Double Feature

A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine was a tiny jewel box of a musical revue, with a cast of just eight versatile performers, that established Tommy Tune as a director-choreographer of the first rank when it opened in 1980. Its second act was an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s one-act The Bear as it might have been performed by the Marx Brothers. The trio’s cheerfully anarchic spirit was conjured with balletic grace and timing in Tune’s staging. Tune expanded the show’s curtain raiser, a series of Hollywood songs, into a satiric cavalcade of music and comic musings on the movies circa 1939, set in the lobby of Hollywood’s legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and performed by its ushers. Its highlight was an ingenious tap number set to the text of the 1930 Hollywood Production Code, with all its taboos duly noted in rhythm.