Qwan Sauce!: Tribune
The ambitions are modest, the storytelling a bit slapdash, and there’s a casual looseness to the dance.
But “Qwan Sauce!”— the Chicago Dance Crash’s send-up of teen dance movies of the past decadeor so — is a joyful two hours, crammed with entertainment and niftily varied in styles that sweep from ballet to hip hop.
Tweaking such fodder as “Center Stage” and “Stomp the Yard,” “Qwan” is written and directed by Mark Hackman, who plays himself as emcee. The tale is a Romeo and Juliet yarn that predates the particular movies being mocked, that of an uptight ballerina wooed by a streetwise hipster and all the class and ethnic conflict such West Side Stories incite.
It’s a natural trope for the Dance Crash — the troupe’s zeitgeist embraces conflicting dance techniques and brings them together.
The juggernaut fun of it all makes that irrelevant, down to and including the illogical but choice arrival of tart and tarty performance artist Mattrick Swayze to rev up the finale with his campy zing.
And, besides, the show is mostly dance anyway, neatly designed and choreographed by Lyndsey Rhoads and Christopher Courtney, richly invigorated by the participation of another troupe, Culture Shock Chicago, and the terrific Morgan Williams, whose ballet pyrotechnics are a swell part of the blast.
This is also a show that so floods the stage with energetic talent that everyone gets his moment, including Gibson, Becky Hutt as the ballerina and Corey Worley as Gibson’s snooty blond rival, as well as all the members of the sizeable chorus. . Somewhere in the mix, there was a sporty, blithely hip duet for Gibson and Jahmilah Alazam — a hint these young artists are as smitten by real romance as the movies they malign.