Listen. Yesenia Roldán said no to three Broadway shows this year. Producers were, and I mean this literally, fighting over her. Yesterday she signed on to choreograph “Brass Heaven” — and the reason she gave in the announcement is the most exciting sentence I’ve read all summer.
Here’s the reason: “It’s the first show that asked me to build the story in the feet instead of decorating it.” Okay. OKAY. Let me tell you why a working dance critic reads that and sits straight up.
Roldán is the most interesting mover-of-bodies on Broadway right now, and it’s because she doesn’t think of choreography as the part of the show where people dance. She thinks of it as a language the show speaks even when nobody’s technically dancing. In “Lantern Street” two years ago, she staged an entire argument between two characters as a walking pattern — no lifts, no kicks, just the way two people cross and re-cross a stage until you understood their whole relationship in your body before they said a word. That’s the thing. She choreographs the space between the dance numbers.
“Brass Heaven” — a new musical from the “Tidewater” team, opening at the Marquis in the spring — is apparently built to let her do exactly that at scale. A big band on stage, a company that the release describes as “never fully still,” and a design that keeps the whole ensemble in motion as environment. If Roldán is telling the truth about building story in the feet, this is the show where her whole method gets a Broadway-sized stage and a Broadway-sized company to do it with.
Here’s the technical thing I’ll be watching for on opening night, and I want you watching for it too. Roldán’s signature is the unison break — she gets a large company moving as one, then fractures it, one dancer at a time, so the formation dissolves into individuals right when the story needs you to stop seeing a crowd and start seeing a person. When she lands it, the whole audience feels a group become a self. On a stage with a live band and a company that’s “never fully still,” a break like that could be one of the great images of the season.
Now the honest part, because even I have to be real. Roldán has never worked at Marquis scale. Her genius has always lived in the mid-size house, where you can read a single dancer’s weight shift from your seat. The Marquis is enormous. Intimacy at that distance is a different engineering problem, and I don’t yet know if her precision survives the trip to a 1,600-seat barn. It might get swallowed. The best choreographers have been swallowed by that stage before.
But if anybody can make a giant house feel like a close read, it’s her. And a choreographer who turns down three shows to chase one specific idea is a choreographer who has a plan.
So mark the spring. Watch for the unison break. And when “Brass Heaven” opens, make noise when the company fractures — because that’s Roldán signing her name, and you’ll want to have been there. Go see what she builds.
“Brass Heaven” begins previews next spring at the Marquis Theatre.
