For the second year in a row, Kurt guest-starred in the US tour,
sharing rotating guest star duties with Ilia Kulik and Michael
Weiss. Katia Gordeeva and Yuka Sato split the tour between them as the
female guest star, each taking on a more integral role in the tour as
the second female soloist. The guest stars were actually integrated
into the opening and closing numbers, but even though Kurt
guest-starred in the Lake Placid show, which was filmed for TV, you'd
be hard-pressed finding him in the broadcast. Perhaps to avoid false
advertising, the camera angles were largely chosen to carefully avoid
showing him, except at the very periphery of some shots. Kurt
(/Ilia/Michael) did have a small role to play in one transition before
his second number when Todd Eldredge, proudly introducing the "World's
Smallest Tenor" (a flea) to the audience, accidentally kills his star
while taking his bows. Kurt is there to commiserate with him as he
realizes what he's done.
The theme of the show itself was "Pure Imagination," and had an
alternately circus/carnival-like atmosphere and a whimsical sense of
wonder. The show centered around Todd Eldredge's ringmaster, who
kicked off the show with "Let Me Entertain You" and provided a number
of the transitions. The songs chosen also fed into the theme, with
music from Willy Wonka, the Who, the Electric Light Orchestra, and
Aerosmith (with "Dream On") providing the light-hearted background.
In the US, Kurt's two solos were linked, both centering around Kurt as
the childlike dad who, left home to repair a leaky pipe, gets soon
distracted by his son's toybox and begins to play with everything he
finds inside. At the end of the second number, to
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, suddenly realizing that Sonia and
Gabe were about to return home, Kurt makes a mad dash to quickly fix
the broken pipe before they step in the door. In Canada, the two
numbers were consolidated into one, which he retitled "Gabe's Toybox,"
and he introduced a second solo "Mr. Bojangles" that also played well
into the theme of wonder, entertainment, and imagination. In it, he
plays a soft-shoe entertainer, dancing around the ice.
Until I saw Kurt skate for the first time, I had not only not been
interested in skating, I actively made fun of it I'm ashamed to
say. Then in 2005 my father dragged me to SOI in San Diego...and
during the opening number I caught sight of this short, adorable man
with an absolutely magnetic personality. To my eternal shame, I
actually thought he was Scott Hamilton (well short...bald...the only
figure skater I actually knew by name...) I watched, absolutely
fixated, as 'Scott' performed his first number, to 'Jitterbug.'
Of course, after the program they announced his name as Kurt
Browning...and I was a fan for life as of that moment. His personality
absolutely beamed up from the ice during that number and all the way
into the nosebleed seats where I was. I bought an autographed picture
of him during intermission so that I'd never forget his name again,
and by the time 'Supercalifragalistic' was finished, my heart was
going, going, gone, and sold to that funny, sweet, and handsome skater
in the yellow shirt. I've never looked back, and my love for the sport
has grown almost as much as my love for the skater who helped
introduce it to me. -Brit
