Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History 2022055426, 2022055427, 9781032121611, 9781032121598, 9781003223368

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DANCE ON THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE STAGE

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk, and social dance imports and America’s indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. This historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway-style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance, and Cultural History. Ray Miller is a Professor of Dance Studies and Theatre Arts at Appalachian State University, NC, USA.

DANCE ON THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE STAGE A History

Ray Miller

Designed cover image: © aluxum / Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Ray Miller The right of Ray Miller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miller, Ray (College professor), author. Title: Dance on the American musical theatre stage : a history / Ray Miller. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055426 (print) | LCCN 2022055427 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032121611 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032121598 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003223368 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Dance--United States--History. | Revues. Classification: LCC GV1781 .M55 2023 (print) | LCC GV1781 (ebook) | DDC 792.80973--dc23/eng/20230124 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055426 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055427 ISBN: 9781032121611 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032121598 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003223368 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsvii Prologue1 1 1492–1776: The Earliest Beginnings

4

2 1776–1866: John Durang and the Dawn of American Theatrical Dance

24

3 1866–1914: Building a Musical Theatre Dance Vocabulary

50

4 1914–1929: The Dance Director: Front and Center

91

5 1929–1943: Depression Ferments New Visions: Ballet and Modern Dance

122

6 1943–1957: Integration: Dance Narrates

160

7 1957–1968: Triple Threats Grow as Director-Choreographers Rise192 8 1968–1975: The Concept Musical Makes Room for Dance

218

9 1975–1996: The Age of the Director-Choreographer Wanes

236

vi  Contents

10 1996–2020: Choreography and the Musical Break Open251 Epilogue269 Bibliography271 Index280

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been working on this book since I was in graduate school in the 1980s; however, I must confess that I gave in and did not heed the advice of my mentors. Do not let the research overtake the writing. I am afraid that I did not listen. Nonetheless, I have truly enjoyed reading general histories about musical theatre by experts like Lehman Engel, David Ewen, Sheldon Patinkin, Larry Stempel, and Abe Laufe. And that is only a few whose works I have relied upon to “get the big picture.” When autobiographies became available, I just had to imbibe. Who could turn down the opportunity to hear, in their own words, from people like George Abbott, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Josh Logan, Arthur Laurents, and too many others to recall. Of course, I had to read Stephen Sondheim’s incredible Look, I Made Hat and I’m Finishing a Hat. My bookshelves are jammed with books that focus on specific types of musicals from revues and vaudeville to book and concept musicals. There are many excellent theoretical texts that can really help the reader to understand more thoroughly about what is actually happening in musicals and how they relate to the wider culture. Some of those include Bruce Kirle’s Unfinishing Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Progress, John Bush Jones’ Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre, Scott McMillin’s The Musical as Drama, Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows are Built, and just about anything written by Elizabeth L. Wollman. One of the first that really opened my eyes about how to look at and better understand musicals was Lehman Engel’s Words with Music: The Broadway Musical Libretto. There are others. There are many excellent writers who have dedicated their time and talents to chronicling the full history of the American musical. Three of those that I frequently consulted and whose exhaustive works always feed me are the many books that Gerald Bordman, Dan Dietz and Ethan Mordden have written.

viii  Acknowledgments

When it comes to the dance, in particular, there are just so many. Of course, the prodigious work that Agnes de Mille has written is a good starting place. If you are interested, may I recommend that you begin with Dance to the Piper and then make your way through her remaining nine books. There are autobiographies including Fred Astaire’s Steps in Time, Irene Castle’s Castles in the Air, Frankie Manning’s Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, Doris Humphrey’s Doris Humphrey: An Artist First, Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove, Bob Avian’s Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey, Tommy Tune’s Footnotes, and Bill T. Jones Last Night on Earth. While we do not have a plethora of musical theatre dance autobiographies, we do have biographers, many of whom have researched thoroughly the choreographers and dancers that they write about. There are indeed too many to name here but I do want to direct you to the work of Deborah Jowitt, Carol Easton, Kevin Winkler, and John Anthony Gilvey. To stay current in scholarly writing on dance in the musical theatre, one of the best journals is Studies in Musical Theatre. With each issue, the reader can discover something that will alter how to look at a particular musical, choreographer, composer, and more. The writing is clean and crisp with a minimum of overbearing jargon that is just simply unnecessary. I have been fortunate to have had the support of several chairs who provided me with research monies and sabbatical leaves to travel and to write. I am most grateful to Carol Winkler, Marianne Adams, Kevin Warner, and Michael Helms. They have also supported student research assistants including Willene Moye, Keith Tims, Natalya Hopper, Megan Mabry, and Abi Wiggins. There have also been several colleagues who share a passionate interest in extending the breadth and depth of musical theatre scholarship and who graciously gave me the time to “pick their brains.” Thank you Derek Davidson, Shirlene Holmes, Gayle Austin, Todd Studebacker, Derek Gagnier, Frank Miller, Joby Bell, Ron Wynn, Janet Descutner, Jean Cutler, John and Paulette Marty, Matt Tyson, Martha Marking, Sue Williams, and Elaine Hartley. I know that I have forgotten someone. The fault is my own. Another tip of the hat to colleague and friend, Keith Martin, who provided me with numerous opportunities to take our students to NYC to see musical theatre productions and to meet with Broadway and off-Broadway actors, directors, designers, producers, choreographers, and others, who read through my initial chapters for this book and provided insightful suggestions, and who carries a wealth of information about musical theatre and shares it openly and often with colleagues, students, and others. Thank you. I must thank the staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, particularly Kathleen Leary, the staff at the Library of Congress, particularly Libby Smigel, and the staff at the libraries at the University of Oregon, Georgia State University, and Appalachian State University, particularly Dianna Johnson. I must thank Steph Hines, Editorial Assistant, who has shepherded me through this process and to Alanna Donaldson, Senior Production Editor for Taylor & Francis,

Acknowledgments ix

who guided me through the final stages of this project. Thank you both for sharing your expertise and your patience along the way. My journey as a dancer started with Aline Mulnick in Canton, Ohio. Everyone remembers their first dance teacher and the one who opened the door. I was raised with parents, Don and Anne Miller, who passed on their love and appreciation for all of the arts to me and my brother, Don, and my sister, Theresa. I have had many memorable times on stage and off with Don and Theresa and with Don’s lovely wife, Mary Lou. When I think of my daughter, Hali, I have to smile. We attend a lot of theatre productions together and it is not unusual to find us making up songs in the kitchen while preparing breakfast. Thank you, little one. I don’t know exactly how to thank my wife, Jessica. This has been a long, long birth, and she was with me the whole way. She shared many of the musical theatre experiences with me. She reads and critiques all that I write and I am certainly all the better for it.. Finally, she never ever doubted – even when I did – that I would finish this book. Thank you, my love. I know that there are others who have contributed to the making of this book. While I may not have included you in these acknowledgments, please know that I value your friendship, your thoughts, and your precious time.

PROLOGUE

The story of the development of dance on the American musical theatre stage in many ways mirrors the conflicts, aspirations, and dominant perceptions of the American public as they defined and redefined themselves over their long history. There is nothing fixed or unchanging about dance on the musical theatre stage. What the audience saw and responded to in The Black Crook in 1866 was very different from that of the appropriated and distorted African-American dance by the black-faced white performers in the traveling minstrel shows of the same period. At the turn-of-the-century, the pleasant and airy social dances of Vernon and Irene Castle, and Fred and Adele Astaire, could not be more different than the Cakewalk dances of the early African-American musical theatre productions of the same period. Sometimes, the romance of the waltz in musical theatre operetta would clash with the competitive tap dancing in musical revues and musical comedies, but there was room for both. This accordion-like effect between different dances, and ways of movement, and choreography has presented each generation with a creative tension from which they could extrapolate their own dance. We are inheritors of this constantly renewing bubbling cauldron and this book attempts to tell – not the story – but a story about dance on the American musical theatre stage from its earliest beginnings to April 12, 2020, when the theatres in New York City were forced to close due to the COVID pandemic. Musical theatre dance casts a wide net across the cultural landscape of the ever-changing complexion of America and its people. For example, while some of these dances from different populations, particularly that of the AfricanAmerican, met with a strong racial bias by their white counterparts, there would nevertheless be an exchange, a melding, a bringing together of the dance cultures of America’s indigenous peoples, immigrants, slaves, indentured servants, explorers, and others. As we shall see, it was not unusual for white performers to learn from African-American performers, Hispanic-American performers, DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-1

2  Prologue

Asian-American performers and transfer those dances to the “Great White Way,” usually without giving appropriate attribution to where they had learned those dances. For much of musical theatre dance history, racism, and sexism were often overt. No attempt was made to hide it – that is, until the early part of the twentieth century. But, even after World War II and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a more insidious form of racism continued to infect musical theatre and its dance.1 Oklahoma!, for example, tells us about cowboys and farmers but it obscures the fact that the setting for the musical takes place on a land that it not theirs. Today, the absence of the Native-American can no longer be ignored. In West Side Story, we see a sharp division between the “American” gang and the “not American” gang. Except for Anita and Maria, there is little mention of the “American” girls and the “not American” girls. Women’s absence rings hollow and reminds us of the critique in Tillie Olsen’s book, Silences – where are women’s voices? There are many more examples that could be given but the point is that the study of musical theatre is a moving target. It has never been nor is it now static. While we will examine certain shows, performers, composers, writers, and others as if they were nouns – established, forever the same – we must remind ourselves that the study of history is fluid and dynamic and ever-­ changing. It depends on who is asking the questions and what questions they ask. What are they looking at? What are they ignoring? Musical theatre dance often extended wide arms of embracement for the movement vocabularies and aesthetics of the various cultures that made up the American audiences. A part of this was due to a willing and curious desire to “learn something new.” This attitude continues to define the best of dancers and choreographers today; but, sometimes, in the past, it was due to the pragmatic necessity of accommodating and entertaining the diverse populations within our increasingly urban environments. Mark Twain makes the observation that “discontent is the first necessity of progress.”2 The history of dance on the American musical theatre stage is one of a tug-and-pull between conflicting ways of accommodating “the dancing body.” For some, this “dancing body” was a lure toward the licentious temptation of the flesh. For others, it represented an ideal and a romantic vision of the beauty of the human form. Still, others focused on its representation of youthful energy associated with the constantly changing and innovative society that many Americans perceived themselves to be a part. Some saw this represented in the precision line performances of groups like those of Ned Wayburn in his Zieg feld Follies or Russell Markert’s still-­performing Rockettes. Others focused on the challenge dances of numerous tap dancers beginning with Master Juba and John Diamond in the 1850s and continuing today. Still, others embraced the language of ballet and the constantly rejuvenating vocabulary of modern dance. As we explore this history of dance on the American musical theatre stage, we will see a wide breadth of movement vocabularies competing for our attention. Sometimes, the focus will be on dance techniques; at other times, it will focus on the personalities and performing abilities of the dancers themselves; and from

Prologue 3

time to time, it will examine the imaginative constructions created by its choreographers. On today’s stage, dance has permeated almost every aspect of musical theatre production from the conception of the libretto and songs to the design and construction of its scenographic elements. We have become a very impatience audience. Our film, television programming, and plethora of social media have chopped up our sense of time into smaller and smaller units. It almost seems that movement (or implied movement as reflected in our surfing the web and scanning our reading materials) necessities that we live in a world always on the go – movement for its own sake without any serious thought about what it might mean or how it might be curated to reflect a sense of beauty. But, I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning when Europeans invaded a world held for centuries by many different indigenous peoples; for many of whom, dance was and still is central to their lifeways. These invaders, or explorers, – depends on who is telling the story – brought with them their own varied attitudes, customs, and suspicions regarding the sundry ways in which the dancing body brought meaning to their lives and to the lives of their fellow immigrants and indigenous populations. So, we will begin at a beginning – my beginning – and travel through the story of how we danced, and why, and how those dances climbed up onto the stage and formed the musical theatre dance we see today.

Notes 1 See Warren Hoffman’s incisive exploration of this theme in his book, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. 2 https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/necessity-quotes accessed September 5, 2022.

1 1492–1776 The Earliest Beginnings

From 1492 to 1776, dance in Colonial America was in a very precarious position. On the one hand, the Puritans in New England viewed dance with suspicion; some declared that it was surely the pathway to hellfire and damnation. While much later, the Shakers would recognize dance as a powerful venue for religious expression. For many of the early settlers, their folk dances provided a means of social cohesion in a new world that was filled with diverse peoples from many parts of the world. For most, however, it was an entertainment, a divertissement, and a way by which to pleasantly “pass the time.” What was present but ignored or demonized were the many dances of the indigenous peoples who populated this “new” land. Dance on the American musical theatre stage has its origin in these varied and contradictory ideas and practices. Its purpose and function within these smaller communities as well as within the wider social milieu in which they coexisted with so many other kinds of people – each with their own customs, values, and ideas – provided the stimulus for conflicts, while at the same, a rich and varied fertile ground upon which to develop a uniquely American musical theatre dance. More broadly, the history of musical theatre in the United States is fundamentally a history of one of its most successful popular arts. In addition to being a barometer for what is current and novel in American culture, like its counterpart in film and popular music, musical theatre also exhibited periods in which artistic aspirations have combined with its propensity for popular appeal to create works of art that have endured from one generation to the next. Musical theatre historian, Richard Kislan, describes American musical theatre as essentially a romantic theatre – a kind of theatre in which the romantic sensibility marries the American aspiration to realize “the American dream” both in terms of one’s personal and professional life. In Democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville observed that Americans in the 1830s went to the theatre “not … to DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-2

1492–1776 5

hear a fine literary work, but to see a play.”1 There is immediacy to the musical theatre that often directs attention to the contemporary situation at the time in which it is performed and a genuine aspiration for articulating an ideal. For example, even when the subject matter of the musical is set in a mythical or literary past, as with the 1960s musicals Camelot and Man of La Mancha, the audience was certainly aware of the ideal aspiration then associated with the Kennedy administration.2 What each of these writers emphasizes, however, is that the audience for musical theatre expects a kind of emotional catharsis rather than intellectual enlightenment when they attend a performance. It is in this regard that dance has traditionally made a major contribution to the musical theatre. Philosopher Suzanne Langer and dance critic John Martin have each made a strong case for the notion that emotional expression is at the very heart of dance, particularly theatre dance.3 In addition, the popularity of dance on the musical theatre stage in its early years and what would eventually evolve into its own genre of musical theatre dance by the nineteenth century is also based on a kinesthetic that is often exuberant, vital, and energetic. This comfortability with its sensuality and its unashamed “need to please” have been both its source of appeal to the musical theatre audience and its source of criticism from those who point to its apparent superficiality. Finally, musical theatre dance is collaborative. Its function within the musical is that of being a part of something larger than itself. Whether its purpose is to serve a particular directorial concept, or a composer’s musical composition, or a writer’s book, or some other production need, the dance in musical theatre has always been an important part of defining the visual vocabulary for a musical theatre performance.4 These four mindsets have created a kind of tension within the overall history of dance in the United States. In Colonial America, however, the perception was more often between those who viewed dance as the devil’s temptation to stray from the “straight and narrow” to a hoped-for heavenly reward and those who advocated for dance as a simple pastime that could bring men and women into harmony with themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. While some Puritans in Massachusetts were issuing tracts against dancing, other colonists encouraged and even participated in varied forms of folk and social dancing.5

Early Beginnings From 1492 until the first English settlement in the Americas at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and later in 1620 with the arrival of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, early explorers and settlers to the Americas were exposed to a variety of dance forms. Some brought their experience of dance with them from Europe, while others witnessed unusual and interesting examples of Native American dance. These Native American dances must have looked peculiar, strange, exotic, fascinating, and intimidating to many of the Europeans as they began to investigate and settle in this new land. For people whose religious expression was

6  1492–1776

mostly conveyed in song, music, and simple pantomimic gesture, the idea of seeing others using dance as a primary means of religious expression would have been completely foreign. Writer Jamake Highwater notes that “the inclination of primal peoples to idealize action as a magical force” gives their dance a power that can be intoxicating to the participants and threatening to those who are not familiar with it.6 The European would have been used to seeing dance as emotional release expressed either as folk or social dance or as theatrical entertainment. In the Americas, they were seeing dance as a vital part of rituals of which they had no knowledge.7 From a culture that descended from the idea that in the beginning, there was the word, to a host of foreign cultures that descended more from the idea that in the beginning, there was movement, there developed an impasse that did not permit any genuine sharing of dance traditions that might have significantly altered the role dance would play in this newly developing country. As a matter of fact, it would not be until the early twentieth century when modern dance artists began to investigate Native American dance forms that they in turn would begin to influence our concert and musical theatre dance.8

European Antecedents The first half of the seventeenth century saw very little recorded theatre dance activity in Colonial America. This was in sharp contrast to the court entertainments and performances in public theatres throughout Europe in which dance as a theatre form was fostered and developed. One of the best examples of this are the French comedie-ballets. This new form of theatre, invented by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better recognized by his stage name, Moliere, and his collaborator, the composer Jean-Baptiste de Lully, was essentially a play in which the song and, particularly dance, were essential to the action of the play and connected the acting scenes. One of their most well-known was Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with choreography by Pierre Beauchamp, which was performed for Louis XIV on October 14, 1670. Just a few years before, in 1661, Louis XIV had founded the Academie Royale de Danse to preserve and teach the court dances that were a part of the ballet d’cour and the commedie-ballet. By the early 1700s, the popularity of the pantomime ballet began to incorporate more directly these court dances into the theatre traditions of many European and American theatres. The transition for this shift from dance as a part of a theatre event to its own independent artistic expression culminated in the development of the ballet’d’action.9 David Garrick, the English actor-manager, invited the French choreographer, Jean-Georges Noverre, to his theatre at Drury Lane to stage his innovative ballet, Ballet Chinois. Unfortunately, the timing was not advantageous for this kind of collaboration. Due to the impending war between England and France, the English audience literally rebelled and rioted at the theatre. Nonetheless, it was Garrick who recognized the magnitude of Noverre’s talent and acknowledged him as “the Shakespeare of the Dance.”10

1492–1776 7

While Noverre did not invent ballet d’action, his work as a choreographer, teacher, and, particularly, writer popularized this form of ballet. In his book, Letters on Dancing and Ballet, published in 1760, he describes the ballet d’action as a self-contained ballet in which the plot and characters define the type of dance and movement used in its creation. He advocated that choreographers use movement appropriate to the story and the characters. He did not think that a demonstration of virtuosic technique for its own sake should be the goal of the ballet. This perspective was reflected in that he was more interested in ensemble work than solo or duet performance. As with his English predecessor, choreographer John Weaver, Noverre argued that dramatically danced pantomime should demonstrate emotion, illustrate aspects of character, and advance the plot.11

