Song-and-dance floor show returns
Spotlighted by media in various cities around the country, the show tells the musical story of ex-gangster turned world-touring singer and actor Johnny Dellaroca, who opens the Roxy Ballroom and Nightclub on Chicago’s East Side in 1949 — only to have his dark past catch up with him.
Locally, the Cats are scheduled to appear Jan. 14 on Nashville’s Fox 17 morning show, where they danced in August.
“Having them back was a no-brainer,” said Center for the Arts Director Michael Reinhardt. “Last August, we turned away enough people on Saturday night to have filled the performance hall all over again on Sunday. My only regret was that we had not scheduled a Sunday matinee.”
Swingin’ at the Roxy features 20 swing-style hit songs from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, including In the Mood, Sing Sing Sing and It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing – performed by the eight dancers and four singers of the Swing Cat troupe on classic 40s floor show sets.
“The goal is to place the spectator into a 120-minute time warp. It will be as if the listener is back in the musical world of 1949, the year RCA was introducing a 45 rpm record to replace the old 78 rpm,” said Swing Cats leader John Pyka. He will be clad in a red pin-stripe zoot suit, shaded by a Clark Kent-style fedora, playing the watchchain-twirling, macho and charismatic Big Daddy Cool, a cross between Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Cab Calloway. “Even eight-track tapes were two decades in the future.”
Swingin’ at the Roxy is a long-standing dream come true for ardent swing enthusiast Pyka, a tenor and the show’s lead vocalist, who has sung in an invitation-only choir at New York’s Carnegie Hall and sang the national anthem two years in a row at the Pro Football Hall of Fame game. Pyka spent more than a year doing swing era research that involved, among other things, viewing scores of old movies and compiling swing dialog and slang from Internet databases.
True to the style of the 1940s night club, Pyka, who has done stand-up comedy and magic on the A&E Network show Evening at the Improv, will also perform his award-winning magic act at intervals during the musical.
One of the show’s key choreographers is Jason Wade, director of the Known World Players, a medieval combat reenactment group that tours Renaissance festivals nationwide. Wade also plays the club dancer Two Dollar Deuce, who becomes involved in a love triangle that ends in a show-interrupting fight, broken up by Big Daddy Cool – and settled by a dance-off between the two male rivals.