ANN REINKING IN ‘MUSIC MOVES ME’

Ann Reinking has the longest legs on a dancer since Cyd Charisse’s, the squarest shoulders since Ginger Rogers’ and a Verdonesque rasp to her voice that gives any song she tackles an edge of playful sensuality. However, in “Ann Reinking . . . Music Moves Me” at the Westwood Playhouse, she’s sentenced nightly to 90 minutes of hard labor: selling cheap routines that misuse her abilities and leave her with no clear identity as a performer.

Aggressively directed and choreographed by Alan Johnson, this intimate (seven dancers, seven musicians) song-and-dance revue strives mightily to confirm Reinking as a name-above-the-title star but, half the time, it showcases her limitations as much as her talents.

Take her bluesy pas de deux in Act II opposite former Joffrey, Tharp and Feld principal Gary Chryst. It starts strong, with each stalking the other hungrily, but Reinking soon virtually drops out of it--becoming just so much dead weight for Chryst to lift and haul around. He melts to her, melds to her, yet she’s merely going through the motions--very minimal, untaxing motions--without much presence or even energy.

Why? An answer immediately suggests itself: Right after this duet, Reinking must sing a demanding, torchy ballad, and if she gives herself completely to the dancing, perhaps she’ll be panting too hard to attempt any vocal showpiece. So while Chryst dances full-out, she paces herself--and you can guess who emerges as the star dancer here.

This kind of compromise keeps “Music Moves Me” unsatisfying, and so does Johnson’s failure to curtail Reinking’s mannerisms. When she sings, she will often momentarily drop into speech or a different style of vocal production--as in Noel Coward’s “If Love Were All” where her plausible, straightforward interpretation suddenly erupts in ruinous (seemingly accidental) Betty Boop-isms.

When she dances, Johnson’s stop-and-go, pose-and-lunge jazz choreography never builds to anything, and through much of the evening makes her look unmusical.

Indeed, one of the major ironies of “Music Moves Me” is its bogus title. Nobody moves to or from music in this show; instead, the music is warped into subservience to Johnson’s whims. Besides clumsy medleys (“Satin Doll” crosscut with “Hit Me With a Hot Note,” for example), there are ghastly uptempo conversions (“Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home”)--plus blaring brass and gunshot drums whenever Reinking bumps, grinds, twitches or shrugs.

As a dancer, she can deliver kicks and hip action brilliantly: unlimited, effortless, perfectly controlled. Yet her arm positions are usually either rigid or slovenly, and tension in her back and upper torso curtails her flexibility. Johnson spotlights these problems in “Ballin’ the Jack,” at the end of Act I, where backup dancers Sara Miles and Christina Saffran do standard shoulder-shimmies comfortably while Reinking looks positively clenched.

Once again, Reinking is presented here as if she can do anything--and she can’t. Nobody can. Yes, within her range she is a star, but out of it, she can be something of a pain. “Music” moves her out of it far too frequently.

Above and beyond its hard, lurid style, the production is professional technically, from Ronald Melrose’s propulsive musical direction to Ken Billington’s apocalyptic lighting. Albert Wolsky’s costumes are often satiric caricatures of period styles (including the present), but by putting Reinking in a loose-fitting top over sheer black hose several times in the evening, he accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative resourcefully.