Wicked is very popular but it hasn't enchanted everyone
She's twenty-four years old and she
weighs a hundred pounds. She's pretty but conventionally so. Plainly human, like
the rest of us, she will eventually wither and die. But right now she's
twenty-four and a bare-backed gown of hip-hugging satin and ostrich feathers
billows about her.
She resists his seduction. He sings to
her – "Cheek to Cheek." They dance beside a pool of
water. He is charming and she is charmed. The music, and the scene, begin as conventional
patter and rise to passionate intensity. Her dance expresses that which
elevates the human above the animal; her movements defy that which reduces
mortals to dirt. She, freed of human limitation, wafts like the wind; she flows
like water. She has joined the eternal elements; she is black and white, the
elemental colors of clouds and constellations.
Near the conclusion, though, three
times, he lifts her, spins her, and she spreads her legs. He then dips her
almost to a full recline, almost to the ground, and her body goes limp. The
feathers cover her face modestly like a fan – her hidden expression no doubt communicates
feelings too intimate to share. The music quiets. He, a satisfied smile on his
face, tenderly guides her to a stone wall, where she leans back, open-mouthed. We
recognize that this old movie is telling us, in old movie language, that she has
just had that precious human experience that one can have only in a human body,
a climax.
Audiences who went to see the 1935 Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Top Hat might have, earlier that same
day, been on a bread line. That year my parents were foraging for food in the
forest. That feather dress transported audiences away from the Great Depression
and into pure beauty.
Ninety years later, when I am crushed by
the burdens of this world, I sometimes rewatch that dance. Its escape from,
return to, and celebration of the human condition gives me what I need to go
on.
Music analyst Robert Kapilow salutes the scene's "meticulous
craft." "Cheek to Cheek" sounds familiar, simple, even corny.
But it demonstrates the talent that Irving Berlin exercised in writing 1,500
songs in a sixty-year career. Berlin also wrote "God Bless America;" his
"White Christmas" is said to be the best-selling single of all time. One-hundred-thirty-six
years after Berlin's birth, during the month of December, one can hear
"White Christmas" on any radio station or in any shopping mall.
"Cheek to Cheek" is "mock-mundane." Any amateur might hear the song and think, "Hey, I could have written that." Berlin's sophistication is disguised. "Every note in the vocal line" Kapilow points out, is on the beat, but with the lyrics, "When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek," "Every single note is off the beat … it's so subtle, you almost don't even notice it." Kapilow says that Berlin "brilliantly elides the" song's sudden, intense passion "in a minor key" and resolves that operatic intensity by concluding with a return to the casual flirtatiousness of the song's opening. "These are not just tunes … These songs are three-act dramas in two minutes."