Dancing Manuals In addition to their folk and popular dance forms, documented in popular teaching manuals, such as Orchesographie (1588) by Thoinot Arbeau, some were familiar with the dance interludes that often-accompanied plays performed in the courts and public theatres throughout Europe. Those in England, for example, might have seen some of Shakespeare’s actors performing popular dances, such as jigs, pavannes, galliards and voltas, among others, between the acts of his plays.12 Those from other parts of Europe would certainly have seen various commedia dell’arte troupes performing their favorite stories with familiar stock characters. Some of these commedia players used comic routines or “pieces of stage business” known as lazzi along with popular forms of dance as a way to engage their audiences in the physical aspects of their unique brand of comic performance. Those who attended court entertainments saw everything from the court ballets in France, such as the Le Balet Comique de la Royne in 1581, to the masques and antimasques in England of playwright Ben Jonson and his collaborator, the scenographer Inigo Jones, such as The Masque of Blackness in 1605 and Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly in 1611. In these lavish and elaborate entertainments, they would have been exposed to many different theatrical dances; some of which were performed by members of royalty, including Louis XIV, and others by an increasing number of professional dancers. The pavanne, the galliard, the courante, and others were familiar court dances to them. Many of these court dances, as well as country-dances, were exported to the United States through the teaching and choreography of dance masters and, for those who could not afford a private tutor, through the use of dance manuals. Beginning with Arbeau’s book, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century country and court ballroom dances were notated, illustrated, and discussed in a variety of these very popular dance manuals. In Orchesography, the dance master, Arbeau, gives instructions to a student named Capriol. The book is written in a way similar to those by Constantin Stanislavski in his well-known acting books, in which the author casts himself as both teacher and student. Some of the dances

8  1492–1776

he describes are the pavanne, galliard, tordions, gavottes, various branles, and la volta. The dance master not only instructs his pupil on the art of the dance and its relation to music, but he also philosophizes on the value of dance to one’s development and to society-at-large. While admitting that some Christian and non-Christian figures throughout history had moral scruples regarding dance, he quickly counters that point of view with the idea that dance fundamentally is “both a pleasant and a profitable art which confers and preserves health; proper to youth, agreeable to the old and suitable to all provided fitness of time and place are observed and it is not abused.”13 While the attitude expressed here would probably be accepted by the Bostonian Puritan, the more earthly notion that “dancing is practiced to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb, after which they are permitted to kiss their mistresses in order that they may touch and savor one another, thus to ascertain if they are shapely or emit an unpleasant odour as of bad meat” would probably have been viewed as most inappropriate.14 Throughout the manual, however, Arbeau gives Capriol and the reader a thorough description of the dances, illustrated with woodcuts, and the accompanying music for each dance. In addition to the dances themselves, many of these books also addressed social etiquette, manners, and morals. For many of the educated in America, these books were viewed as a way to make a connection with one’s European counterparts and, at the same time, as a way by which to educate and prepare one’s children for their adulthood. While there were many such manuals, two others were particularly influential. The first is John Playford’s The English Dancing Mastere: or, Plain and Easie Rules of The Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to Each Dance (1651). This book, containing hundreds of country-dances, was so prevalent that it went through 17 editions from the time of its original publication until 1728.15 These were country-dances that were documented during the reign of Elizabeth I and continued to be popular in Europe and America well into the eighteenth century. What distinguished the country-dance was twofold, that it was a “group dance in which there is interaction between two or more couples, and it is a democratic dance in that the couples often change positions in the set and take turns leading the figures.”16 The second was Pierre Rameau’s The Dancing Master (1725). In addition to its precise descriptions of early ballet theatre dance technique, it also contained a thorough description of the minuet. Eighteenth century in America was filled with many dances, including the sarabande, the gigue, passepieds, allemande, cotillon, gavotte, and rigaudon. Two of the most recognized at this time were the minuet and the hornpipe. The development of the minuet, the most popular social dance of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coincides with the standardization of social and theatrical dance, particularly in France, with the establishment of the Royal Academy of Dance. For example, Beauchamps, Louis XIV’s dance teacher and choreographer, codified certain aspects of dance technique, such as the delineation of the five basic positions of the feet. The minuet, performed in ¾ time, is

1492–1776 9

a strict and formal dance that reflects an academic and elitist attitude. While the dance itself is relatively simple in terms of steps and choreography, it is the quality of the presentation that was highly valued. Belinda Quirey describes the dance as essentially consisting of the following four sections: 1. “The opening figure: leading the lady into the dance. 2. The famous Z figure: revised from Pecourt from a previous S figure. 3. The one handed figure: the couple going round each other, first by the right and then by the left hand. 4. The closing figure: where the man leads the girl round with both hands.”17 This dance is an “intellectual” dance, one that requires a specific kind of execution that is reserved, delicate, and dignified. It carried with it many of the characteristics of the Baroque into the eighteenth century. For the performers and audience members who wanted to see a reinforcement of the European sense of hierarchy, this dance certainly reflected that ideal. While the minuet was the most fashionable dance, other dances like the allemande, the courante, the bourree, the rigaudon, and others were also appreciated both as social dance forms and as theatrical divertissements.18 Other Americans were less concerned about the specific origin of these dances and about preserving a sense of purity in their performance; they wished to adapt them to their own cultural experience. As a result, while the steps for these country and court dances were similar, the manner or style in which they were performed changed. For example, by adding “calling” to some of the early English dances, the Americans would place an emphasis on performing the movements more quickly. This placed less importance on the precision in the execution of specific steps and more on the overall style of performance. In terms of social dance, large group dance forms were preferred to those that highlighted individual virtuosity.19 The hornpipe, on the other hand, was a competitive, folk dance that often called attention to the personality of the dancer over that of the specific technique of the dance itself. This was a dance that privileged improvisation as a necessary and important element in its performance. This kind of dance was better appreciated as a theatrically staged dance.20 Dance as social engagement was valued by many Americans, particularly during the eighteenth century. No less a figure than their first president, George Washington, enjoyed dancing on many occasions. One contemporary observer noted that the president “attended the ball of the 22rd of February; opened it by dancing a minuet with some lady, and then danced cotillions and country dances; as very gallant, and always attached himself, by his attentions, to some one or more of the most beautiful and attractive ladies at the balls.”21 For many, dance provided not only a measure of entertainment but it also was an established social lubricant for the mixing of different and varied people from many different social circles.

10  1492–1776

The Dancing Master As influential as these books and others were, the dancing master himself embodied the grace and deportment that many sought when studying these dance forms. Dancing masters, by profession, were expected to be current with the latest fashions in public and ballroom dance as well as with many traditional and country-­d ances. They were educated in social etiquette and were expected to pass those skills along in the classes they taught and in the balls that they sponsored. There were many who had additional skills in related areas, like music and fencing. Some were attracted to the theatre and worked as dancers, choreographers, musicians, and actors. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, particularly France, dance masters in America were highly individualistic and were not governed by custom or academy recognition. As a matter of fact, American dance masters did not make plans for an overall professional organization to monitor and “license” themselves until 1879.22 While 1672 is the earliest recorded date for a dancing master working in the United States,23 the first expanded account is that of Francis Stepney who attempted to set up a dance school in Boston in 1685. Most dancing masters were highly reputable teachers. Stepney, however, was infamous for his unconventionality. Challenging the Puritan authorities, he insisted on opening a dance school and was charged with blasphemy and with encouraging mixed dancing. Unfortunately for Stepney, he lost both his trial and his appeal and was subsequently fined 100 pounds. Several days later, the most famous anti-dance tract of the Colonial Period was published by Puritan minister Increase Mather.24 Establishing dance as an accepted social activity was constantly disputed in Puritan New England. Dancing masters, like Stepney, were criticized by preachers and political figures for creating an atmosphere in which the members of the community might be tempted to sin. While many Puritans were not necessarily against dancing, as long as it followed rules of public modesty and was consistent with the admonitions described in the Bible, what they objected to vigorously was the notion of mixed couple dances as opposed to group or round dances. Increase Mather, on the other hand, interpreted this idea in a much narrower sense and said so in his An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing, drawn out of the quiver of the Scriptures, By the Ministers of Christ at Boston in New-England. Using passages from the Bible, he argued that dancing was fundamentally sinful. According to his analysis, a somber pious life is in direct opposition to the exuberance of the dancer. While he admits that there may be some acceptance of same-sex group dancing, his ire is directed mostly at mixed couple dancing. He lays out an elaborate argument in which he sees the devil as author of such dancing. For Mather, “the Devil was the first inventor of the impleaded (sic) Dances, and the Gentiles, who worshipped him, the first Practitioners in this Art.”25 It wasn’t just his fellow Europeans and American settlers that he admonished for their Satanic association with dance; but, he saw the devil in the ceremonies of the Native Americans, whom he and his brethren had so brazenly

1492–1776 11

stated that “It is known from their own Confessions that amongst the Indians in this America, oftentimes at their Dances the Devil appears in bodily shape, and takes away one of them alive.”26 From his perspective, dance provides for those doing the dancing as well as for those watching the dance an opportunity to sin against the seventh commandment; therefore, dance should not be tolerated.27 Clearly, the restricted interpretation of this Bostonian Puritan is at odds with the Catholic Arbeau. When viewing the dancing body, Mather sees an occasion for sin while Arbeau sees a physical demonstration of healthy living. These diametrically opposed points of view would continue to create tension in the perception of dancers in America, particularly those who pursued dance as a theatrical art. Nevertheless, one of the earliest recorded dance schools in America was opened in 1672 in Massachusetts. It is also curious to note that one of the most important of the traveling dancing masters strongly influenced one of America’s founding fathers. His name was George Bromwell and he taught throughout Colonial America from 1712 to 1744.28 His most famous pupil was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was not to be outdone by his contemporaries; however, like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, each of whom viewed dance as an important part of a gentlemen’s education. The role of dance in the life of a community and particularly in the education of its young, was a contentious topic for some religious, political, and educational leaders. One of the most influential of these was John Locke, the English philosopher, who wrote extensively on the education of the young and the role of the arts in their education. In his influential book, Some Thought Concerning Education (1690), he advocates for dance in the curriculum of the young and makes a strong case for the employment of a Dancing Master so that the movements will be taught successfully. He makes it very clear that “since nothing appears to me to give Children so much becoming Confidence and Behaviour, as so to raise them to the conversation of those above their Age, as Dancing; I think they should be taught to Dance, as soon as they are capable of Learning it. For though this consists only in outward gracefulness of Motion, yet, I know not how, it gives Children manly Thoughts, and Carriage more than anything.”29 While the Boston area, under Puritan influence, and the Pennsylvania area, under Quaker influence, strongly discouraged dancing, the South followed in Locke’s direction and viewed dance in a very positive light. For many Southerners, dance was a primary means by which to teach socially acceptable attitudes and conventions to their young. The North tended to place individuality above that of social responsibility; Southerners often reversed these priorities. It is certainly true that the lives of many dancing masters in the South were as financially precarious as their counterparts in the North; nonetheless, their services were held in high esteem. One of the more successful of these was Thomas Pike. By opening Pike’s Dancing and Fencing Academy, he was able to establish dancing on a year around basis in Charleston, South Carolina; that is, one that was not dependent solely on the theatre fall-through-spring schedule. Trained as a musician, he taught

12  1492–1776

fencing and dancing from five in the morning until nine at night. Unfortunately for him, his career as a dancing master was cut short when he was arrested and confined by the Continental Congress on September 3, 1777, for his British sympathies.30 Nevertheless, Pike made a contribution, along with other dancing masters, who were trying to establish a foothold for dance in America’s social and cultural life. Many Americans, particularly those in the South, relied on a traveling dancing master to teach them manners and modes of etiquette as well as the latest fashions in dance. Some sought out popular dancing manuals, such as John Playford’s Dancing-Master, to keep them informed on the social graces of the time.31 Many viewed the role of dance as an essential part of making the transition from childhood to adulthood. It was also viewed as a valuable and important social lubricant between the different segments of society. Of course, there were rules and conventions in dance that permitted people to safely negotiate their roles and societal expectations. While some segments of society in the North might have viewed these social graces as so much hypocrisy, many in the South understood that structured dancing provides a sense of self-mastery and social etiquette that is necessary for a community to be successful. After the Revolutionary War, attacks on theatre, and dance in particular, declined. By the middle of the eighteenth century, dance began to enjoy an increased popularity and acceptance throughout the United States. The Minuet, Allemande, Rigadoon, Louvre, Cotillion, Gavotte, Sarabande, and the Quadrille were European forms that found favor with many Americans, particularly those of the upper classes. Nonetheless, there were forms of dance that crossed social classes. Some of these included the waltz, reels, varied country-dances, jigs, and the ever-popular hornpipe.32 Many of these social dances found their way to the theatrical stage as divertissements or as popular entrácte entertainments between scenes in plays and operettas or between songs in musical concerts.

Theatre Dance in Colonial America Early American musical theatre historian, Julian Mates, observes that “Dancing, inextricably a part of today’s musical comedies, was so closely bound up with the lyric theatre in the eighteenth century. Local dances from all over the colonies quickly found their way to the stage, and audiences promptly adapted stage dances for their own amusement.”33 This reciprocity between stage performances and the social dances of the audience was encouraged by the fact that many of the teachers of dance were in fact stage performers. Theatre in America, particularly throughout the Colonial Period, was sporadically performed, varied in its program selection, and inconsistent in its quality. Sometimes, it was simply a recitation of a play as a part of a “literary lecture;” sometimes, scenes from various dramas were included with musical performances. There was an amalgamation of many performances of literary, dance, music, and theatre elements. While some forms of dance were often

1492–1776 13

associated with home life, with public rituals, like marriages, and with seasonal gatherings, theatre more often depended on the development of an urban society. Consequently, most of the evidence that we have for theatrical activity was not regularly recorded until the eighteenth century. By 1700, the population of the Colonies reached about 650,000. New York had a population of 30,000 but, within the next 30 years, its population doubled. 34 Examples of theatre activity, particularly by amateurs, were evident throughout Colonial America. One of the most commonly documented is that of Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665), which is often cited as the colonies’ first play. Several months after its initial performance, the young men responsible for writing and performing it were immediately brought before a court and charged with blasphemy. Since the judges had not seen the play, they felt that they could not rule on this charge and demanded to have it performed before them at the Fowlkes Tavern, the site of its original production. Finding no cause to support blasphemy, they dismissed the charges and ordered Edward Martin, who had brought the complaint, to pay all court costs. Sweet revenge indeed!35 By 1716, the first theatre was built in America in Williamsburg, Virginia. Constructed by entrepreneur William Levingston, it was designed to be a permanent location for dancers/actors Charles Stagg and his wife Mary to present theatre and music entertainments from England.36 Theatre historian Arthur Hornblow points out that Virginia and Maryland were the only Colonial states that did not pass laws against theatrical performance. Most of the citizens in these states were proud of their aristocratic backgrounds and enjoyed a prosperity that permitted them the leisure time for artistic and social pursuits.37 The first professional play was staged in New York on December 6, 1732, when George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer was performed at The New Theatre, the first playhouse built there.38 Two years later, on February 8, 1735, the first recorded performances of a ballad opera, a progenitor of what was to evolve into the American musical theatre, was imported and performed in Charleston, South Carolina. Flora, or Hob in the Well contained Pierrot dances and Harlequin pantomimes. Throughout the mid-1700s, one can find other examples of many European dancers, particularly from England and France, performing dances and pantomimes throughout the colonies. Some of those were Henry Holt, Monsieur Denoier, Pietro Sodi, and Louis Roussel.39 Thirty-two years later, on April 6, 1767, in Philadelphia, the first native ballad opera, The Disappointment, was performed. In addition to being the first native musical, this production is noteworthy because it introduced the song “Yankee Doodle,” which initiated a theatre character type that would remain popular with musical theatre audiences for over a century and a half culminating in the vibrant persona of George M. Cohan in the early part of the twentieth century. While most of the theatrical performances of the time were imported, it was clear that as we moved from the Colonial Period through Revolutionary America and on into its early years as a republic, there was a clear search for an

14  1492–1776

identity that was unique to the experiences of the people living in this emerging new country. That was certainly evident in the name changes of one of its most popular theatre companies – that run by the English actor-manager, Lewis Hallam, the London Company of Comedians, which eventually changed its name to the American Company of Comedians and, after the American Revolution, to the Old American Company. Performers were very eager to reflect back to their audience an identity that was peculiar to how they saw themselves. One particular production in London that eventually played a significant role in the development of the musical in the United States was the John Gay’s three act ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera. This opened at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on January 29, 1728, and it was an unexpected success. The musical poked fun at the overblown and artificial conventions of the then popular vogue for the Italian opera, particularly its use of repetitive arias and its emphasis on the demonstration of the performers’ vocal technique over that of the dramatic value of the plot. John Gay collaborated with several of his peers to provide topical and satiric lyrics to contemporaneous tunes. Some of those songs had rather lascivious titles for the time, such as “Tis Woman That Seduces All Mankind,” “Virgins are Like the Fair Flow’r in Its Luster,” and “Our Polly Is a Sad Slut.” The plot centers on the unsavory attempts by Mr. and Mrs. Peachum to have their son-in-law, Captain Macheath, jailed so that the authorities may not detect their fencing operation. In the interim, the play offered intrigues involving whores, bandits, and beggars. Gay was able to find a formula that permitted the audience to enjoy seeing the underbelly of London by poking fun at the artificialities of conventional morality and to do so with recognized songs that they could sing as they left the theatre. Dramatic performance as mild social and political critique was made more palatable by the unique cast of characters and the use of popular musical tunes to temper criticism. The production was so successful that it was said that the show made “Gay rich and Rich gay.”40 In terms of theatre history, The Beggar’s Opera represents the beginning of musical theatre. It initiated the form now known as the ballad opera, a dramatic piece that incorporates familiar melodies and tunes but often added new lyrics unique to that particular production. Music definitely supported the book in this form of musical theatre. The emphasis was placed more on the dramatic values of the plot and the music and the songs were selected to elaborate the characters and to move the plot along. Most plays at this time ran for one night but if it was extended for four or five nights, it was considered a huge success. The Beggar’s Opera ran for an astonishing sixty-two performances, which set a record that was not overtaken until the nineteenth century. It opened in New York City on January 14, 1751, with Harlequin and Pierrot dancing provided between the acts.41 The Beggar’s Opera with its satiric tone and its use of comedy clearly delineated in the theatergoing public’s mind the notion of musical theatre as a popular art that distinguished it in England and later in the United States from operatic production.

