`Stompin' At The Savoy' Is `Real' Entertaining

"Stompin' at the Savoy," "CBS Sunday Movie," 9 p.m., KIRO-TV.

Four talented young actresses, under the knowing direction of Debbie Allen, collaborate to turn "Stompin' at the Savoy" into an entertaining slice of history, a film also rich in emotional scenes and one that may remind you of ABC's "Women of Brewster Place."

In "Stompin' at the Savoy," the focus is on four young women who live in Harlem in the late 1930s and work as domestics in wealthy white homes. They share a room where they see each other mainly on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons - their only free time - when they try to forget their troubles by heading straight for the Savoy Ballroom, alive with swing and excitement - and attractive young men.

But their rendezvous at the Savoy is only a jumping-off place for the film, as Beverly Sawyer's script follows the quartet's fortunes for several years, ending in the early days of World War II.

Lynn Whitfield plays Esther, the strongest and most ambitious of the four, whose dream is to have her own beauty shop and be independent, a dream she has realized by the film's end but a goal with its own high price.

Vanessa Williams wants to be a singer and is willing to do almost anything to exchange her housemaid persona for that of a sexy nightclub star. Jasmine Guy falls in love with a man she meets at the Savoy but their romance is defeated at every turn by economic racism. And Vanessa Bell Calloway becomes involved with a white actor who fails to comprehend the stresses and pitfalls of an interracial romance in the 1930s.

Michael Warren plays a club owner who gives Williams her big chance, while Mario Van Peebles, who is romancing Whitfield, plays a young man who wants a liquor license so he can open his own club. Darnell Williams portrays the young man with whom Guy falls in love and John Di Aquino is cast as the white actor whose idyllic romance with Calloway suffers when he's offered a role in films.

Sure, "Stompin' at the Savoy" has overtones of soap opera but, unlike, say, last week's "Secrets," this film seems grounded in some kind of reality - and it helps a great deal that the performances are topnotch.

Whitfield has already made a name for herself in films like "The Josephine Baker Story" and on ABC's "Equal Justice" and she gives a strong, sure performance here. Guy proves to be as adept here at drama, as the woman whose marriage falls apart, as she is at comedy on NBC's "A Different World" series. Williams has done a number of TV and film performances, as well as music specials, and her several club appearances in "Stompin' at the Savoy" are standouts. Calloway, while the least familiar to me, also has an impressive list of credits, from "All My Children" and the film, "Coming to America," to guest spots on a great many TV series. She, too, gives a memorable performance, especially in a scene where she suffers a kind of breakdown.

Norma Miller and Frank Manning, who used to dance at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s, did the choreography for the film, and the dances, coupled with lively music and Dawnn Lewis' impersonation of Ella Fitzgerald, gives the movie a real sense of time and place.

And what further keeps "Stompin' at the Savoy" from lapsing into a sentimental soap is a kind of easygoing energy and smartness with which director Allen has imbued the film. This movie, sassy and fast-paced and very human, is not unlike Allen herself - and that makes for an entertaining and involving movie, one of the better TV movies CBS has aired this season.

Plenty of nostalgia

"Bob Newhart: Off the Record," 9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime/cable.

"James Taylor: Going Home," 9 p.m. Sunday, Disney Channel/cable.

There's a great sense of nostalgia in these two cable specials that will be competing Sunday night, since neither star has been seen on TV recently.

Newhart, of course, is seen constantly in reruns and is rumored to be having a new CBS series next season - but for his Showtime special, Newhart re-creates, before a live audience, many of the comedy telephone sketches which launched his career, before he became a TV star.

Newhart's sense of timing is still superb, of course, and it's fun to hear some of these routines again, which he does with all the skill and freshness one could desire. Showtime repeats it Friday and April 21, 25 and 30.

Taylor's special was taped during rehearsals for his tour which began last year and there's a friendly, casual, at-home atmosphere to the rehearsal that's just right for Taylor's brand of music-making. The 14 songs, many familiar and some new ones, are interspersed with brief interview bits that aren't nearly as easy to take as the songs. The Disney Channel will repeat Taylor's special Saturday and April 29.