The season opens with Miami City Ballet performing Paul Taylor’s Company B – a “smash hit” ballet filled with exuberance and sass. This audience favorite features the catchy harmonies of the famed 40s trio, The Andrews Sisters, with their “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and Latin rhythms of “Rum and Coca-Cola.”
Paul Taylor’s Company B is in a class by itself, a rousing modern dance that both celebrates the upbeat optimism that animated the popular music of World War II and reveals the dark realities of war. The music is the songs of the fabled Andrews Sisters — by far the most successful and beloved singing group of its era. Here are the jaunty “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” (Johnny - as someone called him, “a wonderful corn-fed Romeo” — under siege by a swarm of besotted girls); the provocative “Rum and Coca Cola” with its beguiling Latin rhythms; the plangent “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”; the explosive "Tico- Tico”; the signature rallying cry, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy...of Company B.” The dancers are soldiers and bobby-soxers, joyous and carefree, until the war impinges — sometimes fatally — on their fun. Reviewing Company B’s premiere in 1991, The New York Times hailed “the extraordinary appeal of this profound piece of choreography to a groovy beat."