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Theatre Dance One of the first theatrical dance performances recorded in Colonial America was performed in Philadelphia for the benefit of the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1734. While we do not know the names of the dancers, we do know that a young boy performed “capers on the Strait Roap,” while a young woman performed a Courante and a Jig. Both of these dances were performed on a rope. Rope Dancing was one of the most popular forms of dance on the American theatre stage throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. Eventually, entertainers in the circus tended to perform it. To the amazement of their audiences, dancers performed everything from classical ballet and folk dances to specialty dances like acrobatics on a rope. These dances played not only to the audience’s desire for the familiar but also for the spectacular and the unexpected. Three years later in 1737, we have documentation of one of the first male dancers, Henry Holt, performing at a Ball at De Lancey House in New York City.42 American theatre history records a number of professional theatre attempts in Colonial America, including that of an English company headed by Thomas Kean and Walter Murray that performed in Philadelphia and New York from 1749 to 1751.43 Like most traveling theatre companies at the time, The Murray– Kean Company included dancers and choreographers. One of their choreographers was M. Denoir, who choreographed entr’acte dances “Grand Tragic Dance” and “The Royal Captive.”44 The theatre company, however, that most consistently contributed to the development of American theatre in Prerevolutionary American was the Hallam Company. Organized by William Hallam in London, the theatre company was headed by his brother Lewis Hallam when it came to Colonial America. The company first performed at the Nassau Street Theatre in New York City on September 17, 1753. On that first night, a dancer with the company named Hulett performed a “Horn Pipe” and a “Tamborine” dance. Later that season, Mr. and Mrs. Lane, “the first professional American dance team” from New York, performed with the company as well.45 Eventually, the Hallam troupe also performed in Williamsburg, Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina between 1752 and 1755 before traveling to Jamaica. Between 1752 and 1755, the Hallam Company performed many musical entertainments, including Flora, or Hob in the Well, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and others. Unfortunately, while in Jamaica, Lewis Sr. died. After this loss, the company was combined with another English theatre troupe headed by the ambitious and charismatic David Douglass. Douglass soon married Lewis’ widow and appointed her as the leading lady for the troupe and her young son, Lewis, Jr., as the leading man. They returned to New York in 1758 and then traveled throughout many parts of Colonial America. Wherever they went, they built playhouses. Two of the most famous were the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia (1766), the first permanent playhouse in Colonial America, and the famous John Street Theatre in New York (1767), which opened in December

16  1492–1776

with a production of Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem.46 While in Philadelphia, Mr. Tea, one actor in their company, is known to have performed a “Negro Dance.”47 This may, in fact, be the first example of a black-faced white performer rendering an interpretation of an African-American dance.48 Except for major urban centers, the Douglas company, at first called “The London Company” and later changed to “The American Company,” had to be circumspect when presenting their plays to an audience that was still uncomfortable with theatregoing. Depending on where they performed, they sometimes resorted to describing their performances as “moral dialogues.” Many of their performances consisted of a full-length play that incorporated a series of interludes between acts that might include the performance of comic dances or sentimental ballads. An afterpiece might follow the play, perhaps a pantomime, or comic opera, or farce. In addition to establishing a consistent taste for professional theatre in the American audiences, the American Theatre Company also encouraged Americans to write their own dramas. One of the first was Thomas Godfrey’s five-act blank verse tragedy The Prince of Parthia, the first play written by an American to be performed by a professional theatre company. Their work continued in the colonies until October 24, 1774, when the first Continental Congress passed a resolution strongly discouraging the colonists from participating in entertainments and diversions that would prohibit their full participation in the anticipated coming war. The American Theatre Company disbanded and many of its members returned to Jamaica to sit out the war.

African-American Dance While the peak years for the African slave trade in the America were between 1741 and 1810, it is a peculiar fact of history that our first instance of African dancing in this New World occurred even before the arrival of the Pilgrims.49 Specifically, a slave ship landed in Jamestown Bay in 1619.50 Like Native Americans, the African slaves brought with them a strong dance tradition that permeated all aspects of their lives and that was for many a form of religious expression. In addition, these African peoples brought with them multiple kinds of African dances and music. Of course, there was no one monolithic form of dance. While the Africans viewed their dances as central to their lives, the slave traders often initiated a tradition called “dancing the slaves” on slave ships in which they forced their African captives to dance in order to maintain a sense of “health” so that they might fetch more money for them when they landed in the Americas. It was also their way of insuring that more slaves would survive the Middle Passage – an agonizing trial that cost nearly one out of ten to lose their lives.51 Later, on many plantations, celebrations often included dancing by African slaves for their white masters. Sometimes, these dances were derivatives of parts of their traditional dances from Africa; sometimes, they were variations of the European dances performed by their white plantation owners. Jazz dance

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historians Marshall and Jean Stearns characterize the African dance of these early slaves as being flat-footed, often performed with bent knees, imitative of animal-like movement, and having a propulsive rhythm that values improvisation and is centrifugal. Dance historian Kariamu Welsh Asante would add that African dance is essentially polyrhythmic, polycentric, and curvilinear in execution. It also has a strongly layered sense of dimensionality, arises from a kind of epic memory, values repetition, and is in essence holistic. All of these characteristics were undoubtedly not appreciated by the slaveholders. Most of them, however, would later inform twentieth-century concert and stage dance in the United States, but it would be a long time coming.52 By 1740, however, there was a great deal of apprehension by many of the white slave owners. Some were reacting to the Cato conspiracy in South Carolina in 1739 when an insurrection by African-Americans fighting for their freedom resulted in the death of several white men. Because drums were used as a way to inspire these freedom fighters, many owners regarded all traditional African dances and music as suspect. Consequently, Slave laws were passed that placed severe limitations on the use of African musical instruments and dances.53 Over time, traditional African musical instruments were replaced with the banjo, the fiddle, tambourines, pots and pans, and even the human body itself. One of the most well-known African-American dances that developed at this time was the juba, which “derived from the African djouba or gioube, moved in a counterclockwise circle and was distinguished by the rhythmic shuffling of feet, clapping hands, and ‘patting’ the body, as if it were a large drum.”54 The experience of African-Americans living in the North was less restrictive than those living in the South. And the experience of freed slaves, particularly in New York, was different yet. Dance historian Lynne Emery recounts that in the early eighteenth century, Manhattan African-Americans congregated at the Catherine Market to perform percussive dances like the Jig or the Breakdown on wooden shingles accompanied by others who beat out a rhythm using their own bodies as a musical instrument.55 One of the most popular occasions for AfricanAmerican dance was Pinkster Day, a holiday associated with Pentecost. Writer James Fennimore Cooper describes one such celebration in New York City in 1757. In a field near Broadway, African-Americans gathered to sing, dance, and celebrate. He writes “some were making music, by beating on skins drawn over the ends of hollow logs, while others were dancing to it, in a manner to show that they felt infinite delight.”56 While it took the rise of the minstrel tradition to popularize many AfricanAmerican dances on the theatrical stage, the African-American free men and women and the slaves continued, changed, and developed dances that were originally brought to the United States from their homelands in Africa. For the Africans, as for the Native Americans, dance was central to their religious expression and formed a vital social means of communication. Unlike that of many European-Americans, dance was essential in their religious and cultural lives and necessary to their understanding of the world around them.

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Consequently, their dances were vastly different from those of the European tradition. Robert Thompson describes African dance and music as exhibiting the following traits: “dominance of a percussive concept of performance, multiple meters, apart playing and dancing, call and response, and songs of allusion/dances of derision.”57 These characteristics were in sharp contrast to the European’s emphasis on spatial choreographic qualities rather than percussive rhythm, simple duple or triple meters rather than polyrhythms, emphasis on couple dancing rather than solo or small group improvisations, preset musical accompaniment to which the dancers conform in prearranged forms rather than a call and response and finally dances that were to teach a specific kind of social etiquette and manners associated with the wealthy and the powerful rather than dances of a more satiric nature. Dance historian Jacqui Malone particularizes the Africanist aesthetic identified by Robert Ferris Thompson and writes: “The six definitive characteristics of African-American vernacular dance are: rhythm, improvisation, control, angularity, asymmetry and dynamism.”58 The first two of these characteristics will be emphasized in America’s first native musical theatre tradition – the minstrel show – throughout the 1800s. And by the fin de siècle period, as the African-American musical struggled to create its own identity and acceptance on its own terms and as America became infected with the dance mania of keeping up with the plethora of social dance forms, particularly those derived from the African-American experience, each of these characteristics will have an impact in significant ways on musical theatre dance and choreography. The European-derived and the African-American dance traditions existed alongside each other throughout most of the Colonial Period and well into the beginning of the nineteenth century. While there were some instances of mutual influences between these two ways of viewing and performing dance, particularly on some Southern plantations where slaves and plantation owners participated in celebratory events in which sharing each other’s dances became a part of their traditions, for the most part, these two traditions, while contemporary with each other, did not have any significant influence on each other until the early to mid-nineteenth century.

The Shakers While dance was central to the religious and spiritual expressions of many Native and African-Americans, there were a few examples of dance in the religious expression of some Euro-Americans. One of the most unique and well-known was the Shakers. Founded by Ann Lee in America in 1744, they were often referred to as the Shaking Quakers.59 They had originated from an English sect called the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming. This millennial religious group was primarily based in the New England area. They were unique for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that they placed dance at the center of their worship.

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The men danced on one side of the church hall while the women danced on the other. There was a simple choreographic structure to these dances yet, at the same time, there was also room for ecstatic and emotional expression in the manner in which the dances were performed. Many of the dances extended the pantomimic gestures often found in other Protestant and Catholic worship services, particularly through the use of rhythm. Sometimes, these dances were performed in strict lines; sometimes, in a circular configuration and sometimes in square formations. As for the movement itself, one common movement had the dancers bending slightly forward from the waist and shaking their hands similar to shaking water off of your hands but, in this case, it was a shaking off of lustful temptations and selfish desires. Like many Native American dances, many of the dances were based on simple walking patterns. In 1930, modern dance choreographer Doris Humphrey created a dance simply called, The Shakers, in which she incorporated many of the same movements used by the Shakers in their religious services – “hopping, swaying, falling forward, and pulling back, shaking.”60 In some ways, these ritualistic dances were similar to the dance-pantomimes then popular on the English and American stages. There was a kind of theatricality created by the movement, the singing, sound of feet on wooden flooring, the choreographic shaping of the dancers, and the emotional fervor of the participants. Of course, there were other groups, such as the Mormons and the Oneida community that endorsed dance in many of their activities. Nonetheless, what was entertaining and increasingly accepted as theatrical entertainment was condemned by most Americans as inappropriate and “sinful” when associated with Christian religious worship.

Transitions Throughout much of the American experience at this time, dance was viewed with suspicion by many while embraced by others as a valuable social lubricant for a country made up of immigrants and slaves who comprised varied social strata based on who they were, how others saw them, and on where they lived. This tension played out in their personal and social lives and would soon be reflected on the theatrical stages all across America. The dances of the indigenous populations were viewed with scant attention. Some interpreted them as naively childish while others saw demonic forces at work. Of course, European immigrants brought their own dance traditions into the boiling pot of diversity. If they came from the musical or classical stages of Europe, they were perceived by some Americans as welcoming examples of high culture. Others saw them as elitist and rejected their perceived undemocratic associations. The dances from Africa were regarded with a kind of curiosity. For some, it was primitive and unnatural and for others it was cautiously entertaining. Sometimes, it wasn’t even about the dancing itself but more about the idea of the dancing body that pricked the conscience of these new settlers. Seeing the body on display seemed to some as if

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it were temptation itself. All of this would be carried over into the next century and would continue to inform how dance was to develop on the musical theatre stage well into the present. The dances of this period serve as a kind of prologue to the further development and consolidation of dance on the musical theatre stage in the next century by demonstrating a wide breadth of dance experience for the Americans. In the next chapter, we will see how these early examples of dance coalesced and competed for the attention of the American audiences from Boston to Charleston. “A nation’s character is typified by its dancers,”61 observes Confucius and those who graced the American musical theatre stage certainly bore that out; however, it would take several more decades for Americans to acknowledge a common identity and that struggle was reflected by its dancers on the popular stages of this emerging country.62

Notes 1 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ ch26.htm#:˜:text=They%20do%20not%20expect%20to,immediately%20return%20 to%20real%20life. 2 One of the critical issues involving the revivals of musicals has to do with the fact that they must be reinterpreted for a new audience. This will often be reflected in a change in directorial approach, choreographic style, a re-visioning of the scenography, and so on. One of the most successful reinterpretations of the original Hal Prince 1966 Cabaret, for example, was the Sam Mendez 1998 revival of Cabaret. When productions fail in this regard, they tend to enjoy a brief run and the emphasis is placed on a nostalgic approach that is seldom appreciated by a broad-based contemporary audience. 3 See Suzanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953) and John Martin’s John Martin’s Book of the Dance (New York, NY: Tudor Publishing Co., 1963). 4 Two books that directly address the ways in which musical theatre dance and choreography function within the musical are: Robert Berkson’s Musical Theater Choreography (New York, NY: Back Stage Books, 1990) and Margot Sunderland with Ken Pickering’s Choreographing the Stage Musical (New York, NY: Theatre Arts Books/ Routledge, 1990). 5 One of the strongest statements regarding dancing at that time was Increase Mather’s An Arrow against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing, Drawn Out of the Quiver of the Scriptures in 1684. Ann Wagner’s book, Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present, published in 1997, presents an excellent overview of the opposition to dance in American culture particularly as articulated by conservative Protestant clergy. 6 Highwater, Jamake, The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America (New York, NY: New American Library, 1981), p. 137. 7 For an excellent example of how early Americans viewed and interpreted the dances of the Native Americans they came into contact, I would refer the reader to Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876) by George Catlin. 8 While early American modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan, garnered inspiration for her revolutionary form of dance from the Greeks, other American modern dancers like Ted Shawn, Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins returned to the Native American dance traditions for their own inspiration hoping to expand the American experience beyond that of their Euro-American inheritance.

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9 This notion of dance as its own independent theatrical art form would become important in the mid-twentieth century with the transition from dance directors to choreographers. Until that time, dance was often viewed as an incidental contribution to musical theatre production. It may be valued as essential but it was often viewed as a kind of add-on to other aspects of the musical – such as the performers, the spectacle, the music, and so on. For an excellent one-volume history of ballet, I suggest that the reader look at Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet published by Random House in 2010. 10 Cohen, Selma Jean, founding editor, International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspective’s Foundation, Inc. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), Volume 4, p. 697. 11 John Weaver was an English dancer, dancing master, choreographer, and writer who was born in 1673 and died in 1760. With his ballets, like The Loves of Mars and Venus in 1717 and The Judgement of Paris in 1733, Weaver incorporated gesture and mime in the dances in order to advance a more complete dance production. He was a prolific writer whose major work in 1712, An Essay towards an History of Dancing, provided one of the first histories of dance in English. In this and in his other writings, he addressed issues of philosophy, anatomy, education, and theory related to an ideal that he held for the future development of dance. Noverre and his contemporaries certainly benefited from the ideas and work of Weaver. 12 Some readers who are interested in a more thorough examination of dance related to Shakespeare may want to review The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw published by Oxford University Press in 2019. 13 Arbeau, Thoinot, Orchesography. Translated by Mary Steward Evan (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967), pp. 15–16. 14 Ibid., p. 12. 15 Marks III, Joseph E., America Learns to Dance: An Historical Study of Dance Education in America Before 1900 (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1957), p. 18. 16 Keller, Kate Van Winkle and Shimer, Genevieve, “Playford’s ‘English Dancing Master’ (1751) and Country Dancing in America,” in Needham, Maureen, ed., I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000 (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 17 Belinda Quirey, May I Have the Pleasure: The Story of Popular Dancing (London: Dance Books, 1987), pp. 56-57. 18 See Louis Horst’s Pre-Classic Dance Forms for a description of these and other dances of the time. 19 Todd, Arthur, “Four Centuries of American Dance: Folk Dances of Our Pioneers,” Dance (November 1949), p. 21. 20 More will be said about this dance in the next chapter when we examine the work of America’s first popular musical theatre dancer – John Durang. 2 1 See: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-today/dancing. This website is an excellent resource for a description of the most popular dances of the eighteenth century in America. In addition to text, there are interviews, videos, and reproductions of paintings from this period. 22 The American Society of Professors of Dancing was established in 1879 to be followed by the American Association of Masters of Dancing in 1883. 23 Ibid., Marks, p. 19. 24 Wagner, Ann, Adversaries of the Dance: From the Puritan to the Present (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 47–48. Previous to the incident with Francis Stepney, there had been other dancing masters in Boston, like Charles, Cleate, and Henry Sherlot, who were encouraged to leave the city and the colony. Attacks on dance coincided with similar attacks on the theatre. One of Mathers’ contemporaries in England, Jeremy Collier (1631–1700) authored a vicious attack on theatre with his A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.

22  1492–1776

The performative aspects of theatre and the primary emphasis on the human body as the means of expression in dance challenged those who might today be described as Christian fundamentalist. This was not and is not unique, of course, to Colonial America. A very thorough analysis of this problem is analyzed and discussed in Jonah Parrish’s book, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. 25 Mather, Increase, “An Arrow against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn Out of the Quiver of the Scriptures (1685),” in Needham, Maureen, ed., I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000 (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 106. 26 Mather, Increase, “An Arrow against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn Out of the Quiver of the Scriptures (1685),” in Needham, Maureen, ed., I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000 (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 109. 27 Ibid., Wagner, pp. 47–55. 28 Ibid. Kraus, pp. 100–101. 29 See Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke, Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Critical Apparatus by John W. and Jean S. Yolton (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 124–125. 30 Cobau, Judith, “The Precarious Life of Thomas Pike, A Colonial Dancing Master in Charleston and Philadelphia,” Dance Chronicle, Vol 17, No 3, 1994, pp. 229–262. 31 Barzel, Ann, “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” Dance Index 3 (1944): 54. 32 In addition to Barzel’s “European Dance Teachers in the United States” article, see Julian Mates book, The American Musical Stage Before 1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), pp. 56–57. 33 Mates, Julian, The American Musical Stage Before 1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 36. 34 Hornblow, Arthur, A History of the Theatre in America: From Its Beginnings to the Present Time (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1919), pp. 28–29. 35 See: http://historyarch.com/2019/08/27/the-first-american-play-ye-bare-and-yecubbe-insights-into-colonial-culture-and-individual-rights/ for a more detailed description of this play and is history. 36 Ibid. Hornblow, pp. 35–36. It is possible that Mary Stagg was the first American female dance-master that we recognize. 37 Wilson, Garff B., Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bear and Ye Cubb to Hair. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), pp. 7–8. 38 Ibid. Hornblow, p. 31. 39 Moore, Lillian, Echoes of American Ballet (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1976), p. 41. 40 Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973). This ballad opera continued to interest musical theatre artists into the twentieth century. Gay’s musical, for example, was the basis for at least two well-known twentieth-­ century adaptations. One was the John LaTouche and Duke Ellington version in 1946 called Beggar’s Holiday starring Alfred Drake and Zero Mostel and the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht Three-Penny Opera. The play was memorialized in the famous paintings of Hogarth. 41 Winter, Marian Hannah, “American Theatrical Dancing from 1750 to 1800,” The Musical Quarterly, Volume XXIV, Issue 1, January 1938, p. 59. 42 Todd, Arthur, “Theatre Dance Before the American Revolution – 1734–1775,” Dance, March 1950, p. 20. 43 It was this company that performed the American premier of The Beggar’s Opera in 1751. 44 See Mates, p. 166. 45 Ibid. Todd, 1734–1775, p. 21. 46 The John Street Theatre was the most prestigious theatre in New York for the remainder of the century until the Park Theatre was built in 1798. 47 Ibid., Todd, 1734–1775, p. 21.

