Writer: Allan Knee
Director: Karen Jemison
A rare modern dance musical, Allan Knee’s Syncopation receives its UK premiere at the Bridewell Theatre following a formative dance partnership and love story between ballroom dancers in 1910s New York. A slow story that applies a standard dance training model – a novice learns the moves – applied to equivalent stories from Dirty Dancing to Strictly Ballroom, this slightly repetitive two-hander is sweet but its tendency to tell rather than show gets in the way of the dancing.
Advertising for a new partner, meatpacker Henry meets refined shopworker Anna in a dingy sixth-floor room to teach her the skills needed to accompany him. Desperate to fulfil his dream of dancing in front of “the Royals”, the couple slowly increase their time together, mixing work and their private life as they become competition-ready.
Knee’s elongated story spreads itself across 2.5 hours and most of the first Act includes a series of arguments and personality clashes that play out the same scene over and over without moving the story forward – Henry’s gruff manner, complaints about Anna’s commitment and increasing jealousy that she is unwilling to sacrifice her fiancé and family routines to devote herself to Henry and his cause. Character, as a result, is thinly drawn and, while the actors have chemistry, there is little psychological depth to justify the running time.
Knee creates a shallow backdrop of protest and agitation that is never fully specified. Through his work, Henry gets involved with some generic radicals looking for factory reform while Anna’s slightly livelier self-discovery takes her first to Henry for secret dance lessons and then to marches for women’s suffrage and economic reform. But all of this is described after the fact and Syncopation’s structural device in which both characters only talk to the audience and to each other means the opportunity to dramatise these more interesting events is sacrificed.
It is a curious decision to make this a two-hander, a period rom-com that constantly fights against the scale it so clearly aspires to where alternative conversations between Anna and her ferocious women campaigners, the respective disapproving families and even the showcase moments on the dance floor could be depicted in multi-character dialogue. And, what they do too little of is actually dance. Choreographed by Jenny Thomas a couple of numbers are eked out across the show, variations on the same routines while to be a true dance musical it needs to replace so much hefty dialogue with movement that expresses the character’s feelings instead.
Performers Devon-Elise Johnson as Anna and Jye Frasca as Henry make a cute couple investing their creations with emotional weight and building a nervous connection that eventually blossoms. There is an undesirable subplot in which Henry follows Anna in her daily life to watch her, and it is frustrating that writers still think this is a deserving basis for romance – far from suggesting his devotion, it is creepy, non-consensual and an invasion of privacy that makes us think much less of Henry as a result.
Syncopation is hard to describe, it is a play with occasional music and dance but more fully embracing its musical theatre aspirations and some more character perspectives would give this the lift it needs.
Runs until 13 April 2024
