he can’t feel. The result flings phantom dancers into the path of Bandstand’s narrative like so many irritating gnats.
To compound this weirdness, many of the vets, as they go about the business of living, suddenly find themselves encrusted with contorted dead soldiers who follow them around, draped across their live bodies like dead memories. I know this sounds poetic. In the middle of a musical like Bandstand it is not. The characters we are trying to get to know, and the dead heroes who haunt them, both feel disrespected.
I really wanted to like Bandstand. I appreciate the creative effort it makes to tell a familiar story in a new way. That effort collapses into incoherence more times than not, but there were moments of nice music and amusing banter. A few of the performers found some threads of resonance in their disjointed, stitched together character amalgams. Laura Osnes, as the widow, sang well and communicated a whisper of sincere mourning for the lost love that war had taken from her. Beth Leavel, as her mother, is sensationally droll and steals most of her scenes, but she is acting in a different musical entirely. The show’s 11:00 o’clock tune, “Welcome Home,” actually coheres musically and lyrically into something fierce and fine. Framed here as the forbidden song that the band and its lady singer could not sing in public because it was too honest about the pain of coming home when your buddies haven’t, it, in fact, possesses the emotional vocabulary and the passion that should have underpinned Bandstand’s score in its entirety.
I’ve saved the worst for last but I can’t let this go.
I do believe that everyone (with the possible exception of Donald Trump), I mean everyone, knows that jazz is an African American art form. I’m sure I don’t have to give a music history lesson here. That is what jazz is, right?
There is not one African American jazz musician character in Bandstand.
How to explain this. The question must have come up at least once around the table with Tara Rubin Casting and Bandstand’s producers – all 30 of them: We’re casting a Broadway musical in 2017 about jazz musicians home from the war in the United States of America of the 1940s. Shouldn’t at least one of these guys be black?
Granted, there is one token black actor onstage in Bandstand, tossed a variety of secondary roles, as a priest, a radio exec. Did no-one consider tossing him a trumpet? What was the thinking here? How did it all add up to: No. Only white jazz musicians. Only whites on this Bandstand.
I’d really like to know.