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In different fingers, these mini-dramas could be unbearable, however Peck’s dances, neither ethereal nor arcane, make them candy as a substitute. They typically start with acquainted hand gestures, like fanning flies or dangerous ideas from the pinnacle, then develop into arm actions that in the end pull in the remainder of the physique. In this fashion Peck eases us into the unusually divided language of the present, summary above and concrete under, giving type to inchoate emotions.
Those emotions get extra particular when, after half-hour, the main target narrows on Henry, a beforehand reluctant sharer on the campfire. As performed by Ricky Ubeda, a Broadway common and a winner on “So You Think You Can Dance,” Henry is a type of younger males whose innocence is shadowed by a everlasting unhappiness. We watch with some dread as, reliving earlier days, he and his greatest buddy, Carl (Ben Cook), play video games that step by step remodel from roughhousing to romance. As their love develops in craving and frisky pas de deux, we perceive why Carl — who has a girlfriend, Shelby (Gaby Diaz) — does solely dainty social dances along with her. Diaz, one other “So You Think You Can Dance” winner, turns the second when Shelby steps away right into a quiet heartbreak.
Soon, inevitably, Henry and Carl go away their small city, recognized on a graffitied wall as Middle of Nowhere. To the strains of “Chicago” (“If I used to be crying within the van with my buddy/it was for freedom from myself and from the land”) they embark on a traditional street journey, first for the state’s greatest metropolis after which the nation’s. But tragedy quickly calls Carl again from New York. And although Henry finds a point of happiness with Douglas (Ahmad Simmons), ultimately he too should make peace with the ghosts of his previous.
This would by no means do in a “ebook” musical; it’s too compressed and sketchy. Nor would you pair such a narrative with songs like “Casimir Pulaski Day,” “Prairie Fire That Wanders About” and “The Seer’s Tower,” with which it shares solely a glancing cousinship. But with the verbal dials turned method down, and the bodily and musical ones method up, the calibration of knowledge, from dreamy to piercing, is just about good.
