NY Review: 'Heat Wave: The Jack Cole Project'

A long overdue tribute to choreographer Jack Cole, “Heat Wave: The Jack Cole Project” celebrates the father of jazz dance with an entertaining revue built mainly of reconstructed Cole numbers from Hollywood musicals. The Broadway dance community has been yearning to commemorate Cole for at least 20 years (“Cabaret” choreographer Ron Field was working on a Cole musical when he died in 1989) and rightly so. Cole’s influence on Broadway jazz is inestimable. His inventive fusion of vernacular African-American movements, Indian dance, and Latin rhythms inaugurated a new dance form that impacted the work of virtually every major commercial choreographer of the last half of the 20th century (most particularly Bob Fosse). More importantly, Cole invented the training method that shaped great performers such as Carol Haney and Gwen Verdon, whose dancing inspired much of Broadway’s most memorable choreography, and continues to undergird jazz-dance training today.

Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Chet Walker, “Heat Wave” features choreographic passages from more than two dozen Cole dances, most designed to frame musical performances by glamorous Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. Played on Kelly James Tighe’s spaciously “cinematic” set, cleverly backed by shelves of film reels, the show is danced and sung by an industrious 15-member cast, dolled up in ravishing costumes by Brad Musgrove. It is accompanied by snazzy swing arrangements (by musical director Richard Hip-Fores) played by an onstage jazz band, and is seasoned with voice-over quotes from famous entertainment-world figures touting Cole’s greatness.

However, it is likely that, to general audiences, the show doesn’t demonstrate the enormity of Cole’s contributions and may appear dated and tame. Cole’s choreography is about style, musicality, and expressivity -- not tricks -- and has an internal, “adult” quality to it that is not well-served by the presentational, upbeat, showy approach of many young dancers. Cole’s meticulously detailed choreography may also be out of sync with what today’s viewers expect from dance entertainment and, in this production, suffers from the obvious problems resulting from translating choreography originally created for the screen to the stage. 

Yet while Walker’s fast-paced endeavor falls short of wowing and needs a stronger through line to motivate its whizzing from one unrelated number to the next, it contains some genuine terpsichorean gems. The most priceless is the dancing of Matt Rivera, a true exemplar of Cole’s classic jazz style. Unlike the happy, spatially flat, sex-less performances of some of his fellow cast members, Rivera (who looks a bit like Cole) performs with an intense, weighted, cool, ultra-smooth quality that captures the simmering tensions, deep sensuality, and three-dimensionality of Cole’s vocabulary. Rosie Lani Fiedelman offers another of the evening’s gems in a short, quiet solo that illustrates the power Cole was able to find in slow, fluid movement. And Kristin Piro is excellent in an invigorating “Harem Dance.”

Presented by Queens Theatre in association with Walkerdance, at Queens Theatre, 14 United Nations Ave. South, Queens. May 3-20. Wed., 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Thurs.-Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. (718) 760-0064 or www.queenstheatre.org. Casting by Michael Cassara.