Parachuting Southern California

Flashy 'Xanadu' should skate with abandon

With a show that’s all about creating the ultimate roller disco as a fusion of music, graphics, movement, fitness — and maybe even a little chutzpah — I was hoping for just a tad more fancy skating in Music Theatre of Wichita’s premiere of “Xanadu.”

Guest director/choreographer Roger Castellano from Los Angeles shoehorns almost all of it into the titular finale and lets the skaters individually unleash a few tricks, from cartwheels to sit-stands to handstands.

Most of the couple skating is merely straight lines or conga lines and a few simple lifts.

Opening night, everybody was so cautious about not falling or overshooting the stage that it blunted the energy level — like racing with brakes on. Hopefully, joyous abandon will break out now that confidence has been established.

That said, “Xanadu” otherwise is a gaudy, silly surprise and delight that makes clever lemonade out of a clunky lemon — the 1980 Olivia Newton-John movie of the same name — by spoofing itself and its shallow disco-era mentality through a sharply satirical new book by Douglas Carter Beane.

The original music by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, which became a hit despite the old movie, is lovingly reworked and given new life.

The tale is about an ancient Greek muse who feels the vibe of an artist desperately needing inspiration and magically appears to help him. She’s thinking Renaissance in Venice, Italy, in 1780, but winds up in Venice, Calif., in 1980 where creativity has hit its lowest point.

The artist she is trying to inspire decides that the ultimate expression of his talent will be fixing up an old theater into a roller disco. Yes, really.

Emily Mechler, a MTW veteran who will make her Broadway debut next spring in the revival of “Evita,” makes a beautiful and powerfully tuneful Kira, the name she takes to fit into Southern California in the guise of a roller babe in short skirt and leg warmers.

Mechler gives the right comic touch to a ridiculous accent in paying homage to Newton-John, essentially becoming an Aussie valley girl. She seems just as comfortable belting out an anthem like “I’m Alive” as softly harmonizing through a romantic duet like “Magic” or “Suddenly.”

Josh Sassanella plays Sonny, the frustrated, introspective and somewhat clueless artist who wants to do something big but doesn’t know what. The lanky, likable Sassanella, who just finished the national tour of “Rock of Ages,” is familiar from his MTW debut in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe.

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