McCarter's Ten Cents a Dance

While the music of Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart is a always a pleasure, imposing a psycho-drama on top of this music is not a foolproof idea. Ten Cents a Dance tells the story, if you can call it that, of a man reminiscing about his relationship with a single woman over a long span of time. The reminiscing man is played by a single individual and the woman is played by five different actresses. Sounds fair enough. It's hard to make a single person appear 20 years old and then 60 years old, especially if the character shifts back and forth in time. A motion picture could accomplish this, but not a play.

This production, however, puts all five of the women on the stage at once to sing and dance about with the male lead. This in and of itself might work if you could be sure which woman is which. In Ten Cents a Dance you can't. You know who is youngest and who is oldest, but the remaining three are hard to differentiate. The time periods involved are hard to tease out also. All five women wear the same print on very similar gowns all of which would look right at home in 2011. Their hairstyles (all are redheads) bear no obvious marks of any particular era. This is a big fault as it would be so simple to fix. Pick a decade and research women's gowns and hairstyles and you could find plenty of differences over presumably a 50 year period. A twentyish woman from the 1920s should be easily distinguinguished from a fortyish woman from the WWII era, no? YES! And lose the print, it was inappropriate and made dating the characters more difficult than it was before. A black and white theme would have worked well....Think Zelda Fitzgerald for the 20s and go from there.

The five actresses did as much as they possibly could with the situation, we could have used a stronger male lead with a stronger voice. And why the heck did he keep taking off clothes? Perhaps to peel away layers of memory? Whatever.

A psycho-musical like this is an interesting concept, but it would need marvelous costuming and be truly representative of the time frames. The current costuming/hair is sloppy and distracting.

LOVE Rogers and Hart.