NEW YORK — A good dancer does more than just defy gravity; he seems to have his own personal supply -- a force field that shapes space and time around his movements. Every impulse has weight and no energy is wasted, even in the enervating trial and error of rehearsal.
You can see it in the way Casey Nicholaw, Broadway chorus boy turned director-choreographer, darts among the performers at a rehearsal for "Minsky's," the splashy new musical comedy that opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Friday, with sails trimmed for a newly stormy Broadway. Anyone else moving that fast, and segueing as quickly between minutiae and a wide-angle view, would look scattered, even desperate.
Not the stocky yet graceful Nicholaw: The man who whipped 2006's sleeper hit "The Drowsy Chaperone" into a giddy froth seems uniquely in his element. And no wonder: "Drowsy" librettist Bob Martin and two of that show's producers, Bob Boyett and Kevin McCollum, are on board for "Minsky's," along with cast members Beth Leavel and Gerry Vichi.
But it's more than that: If "Drowsy" was a spirited but wry ode to a bygone musical style, "Minsky's" promises an unabashed resurrection of a kind of show Broadway hasn't seen in a blue moon -- and you can hold the wry.
"This is a big, tap-dancing musical that doesn't apologize for itself, like '42nd Street' or 'Crazy for You,' " says McCollum, an ever-besuited producer whose unsettled energy feels closer to the nerve's edge than Nicholaw's purposeful intensity. "I think audiences are thirsty for that. The era of the meta-musical is leaving us; we all get the joke of a musical making fun of musicals. We don't need to have the actors winking at us, saying, 'Aren't musicals dorky?' in order for us to enjoy it."
In fact, "Drowsy Chaperone" might be Exhibit A (or B, after "Urinetown") in the case of self-reflexive musicals-that-know-they're-musicals: Narrated by a lonely show queen simply known as Man in Chair (played by writer Martin), it conjured, then commented on, a fictional musical comedy of 1920s vintage.
"This may be a weird thing for me to say, but I don't like to be too self-conscious, unless it's a show where it sort of has to be," Nicholaw said during a lunch break. (A glaring exception to the rule: the full-metal jokery of "Spamalot," which Nicholaw choreographed.) He makes a distinction about "Drowsy," which marked his directing debut: "I don't feel like we were ever really commenting on the show -- the Man in Chair was, but he was the only one who was allowed to comment. Everyone else had to be completely in it, completely serious."
