As the world knows now, Wednesday’s eruption of a real volcano in Iceland, instead of the financial one that first blew up there two years ago but in this case has helpfully been dormant for some 187 years saw it finally choose to bubble up again this week. According to The Guardian’s news report today, it has “sent a plume of ash across some of the world’s busiest flight paths” that “has brought the worst disruption to international air travel since September 11.”
And it very nearly grounded me, too: I was flying to New York yesterday morning on a flight scheduled to depart Heathrow at 10.35am, but finally took off at 11.47am after the pilot got a new route to avoid affected airspace.
But as we came into land at JFK seven hours later, he advised us casually how lucky we had been: we were on the fourth last plane to get out before the airspace was entirely shut down. As it remains now. All of which had a particular irony for me, since the first show I was seeing last night was Twyla Tharp’s new “dansical”, Come Fly Away, which of course I very nearly didn’t.
But I’m obviously on a winning streak at the moment - I’d also managed to get upgraded from economy to Virgin’s Upper Class for the flight; and felt like I’d remained there as I watched Tharp’s scintillating Sinatra floorshow. Tharp created what was for me of the seminal shows of the first decade of the century, Movin’ Out, which dazzlingly reinvented the jukebox musical as narrative ballet - one which, seen against the context of this week’s London transfer of the current Broadway revival of Hair, provided another thrilling portrait of the personal cost of lives affected by the draft and the wars that citizens of the US are called upon to fight for their country. (And continuing the Tharp and Hair connections, of course, she had also choreographed the 1979 film version of that show, which is the best thing about it).
But Tharp ran aground when she next tackled the Dylan catalogue in a show called The Times They Are A-Changin’, which ran for less than a month after it premiered on Broadway in 2006. I saw it and they couldn’t change fast enough to get me out of the theatre.
Come Fly Away is a return to form. It may not have the depth and insight of Movin’ Out, but as a sheer outpouring of athletic display and breathtaking technique there is no dancing on Broadway like it. I’m so glad I managed to fly so I could indeed come fly away and take to the skies again with this show the same night.
And talking of flying: in the interval my guest and I got speaking to a woman, who had come in from Las Vegas to see it. She turned out to be widow of Peter Foy, the man behind one of my favourite behind-the-scenes credits, “Flying by Foy”, which has graced shows from Peter Pan (inevitably and most famously), to The Lion King and Monty Python’s Spamalot, which was in previews on Broadway when he died back in 2005 at the age of 79. According to his obituary in the New York Times, “spent his life suspending people by wires not much thicker than sewing thread and sailing them through the air by means of intricate systems of harnesses, pulleys and tracks he developed. Mr. Foy lived, he often said, for the audible gasp from the audience when an earthbound performer suddenly took flight. He flew a string of Broadway Peter Pans, including Mary Martin, Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby. He flew Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Michael Jordan. He flew Garth Brooks over Texas Stadium and Nadia Comaneci over Times Square. He flew Liberace, piano and all.”
The New York Times also noted that, given his work, Mr. Foy was understandably preoccupied with safety. It quotes an interview that he gave with National Public Radio in 2002, describing the peculiar risks of Peter Pan: “Once that person’s in the air,” he said, “you can’t run out onstage and grab him with a hook. And so he’ll fly towards that mantelpiece and go ‘splat.’”
The great news about Come Fly Away is that no one goes splat in that, either - though there are some astonishing jumps and leaps and tumbles in it so I wouldn’t rule it out! And one last note: one very welcome sight on West 46th Street is that the Marquis Theatre (buried, in fact, on the third floor of the imposing Marriot Marquis Hotel that towers over Times Square) has finally acquired its own marquee! They’ve relocated the box office from the draughty cubbyhole that it used to occupy on the Broadway side of the theatre to a more welcoming spot on 46th Street, and brought with it a new marquee which is actually closer to the entrance escalators that take you up to the theatre itself.
Marquis sounds cool