1492–1776 23

48 Arthur Todd points out in his article, “Theatre Dance Before the American Revolution – 1734–1775,” that this was not the only example of male actors performing “Negro Dances” in blackface. As a matter of fact, the notion of the Negro as a stage character was quite common at this time. 49 Malone, Jacqui, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 25. 50 Todd, Arthur, “Four Centuries of American Dance: The Negro Folk Dance in America,” Dance, January 1950, p. 15. 51 There are many excellent histories of the Middle Passage but one that I think is particularly helpful in understanding this period is Stephanie S. Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. (2008). 52 Please see Marshall and Jean Stearns’ Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, pp. 14–16 and the essay, “Commonalities in African Dance: An Aesthetic Foundation” by Kariamu Welsh Asante anthologized in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright. 53 It is important to note that Lynne Fauley Emery in her book, Blank Dance From 1619 to Today, reminds her readers that those Africans who were brought to the West Indies were often able to preserve their dance and music traditions, while the American slave owners, many of whom did not consider their slaves to be anything other than property, were much more suspicious and afraid of these dances and the music that accompanied them. 54 Hill, Constance Valis, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5. 55 Emery, Lynne Fauley, Black Dance from 1619 to Today. 2nd edition, revised. (Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1988), pp. 140–141. 56 From Lynne Emery’s Black Dance: From 1619 to Today, p. 141. See original quote in James Fenimore Cooper’s Satanstoe: or, The Little Manuscripts. A Tale of the Colony. Volume 1, p. 65. 57 Malone, Jacqui, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Invisible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996, p. 15. 58 Ibid., Malone, p. 32. For a more in-depth analysis and description of African dance aesthetics, see Robert Farris Thompson’s African Art in Motion: Icon and Act published by the University of California Press in 1979. 59 Ibid., Todd, “Folk dance …”, p. 34. 60 Cohen, Selma Jean (edited and completed this autobiography) Doris Humphrey: An Artist First (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), pp. 95–96. In 1969, I performed in a reconstruction of this dance based on a labanotated score lead by Professor Janet Descutner. As a part of the dance dramaturgy, she introduced us to the history and theory behind these Shakers dancers. With the exception of the concluding section, most of the choreography for this piece was respectfully based on the Shaker movement that was a part of their religious ritual. After its concert premier, it was latter performed as a part of the revival in the 1932 production of Americana. It was not unusual for modern dancers to perform in vaudeville and in musical comedy revues of the 1920s and the 1930s. 61 See: https://www.streetswing.com/histmain/d5qoutes.htm 62 One of the best sites to visit to learn more about the dances of this period is that by the Mount Vernon organization at: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/ digitalhistory/colonial-music-institute/essays/dances-of-colonial-america/

2 1776–1866 John Durang and the Dawn of American Theatrical Dance

Theatricality Struggles for a Foothold in a New Republic Despite the United States Congress passing an anti-theatre law in 1787, as soon as the Revolutionary war was over, it was immediately repealed. For many of the framers of the American constitution, dance was viewed as an important part of the social and theatrical life of their emerging new country. In fact, many of the early Presidents were enthusiastic dancers themselves and advocated for the educational and social benefits associated with dance. As previously mentioned, George Washington himself was an excellent dancer. When New York was the capital of the United States, he patronized theatre productions at the John Street Theatre on a regular basis. When the capital was moved to Philadelphia, he continued to patronize the theatre by attending performances at the Chestnut Street Theatre and the Southwark Theatre. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson shared John Locke’s perspective on the value of dancing in the socialization of the young by encouraging their own children to dance as a part of their overall education. These men were echoing the arguments made for dance as a part of a young person’s education by writers, preachers, and leaders like John Gregory in A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, Dr. Fordyce in Sermons to Young Women, and Benjamin Rush in Sermons to the Rich and Studious on Temperance and Exercise. Additionally, it was not unusual to find young John Quincy Adams dancing until three in the morning.1 Later, “Andrew Jackson and his wife were dancing in the White House to such tunes as “Possum Up a Gum Tree.”2 Many American political, business, and religious leaders viewed dance as an important part of their social and cultural life. Throughout the early years of the republic, there was an influx of French dancing masters, many of whom were escaping the ravages of their own French Revolution. Like their predecessors, they emphasized deportment and grace DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-3

1776–1866 25

when they taught the current dances of their day. These included the cotillion, rigadoon, hornpipes, and the ever-popular minuet. In addition, popular social and folk dances found their way onto the theatrical stage. Some of these were the gavotte, sarabande, allemande, and the quadrille. Of course, there were many instances of a give-and-take relationship between the theatrical stage and the social world with such dances as the hornpipe, jigs, waltz, and reels. Audiences enjoyed seeing performers, who were more technically proficient than they, perform the social dances that they enjoyed doing. Of course, each performer added his or her own “take” on a particular dance form and enhanced it with his or her own stage persona. It was not, however, a one-way communication between audience members and the dancers. For example, sponsored balls were common after a theatrical performance and performers and audiences alike mingled and exchanged dance steps. Through the efforts of these dancing masters and performers, dance became more and more a part of the social and educational fabric of American life. After the Revolutionary war, Philadelphia, with its population of 40,000, was the largest city in the United States. With the construction in 1794 of the Chestnut Street Theatre, it would ensure its place as the theatrical center of the United States until the 1820s.3 New York began the decade of 1790 with a population of 33,000, but by 1800, it had grown to 44,000.4 By the early part of the nineteenth century, New York was being compared to Paris and London in terms of its diversity of population and variety of cultural art activity. At the time of the American and French revolutions, economic, social, and cultural factors were beginning to place the middle class firmly in the center of American and European societies. While the elites were still influential and important, they were much less so than before. In addition, there was a shift in which popular artistic pursuits were becoming dominant, particularly in America. Before and throughout the American Revolution, many Americans still opposed theatre and dance. Consequently, theatrical and dance performances were often put on the same bill as music events and called “concerts” or “lectures.” But, by 1790, most of the anti-theatre laws in the states had been repealed and theatre and dance quickly developed in America’s major cities like New York and Philadelphia as well as in Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. Among the questions that Americas were asking as they moved into a new century was: “What binds an emerging democratic society together?” Their country was characterized by many different kinds of constituencies, certainly more than had been the case in Europe: old European traditionalists, frontiersmen, slaves, immigrants, and Native Americans. Increasing urbanization, a fascination for new and improved technologies, an emphasis on the homogenization of cultural tastes, and a stronger value placed on education for more of its citizenry contributed to what Russell Nye describes as the formation of America’s popular arts. Before the American Revolution, there was a sharper delineation between folk art forms and the elite arts. Now, America was searching for its own identity and wanted to see its rich complexity reflected on the stage.5

26  1776–1866

As early as 1783, John Henry and later Lewis Hallam successfully petitioned the repeal of the anti-theatre law of 1778. They also combined their resources and established the Old American Company. One of their first successes with this company was at the John Street Theatre in Philadelphia when they produced The Contrast, the first comedy by an American playwright, Royall Tyler. By 1789, they were producing plays written by other American playwrights, the most notable of whom was William Dunlap. Eventually, this company made its home in New York City. There, it opened the famous Park Theatre on January 29, 1798. The theatre had three rows of boxes, a pit, and a gallery that could sit 2,000 audience members. As was the custom of the times, the stage was raked.6 It was one of the best-equipped theatres of its period.7 At this time, Dunlap became the sole director and manager of the Old American Theatre Company. He later earned the title of “Father of the American drama,” not only for his role as the director/manager of one of America’s preeminent theatre companies but also as the author of more than 50 plays. In addition, in 1832, he wrote the first History of the American Theatre.8 In 1781, American audiences were enjoying two other antecedents to the musical theatre – the spectacle and the extravaganza.9 The first of these musical theatre types was performed in Philadelphia and was entitled, The Temple of Minerva. By 1793, Raynor Taylor was introducing burlesque olios10 to his audiences.11 All of these musical forms set the stage for The Archers (1796), one of America’s first original musical comedies.12 The Archers was based on the William Tell legend. It opened at the John Street Theatre on April 18, 1796. Benjamin Carr, a popular composer, wrote the score, while the prodigious William Dunlap authored the book.13 The Archers is important in the history of musical theatre dance for several reasons. In the cast were notable French dancers M. and Mme. Val, Des Moulina, Mme. Gardie, and M. Francisquy, one of the “best choreographers of eighteenth-century America.”14 M. Francisquy was born Jean Baptiste Francisquy in Bordeaux and came to the United States trained as a classical dancer along with a knowledge of the ballet practiced in the French theatre. One of his most famous roles before The Archers was in the popular pantomime Robinson Crusoe that he performed in Charleston, South Caroline, in 1794.15 Just before this production, his ballet company, including Mme. Gardie and John Durang, were performing at the John Street Theatre. The producers for the Old American Company made them an offer that brought M. Francisquy and his dancers into their theatre company. He, along with his French ballet master Alexander Placide, were well known in America as producers and choreographers of many pastoral ballets and between-the-acts divertissements.16

John Durang and the Beginning of Show Dancing However, it was the presence of John Durang, “the first native American to win widespread recognition as a dancer,”17 in this musical that gave this production its primary significance in terms of musical theatre dance. “Quickly removing his Bowman’s costume, he stepped before the curtain to fill in those minutes before

1776–1866 27

Act II of The Archers could begin.”18 While M. Francisquy was the choreographer, the hornpipe dance of John Durang was undoubtedly the most popularly received dance in this production.19 The career of John Durang, extending from 1785 to 1816, not only bridges the history of the American musical theatre from one century to another but also establishes a native-born “beginning” for the history of musical theatre dance. Durang was born near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on January 6, 1768, to French immigrants Jacob Durang and Mary Arten. Ten years later, they moved to Philadelphia; there, he began his professional career. Throughout his adolescence, Durang saw as much theatre and dance as he could. He was entranced. In his journal, he wrote: The first wire dancer I ever saw was one Templeman who was most compleat in the art. He performed in the old Theatre South Street; the house was crowded every night. The next was a dramatic performance by Wall and Ryan and Company; they had among them a Mr. Rusell [Roussel], a dancer. I saw him dance a hornpipe which charmed my mind. I thought I could dance as well as any body but his stile set it off, with his dress. I practiced at home and I soon could do all his steps besides many more better hornpipe steps. He was a Frenchman and the French seldom do many real ground steps. The pigeon wing I never saw done by any other person, and I could not make that out from the front of the house. I contrived to get Mr. Rusell to board at my father’s house that I might have the opportunity to dance more correct than I had been used to. I learned the correct stile of dancing a hornpipe in the French stile, an allemande, and steps for a country-dance.20 When the young Durang auditioned for the managers of the Hallam theatre company, he performed a hornpipe in a sailor outfit. He was quickly hired and he made his theatrical debut when only 17 years old. He performed a “Peasant’s Dance” with the reconstituted Lewis Hallam company on December 14, 1784, at the Old Southwark Theatre.21 The company adopted the name – The Old American Company – and opened their first harlequinade, The touchstone, or Harlequin Traveler, on September 1, 1785. Hallam played Harlequin, while his young dancer, Durang, played the role of Scaramouche and his sister, Caroline Durang, played Columbine.22 Durang learned from Hallam how to perform in these pantomimes and played the role of Harlequin in many harlequinades. Some of these harlequinades were adaptations of foreign productions, such as The Birth of Harlequin or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Harleqiun Woodcutter. Others were original, such as Harleqiun in Philadelphia. What fascinated Durang with this form of theatre was that it allowed him to “play the fool,” or clown, and to dance. Although Durang was eclectic in both his interests and abilities, clowning and dancing were constants throughout his life. One example from his journal illustrates this lifelong passion. Durang tells the story of a “Dwarf Dance,” which

28  1776–1866

he describes as, “the body and the head of the Dwarf were tied above my hip, and the uperpard of my body and head were covered by a coloured petticoat gathered with my hands at the top of my head.”23 Unfortunately, he was not able to see very well. One night, when the stage light blinded him, he fell into the orchestra pit, resulting in spikes entering his legs. He had to recuperate for two months before he could return to his dancing. Durang’s interest in dance was voracious. In the beginning, he danced the Allemande and the jig. He learned commedia slapstick. However, it was his version of the Hornpipe dance that was to become his trademark. He created many Hornpipe dances throughout his career, but his most famous was simply known as “Durang’s Hornpipe.” The well-known German dwarf, Hoffmaster, composed the music for this dance. This dance is credited with being an early “ancestor of the modern tap dance.”24 Durang’s son, Charles, preserved the music and a description of the dance in a pocket guide published in 1855. A rendition of the dance follows: A Sailor Hornpipe – Old Style 1. Glissade round (first part of tune). 2. Double shuffle down, do. 3. Heel and toe back, finish with back shuffle. 4. Cut the buckle down, finish the shuffle. 5. Side shuffle right and left, finishing with beats. 6. Pigeon wing going round. 7. Heel and toe haul in back. 8. Steady toss down. 9. Changes back, finish with back shuffle and beats. 10. Wave step down. 11. Heel and toe shuffle obliquely back. 12. Whirligig, with beats down. 13. Sissone and entrechats back. 14. Running forward on the heels. 15. Double Scotch step, with a heel Brand in Plase [sic]. 16. Single Scotch step back. 17. Parried toes round, or feet in and out. 18. The Cooper shuffle right and left back. 19. Grasshopper step down. 20. Terre-a-terre [sic] or beating on toes back. 21. Jockey crotch down. 22. Traverse round, with hornpipe glissade. Bow and finish.25 The vocabulary in this description suggests that Durang was influenced by native African-American dance as well as the French ballet. Sissone, entrechats and glissade are specific movements from the classical ballet, while buckle down,

1776–1866 29

shuffle, pigeon wing, and others suggest steps common to the then-­contemporary African-American dance vocabulary. Durang worked with many French ballet masters throughout his association with the Old American Company, most notably with Alexandre Placide. Among the kinds of dancing he studied with Placide was rope dancing, which was a very popular form of stage dance at this time. Rope dancing “meant tripping the light fantastic on a rope elevated above the heads of the crowd: the performer might sketch a few elementary pas or dance a hornpipe on his head.”26 He also performed in several ballets with the famous ballerina Mme Gardie. One of the most important was La Foret Noire, what some historians refer to as the first serious ballet performed in this country.27 In 1796, when the French choreographer M. Francisquy began to choreograph for the Old American Company, Durang was more and more reduced to performing in small dance roles. It is unclear why, however, the new choreographer appreciated Durang’s theatrical persona and often choreographed entrácte and afterpieces in which the men would dance together or with lady partners. Later, in his role as Friday in Brinsley Sheridan’s Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday, he applied blackface, anticipating the future minstrel show genre.28 Durang expanded his theatrical dance repertoire to include American Indian dance as when he performed in Tammany, or the Indian Chief (1794), “one of the first operas written in America, with an American subject.”29 His interest in American Indian dance was whetted further while on tour in Canada several years before. In his memoirs, he related one such performance. … I got up an Indian characteristic dance. The N. Wst. Company lent me Indian clothes for those concerned in the dance. I had my own dress which I purchased from an In-dian for rum. The dances I learned from some Chipeway and Naudowessie chiefs of the West. My dress was most compleat with chichicoes tied round below my knees (a kind of large dried bean hollowed and strung, make a music to keep time like the castinates). I performed in Pipe Dance; the manner is graceful and pleasing in the nature of savage harmony. Next, the Eagle Tail Dance. I concluded with the War Dance, descriptive of their exploits, throwing myself in different postures with firm steps with hatchet and knife, representing the manner they kill and scalp and take prisoners with the yells and war hoops. I was told by the officer that I excel’d as their native Indian dances were more simple. I jumpt thro’a barrel of fire and concluded with an exhibition of fireworks.30 By 1796, Durang decided to leave the Old American Company for the circus. He danced, clowned, and choreographed for the Ricketts’ Circus. He created many ballet pantomimes for his new employer including The Country Wake, or the Frolicsome Crew, The Humours of Bartholomew Fair, and The Harvest Home, or Rustic Merriment. Whether performing in his own choreographies or in those of others, like the famous James Byrne, the former ballet master at the Sadler’s Wells

30  1776–1866

and Covent Garden, Durang’s skill as a comic dancer was given full rein in this venue. After Ricketts’ Philadelphia headquarters burned down in 1799, Durang joined the stock company at the Chestnut Street Theatre. He worked with fellow choreographer Francis Mentges to choreograph and perform in various dances, ballets, and pantomimes. The entire Durang family was a part of the theatre company. His wife, Mary, performed small roles in plays while his children were often a part of the ballet corps. John Durang had married fellow dancer Mary McEwen in 1787 and together they had seven children, most of whom went into dance. The year 1812 was a difficult year for Durang. He and two of his sons, Charles and Ferdinand, joined the Pennsylvania Militia to fight against Great Britain in the War of 1812. In addition, Mary died that same year on September 12. He continued to work in the theatre until his retirement in 1819; he died three years later in 1822.31 Durang’s prodigious interests in so many forms of dance and his multiple careers in musicals, operas, ballets, pantomimes, plays, and circuses set in motion the beginnings of what we now recognize as the eclecticism of musical theatre dance.32 Durang was important not only because he was the first significant native-born American theatre dancer, but also because of his wide and varied accomplishments in the field. He was also a part of a revival of interest in dance as a theatre activity that was particularly prominent during the 1790s. Durang’s contributions to the early development of dance on the musical theatre stage were numerous and varied. His popularity and versatility as a showman brought a focus to the musical theatre performer as dancer. He demonstrated an eclectic awareness of many different kinds of dance and of related areas like acrobatics and pantomime. He was meticulous about his work and this is evident in his diary. What best sums up his contribution is what Durang historian Lynn Matluck Brooks writes: “Durang himself embodied a new ethnicity in the theatre: that of the American performer.”33 Durang certainly benefitted from the huge wave of French dancing masters, who immigrated to the United States after the French Revolution and their version of the Hornpipe is likely to have influenced the signature version that Durang developed. Throughout his career, Durang performed other ethnicities and the dances associated with them such as his appearance as an African in Robert Brinsley Sheridan’s pantomime Robinson Crusoe: or, Harlequin Friday, as a Native American dancer in Tammany; or, The Indian Chief, or his performance of the Spanish fandango, a Scottish Highland Fling, a Dutch clog dance, and many others. Brooks makes the point that Durang’s eclectic interest in the variety of dance speaks to his audience’s interest and curiosity in the diversity of what was becoming an “American” identity – the many becoming one. Musical theatre, and particularly its dance, offered a nonthreatening way in which the audience of that time could explore, investigate, and look at the multiplicity of movement vocabularies that different ethnic groups found interesting and reflected their particular aesthetic points of view. “Durang on the stage was an opportunity for Americans to see themselves represented as an emerging and distinct people.”34

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Durang’s Contemporaries Contribute to Dance on the American Stage Another important figure who had a lasting impact on American dance was Alexandre Placide. Born in Paris in 1750, Placide was an excellent dancer who had performed at the Paris Opera Ballet, the Theatre de Nicolet, and the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London before coming to the United States. In addition to his abilities in ballet, he was also recognized as an excellent rope dancer,35 mime, and choreographer. He made his American debut at the well-known John Street theatre on January 25, 1792, in The Bird Catcher.36 This was the same theatre managed by the Old American Company personnel – Lewis Hallam and John Henry. Between his debut and May 14 of that year, Placide staged and performed in many ballets and pantomimes. In The Bird Catcher, Placide danced the title role while his wife, Suzanne Vaillande,37 danced the female lead and Durang performed with Messrs. Martin and Robinson in the role of the Hunters. At the time, Placide was 42 years old and his “wife” was 14 years old. In their next ballet, The Two Philosophers, or, The Merry Girl, both husband and wife performed an energetic and well-received hornpipe dance. By February 6, Placide presented his first staged pantomime, Harlequin Protected by Cupid, or, The Enchanted Nosegay. Two days later, Placide introduced an important innovation when his “dancing ballet,” The Return of the Labourers, featured a dance performed in wooden shoes, which may well have prefigured one of the earliest theatrical performances of what would become tap dance. His next choreography, The Restoration of Harlequin, featured some of the best dancers of their time. Placide danced Pierrot, his wife performed Columbine, Paulo Redige, “the Little Devil,” danced the Old Man, American dancer, John Martin, performed the Lover, and the famous Francois Simonet danced the title role of Harlequin. The “historic pantomime,” The Old Soldier, which opened on February 15, is “one of the few dance works seen in New York during the eighteenth century for which a libretto of sorts has survived.”38 In the next ballet, The Old Schoolmaster Grown Young, M. and Mme. Placide performed an Allemande.39 In The Birth of Harlequin, or, The Witches Frolic, Placide played Columbine to Durang’s Harlequin. Between January and May, it appears that Placide and his dancers were involved with at least five ballets and ten pantomimes, in addition to performing in other forms of theatrical entertainment, like plays and divertissements between acts. Dance historian Lillian Moore characterized the overall contribution of Placide and his company in the 1792 New York City season as “the avant-garde of America’s first golden age of ballet.”40 With this success, Placide had established his reputation and, by 1794, he was offered the opportunity to manage the Charleston Theatre.41 While in that position, he continued to make a significant contribution to dance in the United States. The 1790s witnessed a flurry of activity in terms of ballet, pantomimes, and dance divertissements on the theatre stage. Before then, much of the theatre dance performed on the American stages was derivative of British dance. Now,

