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| Tuesday, August 12, 1997 | ||
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Entertainment | |
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| Tuesday, August 12, 1997 | ||
By Lesley Valdes
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
DENVER -- Michael Flatley is winsome during
an interview. When he's not exposing the gleaming, dripping chest
familiar to viewers of Lord of the Dance, the guy's vibes
are sweet. He's better-looking in person than on the video, too.
Back in Chicago, where Flatley grew up, some say the phenom dancer has always favored shirts open to the belly button. But backstage at the McNichols Sports Arena, an hour before curtain rises, Flatley's totally buttoned in blue-denim shirt and jeans topped by a ho-hum beige jacket. Only the jewelry store on his left ear signals the splash that's selling out stadiums on several continents: two white-gold diamond hoops thick as society matrons wear, and one cluster stud that Flatley, beaming, says he just bought in Montreal.
It's a toss-up which sparkles more, the gems or the boyish brio the dancer offers along with his cheek for a farewell buss. Thirty-nine going on 11, this 5-foot, 9-inch dynamo schmoozes the press as keenly as he does his nightly crowds of 9,000. ``I've loved chatting with ya,'' says this dance lord with a bit of the brogue, who's tapped, no, pounded his way into America's heart to the tune of over $75 million since the show opened last summer. That gross excludes the international appearances and at least $150 million in sales from the Lord of the Dance CD and video. Tonight through Saturday, the tour returns to Philly with five performances at the CoreStates Center.
``We're so lucky, everyone's coming to see us. We've got every age group and nationality,'' the dancer enthuses backstage. ``I was in Tahiti and the prime minister of Tehran -- yes, Tehran -- stopped by to tell me how much he liked the show.''
Denver's no Tahiti: the opening-night crowd at McNichols looks
pretty tame, ho-
mogenous. Women predominate, of all ages; every fifth or sixth
member is a guy, many of them daddies accompanying dance-school
daughters. McNichols is part of the Mile High Stadium complex
where the Denver Broncos play. Onstage, Flatley's a bronco, too.
Watch the women smile at those mile-high kicks and exaggerated
swaggers, at the wham-bam-fabulous tapping that won him a spot in
the Guinness Book of Records for fastest tapping feet in the
United States.
``Aw, we're not going to be able to see the feet,'' says a hefty lady of Austrian origin. She and her husband paid $50 apiece to sit 13 rows from center stage, but the floor isn't raked, so their view is partial. ``I've got the video -- and those feet,'' she confides, ``I can't keep my eyes off his feet.''
One row behind her, other body parts are being considered. ``You know the difference between the Lord of the Dance and Riverdance?'' a gal in tight jeans asks her demurely dressed neighbor. ``In Riverdance he doesn't wear his shirt open way down to there . . . and his pants are buttoned!''
Of course, there are other distinctions. Riverdance, the wildly popular folkloric revue Flatley helped to originate and in which he co-starred, celebrates Gaelic dancing front and center. Lord of the Dance, which Flatley created after he was fired from Riverdance, is a Celtic variety show too -- but it celebrates Michael Flatley. It's his artistic and commercial revenge.
``Whoa!'' exclaims the lady in jeans as Flatley emerges from a volley of smoke. ``This is going to be fun,'' she says. ``This is hot!''
Riverdance used hokey smoke effects and pirouetting strobes to accentuate its ramrod-straight precision dancing, effects Lord of the Dance takes to Rocky Mountain heights. There are so many psychedelic squibs and explosions that a pyrotechnican tours with the entourage; two union firemen stand guard for every show.
The special effects make it hard to focus on the dancing. Lasers and strobes filter across the audience as often as they circle and whirl onstage. (Patrick Woodroffe, lighting man for Michael Jackson and Tina Turner, designed them.) Wraparound quad sound magnifies Ronan Hardiman's New Age Celtic bells-and-whistles music, and radial microphones under the stage floor augment every tap and click. And even that's not enough: every time the dancers pound the floor, a prerecorded tape of their clackety-clacking virtually doubles the impact.
