TAP
One of the more poignant effects of contemporary Hollywood has been the virtual extinction of at least two of the major genres that served as industry staples during the 30s, 40s, and 50s: the western and the musical. When attempts are made to resurrect these old standbys, a certain self-consciousness often makes itself felt. Such “last westerns” as Once Upon a Time in the West and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and such “last musicals” as All That Jazz and Pennies From Heaven tend to wear their obsolescence on their sleeves, representing themselves as last-ditch attempts to revivify forms that are no longer part of the present tense, but only nostalgic emblems of an earlier era.
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The traditional aspects of Tap, as a depression musical, don’t include a period setting–the film takes place in the present–but it does draw on many of the plot and musical elements that one associates with 30s musicals. One example is the sentimental, simplistic plot, in this case about a young, talented hoofer named Max Washington (Gregory Hines) who has to choose between following in the footsteps of his gifted but unsuccessful tap-dancing father and pursuing a life of crime with a gang of jewel thieves. Other traditional elements are the sense of community and camaraderie that persists in the upper rooms of the tap-dance school established by Max’s late father, a conventional romance between Max and Amy (Suzzanne Douglas), who currently runs the dance school, an equally conventional father-son relationship between Max and Amy’s son by a previous marriage, and a straightforward and unironic approach to the various dance numbers, all of which arise naturalistically in the action.
Feuer deals with another subject in her book that has a particular relevance to Tap–the dialectic between bricolage and engineering. Bricolage, the French word for tinkering, used by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to refer to processes by which prescientific cultures made use of whatever materials happened to be at hand, in this context describes the process by which performers in musicals take over everyday objects and locations and convert them into props and theatrical settings. The process usually involves an easygoing, improvisational attitude toward one’s surroundings that masks the actual work and planning that dancers, choreographers, and set designers (among others) engage in for a musical number. Part of the pleasure that we ordinarily take in a dance number derives from its seemingly effortless and spontaneous execution, and much of the “work” of a musical is devoted to making its numbers come across as anything but work.
