Sunday, January 10, 1999

Hit parade leads viewers back in time

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Chuck Hoenes can't remember song-and-dance shows in any actual USO canteens he was just 8 when World War II broke out, and didn't begin dance classes for three more years.

But he remembers well the impact those shows had on his life once he became a dance student. When I was a kid in Ottawa, a small town outside Chicago that was about the size of DeLand, many of the dance teachers from my school joined the USO shows," said Hoenes, director of "Swingtime Canteen," the Seaside Music Theater production that opens Friday.

"One, an exceptionally good dancer, was in a Jimmy Cagney unit," he recalled. "She was killed when her plane went down, on the way from Europe to the Pacific." So Hoenes is bringing a very personal perspective to his version of Swingtime Canteen."

His view encompasses more than just the popular rhythms of a youth in dance and an intuitive appreciation of the fashions and styles of almost 55 years ago. "It's really about the music, and a little about the nostalgia of the era," said Hoenes, who began working with SMT in 1980 and moved to Ormond Beach in 1984. He still travels regularly to Rockford, Ill., though, where the Clock Tower Dinner Theater he owns is in its 26th season.

"Swingtime Canteen' is very much like other shows I've done Hit Parade Revue,' International Cabaret.' Very similar," he said. But swing is the hottest thing now you'll find swing at all the big discos, in a lot of movies, even on TV commercials like the one for The Gap.

"It appeals to every age group. The music is so important to people like myself; swing music held on so long, and now it's back," Hoenes said. "The revival started, really, with clubs and became popular with young kids in college, and even high school. It's the coolest thing to them now."

"Swingtime Canteen" features an all-woman group doing a special performance in a USO club, in London, in 1944. That puts them in a sizzling spot in the country from which the United States launched attacks on the Nazis, in the city that suffered such heavy bombing. The girls from Los Angeles Jo Sterling (Denise Davidson), Lilly McBain (Cristin Hubbard), Topeka Abotelli (Karen Oster), Katie Gammersflugel (Catherine Motley) and the band's leader, Marion Ames (Elizabeth Murff) entertain with a sentimental hit parade as the audience takes "a trip back in that era," Hoenes said. "They're performing for GIs stationed in London, so they talk to the real audience as if they're GIs. There's even an air raid during the show the lights go out, of course, and we hear the anti-aircraft sirens and guns and the all-clear.

"They don't just stand there and sing they talk all the way through the air raid, through the show. They have movements and patterns, dance steps, trio and duo movements and solos, so it involves a lot of choreography," he said. Penny Ann Maas is the show's choreographer.

"The girls are singing-and-dancing musicians who play their own instruments. Marion is the conductor and Denise, as Jo, plays the drums she learned to play them for this role," Hoenes said.

And they perfected the old favorites, which had been arranged and orchestrated by SMT music director Bob McDowell for the show's off- Broadway and London performances a couple of years ago. Among them are "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," I'll Be Seeing You," "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "Bugle Call Rag," Sentimental Journey" and "In the Mood," in an arrangement McDowell has just added to the show.

The music and dance steps will strike familiar notes, though the arrangements and choreography will be as fresh as the new craze for swing, Hoenes said. "The girls in the group take turns singing, playing their instruments, doing solos. There are so many harmonies, so much elaborate Andrews Sisters- style harmonies, and so much toe- tapping music.

"It's fun, just great fun."

Playbill

What: Seaside Music Theaters production of Swingtime Canteen.

When: Jan. 15-16, 21-23, 28-30, Feb. 4-6 at 8 p.m.; Jan. 17, 24, 31, Feb. 7 at 2 p.m.

Where: Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center, 399 N. U.S. 1, Ormond Beach.

Tickets: $20 to $22, with discounts for students, groups. Tickets and information are available at the SMT box office, 454 S. Yonge St., Suite B, Ormond Beach, or by calling (904) 252-6200.