Friends of Hexagon-thewashingtonpost

Friends of Hexagon

The Washington Post
March 8, 2005

Giving Us the Old Song and Dance
By John Kelly

Members of Hexagon's current kick line
perform Saturday at Duke Ellington School
of the Arts in Georgetown.
(Rebecca D'Angelo - For The Washington Post)

I'm trying to think if there's anything quite like the sight of 16 long-limbed women dressed in pink leotards and white feathered headpieces marching around a gigantic birthday cake, linking arms, spinning like human pinwheels, then arranging themselves in an unbroken line and kicking out their legs in glorious unison.

The launch of a Saturn V rocket? Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River? A gyrfalcon lethally descending on an Arctic ptarmigan?

No, none of these things is quite like the "kick line" I saw last week during a rehearsal of the new Hexagon show at the Duke Ellington school.

For those of you who, like me, have heard of it but never really known what it is, Hexagon is a musical theater revue. Amateur song-and-dance lovers have been getting together every year since 1956 to put on a show and raise money for charity. Or, as a song lyric plucked from this year's opening number proclaims: "Making fun of everyone is what Hexagon does."

This being Washington, the Hexagoners have plenty of material to work with. Every chief executive from Ike to Dubya gets his bumbling turn upon the stage in this year's show, "With Levity and Jesting for All."

Groan-inducing puns are sort of a Hexagon specialty. So is the Rockettes-style kick line, which has been a staple from the very beginning. What's the appeal of a kick line, anyway, I asked this year's director, Malcolm Edwards.

"I think myself it's the precision, the energy, the craft and the beautiful legs and ladies," said Malcolm. "It's the whole package, isn't it?"

Being English, Malcolm delivers his explanation in an accent that calls to mind a Blackpool music hall impresario, or what the British call a "compere."

Malcolm, former British Army guy who works at the Australian Embassy, joined Hexagon in 1981 to meet women. Now married, and his women-meeting days apparently over, Malcolm still pitches in, helping with valet parking last year, directing the whole shebang this year.

The cast ranges in age from 22 to 70. It's full of people who acted, sang or danced in high school or college and find they just don't have much call for that as senior technical specialists at PanAmSat.

Which is what Neil McElroy is in real life.

"This guy's played Nixon year after year," Kay Casstevens whispered to me as we sat in the auditorium and Neil, looking suitably jowly and scowly, channeled Tricky Dick on stage.

When she's not choreographing for Hexagon, Kay is chief of staff for Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Songwriter Doug Maurer, a computer professor at George Washington University, has been part of Hexagon since 1976. That year's show, "Barbs and Snipes Forever," featured two of Doug's originals: "My Pet Rock Is in Love" and "Dracula's Mood Ring."

Ah, the '70s. They seem so quaint in comparison with these nascent days of the 21st century. This year, Rick Horowitz and Walt Gilbert have penned a song inspired by the tawdry Washingtonienne scandal; it includes the lyric, "Keeping track of all your tricks'll/stimulate each little pixel."

The Ziegfeld Follies-ish kick line is the work of Peggy Halderman, whom director Malcolm tapped to bring some pizzazz to the proceedings, even though she left Washington for Denver a few years back. She was involved with Hexagon when she lived here and worked for the National Park Service. Through the magic of audiotape, telephones and the Internet, Peggy was able to choreograph from another time zone.

I called her to ask the secret of a good kick line.

It's the kick, she said. But not just any kick.

"If you were to stand and just do eye-high kicks, what happens is in most women the leg goes straight up and out," Peggy explained.

When she says "out," she means that the right leg has a tendency to splay to the right, the left leg to the left.

This bowlegged abomination is not what Peggy would call a "pretty kick." For that, you need to kick across your body, right leg to the left, left leg to the right. A-one and a-two . . .

Really, though, isn't the whole "hey kids, let's put on a show" thing a little anachronistic in this age of Microsoft Xboxes and reality television?

No, says Malcolm.

"When you have a live theater crowd, the electric atmosphere that that creates in a theater can never be replaced by any video game or bloody 'Fear Factor'-putting-your-hand-in-a-bowl-of-tomatoes or whatever it is," he said. "We are a throwback in some respects, but we are a modern throwback, because we're using everyday occurrences to laugh at. We're trying to make people laugh at themselves, which is the greatest therapy in the world."

Six on the Mind

Why "Hexagon"? The name was inspired by Princeton's Triangle Club, the country's oldest collegiate musical comedy troupe and the training ground for some of the founding Hexagoners. At the time Hexagon started, Princeton didn't admit women, so the coed Hexagon -- six sides rather than three -- was thought to be twice as good.

In the 50 years it's been around, Hexagon has raised some $3.5 million for local charities. This year, it's raising money for itself as a way to ensure that the show will go on.