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with the French Revolution and the revolt in Santo Domingo, American theatre was inundated with French and French-trained dancers. The Placides instigated an exciting decade for dance in New York and other theatre centers in the United States of the 1790s. In their wake, we find others like Jean Baptiste Francisquy, a brilliant technical dancer as well as choreographer of such lauded ballets as The Whims of Galatea and Mirza and Lindor,42 and James Byrne, the British choreographer who contributed his own ballets such as The Death of Captain Cook and Dermot and Kathleen.43 But, one of the most well-known and notorious was Anna Gardie, often referred to as “the first ballet star of the United States.”44 Born c. 1760 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, she started her professional career as a ballet dancer there before immigrating to the American colonies. Gardie made her debut in one of the most successful “serious pantomimes” of the 1790s, La Foret Noire.45 This particular genre, called the “serious pantomime,” brought together elements of the ballet tradition of France with the pantomimic tradition of England. It was strongly influenced by some of the characteristics of melodrama; that is, clearly drawn characters, emotional clarity, and no moral ambiguity. While characters were effectively illustrated with the pantomimic elements, the mood and emotions inherent in the piece were best realized in the dance portion of the production. In addition to excellent scenographic effects, the music, which was newly composed by Alexander Reinagle, was performed throughout the piece.46 La Foret Noire opened at the New Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on April 26, 1794. This production permitted Ms. Gardie, the lead dancer, who probably served as co-choreographer with French dancer, Quesnet, to demonstrate her excellent skills at performing emotional and melodramatic roles. Three weeks later, on May 16, she performed in a “comic pastoral ballet” entitled L’Amour trouve les Moyens, or The Fruitless Precaution choreographed by William Francis. Some historians think that this may, in fact, have been the first time that Dauberval’s ballet, La Fille mal Gardee, was performed in the United States. This particular ballet, with an elaborate history that includes stories about Fanny Elssler and Anna Pavlov, continues to be popular today with American audiences.47 Several weeks later, she made her New York debut in Sophia of Brabant, a ballet pantomime based in part on the Arthurian legends. Some of the other ballets in which she performed included Noverre’s Whims of Galatea and The Independence of America, or the Ever Memorable Fourth July 1798. She did not restrict herself to the ballet however. Again, with John Durang, she performed divertissements, which included dances such as the Allemande and the Hornpipe. Tragically, her career was unexpectedly cut short. Her husband desperately wanted to return to France but she refused. He stabbed her to death before turning the knife on himself. Both were found dead the following morning.48 She died on July 21, 1798. Throughout Gardie’s brief four-year career in the United States, her beauty, grace, balletic abilities, and pantomimic emotionalism fascinated her audiences and made her a star. Anna Gardie’s success on the American musical theatre stage encouraged more French dancers and choreographers to travel to the United States, particularly

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in the wake of the French Revolution. To supplement the meager pay from their theatrical activities, many opened schools of dance, where they taught ballroom dancing as well as theatrical dance. Some of these French dancing masters included such well-known and respected figures as Paul Taglioni, James Sylvain, and P. H. Hazard. The French approach to ballet was characterized by a “graciousness of style and soft arm movements and neatness of footwork, developing suppleness of the arches and Achilles tendons.”49 American dance artists, such as Charles Durang, George Washington Smith, and Augusta Maywood, studied ballet with these French dancing masters. Nonetheless, the corps de ballet in many of these musical theatre spectacles “were filled with ladies of questionable reputation,”50 which continued to hamper the acceptance of dance in the musical theatre until the early twentieth century. Unlike the period of the Revolutionary War, most theatres continued to operate throughout the War of 1812. The American people’s response to the potential threat posed by their country’s involvement in this war was decidedly different than it had been before. A lessening of the Puritan influence and confidence in their nation certainly contributed to this change in attitude. The arts and entertainment in general were viewed as important diversions in what was obviously a very grave time. Patronizing the arts was not then viewed as negating serious preparation for the war effort.

French Dancing Masters and Ballet Comes to America The years following the French Revolutionary War saw a continuing influx of French dancing masters immigrating to the United States. In addition to bringing social dance forms, some of them also advocated for an appreciation for ballet. The reforms of French choreographer Jean George Noverre and his advocacy for a ballet d’action were appealing to American performing artists. His emphasis on using the human body to create character and to tell a story was also appealing to an American audience still suspicious of dance as a theatre art, particularly where women were concerned. While there were still people who endured moral scruples about dancing, the suspicion of others had more to do with the display of the female form moving on stage. Dancing that stressed technical virtuosity over that of character development made the dancer an object of display, of spectacle. For an audience who still viewed the body as a means by which things “get done” rather than as an object of contemplation, or appreciation, to see dancers dancing for their own sake seemed gratuitous or at the very least inappropriate.51 Spectacle of that kind may be appreciated when it is served by the aesthetic consideration of tableau vivants, or as an element of spectacle in serving the needs for the narration of a story, but it was highly suspect when it was displayed for its own purpose. It would take another generation before American theatre audiences would consider dance on its own merit. By the 1820s and 1830s, there was a significant shift in the expectations of theatre audiences. The United States was on its way to becoming more cosmopolitan

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in terms of its development of natural resources, rising urban populations, and its determination to engage with other nations economically and politically. From the 1790s to the 1830s, the population grew from 4,000,000 to 13,000,000. At home, international performing artists continued to visit and perform not only in America’s major cities but also increasingly on tour throughout the nation. Beginning with the performance of George Frederick Cooke in 1810, there was soon a system of star European actors and performers who flooded the American stage. None other than the famous English actor, Edmund Kean, made his first illustrious appearance at the Anthony Street Theatre in New York in 1820. For over 30 years, this system was a cash cow for many European artists and an excellent way for American audiences to see some of the best theatrical performances of their day. This continued until May 10, 1849, when a riot broke out at the Astor Place Opera House by adherents for two notable performers – the American Edwin Forrest and the English William Charles Macready. The first enjoyed populist support particularly from the working class, as a strong, physical and emotional actor; the second was supported by the upper middle class and the literati and was recognized as one of England’s great actors – genteel and refined. Their differences in acting styles played into a growing sense of American nativism that challenged European, and particularly British taste, in theatrical performance. Partisans on both sides used the growing rivalry between these two men to act out their own agendas. The result was tragic. A riot ensued and was met with deadly force by the state militia. The net result was that over 20 people were killed with many more injured and a famous theatre destroyed. Among the repercussions of this event was an even stronger sense that popular art and fine art taste could not be conjoined. This continued to color how musical theatre evolved throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century and would not be resolved until the composer Jerome Kern insisted on the integration of music and song with narrative in the Princess Shows of the 1910s and George Balanchine brought concert dance expectations to musical theatre choreography in the 1930s. The famous Bowery Theatre, which had just opened in 1826, and was a strong draw for those who supported the actor Edwin Forrest, was also the scene of a dance scandal the following year. Mme. Francisquay Hutin was making her American debut performing a “grande pas seul” in a ballet entitled La Berege Ciquette on February 7, 1827.52 The beautiful and talented French dancer had scandalized the women in the audience with what they viewed as a scantily clad costume, when in fact it was simply a short skirt, a forerunner of the ballet tutu. A contemporary noted: An anxious look of curiosity and expectation dwelt on every face, but when the graceful danseuse came bounding like a startled fawn upon the stage, her light and scanty drapery floating in air, and her symmetrical proportions liberally displayed by the force of a bewildering pirouette, the cheeks of the greater portion of the audience were crimsoned with shame, and every lady in the lower tier of boxes immediately left the house.53

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In addition to the perceived scandalous nature of her costume, Madame Hutin was notable because she presented a section from La Sylphide for the first time in the United States thereby teasing the audience with the shift from the Neoclassic to the Romantic ballet.54 Later that same year, another ballerina, Celeste, made her debut in The Dashing White Sergeant, in which she performed the Turkish role not wearing a skirt but dancing in trousers! Fortunately, dance and excellent pantomimic abilities brought this dancer adulation by the American theatergoing public that was only rivaled by the famous singer, Jenny Lind, and the equally well-known actress, Fanny Kemble. One of the most significant contributions to American dance was her performance at the Park Theatre on April 15, 1835, with the debut of La Sylphide. This was the first Romantic ballet, which had its premiere on March 12, 1832, at the Paris Opera starring Marie Taglioni. The popularity of this ballet radically altered the direction of ballet for the next 20 years. Exotic locales, unrequited love, tragic endings, aspirations unfulfilled, and elements of the supernatural – were all aspects of the Romantic ballet that contributed to its appeal. In addition, it placed the female dancer at the center of the ballet and consequently, the male dancer was becoming more and more peripheral with his primary function being that of “presenting” and partnering her in the choreography. These ideals were also represented by the development of the pointe shoe, which emphasized the ethereal qualities of the female dancer by giving her the appearance of lightness and grace. In addition, the change to shorter skirts so that the ballerina’s legs could be more easily viewed placed the emphasis on the “natural” qualities of the female dancer. While theme and subject matter found a resonance with the American theatergoing public, the emphasis on the female form created by the costume continued to cause some controversy for some and mild embarrassment for others. In the United States, if melodrama was king; in Europe, the Romantic ballet was the queen and she was soon to capture the affection of the American audience. The 1830s closed with the appearance of Paul and Amelie Taglioni. While Paul’s sister, Marie, was acknowledged as being one of the world’s greatest dancers performing on the European continent, Paul and his wife were also recognized for their talent as performers. They chose La Sylphide for their American debut at the Park Theatre on May 22, 1839. This marked the first time that the entire ballet was performed in the United States. While the critics were merciless in their comments on the American dancers recruited for the corps de ballet, they were enthusiastic about the performance of the two stars. What impressed the critics the most about their performance were the adagio sections of their pas de deux. Critics and audiences alike admired the acrobatic nature of their technique and their ability to sustain difficult poses. Following their triumph in New York, they traveled to Boston, where their engagement with the corps de ballet again demonstrated how extremely amateurish and disrespectful they were with these professional dancers. During one of Paul Taglioni’s solos, “they strolled out on the stage, seated themselves

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comfortably on the floor, and proceeded to smoke cigarettes … while they watched the performance!”55 Their experience in Philadelphia at the Chestnut Street Theatre was very different. A French dancing master, Hazard, who had also coached other Philadelphia natives – Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee – had prepared many of the dancers in the corps de ballet. After their brief tour, they returned to New York to perform in several more ballets, including Undine, ou La Naiade and Nathalie, ou la Laittiere Suisse. The latter required a lifesize statue of Paul Taglioni as a part of its scenography. The chief property master at the theatre agreed to make the prop and proceeded to encase Paul in plaster. Unfortunately, he did not know what he was doing because he had never made a cast before and he almost suffocated the famous dancer. The Taglionis had to delay their departure from New York, which was fortunate because the ship they were to have sailed on, the President, left the dock and disappeared.56 They finally were able to return home on October 1 on the British Queen. While the American public was most grateful to see the performance quality of these two dancers, they themselves may have better described their experience coming to this new land as at times, disappointing, and at other times, hazardous.57 The importance of the Taglionis’ success in America cannot be overstated. Before their visit, the public’s perception of the ballet was precarious at best. But, with their professional performance, the public was much more open to accepting the ballet as theatrical art because their interpretation suspended “the ballerina within a silent, removed world; within plots that alluded to the settings of high-art literature and painting; and within a body that promoted rather than detracted from the illusion that the audience was watching a creature with the same materiality as a fairy.”58 The sensuality of the female form moving in space had been etherealized. She was as far removed from any earthy eroticism as the painted nude was from pornography. She was not however wrapped in a gaze of artistic pretention and could therefore strut and prance upon the stage. This victory was to be short-lived however once we get on the other side of the Civil War. In the meantime, America would continue to grow her own dancers. While these French dancers were the most well-known, they were not the only dancers from France who performed on the American stage. Others, such as M. and Mme Ronzi-Vestris and later, Mlle. Augusta, who made their debut at the Park Theatre on December 3, 1836, with La Bayadere, helped contribute to the popularity of the French ballet on the American musical theatre stage.59 Interest in the United States in the Romantic ballet was further encouraged when French dancers Charles and Ronzi Vestris, the Ravel family, and Francisque Hutin toured throughout the country introducing the first pointe footwork in multiple pirouettes to American audiences.60 The European stars of the Romantic ballet, like Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, Lucile Grahn, and Fanny Elssler, were gradually creating a hunger in the United States for their own Romantic ballerinas and that appetite was being addressed with the success of several American born dancers from the 1830s onward who contributed to the

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history of American dance on the musical theatre stage. Among those were Julia Turnbull, Augusta Maywood, Mary Ann Lee, and George Washington Smith. Julia Turnbull began her professional dance career in New York in 1834 at the age of 12. Like Maywood and Lee, Turnbull achieved professional recognition while still a child. This foreshadowed the famous “baby ballerinas” of George Balanchine in the twentieth century.61 She performed a major role in Mary Ann Lee’s production of La Bayadere in New York on June 12, 1839. When internationally renowned Fanny Elssler arrived in the United States, Turnbull performed major roles alongside Elssler on her famous tours. Many agree, however, that her greatest success was in The Naid Queen in 1847. Having obtained celebrity status, Julia Turnbull continued performing until her retirement from dancing just before the Civil War in 1857. She died in Brooklyn 30 years later.62 Two American ballerinas of note at this time were Turnbull’s contemporaries, Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee, who made their debuts together at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on December 30, 1837, in The Maid of Cashmere, an English version of Mlle. Augusta’s La Bayadere. While Maywood soon left the United States to make her career in Europe, Lee established a brief but significant career at home. Augusta Maywood was born in Philadelphia in 1825. Her stepfather, R. C. Maywood, was instrumental in bringing Mlle. Augusta to the United States to perform in her famous La Bayadere. Eventually, Ms. Maywood became known as “la petite Augusta,” after the famous French dancer. In 1837, she made her debut in New York and was roundly praised for her elegance and her dramatic skills. While she was offered many lucrative contracts to travel in the United States, she chose instead to travel to Paris to study ballet. In 1839, she made her European debut at the Paris Opera and from then on, her reputation was secure. For the next 23 years, she had an illustrious ballet career in Europe. While she never returned to America, her success in ballet demonstrated to many Europeans that excellent ballet dancers could indeed come from the United States. Among her more famous accomplishments was an 1853 Italian version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called La’ Capenna di Tom. She continually reprised her role in Rita Gauthier, a ballet based on the tragic character of the courtesan, Camille, from 1857 until her retirement in 1862.63 This character was created by Alexandre Dumas fils’ in his novel and later in his play, The Lady of the Camellias, and made famous by the performance of the famous French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. Much like Giselle, this was a role that made strong acting demands as well as technical challenges on the ballerina. Due to the public’s infatuation inflating this character with the performance by this ballerina, it was a role that allowed her to end her career on a high note. Finally, there was Mary Ann Lee, who “was the first American dancer to attain national fame as an exponent of the classical ballet.”64 Born into a theatrical family in Philadelphia in 1823, Lee received her first lessons in ballet from French ballet master, P. H. Hazard. Beginning her professional career as a child actress at the Chestnut Street Theatre, she made her dance debut in 1837 in the

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opera-ballet The Maid of Cashmere. By 1839, she had made her New York debut in La Bayadere and, a few days later, in one of the first original American ballets, The Sisters. In addition to her classical ballet work, Lee also performed in more popular entertainments. For example, she danced in a P. T. Barnum production at the Vauxhall Gardens and in a burlesque of La Bayadere entitled Buy It Dear, T’is Made of Cashmere. Although she was not particularly well known for her virtuosity in terms of classical ballet technique, her grace, style, and charm won her a large following from the American musical theatre audience. By extending her talents beyond the exclusivity of ballets and pantomimes, she was instrumental in popularizing the ballet for the American public by performing in operas, spectacles, and circuses as well. Throughout the last years of Lee’s career, she organized several tours to major cities along the East Coast. Her dancing partner at the time in many of these ballets was none other than George Washington Smith, “America’s first native premier danseur.”65 Her crowning achievement, no doubt, was when she earned the title as America’s first Giselle, when she performed in its American debut production in 1846.66 All of this she accomplished before the age of twenty-four! A few months later in May of 1847, due to poor health, she was forced to retire from the stage.67 She died in 1899 at the age of 76. The 1830s concluded with an event that is marked more by what did not happen than what did happen. Marius Petipa, the dancer and choreographer, who would later revitalize Russian ballet with such ballets as Don Quixote, La Bayadere, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker came to perform on the American stage with his father, Jean. They traveled to New York on the British Queen, the same ship that took the Taglionis home. It is likely that the Petipas saw the Taglionis at the latter’s farewell performance. Originally, the Petipas were invited to come to the United States by Mme. Lecomte to join a ballet company she was forming in New York. Unfortunately, there were a series of mishaps that worked against this invitation. Just before their arrival, the young 20-year-old Marius had broken a leg and was slow to recover. The theatre in which they were to have performed burned down and they had to hastily prepare their debut at the National Theatre. The Petipas received little attention by the critics and the ballets they brought over from Europe were financial failures. They both left within a month of their arrival, never to return to the United States. It is interesting to speculate whether an American form of ballet might have developed if Marius Petipa’s experience had been more congenial. As it was, the Russians gained from his talent and experience, and the Americans had to wait for nearly a century until George Balanchine arrived to foster and develop a truly American form of ballet.68 The most significant ballet event of the mid-nineteenth century for Americans however occurred in 1840 when the celebrated ballet star, Fanny Elssler, began a two-year tour of the United States. The enormity of this event would remain unequaled until the beginning of the twentieth century when Anna Pavlova came to America and toured not only in its major cities but also throughout many of its small towns and mining camps from coast to coast.