Offstage, Flatley plays the sensitive bronco: ``My girlfriend plugs into the Internet -- I don't do computers myself -- and it just brings tears to my eyes to see what people are saying about the show.''
He doesn't mean the critics. ``I've never done particularly well with serious dance critics. They don't understand. This is entertainment. . . .'' Long pause, then the qualifier: ``With 26 hardworking years of art put into it.''
No, the Denver Post critic didn't understand. After crediting Flatley's ``dazzle of footwork'' and precision corps, Glenn Giffin pronounced much of Lord of the Dance ``rampant vulgarity,'' finding irksome the star's frequent costume changes and habit of hogging the stage. He's becoming ``the Liberace of the Dance World,'' Giffin wrote.
``People get bored easily. They want variety,'' Flatley responds. ``You want to keep punching things up.''
His assortment of sequined boleros, worn over bare breast, includes a black-and-white number that coordinates with an ebony-and-ivory flute he plays onstage. Shades of Liberace? The dancer doesn't mind the comparison, or even ones to Michael Jackson and Elvis for the about-to-be-famous Flatley pelvis squiggles, which arrive toward the end of the show: ``I'm just being myself. The older I get, the more I know I can only dance my dance, paint my picture.
``To tell the truth, I think I could do anything on stage, but dance happens to be my medium. It's bliss. It's what I came to this planet for. If there's anything I can do, it's move people.''
He can confuse them, too.
``I don't really get the story line, it seems kind of weak,'' says Tim Lynch, who's brought his daughter Tiffany to Lord of the Dance to celebrate her 10th birthday. The Lynches aren't the only ones to find Flatley's good-and-evil battle scenes and the love trysts that alternate twixt the star and Irish Colleen (Bernadette Flynn) or Temptress (Gillian Norris) corny and unconvincing.
In spite of this, audiences are enthralled, so much so that anyone might reasonably wonder why people go wild for an MTV packaging of a not-terribly-varied 19th-century art form? Step-dancing started when Irish lads and lasses pounded nails in their shoes and tapped the nights away in tight spaces such as kitchens and pubs; in this century it's spent most of its time as a rule-bound athletic competition. The body's ice, the feet the fire, goes an old Irish saying, one that Flatley simplifies first to one word, passion, and then to another, energy. His step-dancing is all about energy: ``We start at the heartbeat and then build, build, till at the finale everyone in the audience is right there with us. Ten thousand people standing and cheering, every night,'' Flatley boasts.
Who wouldn't stand and respond to the beat of dozens of pounding feet? No matter how complex they become, step-dancing rhythms are basically rock rhythms: one-two, one-two. However ``family'' the Lord of the Dance audience may be, the appeal of the spectacle is primal, even copulatory.
One distinction between Riverdance and Lord of the Dance may not be widely celebrated. ``Flatley's got the best Irish dancers in the world,'' says Mark Howard, a choreographer whose business it is to know such things. Howard says the 40 dancers in Lord (most Irish, a few English, two Americans) are superior to those in Riverdance; he also says Flatley was brilliant to hire Dubliner Marie Duffy, a legend among step-dancers, to help him choreograph the show.
Howard is a Chicagoan like Flatley and a former step-dancing world champion. He runs the Trinity Irish Dance Company, founded in 1989 to create progressive choreography for competitive step-dancing routines. Both men studied at Chicago's Dennehy School, though Howard stresses that ``Michael was always leagues ahead of me as a dancer.
