NEW YORK, NY.- “What’s up, Joyce? It’s been a little while.” That’s how tap dancer Ayodele Casel greeted the crowd at the Joyce Theater on Wednesday, the opening night of a postponed two-week run of her show “Chasing Magic.”

“Chasing Magic” originated as a virtual production — a joyous, generous one — in 2021, when the Joyce was still closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. A live version was originally scheduled for January, but omicron got in the way. Like many productions this year, the show has a feeling of trying to pick up where we left off.

Well, Casel is still a wonder, as humanly appealing as she is superhumanly skilled. To join her as she plays with a band of excellent musicians and tap dancers is still a joy. She and the show are as welcoming as ever. There are singalongs (with songwriter Crystal Monee Hall) and clap-alongs (with percussionist Keisel Jiménez).

“There’s a part for you,” Casel says to the audience, characteristically. “Tap is magic,” she also says, as she has said often before, and again she demonstrates how what she says is true.

The show is most exciting, though, when it isn’t asserting or showing magic but chasing it. As in the virtual version, the high point of the performance is an improvised duet between Casel and virtuoso pianist Arturo O’Farrill.

“First I have to warm up,” he said Wednesday before launching into scales that quickly accelerated into a rhapsodic, keyboard-covering roller-coaster ride — catch me if you can. Casel can keep up, musically, technically, imaginatively, as O’Farrill knows. But he challenges her, forces her to stretch. It’s thrilling.

In the group numbers, Casel sometimes does something similar with her dancers. She gives them many chances to reveal themselves as improvising soloists, and her rhythmically intricate choreography, chasing that magic, nearly pushes them past the pulse of the music in spots. Almost all the numbers end with a lovely little surprise, like a trap escaped, and that keeps the magic flowing.

But much of the 75-minute production, directed by Torya Beard, feels more complacent, if charmingly so. Quieter moments are welcome, like a shell-game trio for Casel, Amanda Castro and Naomi Funaki that maintains a tone of nearly whispered conversation even as the dancers, in counterpoint or perfect unison, complicate delicate taps and scrapes with quickness and thumps. Two duets that Casel choreographed with Anthony Morigerato (who performed in the virtual version but is absent here) are like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on speed.




Casel tells us, as she has many times before, about how she was obsessed with Rogers as a child, and how, because she is Black and Puerto Rican, she thought no one would see her as a tap dancer. She tells how Baakari Wilder, a dancer in “Bring in ’da Noise/Bring in ’da Funk,” taught her that tap was her ancestral legacy, her African heritage.

“I speak often of this,” she says onstage.

Must she speak of it every time? (Maybe. A lot of people don’t know.) Does the production need to project words telling us what each section is about? “Friendship,” “Legacy,” “Culture,” “Ancestors.” That meaning is already in the music, much of it Latin jazz, and it’s in the dancing, especially when Castro, now barefoot in a white skirt of ancestral spirits, trades phrases with the dancers still in tap shoes.

These are questions of style and audience. To me, those projected words seem like leftovers from the virtual version. Other remainders include the use of much recorded music, leaving the terrific musicians on hand, like Jiménez and pianist Anibal César Cruz, underused. (The sound balance also needs work.)

The didacticism and repeated stories are a trickier matter. Being demonstrative — hugging her colleagues, giving herself openly to us — is Casel’s strength, almost her superpower. But when she says “tap dancers are superheroes” and has her cast remove trenchcoats to reveal shirts with lighting bolts, the magic is snuffed. It shouldn’t be labeled. It needs to be chased, as Casel knows how to do.

—

‘Ayodele Casel: Chasing Magic’

Through Nov. 13 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.