Dance Propels Musical 'Millie' in Story of 'Power of Sisterhood'

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4/6/2018 Dance propels musical 'Millie' in story of 'power of sisterhood'

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Dance propels musical ‘Millie’ in story of ‘power of sisterhood’ By Michael Grossberg / For The Columbus Dispatch Posted Apr 5, 2018 at 5:00 AM “Thoroughly Modern Millie” updates an old-fashioned girl-meets-boy plot into a dance-filled story of female empowerment.

Composer Jeanine Tesori, author-lyricist Dick Scanlan and author Richard Morris based the musical comedy, which ran on Broadway from 2002 to 2004, on the 1967 film musical about a plucky young woman who in 1922 moves to New York to find work, love and happiness.

The Otterbein University departments of Theatre & Dance and Music are presenting the Broadway hit, which will open Thursday in Cowan Hall.

″‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ feels like a golden-age musical, a valentine to love and joy and to musicals and movies of the 1920s and 1930s,” director Thom Christopher Warren said.

“But the show also allows women a voice that they didn’t have even in 1967.”

The show, which won six 2002 Tony awards, including best musical and choreography, offers a satirical but inspiring story set in the decade when newly confident women were bobbing their hair, shortening their hemlines and entering the workforce.

“Millie comes in and declares herself a ‘modern’ when women had just won the right to vote and some power,” Warren said.

The musical “says that times are changing, that we can’t get stuck in the past.”

Dance propels the two-act, 2½-hour show, which was primarily choreographed by Stella Hiatt Kane, director of the Dance Department at Otterbein. Associate choreographer Anna Elliott, a former Rockette dancer now on the Otterbein dance faculty, staged the tap-dancing numbers — most notably, the second-act-opener “Forget About the Boy” and “The Speed Test,” in which tapping reflects the fast pace of Millie’s typewriting.

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“Anna brings a great wealth to the choreography,” Hiatt Kane said.

“Her tap is very traditional, clean and specific.”

Hiatt Kane’s choreography, meanwhile, encompasses the rapturous romanticism of duets by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the jazzy feeling of the wordless “The Nuttycracker Suite,” and period dance crazes such as the Charleston, the Varsity Drag and the Black Bottom.

“What’s terrific about the show is its range of dance styles,” Hiatt Kane said.

“Throughout the script, almost in every scene, there’s dancing. ... The movement in this show does a lot of the storytelling. The dancing is free and open and fun, reflecting how women and the times are changing.”

Abigail Isom, an Otterbein junior, plays Millie Dillmount, the perky title character originated by Julie Andrews in the film and by Sutton Foster on Broadway.

“Independent, ambitious, spunky and energetic, Millie knows what she wants,” said Isom, 20.

After moving into a women’s residency hotel and finding a secretarial job to support herself, Millie sets her eye on her boss, Trevor Graydon (Matt Gittins). But her chance meeting with handsome Jimmy Smith (Colin Robertson) changes her feelings.

“Millie is driven to marry her boss, so she doesn’t recognize for quite a while that she’s falling in love with Jimmy,” Isom said.

Millie’s internal conflict about the two men is dramatized in “Forget About the Boy,” which is sung and danced with the women in her office.

“The song is about her trying to forget she ever met Jimmy because he’s ruining her plans,” Isom said.

“We’re all talking about our boyfriends but realizing we don’t need to think about men, because we’re strong enough on our own.

Ultimately, she said, the musical champions the power of sisterhood.

“You have to have a support system, which Millie finds through her friend Dorothy and the other girls at the women’s residency hotel,” Isom said.

“Women have been fighting for empowerment since the 1920s, and today we’re going through another phase of feminism. ... Millie learns that you can’t do it alone.” http://www.dispatch.com/entertainmentlife/20180405/dance-propels-musical-millie-in-story-of-power-of-sisterhood 2/3 4/6/2018 Dance propels musical 'Millie' in story of 'power of sisterhood'

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