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Scott Hamilton is skating off in a new direction
| Source: |
Philadelphia Inquirer |
| Date: |
February 23, 2001 |
| Author: |
Penny Jeannechild |
The 1984 Olympic gold champ's final Stars on Ice tour comes to the
First Union Center tonight.
Scott Hamilton will hang up his skates only temporarily. He
plans to return to the Great White Way with an update of his "Broadway
on Ice" musical comedy.
Scott Hamilton is hanging up his ice-show skates to glide on
Broadway.
But first, Hamilton is headlining the Target Stars on Ice tour, a
65-leg journey through the United States and Canada that arrives
here tonight. The entire season revolves around the 42-year-old
skating pro's farewell to his fans.
Joining Hamilton in the soul-music spectacular are the creme de la
creme of professional skating: Kurt Browning, Steven Cousins, Ilia
Kulik, Tara Lipinski, Jenni Meno and Todd Sand, Denis Petrov, Renee
Roca and Gorsha Sur, Yuka Sato, and Kristi Yamaguchi.
It is Hamilton, though - the heart and soul of Stars on Ice since
he founded it 14 years ago - who will most surely garner most of
tonight's standing ovations. A notorious fun-lover who plays to his
crowds with at least one back-flip each show, he wears a perpetual
ear-to-ear smile that has endeared him to ice aficionados virtually
from the moment he took the World Champion title in 1981.
No one who knew him as a boy possibly could have foretold this
future. Hamilton stopped growing, literally, when he was 2 years
old. Until he was 8, treatment upon treatment failed. By some
serendipitous miracle, he landed at Boston Children's Hospital, near
an ice rink.
Skating was something to learn between treatments. He began to
grow. And kept growing. The doctors attributed it not to the medical
care, but to the skating and its physical demands. At 13, he began
formal training with former Olympic medalist Pierre Brune.
By the time Hamilton dropped his amateur status to join the Ice
Capades, the same year he took the 1984 Olympic gold, he carried with
him three first-place finishes at the World Championships and four
at the U.S. Nationals.
The born entertainer let no grass grow under his skates when, in
1987, Ice Capades neglected to renew his contract. Later that year,
the American Tour, starring Scott Hamilton, debuted. It adopted a
new name, Stars on Ice, by the end of the five-city tour.
From the start, Stars on Ice has focused on razzle-dazzle, full of
stylish costumes (none of those skating-competition fluffy sleeves,
please!), laser lighting and pop music. Tonight's show won't differ
much from the successful formula that has made the diversion so
popular, with one exception: The music to which each skater performs
will come, almost exclusively, from the soul genre.
So Tara, Kristi, Ilia, Kurt, Scott, et al. will execute axels,
camels, death spirals, lutzes, salchows, spins, split jumps, throw
jumps and toe loops to the likes of Marvin Gaye ("Let's Get It On,"
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine"), James Brown ("I Feel Good,"
"Get on Up"), Ray Charles ("A Song for You"), Nina Simone
("Everything Must Change"), Teddy Pendergrass ("If I Had"), Isaac
Hayes ("Shaft"), Sam and Dave ("Soul Man"), and the Queen of Soul,
Aretha Franklin ("Think," "Chain of Fools").
Should you miss tonight's gig, the gang will be back in the area:
April 3 in Hershey, April 5 in Wilkes-Barre, and April 6 in Trenton.
Then, they're off to Maine for Hamilton's final ice show. At the
close, he'll take off his skates, and . . . wait a few months, then
put them back on. His critically acclaimed Broadway on Ice, a 1989
touring musical comedy set to skates, left him longing to settle
onto the Bright Lights Boulevard of Dreams. He'll update and reprise
the show sometime soon.
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