With charm and grace, pair dance into audience’s heart
Detroit Free Press
In 1911, a New York City meat cutter named Henry Ribelow rents a large empty room and puts an ad in the paper looking for a dance partner. The first thing you need to know is that he really is looking for a dance partner. A woman named Anna Bianchi, a beader in a garment factory, answers the ad.
Henry, who speaks of dancing for royalty, nearly overflows with self-assurance. Anna, timid, seems ready to run away at any moment.
You just know they’re going to fall in love. What you don’t know is that you, too, are about to fall in love: with them, as played by Richard Marlatt and Roxanne Wellington, in Allan Knee’s play “Syncopation.”
John M. Manfredi’s Meadow Brook Theatre production abounds in feeling and detail, in affection for the characters and appreciation for their time and place and for the larger themes in Knee’s script. “Syncopation” isn’t only about love, dancing and love of dancing.
It’s a tale of liberation and possibility, fulfillment and frustration, illusion and disillusionment, playing out against a background of a changing nation, America in the early stages of the labor movement and the women’s movement.
But while we’re on the subject, Marlatt and Wellington can really dance. “Syncopation” is also about the way creativity lifts the soul. Henry’s job “kills the spirit,” he says. Anna doesn’t use those words, but says that whenever she suggests trying new designs at work she is told to stick to the established patterns.
In Henry’s studio with its windup gramophone they find each other — and themselves.
Not that it’s easy.
Nothing about Knee’s play is cliched, and just because the two characters fall in love, it doesn’t mean that they realize it, or act on those feelings.
A Chicago actor last seen here as the stalker in Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s 2004 production of “Boy Gets Girl,” Marlatt radiates decency and determination as the Jewish immigrant Henry and his accent is consistent and convincing. As the more assimilated Anna, Wellington speaks in cultivated all-American tones until, under stress, traces of an Italian accent appear.
Physically, Marlatt begins graceful and remains so; Wellington begins awkwardly and acquires her grace gradually. The fetching choreography is by Emily Rose Merrell; the set, with its evocative black-and-white videos of old New York, is by Brian Dambacher.
The weak city light that filters through high and grimy windows is by Reid G. Johnson. The brighter light that emanates from “Syncopation” comes courtesy of all concerned.
