An infectious pitter-patter engulfs Cahn Auditorium as an enormous tap dancing ensemble fills the stage for the 70th Annual Dolphin Show. It is the performance of the “ballet number” as director Emily Maltby, a Communication senior, refers to it, accompanying the song from which the show receives its title, 42nd Street.
The play, essentially a show within a show, follows the conception and production of the fictitious musical Pretty Lady in Depression era New York. Pretty Lady’s director Julian Marsh (Communication senior Alex Goldklang), a big name in this imaginary Broadway world, puts together his new project while grappling with complicated dance numbers, catchy tunes, and a leading lady Dorothy Brock (Bienen junior Kara Dunlevy), who cannot dance and worries about losing the spotlight to a young ingénue, Peggy Sawyer (Communication junior Evelyn Jacoby).
Maltby wears many hats – or shoes perhaps – as this year’s director of the nation’s largest student-run musical production as well as its choreographer. In her time at Northwestern, she has been assistant director of the Dolphin Show in her freshman and sophomore years, the choreographer for last year’s Dolphin Show Ragtime, and a director for several other campus productions.
42nd Street is based on a film of the same name made in 1933. The music, composed by Harry Warren with lyrics by Al Dubin, harks back to the early Broadway motifs of large, choreographed ensemble numbers with kicklines and girls wearing elaborate costumes and heeled tap shoes. But even more than the music, 42nd Street is a show about choreography – and the many different classical styles of theater dance.
And Maltby knows a thing or two about how to recreate that traditional style of dance. “I’ve been dancing my whole life and in high school specifically,” Maltby said. “I was a tapper first and then ballet, jazz and some modern, but mostly classical.” Her experience working with these time-honored forms of dance shaped one of the major thematic concepts of the show – the value of dance as a form of expression and art.
Adding to the precision in choreography was Maltby’s experience working on the show several years ago. “I’ve known the show forever,” Maltby said. “I was actually in it at camp when I was 13, and it had always been on my mind, and when we read it I got really excited about doing it and about what the campus reaction would be like.”
But the process that brought 42nd Street to the stage this winter was not a quick and easy path. “We start work in the year before, so we’ve been working on the show since May [2011],” Maltby said. And in the nine months of work that go into the Dolphin Show, 150 undergraduate students become involved in an intricate planning process. “But what is amazing about it is that because we work on it for so long and there are so many of us, it really is like a family of people who work on the show, “ Maltby said.
A week before the show opens, with the periphery production aspects, from costuming to lighting to sets, still in the works, the performance already glistens with the hugeness of Cahn Auditorium. The stage sets the mood for the entire production with an outline of the New York skyline defined in PVC pipe along a brick wall backdrop to accompany the more elaborate props and set pieces. “It’s a show that is famous for these large dance numbers, large sets, large costumes,” Maltby said. “But I don’t think that’s, at its heart, what the show is about.”
As Maltby puts it, 42nd Street is about “the need for art in economic hardship.” Even the show within the show, Pretty Lady, recalls those themes. “I think the show is about how from the terrible, awful, gritty world of a Depression, you can create magic,” Maltby said.
But that is not to say that 42nd Street’s magic will only exist in its message. It is a spectacle that speaks for itself, despite its profounder and deeper meaning. “We still have 15 dimes rolling across the stage for ‘We’re in the Money’ that are the size of hula-hoops,” Maltby said.
Despite the inherent efforts of the cast and crew to put on a spectacular student-run musical and the tremendous work involved in the production, there is an optimism that pervades the show and those involved with it. “I have more fun standing in this room, working with these people, than I do doing most other things, so it’s not a burden for me,” said Maltby. And much like the show illustrates with its own show within a show perspective, “Put all the specks of dust together,” as Peggy says, “and you have something big and beautiful.”
42nd Street will run for five performances from Friday, Jan. 20 to Sat, Jan. 28. Tickets are $25 for the general public, $20 for seniors and Northwestern faculty and staff, and $10 for students and children.