Duke's Place

By T.E.Kalem

SOPHISTICATED LADIES

Concept by Donald McKayle

Based on the music of Duke Ellington

Nuclear energy is being released at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theater, but no one need fear anything more drastic than delight. Sophisticated Ladies has no book and seems not to need one. It relies on incendiary dancing, notably tap, an onstage Big Band blast under the baton of Duke Ellington's son Mercer, and some 36 of the Duke's tunes of seductive genius.

The link between Ellington and his genius is Gregory Hines, a supernova of a performer with formidable gifts. Whether he is dancing, singing or flaying and feathering the drums, Hines has a sly, unaffected good humor that winningly permeates the evening and the show.

His high-stepping, svelte-styled fellow performers are not far behind. With insinuative grace, Judith Jamison uncoils in the title number to lament the bittersweet tempo of the heart at dawn. Gregg Burge and Hinton Battle challenge the speed of light with their agility, and Phyllis Hyman and Terri Klausner pour molten sensuousness into numbers like In a Sentimental Mood and Hit Me with a Hot Note and Watch Me Bounce. If Harlem had a Renaissance court, Willa Kim's color-splashed costumes would adorn it.

No amount of professional proficiency alone enables a musical to take wing and make a chairbound audience irresistibly airborne. The X factor, and Sophisticated Ladies has it, is mood. All of Ellington's music is mood music, and its components are inescapably urban, elegant, nocturnal and just a trifle snobbish. Ellington is as close as possible to being Noel Coward's twin.

What Coward did for the bright Weary of It All worldlings of London, Ellington did for the smart, sassy Take the "A " Train Harlem-Manhattan axis. This mood resonates throughout the show, particularly in Set Designer Tony Walton's scenic imagination. He inscribes the Cotton Club in neon across the night sky rather as Picasso painted with a flashlight in the dark. Through dark blue and white lighting, a flight of stairs becomes a piano keyboard to prance on.

A cruel amplification of sound --Broadway's sin against all musicals --robs some of the numbers of the sinewy, teasing subtlety that is an Ellington touchstone. Otherwise, the show is torrid, torchy and trig. --T.E.Kalem

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