Swing high MSTM brings on big band BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Swing! Originally conceived by Paul Kelly. Directed and choreographed by Ginger Thatcher; music direction by Steven Gross. Produced by the Maine State Music Theatre, at Bowdoin’s Pickard Theater, through June 25. Call 207.725.8769.

Don’t be put off by the last decade’s massive nostalgia for swing in Hollywood and the music industry. The treatments may get old, but as for the music itself — well, what halfway sentient creature could ever really tire of the ambrosial stuff of Ellington, Basie, and Miller? With that in mind, the Maine State Music Theatre opens their season with Swing! (directed and choreographed by Ginger Thatcher), a revue of the big-band best of our American heritage.

With an eight-piece band (including a particularly fine horn section), four main vocalists, and 10 dancers, the sounds and moves of Swing! really are a pleasure for anyone with a bent for the Duke, the Count, and the King. The capable singers and dancers (many of whom appeared in this show’s Broadway run) have no pressing demands of character to distract from their vocal and physical exertions (which are mighty, particularly for some of the featured dancers). In fact, they go through the numbers by their own names, in refreshing ensemble-style.

It’s at once obvious that Swing!’s ensemble of dancers is highly trained, but one of the things that’s exhilarating about this show is the range of style and posture represented up there. On the one hand, take the exquisite Adealani Malia and her partner Mark Stuart Eckstein. Together, and particularly when (in "Throw that Girl Around") they represent as the West Coast couple in a dance showdown, they execute some stunning technical moves that require intimidating precision — Mark sends Adealani flipping and sweeping fleetly over his head, across his back, and through his own and other people’s legs. Both wield formidable control over Thatcher’s excellent and ambitious choreography, but whenever Adealani’s back on her feet, they relax effortlessly back into that very loose exuberance that marks the swing style. Then there are the dancers like Amy Shure, Amanda Rose, and Tera-Lee Pollin, whose dancing doesn’t project their training so much as a playful, regular-gal abandon that’s immensely appealing. Taken all together, the dancing succeeds at suggesting how swing was danced by both the practiced and the purely enthusiastic.

In that respect — and by setting its songs in the streets of Harlem as well as the Savoy and USO halls — Swing!’s dancing celebrates the populist tinges of a dance craze that was really the first to transcend things like class, race, and region.

That said, a few of Thatcher’s choreographic decisions are a little off, and sometimes downright befuddling. The arch sultriness of Earl Hagen’s "Harlem Nocturne" — one of the most gorgeous compositions of the era — is wasted in too much meaningless, back-and-forth motion between the haughty lovers who dance it, with far too little incendiary slink. And in "I’ll Be Seeing You" (a ballad that Bing Crosby put on the top of the charts in 1944) Thatcher departs from the swing idiom completely, and sends Amanda Rose languishing through a balletic pining over a sailor.

The human dramas of and around the armed forces play a hefty role in the swing movement’s history, and this production devotes a particularly large ratio to this angle (your Louis Jordan G.I. Jive, your USO entertainers), more so than to the Negro and mixed-race experiences of Harlem (The program notes that Thatcher is a self-proclaimed "Navy brat"). This is relevant context, certainly, but it sometimes feels a touch overplayed. Thatcher ends Glen Miller’s infectious "In the Mood" — and, weightily, the whole first act — with the boys exiting off to duty stage right, in slow motion under red gels. It’s a moment of rather forced solemnity in a production that otherwise does well in keeping, mostly, to the ebullience of the jitterbug and the gleaming optimism of the horn section.

But apart from the armed forces fixation (and the continuing, ultimately successful saga of Alan Green wooing singing mama Marie Pressman), Swing! wisely eschews narrative. A plot line forced over this buoyant stuff would weigh it down, and instead, the show is carried by its fine essentials of jump. In its vigorous execution of that song and dance, and in how winningly it delivers up the energy and happy feet of a people and an era, MSMT starts its summer swinging high.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com