Conceived by: Mark Robin and Aaron Thielen
At: Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre, 10 Marriott Dr., Lincolnshire
Contact: ( 847 ) 634-0200; $42 - $45
Runs through: Feb. 11
How huge is Marriott Theatre's All Night Strut? It's not just a musical-within-the-musical that showcases the roaring fine dance revue that required a whopping five choreographers. There's a musical within the musical that's within the musical.
As dance shows goes, Marc Robin rarely does less than razzle-dazzle, neon-bright work. With the non-stop All Night Strut, the dazzle takes on the intensity of sunspots.
Consider, for just one example, the moment in the Lullaby of Broadway, segment, wherein two fresh-faced young hoofers in a Busby Berkeley-era spectacle learn that they must go on for the stars. 'You! Chorus boy! You! Chorus girl! Can you do it?' barks the megalomaniac, beret-topped director. The milk-fed, can-do, let's-go-out-there-unknowns-and-come-back-stars earnestness of the chorus kids is hilarious. And once the ensemble starts dancing, it's clear: Everyone in this show is a megawatt star.
Director Robin, with Marriott Co-Artistic Director Aaron Thielen, crafted the All Night Strut from a tiny, four-person musical that ran in 1998 in south suburban Evergreen Park. Now, the show has a cast of 23. The music classic tunes from the 1930s and '40s as well as an extended hip-hop sectionhas been revised and re-orchestrated ( with terrific musical direction by Doug Peck ) to provide a showcase for a powerhouse vocal quartet ( Susan Moniz, Susie McMonagle, Stephen Schellhardt and Jim Weitzer ) , and a dance extravaganza that showcases styles from Latin to ballroom to hip-hop to lindy hop. There's even a New Age-y, black-lit aerial ballet, wherein a pair of ethereal sylphs leap and tumble aloft to the gently haunting strains of White Cliffs of Dover.
The songs are eminently familiar, yet re-fashioned to reverberate anew. And how they reverberate. A brow-mopping Minnie the Moocher ( sung by Moniz and McMonagle and danced by Allison Stodola with Tucker Ty and Ian Liberto ) is steamy enough to fog up the windows of a stadium-sized solarium. Nightmarea number depicting combat in World War IIis darkly brutal, the all-male dance corps moving like West Side Story's Jets stranded in hell.
The bar for all seven segments of the production is set in the opening swing dancing movement ( choreographed by Mark Stuart Eckstein and Beverly Durand ) , a foot-flying display of breathtaking grace and athleticism.
Then there's Moniz' heart-searing rendition of As Time Goes By. If you've got a heart, it will break in all the old familiar places before she reaches the final measures.
What doesn't work here is a distracting, irksome character named Coda, a mime who shows up between each of the dance numbers and does shtick involving lighting and sound effects. He doesn't provide segues between the numbers; he merely destroys the momentum of the production.