``He's absolutely a phenomenal talent. He's fun to be with; as charismatic as a rock star. But he can be slippery: he exaggerates things,'' Howard says, remembering the Irish talk show on which Flatley said he was a member of the high-IQ group Mensa, which he later denied. Howard also wishes the famous dancer ``would give credit where it's due.'' He believes Flatley was influenced by at least two dance-theater pieces Howard created in 1989 and 1990 for Trinity and that bear resemblance to those in the later Riverdance. Howard is not suing because movement is virtually impossible to claim, ``and because I don't want to be Little Richard. Little Richard went around saying he, not Elvis, invented rock and roll, and he was right -- but who cares?'' Besides, Riverdance's success has benefited everyone in the field, acknowledges Howard, whose troupe appeared in Philadelphia last season and makes its debut at the New York's Joyce Theater this month
Irish dance's Baryshnikov was raised in a comfortable,
upper-middle-class Chicago family. His father, now retired, had a
thriving plumbing business; mother helped out. Michael, the
second-born, says that when his oldest sister went to live in
Ireland, ``I helped out with the others,'' meaning his two
younger sisters and brother Patrick. Every sibling danced.
``The whole family's talented,'' confirms Marge Dennehy, whose longtime school in Chicago's Oak Lawn section has turned out hundreds of step-dancing competition winners, including Howard and the Flatley bunch. Until recently Flatley neglected to mention the training he'd gotten at her school; when Flatley was her student, she choreographed a number called ``Lord of the Dance'' for Michael, which was later danced by brother Patrick.
Dennehy says that after graduating from Brother Rice High School, Flatley briefly ran a dance school, ``but that wasn't his bag.'' Then he started his own business, Dynasty Plumbing.
During the early '90s Flatley toured with the Chieftains. His big break came in April 1994, with his televised performance during intermission of the Eurovision music contest in Dublin. Riverdance opened later that year; Flatley was fired in 1995 after a dispute with producer Moya Doherty over money and artistic control; ``A terrible injustice,'' says Flatley, whose lawsuit for 2 percent of the show's $7 million-plus profits is pending.
He says he can use the money: ``My dancers are the best-paid in the world. They're all going to be able to buy homes,'' he boasts. According to a lawsuit filed by John Reid, Lord of the Dance's start-up producer (better known for working with Elton John), Flatley owes him $750,000; after working together six months, Flatley reportedly fired Reid. Backstage at McNichols, tour director Martin Flitton protests: ``I'm fed up with hearing how he [ Flatley ] fires people. He's a good boss. The best I've had,'' says Flitton, who's a veteran of rock and roll shows.
Principals second the praise. ``Michael's always there for us,'' says Helen Egen, 17, the whistle-tootling sprite who opens the show and nearly -- but not quite -- steals a scene from her boss. ``This is a dream come true,'' says the giggling lass from Digg's Lane Dance School back in Dublin.
Daira Nolan, Flatley's 28-year-old opposing Dark Lord, knows he's in dreamland. Before this show he worked for a computer company, a career as an Irish dancer being ``unthinkable.'' Now, Nolan intends to dance till he drops. ``It sounds cocky, but you just live for the response you get here every night,'' says Nolan, whose lean good looks are thwarted by the baggy costume he wears opposite the leather-slick leader.
What will the dancers do when the boss hits Hollywood? A movie deal is in the works for Dream Dance, which Flatley is writing and choreographing. Production has been announced for March; on St. Patrick's Day, Flatley is expected to dance his farewell Lord of the Dance in Chicago.
Dream Dance, the movie, is intended to inspire others to follow their bliss, he says. ``I have a simple method for achieving my dreams: I visualize what I want in living color on a giant screen, and then I work backwards. To tell the truth, I've been doing it since I was 6. In school, they'd say `Flatley: What are you looking at?' I'd be dreaming about the movies, about John Wayne.'' Later, he visualized dancing on Broadway. Now, he says, he feeds his powers of self-actualization with books such as Napoleon's Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Arnold M. Patent's You Can Have It All.''
``To tell the truth, I'm thinking of writing my
own book.'' And unbidden, he offers a sample of his writerly
advice: ``Think of the thing that gives you goose bumps, then do
it!''
Philadelphia Online -- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Entertainment -- Copyright Tuesday, August 12, 1997 |
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