FOREVER TANGO.

FOREVER TANGO HAWAII THEATER HONOLULU, HAWAII MARCH 28, 2000

Since the early 1980s, tango shows have opened in rapid-fire succession around the world, but none has attracted audiences like Forever Tango. Director, author and presenter Luis Bravo, a Buenos Aires-trained cellist who has spent most of his career in symphony orchestras in the United States, calls the creation he premiered in 1994 "the most successful tango show that exists anywhere today and perhaps that has ever existed." It ran for a year and a half on Broadway and is now performed eight times a week by each of two companies in different locations.

Soloists Miriam Larici and Cesar Coelho led the seven-couple corps Bravo brought to Honolulu. The curtain rose on a gigantic bandoneon, the accordion-like instrument that is the backbone of any tango orchestra. Coelho emerged from the bandoneon to stalk Larici in a Preludio del Bandoneon y la Noche that is just a teaser for their Romance by the same name, an athletic, part-adagio pas de deux performed just before the evening's finale.

The showcase really starts when a spectacular overture segues into the inevitable reference to the low-life origins of the baroque legwork and suggestive posture that are the tango's signature. Tango Argentino and the films Tango and Tango Bar also showed how the dance first developed as foreplay to commercial sex back when Buenos Aires was a notorious hub of the white slave trade, but Bravo depicts that desperate situation with a light hand here. The focus is the pimp, played by senior dancer Carlos Gavito, with his stable of floozies, and the men who press up against the women, pat their behinds, and provoke each other as they slink around the dance floor. "Just keep on dancing," Gavito barks when two macho young toughs start to fight, then grabs a partner and struts his own marvelous stuff.

Much of the remainder of the show was an exhibition by individual couples representing the new generation of tangueros. Their dance was an accelerated display of toes stabbing the floor, legs entwining or soaring into high extensions, jumps in attitude by one of the partners or simultaneously with the pair locked in a wild embrace. Nearly all of the dancers were ballet-trained and there seemed to be nothing they could not do. Oscar Mandagaran finished the first of these tours de force, En lo de Hansen, by flipping Natalia Hills over and almost standing her on her head, and the next four couples indulged in similar thrills.

As perfectly polished as these acrobatics were, they were a little too frenetic, and it was left to Gavito to bring back the magic. A veteran of some forty years on stage, he understands as well as anyone that his art is anchored in sexual urgency, but he takes his time, carefully treading a fine line between sophistication and soft-core; his much younger partner Marcela Duran, a raving beauty, adapts her fancy footwork to his pace. Their formula was especially effective in the group number Three Couples ... where Gavito's suave seduction outshone all the surrounding sizzle.

If Forever Tango had a star, though, it was the orchestra. Between the dance sequences, musical director Lisandro Adrover and his ten musicians created a wall of sound that penetrated to the darkest reaches of each listener. The tension between Adrover and his bandoneon, his obvious pleasure in producing this unlyrical but hauntingly compelling music, left the impression that the man and his instrument were the most passionate duo on stage.