BOTTOM LINE: An incredible dance show, unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The Groovaloos are a dance company from LA. They’re hip-hop dancers with diverse backgrounds who came together a while back as a community of freestylers who liked to jam with one another. They’re perhaps the most talented group of hip-hop dancers out there, at least as far as I’m aware. You’ve probably seen them on TV in one way or another, as they’ve been featured on several of those reality talent shows over the past couple of years (Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance, MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew). Their autobiographical show, Groovaloo, has grown and changed since its inception in 2003, and it now comes to New York to play at the Joyce Theater after a successful run in LA. After its brief stay in New York — it plays though September 27 – Groovaloo will tour the country beginning January 10.
Performance-wise, Groovaloo is an athletic, energy-packed 90 minutes that gets the audience’s attention and doesn’t let go. Each of the 14 dancers is better than the next, and with men and women of all cultural backgrounds, the cast is totally captivating. Each dancer gets a solo moment, and as the show reveals itself, the audience learns each dancer’s story and how they got to where they are now. Although there are many featured moments for each dancer where they can break and freestyle and do their own thing, there are also many synchronized and choreographed moments where some or all of the dancers perform the same steps or tricks in smaller groups or as bigger production numbers. The variety keeps the production moving along at a nice pace.
Brian Yorkey is not an asshole. The playwright of the new Broadway musical Next to Normal would never write disparaging comments on a blog post critical of his show. He actually welcomes intellectual discussions about Next to Normal and is much more humble than proud. So it was obviously disconcerting when he discovered an impostor was posting offensive comments as “Brian Yorkey” on a handful of websites this past spring as Next to Normal opened on Broadway.