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Excelling in pointe work and in quick-paced footwork, she had achieved an international reputation by 1834. Her rivalry with Marie Taglioni is legendary. While Taglioni was known for her lightness in execution of movement and for her soft, graceful style, Elssler’s dance was impetuous, earthy, and very dramatic.69 These qualities worked to endear Mme. Elssler to the American audience, and she was enthusiastically welcomed and prodigiously successful wherever she toured. Fanny Elssler was an excellent dancer with a gift for executing balletic technique with ease. She was also a gifted pantomimist with a broad range of emotional expression. She was tall, sensuous, energetic, and immensely talented. There was an effortless charisma that engulfed her wherever she traveled. On the eve of her departure from Paris, Elssler wrote in her journal: “My professional career has reached its zenith.” 70 The American audiences fell in love with Elssler from the beginning. It appears that the admiration was mutual. In her journal, she wrote, “The harbor of New York opens upon us. Can anything in nature be more magnificent?” 71 Elssler made her debut at the Park Theatre in New York on May 14, 1840.72 Among the dances she performed that evening were two of her signature pieces – La Tarantul and La Cracavienne. By all accounts, she captivated the sold-out audience. In her own words, “The curtain rose and breathless silence prevailed; … I appeared. … The whole house rose, … Men waved their hats and women their handkerchiefs, and all was inexplicable dumb show for several mortal minutes. I stood confounded, and tears streaming down my face. … I was scarcely conscious of what I was doing…. But I must have danced as I hope never to dance again. I was encored to the echo.” 73 Wherever Elssler toured, the response was just as genuinely enthusiastic. In Washington D.C., congress adjourned when she arrived. Apparently, when she was performing, there were so many congressmen in attendance that there was not the required quorum to conduct governmental business. As a matter of fact, it is reported that some congressmen even pulled her carriage from the theatre to her hotel after a performance. President Van Buren invited her to the White House and his son, “Prince” John, was a constant escort while she traveled the United States. In Baltimore, young men would put themselves in the horse harnesses of her carriage and pull “the flower-laden vehicle through the streets to the doors of her hotel, where they serenaded her until the small hours of the morning.”74 When she traveled to Boston, luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller were in attendance. Their famous response to her performance echoed that of many who saw her. Emerson said to Fuller, “Margaret, this is poetry.” Fuller retorted – “No, Waldo, this is religion.”75 For a country that just a few short years ago was highly critical of the dancer and her art, this was high praise indeed! Later, Emerson elaborated in his journal. “…The chief beauty is in the extreme grace of her movement, the variety and nature of her attitude, the winning fun and spirit of all her little coquetries, the beautiful erectness of her body and the freedom and determination which she can so easily assume… she seems to have invented new depths of grace and condescension.” 76 The excitement that swept

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the country from 1840 until 1842 was referred to as “Fannyelsslermaniaphobio” and was reflected in the commercial products associated with her visit, everything from Elssler hats and jewelry to oysters a’ la Elssler.77 The dance most associated with Elssler while in the United States was the Spanish Cachucha. This was a fast-paced dance that required a performance of high intensity along with a pleasant yet alluring sensuality. She returned to Europe in 1842. Shortly afterward, in 1845, she retired from the stage. Up until her death in Vienna in 1884, she talked fondly of her performances in America, particularly the time spent in Boston.78 Among the prominent American dancers who traveled and performed with her were George Washington Smith and Julia Turnbull. Yet, Elssler’s influence on the American musical theatre was probably most directly felt through the efforts of her ballet master, James Sylvain. Wherever they performed, American dancers and actors studied with Sylvain. While Elssler provided aspiring American dancers with inspiration, Sylvain provided them with diligent and exacting technical expertise. Two of those students were to become particularly influential in the American theatre. In addition to May Ann Lee and others, Sylvain’s technical precision in his pedagogical approach to ballet training was strongly imprinted on the voraciously interested American dancer, George Washington Smith. Following John Durang’s retirement from the stage in 1819, there was a gap in terms of a widely recognized and popular male musical theatre dancer; that is, until the mantle was picked up by George Washington Smith. His lengthy career extended from 1838 until shortly before his death in 1899. His style, his persona, and his charisma captured the essence of nineteenth-century American musical theatre dance. Moore summarized his career in the following statement: He first danced in public about 1838; he was active as an actor and ballet producer as late as 1883. At his death in 1899, he was still a teacher of dancing. In the course of these sixty years, Smith danced in everything from grand ballet and opera to the circus; he worked for P. T. Barnum and Edwin Booth; he entertained between the acts of Hamlet; he put on the grease-paint mask of the clown; he partnered almost every great ballerina who visited this country, from Elssler on; he staged almost every one of the well-known romantic ballets, and choreographed many of his own; he taught social dancing, Spanish dancing, and academic ballet, he trained several pupils who became famous; he spanked Lola Montez; he was the cause of a riot at the Bowery; he even found time to marry a beautiful convent-bred heiress and produce ten children: It was almost as though he alone, through the sheer force of superhuman effort and accomplishment, were attempting to compensate for the scarcity of American dance artists.79 The sheer length and variety of Smith’s career were awe-inspiring. He began his career as a clog and hornpipe dancer, later trained in classical ballet and ended his career performing almost every theatrical dance form

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available on the American musical theatre stage in the nineteenth century. His love for dance was eclectic and he exhibited a driving passion for all aspects of dance production. In addition to his distinguished performing career, Smith made his most immediate impact on the musical theatre of his day in his role as ballet master and choreographer. In 1847, Smith was hired as a ballet master for the Bowery Theatre in New York. Smith was instrumental in producing many ballets of the mid-nineteenth century. Of the many ballets that he choreographed, the Bloomer Polka in 1852, in which he satirized the Bloomer Girls of that era, was one of the most humorous. In the spring of that year, he was responsible for mounting the dances for the extravaganza The Naiad Queen.80 Originally produced in 1841 at Niblo’s Gardens with Charlotte Cushman,81 The Naiad Queen anticipated The Black Crook with its songs and marches and “underwater Amazons.”82 Later in his career, he would choreograph the opera, The Bohemian Girl (1848), in addition to pantomimes, operatic ballets, and out-of-town versions of The Black Crook. Until his retirement in 1883, he could take solace in the fact that he had performed with every major foreign and domestic female dancer on the American stage, including Mary Ann Lee, Julia Turnbull, Lola Montez and, of course, Fanny Elssler, among others. After retirement, he devoted himself to teaching dance until his death in 1899.83 Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, other ballet performers graced the American stage. Among them were Pauline Desjardines and Louise Ducy-Barre. An unusual group was Les Danseuses Vienoises, under the supervision of Mme. Josephine Weiss. This was a group of 48 dancers who performed in a way that may have anticipated the precision dancers of the early twentieth century. Their performance at the Park theatre in 1846 was very popular with the New York audience. On September 18, 1848, Adele and Hippolyte Monplaisir and their ballet company premiered Jules Perrot’s Esmeralda at the Park Theatre. Based on Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, the success of the ballet was in part due to the rising interest in American theatre in melodrama, and particularly melodrama with spectacle. The ballet was so successful that it ran every night until the middle of October, an unusually long run for a ballet production at the time.84 Then, in the 1850s, the appearance of Lola Montez caused quite a stir – not so much for her dance abilities, which were crude, but her flamboyant personality on and off the stage. Despite the fact that she had been booed off the stage in London, George Washington Smith nevertheless choreographed Betly, the Tyrolean for her New York premiere. While successful with the audience, the musicians in the orchestra pit were painfully aware that she did not have a sense of rhythm, and they were admonished by Washington himself to follow Montez during performance rather than the other way around. Her career in America was certainly enhanced by Washington’s contribution; nevertheless, his patience for her many tantrums was limited. On at least one occasion, he turned her across his knees and gave her a spanking. While she did not contribute to the development of classical ballet, her stage persona certainly was that of many star dancers, who eventually defined the musical theatre stage after the Civil War.85

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Another melodramatic dancer of the time was Leon Espinosa, who made his debut performing with Mlle. Celestine Franck in the ballet, Ondine, at the Astor Place Opera House on September 23, 1850. The following year, he was performing with George Washington Smith. In 1856, he performed with Mme. Adele Monplaisir in the Ravel revival of Esmeralda. While generally recognized for his comic pantomimic abilities and elasticity of his body, there was an element of the unexpected that characterized his performances both on and off the stage. For example, Indians reportedly captured him while traveling in the West. He persuaded his captors to let him dance for them and then proceeded to escape while the dance was going on.86

The Minstrel Tradition and Dance The eighteenth century witnessed a tremendous growth in the variety of its theatrical entertainments, most of which incorporated theatrical dance forms. Melodrama reached its height of popularity at this time and was joined by a variety of entertainments, such as the burlettas, burlesques, opera, operetta, and musical comedy. All of these forms gave dance an opportunity to grow and develop; however, it was the minstrel show that encouraged an American vernacular dance that eventually evolved into what we recognize today as tap dance and jazz dance. White performers imitating black life through exaggeration has a long and arduous tradition in the United States. Durang’s Friday, for example, was performed in the 1780s. “By the late 1820s, black-faced white American performers like George Nichols, Bob Farrell, George Washington Dixon, J. W. Sweeney, John N. Smith, and Thomas D. Rice toured the nation, performing alleged Negro songs and dances in circuses and between the acts of plays.”87 Oftentimes, the black persona presented in the songs and dances of these performers portrayed African-Americans as “either comic buffoons or romanticized Noble Savages.”88 The minstrel show was predicated on the work of these performers and on the extraordinary skills of dancers like William Henry Lane (“Master Juba”) and John Diamond (“Master Diamond”). Master Juba (Lane) was born in 1825 in Providence, Rhode Island. He credits “uncle” Jim Lowe, a jig and reel dancer, for his initial training. When he moved to New York, he “lived and worked in the Five Points District in the early 1840s and in such surroundings a blending of African Vernacular with the Jig was inevitable.”89 He was soon met with some competition when he was confronted with white dancer, John Diamond (“Master Diamond”). Diamond was born in 1823 in New York City. By the 1840s, he had established a reputation based on his abilities to perform “Negro dance.” Some of the dances he popularized were the Negro Compton Hornpipe, the Ole Virginny Breakdown, the Smoke House Dance, and the Five Mile Out of Town Dance. His heel and toe work were praised and he earned the title “King of the Diamonds.”90

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These two men met in a series of contests to determine who was the better dancer. Three sets of judges adjudicated these contests. “Style judges sat in the orchestra pit, time judges sat in the wings, and judges of execution sat under the stage.”91 Variety in leg movements, intricacy in the execution of shuffles, and originality in the use of rhythm eventually won Lane the recognition as “the greatest of jig dancers.”92 Afterward, Lane performed with the blackface minstrel troupe known as the Ethiopian Serenaders, and eventually traveled to Europe with them. Once there, he enjoyed tremendous success with his unique blending of British folk dances, for example, the Jig, the Reel, the Hornpipe, and the Clog with African-American dance. He remained in London, never returning to the United States, and opened a dance school all the while continuing to perform on the musical theatre stage. Tragically, he died in 1852 at the age of 27.93 Dance historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild best summarizes his contribution to theatrical dance by pointing out that “Lane’s Africanist rhythms and syncopation, speed, and delay tactics, and torso articulation indelibly influenced popular dance forms. He was the forerunner of tap dance …”94 While the previously mentioned performers “set the stage” for entertainment based on the African-American experience, Thomas Dartmouth Rice (“Daddy Rice”) must receive the credit for actually beginning the minstrel show. Born in 1808 in New York City, Rice was one of the first to blend the syncopated rhythms of African-American dance with the intricate footwork of the Irish Clog. When he introduced his “Jim Crow” dance in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1829, he focused attention on the African-American experience and encouraged other white performers to look to the African-American culture for their subject matter and dance forms. He earned the title, “Father of Minstrelsy,” not only through his performance but also by his writing of Negro extravaganzas and “Ethiopian Operas.” His career continued successfully until his death in 1860. E. P. Christy formed the first minstrel show with his Virginia Minstrels in 1843 and initiated a theatrical form that was to enjoy a high popularity throughout the remainder of the century. The stock minstrel characters: Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Dan Tucker represented and reinforced the white image of black America.95 The format for the minstrel show was clearly delineated by 1850. Usually, it was divided into three sections. In the first part, the players entered the stage and sat in a semicircle. “End men,” known as Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, sat on either end, and the interlocutor sat in the center. Typically, part one consisted of a comic exchange between these three characters, along with some humorous and/or sentimental songs sung by the group. This portion could either begin or conclude with a Walkaround. The second section of the show, the Olio, was comprised of a collection of songs, dances, and acting or comic monologues. The Afterpiece, the third portion of the performance, presented a short sketch based on African-American plantation life and included the usual singing and dancing associated with the life of the “Darkey.” Another Walkaround generally completed the evening’s entertainment.96

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Unlike many of the other theatre forms available to the general public, the minstrel show was peculiarly American. Its rise prior to the Civil War may have been no accident. White Americans were becoming more and more aware of the “Black Problem,” and the minstrel show offered them a vehicle by which to come to terms with that “problem.” Theatre historian Toll suggests: …It was unabashedly popular in appeal, housed in its own show places, performed by middling Americans, focused on humble characters, and dominated by earthly, vital, song, dance, and humor. Every part of the minstrel show – its features, form and content – was hammered out in the interaction between performers and the vocal audiences they sought only to please. ‘I’ve got only one method.’ J. H. Haverly, the greatest minstrel promoter, explained, ‘and that is to find out what the people want and then give hem that thing. …There’s no use trying to force the public into a theater.’ Besides this responsiveness, minstrels combined the folk-based and lore of other forms with Barnum’s flair for promotion and added a compelling new figure – the Black man.97 The minstrel’s pandering to public taste, its emphasis on the sentimental, its melodramatic tone, and its vitality in its dances combined to create a “popular” theatre that became very compatible with the musical theatre at the turn of the century. While the American musical theatre generally did not adopt the minstrel’s subject matter or its formal structure, dance in the musical theatre would be heavily influenced by the minstrel show’s dances. There were many dances associated with the minstrel show, including “the chicken flutter, sugar cane reel, Congo coconut dance, burlesque African polka, corn-shucking jig, Mississippi fling, Zouzve’s clog-reel, smokehouse reel, Union breakdown, the fling d’Ethiope, walking jawbone, double trubble, and the grapevine twist.”98 However, the most popular dances of the early minstrelsy were the Walkaround, the Irish Jig, and the Lancashire Clog.99 The Walkaround, universally used in all minstrel shows, was derivative of the early African-American folk dance known as the “ring shout.” Generally, the performers began the dance by walking around in a circle. A particular rhythm was set and each performer could do a variation on that rhythm when they came to the downstage side of the circle. After that, they returned to the dominant rhythmic structure of the “walkaround dance.” At times, all of the performers danced together; while at other times, they performed solo dances. These dances could involve a competitive element, but a commonly agreed upon “break” often served as a transitional movement from one section of the dance to another. Like many minstrel dances, the Walkaround had its origins in African-American folk and social dance forms associated with country and plantation life.

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Eventually, the popularity of the Walkaround from the minstrel tradition evolved into the more sophisticated and “theatrical” Cakewalk from the AfricanAmerican musicals that become popular at the turn of the century.100 Originally, the cakewalk was a contest in which dancing couples executed walking steps and figures in precise formations as if in mimicry of the white man’s attitudes and manners. Since the couples were eliminated by consensus until the best couple remained to accept a festively adorned cake, the dance originated the expression ‘to take the cake’ and came to be known as the cakewalk. The dance adapted well to the stage, where its most salient feature was a promenade executed in a high-leg prance with a backward tilt of head, shoulders, and upper torso.101 All these dances enjoyed a high degree of popularity in their time, but the two dance forms that were to evolve out of minstrel dance and continue to have an impact on the history of musical theatre dance were the soft shoe and tap dance. The Irish Jig, known for its quick legwork and intricate foot combinations, and the Lancashire Clog intermingled and evolved into the soft shoe. Initially, the Clog was performed with wooden soles and the soft shoe was performed with leather shoes. Eventually, syncopated rhythm was added and the “buck and wing” was created from the combinations of all three dance forms. One of the earliest tap dance styles was The Essence of Old Virginia, a combination of the Shuffle and the Soft Shoe. According to Marshall and Jean Stearns, “The Essence was the first popular dance-for-professionals from the Afro-American vernacular.”102 The man who did the most to give the soft shoe such prominence was George Primrose. Born in London, Canada, in 1852, he joined the McFarland Minstrels in Detroit at the age of fifteen. In the beginning, he was known for his clog dancing and traveled from one minstrel group to another. By 1871, he had formed a partnership with William H. West and had developed the soft shoe from the Virginia Essence.103 He was most recognized by his contemporaries for his style rather than his technique.104 He turned the soft shoe into an elegant and graceful dance. Due to monetary considerations, and the changing tastes of the public, he retired from the minstrel show to the vaudeville stage, where he developed what was to become “the class act.” Primrose died in 1919.105 As the minstrel show approached the twentieth century, it lost its popularity and its performers switched over to other theatrical forms of entertainment, such as the revue, the operetta, burlesque, variety shows, musical comedies, and, of course, vaudeville. By then, the minstrel show tradition had brought into the musical theatre many new and exciting dance forms. In addition to the soft shoe, the Essence, and the beginnings of tap dance, the minstrels incorporated the Cakewalk, the Stair Dance (later made famous by Bill Robinson), and the Buck and Wing into the musical theatre dance vocabulary. Twentieth-century

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musical theatre performers Bill Robinson, George M. Cohan, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Bert Williams, and Fred Stone owed much of their style and varied use of rhythms to the minstrel performers who preceded them. Musical theatre dance was enriched by this influx of new material. The initial excitement stirred by the popularity of ballet in the 1840s onward along with these traditional and new dances from the minstrel show laid a firm foundation on which a musical theatre dance vocabulary was about to be created.

Notes 1 Richard Kraus, History of the Dance in Art and Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, Inc., 1969), pp. 101–102. 2 Arthur Todd, “Four Centuries of American Dance: Folk Dances of Our Pioneers,” Dance, November 1949, p. 21. 3 Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A 1665 to 1957 (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959), pp. 38–46. 4 Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 4. 5 Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York, NY: The Dial Press, 1970), pp. 1–7. 6 A raked stage was a convention in theatrical architecture dating from the Middle Ages in which the stage floor sloped upward from the audience to the back of the stage. Those actors who moved down toward the audience were said to move “downstage,” while those who moved toward the back of the stage were said to move “upstage.” 7 Ibid., Hewitt, p. 51. 8 Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bear and Ye Cubb to Hair (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), pp. 45–49. 9 While these terms are often used interchangeably, the emphasis is usually different. The spectacle places more of its emphasis on technology and scenographic elements while the extravaganza is focused more on the amount of personnel, the elaborateness of the story, music and dance elements, and the grandiosity of the selected scenographic features. 10 Burlesque at this time referred to forms of entertainment that poked fun at conventional popular plays, songs, or ballets of the time and/or prominent contemporary political or other cultural figures. 11 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 1–4. 12 Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 1800, p. viii. 13 Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bare and Ye Cubb to Hair, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), pp. 45–55. 14 Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 1800, pp. 128–129 Mates makes the case that the four best choreographers of eighteenth-century America were Alexander Placide, M. Francisquy, James Byrne, and William Francis. 15 Lillian Moore, “When Ballet Came to Charleston,” Echoes of American Ballet, ed. Ivor Guest (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1976), pp. 36–37. 16 Barzel, European Dance Teachers in the United States, p. 57. 17 Moore, “John Durang: The First American Dancer,” Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1978), p. 15. 18 Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 1800, p. 127. 19 According to Mates, the choreography for The Archers consisted of marches and processions within the play and pantomimic ballets and hornpipes between the acts.

