Syncopation, which runs June 8-25 at Ensemble Theatre Company’s (ETC) New Vic, takes the already considerable challenge of a two-person show and raises the stakes by adding dance to the acting. Zander Meisner will play Henry, a butcher who dreams of becoming a famous ballroom dancer, and Sara Brophy is Anna, the shy seamstress who answers his classified ad for a partner willing to practice social dancing in Henry’s dingy sixth-floor walk-up on New York’s Lower East Side. The play is set in 1911, when such stars as Vernon and Irene Castle were starting a revolution in American mores by introducing close partner dancing to the masses. Choreographer William Soleau, a familiar presence in Santa Barbara due to his long association with State Street Ballet, will choreograph the scenes, and Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, the producing artistic director of the Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, will direct the show, which was written by playwright Allan Knee.
For Soleau, the project began with the script, which he read at the behest of State Street Ballet’s Rodney Gustafson, who had received it from ETC Artistic Director Jonathan Fox. “There’s no singing,” Soleau told me. “It’s not like a musical. But there is this beautiful story of two people falling in love through learning to dance, and that appealed to me.” Dancing and talking at the same time, Henry and Anna must demonstrate a wide range of popular steps from the period, including such tricky maneuvers as the hesitation waltz, and they must do so in the small space defined by the set of Henry’s tenement apartment.
Soleau’s original full-length ballet An American Tango, which was performed at the Granada as the kick-off to State Street Ballet’s 2016-17 season, required the choreographer to do extensive research into the period represented in Syncopation, a time when ballroom-dance fever was at its height, especially among working-class people. The prestige of dance stars and the rapid development of a series of dance crazes, many of them based on the movements of animals, gave ordinary folks permission to hold each other closer than ever before and authorized women to discard restrictive corsets in favor of more flexible garments and even, gasp, shorter dresses. “When Irene and Vernon Castle came back from Europe” Soleau said, “Irene’s legs were flying,” and America was never the same again.