On broadway: high fliers: broadway shows are taking off-literally. The Frank Wildhorn musical Dracula is the latest to make audiences gasp with its aerial choreography

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2004 by Sylviane Gold

It used to be enough to dance, sing and act. But these days, to get a part on Broadway, it helps if you can fly. "The Greeks flew gods onto the stage in machines, and a century ago Peter Pan flew into the Darlings" nursery. But until recently, most Broadway musicals kept their feet on the ground. No more. In shows from Wicked to Fiddler on the Roof to The frogs, performers are hanging from the rafters. The most spectacular aerobatics arrived on Broadway with Dracula, the Frank Wildhorn musical that opened to withering reviews during the summer.

As all students of the undead know, the count from Transylvania has supernatural powers, so it's no surprise to see Tom Hewitt making straight for the ceiling like a shot. But when his three sexy handmaidens sing about being forever young, they swoop across the stage in great curling arcs, trailing jetstreams of gauzy fabric. This is not your standard hoist-'em-up, drop-'em down stage trick; it is aerial choreography of the first order.

Followers of modern dance will not be surprised to learn that its designer is Rob Besserer, a striking dancer who's best known for his longterm association with Martha Clarke. For some twenty years, Clarke has been making extensive use of airborne dancers in potent, poetic stage works like The Garden of Earthy Delights, which don't quite fit the usual dance or theater pigeonholes but win rave reviews nonetheless. (In fact, Besserer is working with her again on Belle Epoque, scheduled to open October 28 at Lincoln Center.) Clarke taught him to fly for a role in Earthly Delights, and he's been happily ascending ever since.

"It's very addictive," he says. "It's the kind of fun you have when you're ten, and you figure out how to do tricks on a swing, or how to dangle from a tree." It is, he admits, also terrifying, add, he says. "When you mix normal performance adrenaline along with sheer terror, it's quite a high."

Tracy Miller, one of six performers who share three vampire roles in Dracula, agrees, even though she normally gets carsick and seasick, and tends to avoid heights and rollercoasters. "For some reason," she says, "it doesn't frighten me. I actually love it. Hanging upside down--I love it. You feel really secure--somebody's holding on to you, and you can do anything you want."

Well, now she can do anything she wants. Both she and Besserer are very clear about how much practice, practice, practice goes into effective stage flight. (Also lots of Coke and ginger ale, to dispel the inevitable nausea.) Miller, who's been with the show since it was workshopped in 2001, remembers the rigorous three weeks she spent in La Jolla learning to fly. In a rehearsal studio rigged with two cables, she and the other vampires were suspended above the floor, to accustom them to their harnesses, to spinning, and to being upside-down.

"The harness," she explains, "goes around your legs, kind of like a diaper. You put your legs through the holes, pull it up, and buckle it shut, like a seat belt." The wires are attached to the harness with clamps, each individually adjusted, since even people of the same height and weight have different centers of gravity. A one-inch difference in the placement, she says, will alter the weight distribution. "You still could fly," Miller says, "you just would look kind of lousy."

Besserer created the Broadway choreography in upstate New York, in a rented theater fitted with four flying tracks. "I convinced the producers that the only the way to make up the moves was to try them," he said. For two weeks, he worked with the east, first on flight basics, then on embellishments. "Most dancers, when they get up in the air, they just flip over. They get in trouble because they don't realize that if you move your tongue from one side of your mouth to the other, it will make a difference. It's a very delicate weight shift."

Dracula's flying is pretty fancy--a lot more flamboyant than the number that's probably responsible for Broadway's current infatuation with air traffic, Jane Krakowski's slithering, show-stopping descent from on high in the recent revival of Nine. Such numbers ate, perhaps, the inevitable next step, now that theatergoers have become blase about swinging chandeliers and rising helicopters. Someone I know can't go to the circus, because watching the aerialists gives her vertigo. Soon, she may have to give up Broadway musicals as well.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.