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20 Alan. A. Downer (editor). The Memoir of John Durang: American Actor, 1785–1816 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), p. 11. 21 Arthur Todd, “Theatrical Dance in America – 1784–1812: Spotlight on John Durang, Mm. Gardie and The Placides,” Dance, April 1950, p. 24. Todd also notes that his son, Charles, would also make his debut as a dancer at the age of 17 in New York in 1811 performing Harlequin. 22 Harlequinades were very popular during the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century American Theatre. As a British import, it was initially made popular with the famous mime, John Rich in the early eighteenth century. There were stock characters from the commdia dell’arte such as Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and others that were often a part of the pantomime. One of its distinguishing features was the ever-popular transformation scenes in which the characters and the scenography would provide a stunning visual metamorphous in full view of the audience. 23 Durang, p. 23. Note: There are excellent colored reproductions in the Durang journal. 24 Moore, John Durang: The First American Dancer, p. 22. 25 Moore, John Durang: The First American Dancer, p. 21. 26 International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol 2, p. 174. 27 Moore, p. 27. 28 The use of Blackface predates the minstrel tradition in the United States. It evolved from the commedia dell’arte tradition to distinguish one character from another in terms of background. 29 Moore, John Durang: The First American Dancer, p. 21. 30 Alan S. Downer (editor). The Memoir of John Durang: American Actor 1785–1816 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), pp. 79–80. 31 Moore, John Durang: The First American Dancer, p. 85. Arthur Todd says he died in 1882. 32 Here is a reconstruction of the Hornpipe dance of John Durang by British dancer, Wayne Sleep. See: https://vimeo.com/296849964 33 Lynn Matluck Brooks, “Staged Ethnicity: Perspectives on the Work of John Durang,” Dance Chronicle, Vol 24, No 2, 2001, p. 195. 34 Ibid., Brooks, p. 196. 35 See Mates, p. 165 for some description of rope dancing. 36 Later, when he and Suzanne moved to Charleston so that Placide could manage the Charleston Theatre, they would be involved in a well-publicized scandal. Suzanne was involved in a love affair with singer Louis Douvillier. Placide challenged him to a duel. While no one was seriously hurt, it was discovered that the marriage between Placide and Suzanne was not legal. Suzanne married Douvilliers and they moved to New Orleans. 37 Dance historian Lillian Moore points out that once she left her husband, she went on with her career and is credited as being the first woman choreographer in the United States. 38 Lillian Moore, Echoes of American Ballet (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1976), p. 46. 39 Moore described the Allemande as “a theatrical adaptation of a social dance popular in the ballrooms of the time, was characterized by the complicated turns and evolutions executed by partner turning under each others’ arms, with their hands joined.” p. 47. 40 Ibid, Moore, p. 51. 41 Ibid., Todd, April 1950, p. 24. Todd writes that in 1793, Placide purchased a building in Rhode Island, which he called the “Speaking Picture Theatre.” While this theatre adventure was not successful, Todd notes that the name of the theatre may, in fact, describe how Placide viewed his ballet pantomimes. 42 Lillian Moore, Echoes of American Ballet (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1976), p. 36. 43 Ibid., Moore, p. 51. 44 Ibid., Moore, p. 59.

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45 This is the only “serious pantomime” from the eighteenth century that we have a libretto – one of the first ballet librettos published in this country. This particular one is housed at the University of Pennsylvania library. 46 Ibid., Mates, Music … Before 1800, pp. 172–173. 47 Ibid. Moore, pp. 62–68. 48 Lillian Moore, Echoes of American Ballet (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1976), pp. 59–60. 49 Barzel, European Dance Teachers in the United States, p. 61. 50 Ibid., p. 63. 51 For many, there seemed to be more tolerance for dancing for dancing’s sake when it was performed in a social setting. 52 Ibid. Todd, May 1950, p. 23. 53 Record of the New York Stage by Joseph N. Ireland, found in Hornblow, p. 262. Locate the original. 54 Lillian Moore, Echoes of American Ballet (New York, NY; Dance Horizons, 1976), p. 74. 55 Moore, Echoes, p. 77. 56 The unexpected loss of this ship in March of 1841 remained news throughout the United States and Europe for several months; even, Queen Victoria took note of its strange disappearance. At the time of its disappearance, it was the largest passenger liner of its day with a passenger list of 136. 57 Ibid., Moore, pp. 70–81. 58 Allen, p. 91. 59 Todd, May 1950, p. 24. 60 Kraus, History of the Dance in Art and Education, pp. 103–104. 61 When forming Les Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the early 1930s, its principal choreographer, George Balanchine, choose Irina Baronova, and Tamara Toumanova, who were merely 12 years old, and Tatiana Riabouchinska, who was two years older, to make their professional debut with the company. 62 Ibid., Todd, three ballerinas, p. 44. 63 Arthur Todd, “Four Centuries of American Dance: Three Ballerinas and a Danseur,” Dance, September 1950, pp. 28–44. 64 Moore, Lillian. “First American Giselle,” Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 103. 65 Kraus, History of the Dance in Art and Education, p. 106. 66 Moore, The Slain Ballerina: Anna Gardie, p. 60. 67 Ibid., Todd, three ballerinas, p. 44. 68 Ibid., Moore, pp. 89–91. 69 Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, Ballet: An Illustrated History (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1973), pp. 64–67. 70 Ibid., Moore, p. 105 (from her Letters and Journal of Fanny Elssler). 71 Ibid. Moore, p. 107. 72 Note: Moore claims on p. 107 that her debut was on May 9, 1840. 73 Arthur Todd, “Four Centuries of American Dance: … the Coming of Fanny Elssler and Lola Montez,” Dance, October 1950, p. 14. 74 Ibid., Moore, pp. 110–111. 75 Note. Moore on p. 111 reverses this quote. 76 Ibid, Todd, Elssler, pp. 14–15. 77 Ibid., Moore, p. 112. 78 Ibid, Moore, p. 112. 79 Moore, “George Washington Smith,” Chronicles of American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1948), p. 139. 80 Moore points out that many theatre producers neglected to give program credit to choreographers during the first half of the nineteenth century. At times, exceptions were made if the choreographer was foreign or had a “name.”

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81 Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, p. 14. 82 Moore, George Washington Smith, p. 151. 83 Ibid., Todd, three ballerinas, pp. 44–45. For more information, please see this short documentary of George Washington Smith at: https://youtu.be/_xnvmg-hDE8. One of the best overviews of his life and work was a monograph written by dance historian, Lillian Moore, and published in Dance Index in 1945. It can be accessed at: https://archive.org/details/georgewashingtonunse/page/n1/mode/2up 84 Moore notes that before this production of Esmeralda, previous performances of plays based on the book by dancer/actresses like Julia Turnball and Mary Ann Gannon, had whetted the appetite of the audience for this kind of production. The ballet continued to find an audience with performances continuing in New York right up to 1869 with Giuseppina Morlacchi performing. 85 Ibid, Todd, Elsser, pp. 15 and 38. 86 Moore on p. 122 recount Ann Barzel in Dance Index “European Dance Teachers in the United States, Vol III, Nos 4-5-6, April–June 1944, p. 66. 87 Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 27. 88 Ibid. p. 26. 89 Ollie Mae Ray, Biographies of Selected Leaders in Tap Dance, (PhD dissertation, University of Utah, 1976), p. 51. An excellent short documentary on the life of Master Juba by two scholars can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/ZdCMMzL4dmI 90 Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Paperback, 1978), pp. 45–46. 91 Marshal and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1968), p. 46. 92 Russella Brandman, The Evolution of Jazz Dance from Folk Origins to Concert Stage (PhD dissertation, The Florida State University, 1977), p. 139. 93 Ray, Biographies of Selected Leaders in Tap Dance, pp. 54–56. 94 Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), p. 98. 95 Brandman, The Evolution of Jazz Dance, p. 141. 96 Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1972), pp. 191–197. 97 Toll, Blacking Up …, p. 25. 98 Brandman, The Evolution of Jazz Dance …, p. 146. 99 Stearns, Jazz Dance …, p. 49. 100 Brandman, The Evolution of Jazz Dance …, pp. 143–144. 101 Kislan, The Musical: …, p. 31. 102 Stearns, Jazz Dance …, p. 50. 103 Ray, Biographies of Selected Leaders in Tap Dance, pp. 57–61. 104 Stearns, Jazz Dance …, p. 52. 105 Ray, Biographies of Selected Leaders in Tap Dance, pp. 59–61.

3 1866–1914 Building a Musical Theatre Dance Vocabulary

Although the ballet in musical theatre productions was in a period of stagnation for much of the nineteenth century, it was not always so. In fact, The Black Crook served as a high-water mark for ballet in the nineteenth-century musical theatre performance. Nineteenth-century American ballet generally falls into two categories. From the time of John Durang in the period following the American Revolution through much of the nineteenth century, it was the French ballet master who had a strong influence on American ballet dancers. However, by mid-nineteenth century and just prior to the opening of The Black Crook in 1866, Italian ballet began to exert its influence and continued to do so throughout the remainder of the century.1 Italian dancers and choreographers who contributed to the popularity of ballet on the musical theatre stage included David Costa, Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, Giuseppina Morlacchi, and Malvina Cavallazzi, among many others. While acknowledging the importance of the classical balletic technique of their French counterparts, they also brought a kind of dramatic flair to their approach to dance. They did not see the sensuality of movement as pandering to their audience. For them, the ballet aesthetic could be combined in interesting and creative ways in musical theatre productions alongside that of other dance forms to create a more visually colorful, exciting, and enticing experience for the American audience. In addition, dance on the musical stage was informed by beautiful yet, at times, revealing costuming and was very much a part of the technological display in the overall scenography of the production. This openness to a variety of dance movements could be combined to great theatrical effect would eventually lay the foundation for the confluence of popular dance with concert dance in the development of the eclecticism we now refer to as musical theatre dance. After their performing careers had ended, many opened dance studios and taught DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-4

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their approach to ballet – a ballet more focused on the musical theatre stage than on the concert stage. As we will see, this would have an impact on early twentieth-century musical theatre choreography with artists like Gertrude Hoffman and Albertina Rasch.

The Black Crook and Nineteenth-Century Romantic Ballet The extravaganza, The Black Crook, opened at Niblo’s Garden on September 12, 1866. The preproduction period was filled with coincidences and non sequiturs. Originally, two theatrical managers, Henry C. Jarrett and Harry Palmer, were going to produce a production of La Biche au Bois. French ballet artists were imported and costly elaborate scenery was built. Before the production opened, a fire destroyed the Academy of Music, the theatre where it was scheduled to be performed. In an attempt to recoup their investment, they sold the dancers’ contracts and the scenery to William Wheatley, the producer for Niblo’s Garden.2 Wheatley employed the dancers and used the scenery to embellish a melodrama, The Black Crook, originally written by Charles M. Barras. This musical extravaganza cost Wheatley an exorbitant $50,000 to produce. When the production opened, the reviews were in agreement about one thing. “The scenery is magnificent; the ballet is beautiful; the drama is—rubbish.”3 The plot line was thin and trite. It can be summarized very briefly. Hertzog, the Black Crook, makes a pact with the devil to deliver a human soul each year, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Endowed by the devil with supernatural powers, Hertzog selects for his victim Rudolph, a painter then imprisoned by Count Wolfenstein. Hertzog manages Rudolph’s release from his cell, then leads him on a quest for hidden gold. En route, Rudolph saved the life of a dove, which in reality is a fairy queen. She discloses to Rudolph Hertzog’s evil design, and thus Rudolph is saved. Hertzog is led away by the devil for failing to fulfill his bargain, and Rudolph finds not only freedom but also his beloved, Amina.4 The stage spectacle captured the attention of the audience and held them spellbound for over five-and-a-half hours. Transformation scenes, demon rituals, palaces of exotic gems, fairies on silver couches, and clouds with gilded chariots ascending and descending captivated everyone’s imagination. Set designer Richard Marston and machinist Mr. Froude created a phantasmagoria of opulence and grandeur that had not previously been seen on this scale on the New York stage.5 This simple, fairy-tale plot and the wizardry of the set combined to give Italian choreographer, David Costa, formerly of the Paris Opera, a grandiose environment in which to stage his extravagant ballets. Elaborating on melodrama’s tradition at the time to incorporate tableau vivant and pose plastique, the choreographer and designers were able to create intense and exciting moments in which the female dancers could be featured as both erotic and ephemeral. As Bradley Rogers in his excellent article on this topic notes: “while melodrama

52  1866–1914

valorized the arresting of a woman’s body, the musical celebrated instead her performing power.”6 What had been an important feature in melodrama in which the audience, and particularly the men, could linger on static poses based on suspended or frozen paintings or sculptures of the female body, the musical could now make these figures move – these sculptural or painted fantasies of women ballerinas dressed in costumes that were suggestive and alluring could now dance. In addition to an international cast of ballet performers from England, Italy, France, and Germany, he supplemented the cast with 50 American trained dancers. While slamming the narrative of the musical and commenting on the scantily clad dancers, critics often used superlatives to describe the dances and the performers. For example, the New York Times critic described the performance of Mlle. Bonfanti “as light as a feather, and exceedingly graceful.” 7 Mark Twain’s comments were more vividly descriptive. The scenery and the legs are everything; … Beautiful bare-legged girls hanging in flower baskets; others stretched in groups on great sea shells; others clustered around fluted columns; others in all possible attitudes; girls – nothing but a wilderness of girls – stacked up, pile on pile, away aloft to the dome of the theatre, diminishing in size and clothing … all lit up with gorgeous theatrical fires, and witnessed through a great gauzy curtain that counterfeits a soft silver mist! It is the wonder of the Arabian Nights realized. Those girls dance in ballet, dressed with a meagerness that would make a parasol blush. And they prance around and expose themselves in a way that is scandalous to me. Moreover, they come trooping on the stage in platoons and battalions, in most princely attire I grant you, but always with more tights in view than anything else.8 While dancers Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Betty Regal received special notice, many critics agreed with one who said that “to discriminate between the dancers would be as difficult as to distinguish one rose from another amid a wilderness of roses.”9 Since Costa, Bonfanti, and Sangalli had all studied under the famous Carlo Blasis, the director of the La Scala Ballet School in Milan, it can be assumed that much of Blasis’ ballet aesthetic was evident in this production and in subsequent musical theatre productions in which these dancers performed or choreographed. Born in Naples in 1795, Blasis spent his career studying, examining, writing about, and teaching ballet technique. His formal training included performing at the Paris Opera ballet and studying with Jean Dauberval, Pierre Gardel and Salvatore Vigano, among others. While his choreography was workmanlike and the dancing acceptable, it was his teaching and writing that was exceptional and, to that end, “he devoted all his efforts toward directing the newborn romantic ballet along classical lines.”10 His ideas would later be picked

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up and expanded upon by ballet master Enrico Cecchetti, which would have a dominant impact on international ballet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Two of Blasis’ most influential books are the Elementary Treatise upon the Theory and Practice of the Art of Dancing and The Code of Terpsichore. In these and others, he was able to analyze and codify classical ballet technique through the lens of his obsession with antiquity. He searched for technique that was flawless and appeared effortless and for a “look” that paid homage to its classical roots. His influence then and today is enormous. He is credited with creating the position known as attitude, which was inspired by his admiration for Giambologna’s famous statue of the Greek messenger god, Mercury, who is seen pressing into relevé on his left foot while extending his bent right leg to the derriere. He stressed the importance of the dropped plumb line to his students to help them understand the physics of motion and he worked with them on the execution of pirouettes so that they could be performed efficiently and yet appear to be done with ease and grace. While he advocated for a pure classical ballet technique for the concert stage, it may have been a losing battle. Ballet historian Jennifer Homans concludes her evaluation of Blasis’ work with the idea that “everywhere he continued to uphold the standards of ballet classicism against a rising tide of more popular music hall genres-and to fight against the runaway virtuosity he had inadvertently done so much to inspire.”11 While much of contemporary commentary on The Black Crook emphasizes the revelatory and erotic appeal of the dancers’ costumes, the elaborate scenographic elements surrounding the dances themselves and the vast number of military Amazonian performers, it is also true that they acknowledge that these performers are also some of the best technically trained ballet dancers of their time. Like many of today’s Broadway choreographers, David Costa constructed dances that had wide popular appeal with performers who had some of the same training and experience as those who performed on the concert stage or in operas. Dance historian Barbara Barker acknowledges the eclectic nature of his choreographic ideas along with “the lightness and simplicity of his choreography ….”12 This tension between the commercial demands of an essentially popular art form with the potential to offer fine art quality has informed American musical theatre dance from this mid-nineteenth-century production to date. Nonetheless, dance scholar Barbara Barker makes clear that “The Black Crook established the leg as an American theatrical staple and ballerinas as negotiable stock.”13 The Black Crook played for 474 performances making it the second longest continuous running musical of the nineteenth century. The profit from this production was well over a million dollars! This extravaganza in a myriad of forms continued to be revived for over 40 years.14 If imitation is a form of flattery, then The Black Crook was certainly flattered. Within one week after The Black Crook closed, Wheatley produced The White Fawn (1868), which relied on many of the same features and employed many of the same performers. The response by the

54  1866–1914

audience and the critics was the same. The sets and dances were praised; the plot, though lighter and less dark, was damned. One reviewer noted: As to the Ballet, it appears to be a very good one, the legs are very numerous, and some of them are beautiful, and most of the young ladies are scant of apparel-a lack, however, which does not seem to occasion poignant regret, either in their own gentle bosoms or in their more rugged breasts of their manly admirers. Bonfanti, Sohike, and Billon are the reigning stars. Most of the other innocents remain nameless, but blaze in groups of sixteen, divided according to nationality. Thus the connoisseurs of dancing and of Feminine beauty may delight his mighty mind by subtle discrimination betwixt the German, the English, the Italian, the Spanish, and the American. … The Ballet is the main thing; and, as already intimated, the spectacle of an enlightened populace worshipping at this gentle shrine is the most edifying thing in the world, and calculated greatly to exalt one’s ideals of the perfectibility of human nature.15 Ballet has been a part of musical theatre performance from its very beginning. As one critic in the New York World (September 17, 1866) wrote about the dancers in The Black Crook: During the two hundred and odd years of its existence New York has never enjoyed the presence of so beautiful, varied, efficient, facile, graceful, and thoroughly captivating a corps de ballet as the one herein introduced. We have had great danseuses, in consignments of one, from time to time – Ellsler [sic], Montez Cerito, Cubas – but never, according to history, a regiment of lithe, active beauties bent on turning old heads by kicking their two regiments of young heels high in the air.16 And now, it had reached its zenith with the success of The Black Crook, The White Fawn, and many of their revivals and imitators. Its popularity was not only evident in these spectacles but also in other forms of theatrical entertainment from operas and Tony Pastor’s variety shows to pantomimes and burlesques. Sometimes, these forms included full-length story ballets but, more often than not, they included shorter ballet divertissements. Not all could attract the best dancers nor fund the elaborate scenery and costumes that these early spectacles were able to do; nonetheless, ballet did not lose its appeal. What is important to note however is that ballet was often performed alongside the ever increasingly popular cancan as well as the long-standing clog and jig dancing, among others. Musical theatre dance was not only becoming more and more encyclopedic but it was also striving for a professionalism that was more frequently associated with the concert stage. As Kristina Gintautiene notes in her exhaustive study of the dancing in The Black Crook and its immediate successors in the following decades post The Black Crook, “the popularity of ballet waxed and waned through periods of

1866–1914 55

evanessance (sic) and decline. Quality ballet had been incorporated into drama, opera, opera bouffe, pantomime, burlesque, and variety as well as into a great number of spectacles modeled after The Black Crook.”17

