‘Spectacular’ reinvents itself quite nicely – St James Theater to expand stage

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A year or so after creating a nonstop, messy, sloppy show as part of their hope to create a non-Christmas event, the Rockettes star in a sleek, pretty summer musical at Radio City Music Hall. It’s got new songs, a new story and a new look. It’s reinvented, New York-style.

“The New York Spectacular,” written by Douglas Carter Beane and directed by Mia Michaels, focuses on a pair of siblings visiting New York who get separated from mom and dad. The city’s famous statues come to life to help guide them to a reunion.

Like all reinventions, the things that worked in the past have stayed, including the Rockettes’ magical tap-dancing number in real rain, the animatronic recreations of the Statue of Liberty and Central Park’s Alice in Wonderland, a fashion number with Madonna’s “Vogue” and the LED jackets on the dancers in Times Square.

Beane’s often-too-sweet script — the older sister learns during her day to abandon sarcasm and embrace her inner child — is also peppered with jokes only adults will get. (When one of the kids discovers the Naked Cowboy in Times Square isn’t really naked, a character retorts: “You can thank the Board of Health for that.”) Beane also gets in a few digs at Anna Wintour and Donald Trump.

Michaels, the “So You Think You Can Dance” judge, has taken over all choreography and directing duty — in the first one she did only the opening number — and her editing is as sharp as her twitchy, leg-lifting touches. She knows the stars of the show are the Rockettes — and they shine. There’s something remarkable about watching 40 women dance in unison that never dulls.

Classic

The 90-minute show features pop songs like Swift’s “Welcome to New York,” Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind” and the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” as well as classic tunes like “New York, New York” and “Cheek to Cheek.” The two lions that guard the New York Public Library do A Tribe Called Quest-inspired original rap and Vivaldi is heard during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The show meanders into some weird places, like an almost lascivious portrayal of corporate greed on Wall Street to the tune of “Money, Money” (especially interesting for a show prominently sponsored by Chase bank), and has an unwillingness to cut good musical moments that have no real statute tie-ins.

But there’s plenty of magic here, particularly Tony Award-nominee Emilio Sosa’s bright costumes and projections by Moment Factory that mix high-definition photos, bright animation, 3-D elements, live-action footage and complex LED sequences like the subway and the Empire State Building.

In the last Rockettes spring show, everyone got garish wristbands that lit up and throbbed in time to the beat. It was a little too Chuck E. Cheese. In this one, hundreds of tiny lights attached to little wings float down like butterflies. It’s simply prettier and classier this time.

“The New York Spectacular” might not be perfect, but it’s made huge steps in both editing and technology. It’s reinventing itself quite nicely — like any other New Yorker.

One of Broadway’s prime musical houses, the St James Theater, will soon begin an expansion of its stage that will push the back wall of the theater out into the alley behind it. Work begins this summer, just as the Helen Hayes Theater next door begins its own renovations — and as the St James’ current tenant, “Something Rotten!,” continues its performances unabated.

The alley between the St James and the Helen Hayes, two theaters that stand side by side on West 44th Street, has previously been part and parcel of the Hayes. But as Second Stage undertook its purchase of the Hayes, Jujamcyn Theaters, the owner of the St James, bought the alley from the nonprofit. The goal is to deepen the St. James stage by ten feet, in order to accommodate the hefty technical demands of many of today’s splashy musicals. (Both Jujamcyn and Second Stage are keeping mum on the cost of the puchase.)

“At the end of it all, the Hayes will be a beautifully renovated play house and the James, which is already a premier musical house, will have a stage that can accommodate anything our creative teams dream up,” said Jujamcyn president Jordan Roth.

Adaptation

No one’s saying it out loud, but the St James already has its first large-scale musical lined up for the newly expanded space — and it’s a doozy. Disney Theatrical’s stage adaptation of “Frozen” is poised to claim the venue when it skates onto Broadway in spring 2018. But none of the players involved will cop to that on the record, since “Frozen,” which premieres in Denver in summer 2017, hasn’t announced its New York specifics yet, and “Something Rotten!” is still chugging along in an open-ended run with no closing date announced. (The stage expansion, it’s said, had been planned for several years, predating “Frozen.”)

While “Rotten” is still running, Jujamcyn will begin the construction and renovation in the alley that will prep the space to become a part of the St. James stage, in a process that will include clearing out a few floors of offices that occupy the upper reaches of the alley. Sometime in 2017, the theater’s current back wall will be knocked out to connect the stage with its new expansion.

The process gets underway as Broadway real estate has become a topic of concern for commercial producers. The scarcity of available Broadway theaters has become a common state of affairs in recent years, but now the Hayes is about to begin its lifespan as a nonprofit house, the St. James seems to be spoken for, and the Palace Theater is due to undergo a complicated elevation process that will take that venue out of commission for three years or so. There are also rumors that the construction of a proposed new Broadway theater, being built by the Shubert Organization next to the Imperial Theater, would at some point darken the Imperial Theater next door — but the Shuberts have never publicly confirmed whether that theater is in fact in the works, much less what kind of impact its construction would have.

The current tenant at the Palace, “An American in Paris,” just announced it will close in January, but it’s not yet certain whether the renovation on that theater will begin immediately after the production exits. Meanwhile, Jujamcyn will begin its work on the 44th Street alley later this summer, while Second Stage will start its own renovation process on the Hayes at around the same time. (Agencies)

By Mark Kennedy

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