42nd Street

Okay, it’s a corny show, but it’s gaudy good fun. This ultimate Broadway showbiz story, 42nd Street, came back from a 1933 blockbuster film starring Ruby Keeler in Busby Berkeley’s elaborate dance routines and became a megahit musical, recreating its nostalgia and melodrama onstage. Still about becoming a star and creating a hit show, it also re-established tap dancing as a creative Broadway show element after tap had been dropped from new shows for decades.

42nd Street ran for nine years on Broadway and re-introduced that kitschy line, “You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!” It also became a tragic Broadway legend on opening night when producer David Merrick had to stop the raucous final applause to announce that its legendary director/choreographer Gower Champion had succumbed to cancer in his hotel room just a few hours before.

Coming back a star in Stratford’s showy new version is Cynthia Dale, who has starred in several plays and at least eight musicals at Stratford. After a five-year absence and looking uncannily young and still extraordinarily beautiful, she is singing gorgeously as always and bringing sly, sophisticated touches to the role of Dorothy Brock, a glamorous star adored by the show’s chief financial backer.

Dorothy Brock is a famed singer, not a dancer [though we know from Cynthia Dale’s Anything Goes at Stratford that she certainly is a dancer], and when Dorothy breaks her ankle, she can’t do more than appear in one song. So someone has to “save the show.”

Going out there a youngster is Jennifer Ryder-Shaw, playing Peggy Sawyer, the innocent novice who barely got into the cast of this, her first musical (called “Pretty Lady,” as in the novel, movie and original stage show). She sings charmingly and can really tear into a hoofer routine. I hadn’t seen a 42nd Street before with two leading ladies, but Dale and Ryder-Shaw work very well together.

The director is Chicago’s Gary Griffin, whose West Side Story, Evita, and Camelot at Stratford rivaled the Broadway versions. He finds ingenious ways to stage lively dance numbers almost constantly throughout the show. Choreographer Alex Sanchez aids Griffin in making Stratford’s classical repertory actors all look like professional dancers in stunning unison tap numbers. But this is a repertory of traditional time-steps, shuffles, taps, and those raised hands with wide-splayed fingers and open palms facing the audiences and waving from side to side, the uniform stomps and climactic kick-lines that are guaranteed to make any audience applaud with Pavlovian conditioning. It all looks great, but it’s button-pushing: don’t expect creative new choreography.