Pantomime: An Avenue for a More Eclectic Form of Dance If imitation lends itself to repetition in the popular arts, then satire is not far behind. One of the most popular forms of satiric musical entertainment at this time was the pantomime, an English transplant that found an audience in the United States. The most successful exponent of this kind of entertainment, George Lafayette Fox, was described as “the first real ‘star’ of the American Musical Theatre”18 by the theatre historian Gerald Bordman. Like Durang before him, he was native born. In this case, the best evidence suggests July 3, 1825. Born into a family of actors, he was on the road throughout most of his early life. He learned his craft by performing in standard popular works of his time – in this case, the obligatory production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After a stint in a pantomime, it was clear that his ability to create empathic characters in a commedia style was his forte. While he performed with success in many pantomimes, it was his title role in Humpty Dumpty that would solidify his career making him, at over $20,000 a year, the highest-paid actor in America.19 As with The Black Crook and The White Fawn, ballet and country-style dances were interpolated into the production. It even included “ballet girls making music with wooden and straw sticks and the same young ladies dressed as men.”20 In addition, all three productions shared the same choreographer – David Costa. In this case, he was able to attract an alumnus from The Black Crook – Rita Sangalli, who, at $180-a-week salary, was the highest-paid dancer in New York City at the time. Humpty Dumpty was a 16-scene pantomime very loosely based on the children’s fantasy story. In this case, the four principal characters are children named Humpty Dumpty, Goody Two Shoes, Dan Tucker, and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Over the course of the evening in this romance fantasy-meets-burlesque, they morph into the Clown, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Harlequin. This structure allowed for contemporary, satiric allusion in the comedy and in the dances. One example was a takeoff on Admiral Farragut, then Secretary of the Navy, by Sangalli and her dance partner M. Baptistan entitled “Farrantella,” in which they could perform the obligatory tarantella and make references to sailor dances and the hornpipe. In addition, Sangalli incorporated a satiric variation of La Sylphide. Costa’s unique contribution was realizing the comic potential inherent in choreographing ballets for Fox and Sangalli. While Fox was excellent as a clown, he also had passable dance ability. The first of these two ballets were “Scandinavian Polka,” which included a comic pas de deux between Fox and Sangalli surrounded by a corps de ballet in which half “carried small wood and straw musical instruments on which they struck a melody, while the other half danced.”21 The second was entitled “Costa’s Fancy Dress Ball, Dance of Deportment,” in which

56  1866–1914

half of the corps de ballet were dressed as men in formal wear while the other half were dressed in formal evening gowns. They were led in a series of send-ups of various popular ballroom dances of the day by Fox and Sangalli and they concluded the ballet with an Italian interpretation of the popular French dance – the cancan. The audience for this production could not get enough of this dance. As a matter of fact, at the conclusion of the prologue for the show, they kicked the show into high gear by playing “Independence Day Has Come,” which coincided with “an old-fashioned Yankee dance, which developed into a parody of the can-can, itself a welcome novelty.”22 This was a production that spared no expense when it came to elaborate and violent slapstick routines, multiple trap doors that provided a frozen pond for the Carrie Augusta Moore to skate upon, the finale, “The Dell of Ferns,” in which “pyramids of fairies in silver skirts ascended to the flies, each item in the tableau slowly unfolding and lighting up until the stage dazzled with gas-lit splendor.”23 Comedy, movement, spectacle – a feast for the eyes and a diversion extraordinaire for a country reeling from the after-effects of a civil war that nearly torn it permanently apart. The American audience was not looking for considered reflection and reassessment on the stage; it was looking for divertissement and it needed time in which to catch its collective breath. Musical extravaganza spectacles like The Black Crook and elaborately staged comic pantomimes like Humpty Dumpty provided that kind of entertainment. Dance was an important part of these musical theatre forms because they captured the dual American obsession with movement and novelty for its own sake. Being new, being current was important for an audience that did not want to look too closely to its past. Dance in the form of constant motion created a sense that one was alive, engaged, and connected with the modern. Costa was able to present dance as a spectator sport. The audience wanted more. They wanted to participate. To that extent, social dance would soon be able to make its impact felt in the development of musical theatre dance. Over the next two decades, there were many imitators of this kind of extravaganza, and they enjoyed varying degrees of success. All of this theatrical entertainment encouraged the growth of the ballet within the New York City area. According to a young female author writing in 1869 under the pseudonym of George Ellington, there were in New York City “exclusive of premiere and leaders, about five hundred ballet-girls or coryphées, holding only second-rate places, and whose pay ranges from seven to fifteen dollars per week. Of this number, about two hundred are regularly engaged in some [other] daily occupation … their services being only in demand when ‘fillers-in’ for a large ballet are required … the greater part being engaged at Wallack’s Niblo’s and the Olympic theatres.”24 This growth continued for the remainder of the century. In 1848, there were eight dancing masters listed in the New York Director but by 1896, there were sixty-three.25 These coryphées worked long hours for little pay and small recognition. It was not uncommon for them to work five hours a day for six to eight weeks for each

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ballet. In addition to a classical ballet vocabulary, they also studied gymnastic skills. Due to the number of ballets and performances, it was necessary for them to possess a keen memory for movement. Typically, they supplied their own tights and shoes. The types of women who were attracted to this kind of life were “girls, who, by talent and force of circumstance, have been driven to dance for a living, but whose every penny is honestly earned and mercifully and charitably bestowed for the support of aged and helpless parents.”26 While Ellington’s subjective observation hinted at the hardship involved, it did not seem to dissuade many dancers from choosing this profession. German and Italian dancers dominated the teaching of ballet from 1866 to 1900.27 Consequently, the graceful and exuberant dancing of the French gave way to the strength of the German style and the meticulous attention to detail of the Italians.28 The result was a mixed blessing for the musical theatre stage. While more dancers were being trained in the classical ballet traditions, few unfortunately would rise above the level of mediocrity. There were minimal opportunities for these dancers to develop their performance skills on a concert stage and those that were available in the musical theatre encouraged those aspects of ballet that lent themselves to superficial acrobatic tricks. For many, “reduced to kicking and posing in lines, the chorus dancers of the 1890s were selected for looks, rather than for talent or ability.”29 With the beginning of a new century, the status of the chorus dancer would change and with it the opportunity to perform dances of a higher caliber.

The Waltz and the Cancan: The Bourgeoisie Gentleman Meets the Working Girl Musical theatre took many forms during this time. Predominately, there was a back-and-forth between the operetta and the burlesque, or extravaganza. While the operetta placed more emphasis on romantic story line, legitimate singing, light comedy, and scenography that tended to look back to an idealized past, the burlesque extravaganza took its cue by taking a more critical look at the contemporary world. Its tone was more satiric. There was an eclectic quality that allowed for more interpolations in its often melodramatic story lines. While it valued popular music, its performers tended to be more broadly trained in that “putting a song over” was often more important than “hitting the right note.” There were many strains of comedy from the grotesque to the clever. Often, this comedy was used as a way by which to incorporate ethnic diversity and to create a world in which the growing variations in the complexion of America’s population, particularly those living in such close quarters as in its quickly developing cities, could create “safe zones” for caricatures and stereotype, not unlike the role played by standup comedy today. Dance played a vital role in each of these two predominate forms of musical theatre. As a way by which to better understand the role of dance in the musical theatre of the 1870s and 1880s, let’s look at two examples.

58  1866–1914

The first comes from the success and influence of Johann Strauss II’s operetta, Die Fledermaus (or The Bat). Originally based on a play by the German playwright, Julius Roderich Bendedix, and a French vaudeville play by Henri Melhac and Ludovic Halevy, this operetta premiered in April of 1874 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Later that same year, it opened in New York at the Stadt Theatre. Die Fledermaus was important to the history of dance on the musical theatre stage because it popularized the waltz as a vital and important form of theatrical dance. The waltz as a form of ballroom dance had been popular in Europe and the United States since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has its roots in the popular but risqué Renaissance dance, the Volta, and in the equally popular German couple folk dances known as the Ländler. Each of these dances was performed in three-quarter time; they were performed in closed couple formation as opposed to a large group of dancers performing in a circle or in a processional formation and they often expressed a spontaneous exuberance, particularly when the male dancer would lift the female dancer high in the air, often at the conclusion of the dance. The waltz was America’s first significant social dance that enjoyed equal popularity on the stage and in the ballroom. There were many other social dances, such as the cotillion, the allemande, and the gavotte, that were also performed in a social setting and on the stage. Certainly, the minuet, particularly during the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries could have rivaled the enormous popularity of the waltz, but the minuet was more often associated elites and upper middle-class society. They would be inserted into an evening’s performance by actors who could dance and by professional dancers, many of them trained in ballet. Ruth Katz in her seminal essay, “The Egalitarian Waltz,” compares these dances in terms of their predominant characteristics. The minuet, performed by many of our early founding fathers and mothers, was a dance imported from the courts of Europe that required training to perform. The steps for the minuet are clearly prescribed and the dance is generally performed so that the dancers can “be seen.” It is a relatively slow dance performed in three-quarter time that is stately and formal in its execution and which begins and ends with “honors,” that is, a graceful movement that acknowledges the audience and one’s partner. The minuet is a dance that best reflects the Neoclassic qualities of restraint, orderliness, and symmetry. Rules based on valued traditions were highly praised. Deportment, carriage, and social hierarchy were rewarded in the manner in which the dance was performed. John Weaver himself advocated many of the ideas of how the minuet should be performed.30 Clearly, the minuet and its related dance forms permitted the audiences for Colonial and Revolutionary America to look back rather than forward in terms of their performing arts. This attitude continued even into the first few decades of this new republic. However, as America started to define itself first as a Jeffersonian democracy in the early years of the nineteenth century through the Jacksonian democracy of the 1830s, there was a significant change in how

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its citizens defined themselves and how they wished their art forms to reflect that change. French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, captured in his famous book of that period, Democracy in America, published in 1835, just what that relationship was between Americans as citizens and Americans as participants in the arts. While excruciatingly observant of how democracy was playing itself out in this emerging country, his observation regarding Americans’ relationship to the arts is best summarized with the following: “In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones.”31 For this writer, art, particularly the fine arts, harkens back to an idealized past best reflected in a Neoclassic point of view. What is interesting is that America in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in her performing arts, was negotiating between a hot-tempered and spontaneous relationship with the contemporary, as reflected in the early development of the minstrel show tradition during the 1830s and, at the same time, its love for simplistic stories told well as reflected in its strong attraction for melodrama, best represented by the overwhelming popularity of the stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the years leading up to the Civil War. By the 1860s, American musical theatre was on the verge of exploding in new and varied forms as reflected in the overwhelming success of productions like The Black Crook, Die Fledermaus, and Ixion. The popularity of the waltz on the American musical theatre stage reflected this persistent aspiration on the part of many American composers and librettists for a form of musical theatre that could combine both fine art aspirations with popular art appeal. They saw this reflected in some of the best imports of their time, such as with the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan for example. The waltz received its international reputation in 1814–1815 during the Vienna Congress when European leaders were engaged in sorting out the reparations and spoils of the Napoleonic Wars that had recently concluded. Thousands of people from all over Europe descended on Vienna. Partying, various entertainments, and dancing matched political intrigue. The importance of the waltz is best reflected in the common saying of the time: “Le congrès ne marche pas, il danse.” There was a feeling that the old world was falling away and that a new one was yet to be born. In hindsight, it is curious that the 18-year-old Victoria Alexandrina would be crowned the Queen of England, the country whose empire was so vast that it was said that the sun never sets on the British Empire and a country that loved to dance, particularly the waltz. Johann Strauss composed waltzes for her coronation and when she later married her prince in 1837, it was said that “the Queen loved waltzing with her husband Prince Albert who was recognized by all as an expert dancer.”32 We are literally on the eve of the Romantic Period in which emotion trumps reason, individual expression is valued over group conformity, feminine qualities are elevated, and myth, the mysterious and the unknown are accorded equal status with the scientific method. The waltz captured this whirling sense of new possibilities because the dance itself rewarded spontaneity over the precise and

60  1866–1914

formal execution of its predecessor, the minuet. Dancers were not interested in “being seen,” but in looking at each other. They held each other in an embrace that closed the outside world out. Even the term itself, to waltz, comes from the Italian word volver, meaning to turn or to revolve. Choreographer and dance historian Mark Knowles describes how the waltz of this time would have been performed: To perform the original version of the Viennese waltz, also called the valse trios temps, the man stepped across the woman, tracing a curvilinear path on the floor, as she swiveled on her own axis. The couple executed one half-turn on these first three steps, causing them to rotate 180 degrees. They then completed the turn on the next three steps, as the man swiveled on this axis and swung the woman across him.33 What is important to keep in mind is that the relationship between social dance forms and theatrical dance was porous. The waltz was undoubtedly the first significant theatrical dance that best represented the interests of those who were increasingly supporting musical theatre – that is, the urban middle class. They wanted to see a dance on stage that they could do in a social setting and, at the same time, represented on the stage their aspirations for an idealization of romance between a man and a woman. In that respect, what melodrama was to straight plays in the nineteenth century, operetta was to musical theatre during the same period. The waltz, of course, met both requirements. It was simple enough to learn and could accommodate whatever individual expression the dancers wanted to incorporate in their interpretation and, at the same time, when viewed on stage, the turning within turning of one couple and then others represented a kind of freedom Americans were experiencing as they emerged from the horrors of the Civil War and began the process of redefining themselves not only politically but also in technological and cultural terms. The mid-century inventions in communications, business, and transportations were creating the conditions for a more confident citizenry who could compete with world markets. There was an upsurge of people moving from the farm to the city. Many more people from other parts of the world such as Eastern Europe and Asia, particularly China, were immigrating to America. With this influx of new and old Americans into her cities, the performing arts, and musical theatre in particular, responded by appealing to forms of entertainment that could cross ethnic and racial boundaries. The waltz certainly was one of those. But, it wasn’t just the waltz, nor was it the early forms of ballet, that intrigued the musical theatre audience of the mid to late nineteenth century. There were other forms that were more risqué – eye candy for the predominately male audience. That dance was – the cancan. The cancan has its origins in the 1830s in Paris in establishments frequented by well-off gentlemen and students looking to “making a connection” with

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lower class women. From its inception, the dance was associated with challenging the conventional by doing exuberant dancing that was erotic, playful, and “naughty.” In its early form, it resembled “the Andalusia fandango, a flamenco-style in which the female performers make much use of their colorful skirts and petticoats.”34 As it became more popular, cancan dancers, like Alphonsine Plessis, Celeste Mogador, Rose Pompon, and many others, added flourished and idiosyncratic movements that were popular with their audiences and their supporters. In terms of its theatrical appeal, the cancan is most associated with the operettas of Jacque Offenbach, particularly his gallop infernal from Orpheus in the Underworld (1859).35 “The music for the gallop is frenetic, exciting and vital, and was an immediate hit with the first night audience.”36 One of the most important of Offenbach’s many operettas to have in impact on the American musical theatre was Le Vie Parisienne, which was his first attempt to compose a operetta that portrayed contemporary Parisian life. The operetta concludes with a masquerade, a switching of roles, and a party in which the cancan is the predominant feature. The plot “implies that nothing really matters, life should not be taken seriously, and frivolity is the order of the day. The cancan so supremely embodies this feeling and provides a wonderful highlight in a glistering show.”37 After opening at the Theatre du Palais Royal in October of 1866, it had its New York premiere two and a half years later in March of 1869, where ticket prices rose to $3.00 doubling what New Yorkers typically paid at the time.38 This was a fortuitous coincidence because his operetta played in the same theatre season as that of Ixion, or, The Man at the Wheel at Wood’s Museum.39 While Offenbach played to the more staid and moneyed audience members who patronized musical theatre at the time, Lydia Thompson and her troupe of blond-haired performers focused their attributes to the predominately male working-class patrons who frequented Wood’s Museum. Her introduction to the American audience began with the performance of the burlesque, Ixion, or The Man at the Wheel, which opened on September 28, 1868, at the Wood’s Museum and Metropolitan. The success of this British troupe in the United States initiated what would become known as the “blonde burlesque.” In addition to Thompson, it also included three other female star burlesque performers – Pauline Markham, Ada Harland, and Lisa Weber. The form of burlesque that developed in England that Thompson brought to the United States “evolved from the more poetic or fairy extravaganza style of piece favored in earlier decades, mixing the scenic, pictorial, and musical values of such pieces with the kind of broad burlesque of the serious theatre popular on the British stages … in the early eighteenth century.”40 Now, with Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the flood gates were open for exaggerated stage characterizations, over the top staging and comic stage business, risqué and sexy dancing, and “word play” that filled the narrative from beginning to end. In this production, the characters burlesqued had their origin from a very loose interpretation of Greek and Roman mythology. The title character is a lecherous deposed king, Ixion, played in travesty by Lydia Thompson,

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who attempts to woo other goddesses. Even the character of Terpsichore and her corps de ballet made their appearance in Juno’s drawing room. This form of theatre was comprised of satiric scenes, broad humor, popular tunes rewritten with new lyrics to comment on a contemporary subject, and extravagant scenography. Some dressed in men’s clothing, while others wore costumes that would easily reveal the female form. Like The Black Crook, this show was also known as a “leg show.” And, it included the expected Amazonian marches and processions, in which many of the dancers and other members of the cast would parade around the stage in formations that would later be popularized by precision dance chorines at the turn of the century and continued to be popular in the routines of the Rockettes today. However, it is important to note that “burlesque dances were the antithesis of romantic ballet, with its controlled, effortless harmony of movement and balance.”41 Historian Robert Allen provides an excellent look at how the dancing in The Black Crook was compared with that of Ixion through the eyes of a contemporary woman’s rights activist of the time, Olive Logan. He writes: But to Logan the threat to the theater and to public decency represented by burlesque performers was far worse than that posed by the dancers in The Black Crook. The latter were, at least, French ballet dancers who ‘represented in their nudity imps and demons. In silence they whirled about the stage; in silence trooped off. Some faint odor of ideality and poetry rested over them.’ The burlesque performer, on the other hand, compounded her nudity with raucous impertinences and self-conscious winks and leers. Worst of all, she did not hide her salacious impudence behind a portrayal of another character.42 For Logan, burlesque performers were about “leg business” or “nude drama” and were more often associated with Negro Minstrelsy.43 When the Thompson women came out in flesh-colored tights and knee-length skirts and, in addition to performing hornpipes and jigs, they parodied the cancan, which both aroused the interest of the audience while stoking the ire of their critics. Strangely enough, in this form of musical theatre, sexual objectification empowered women performers. Theatre historian, Robert C. Allen, concludes that “the power of Thompsonian burlesque to delight and to horrify is inextricably bound to its status as the most thoroughly feminized form of theatrical entertainment in the history of the American stage to that time.”44 After all, they broke the fourth wall with a direct appeal to the desires of the audience. They upended the conventions of the day and satirized shows, people, and events of the day, which was often not welcomed by those representing the standards of “common decency;” nonetheless, they appealed to not only the working class but also many in the rising middle class, particularly the men, who were searching for ways in which to validate their newly created wealth. Their overt flaunting of convention and transgressive behavior had a strong appeal to their audience and created a form of popular musical theatre that was generously rewarded.

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As with Mark Twain before him when talking about his experience of The Black Crook, the writer William Dean Howells found the conventions of burlesque much more problematic than that of the extravaganzas. The burlesque chiefly betrayed descent from the spectacular ballet in its undressing; but that ballet, while it demanded personal exposure, had something very observable in its scenic splendors, and all that marching and processioning was rather pretty; while in the burlesque there seemed nothing of innocent intent…. The dancing commenced, each performer beginning with the Walk-round of the negro minstrels, rendering it grotesqueness with a wonderful frankness of movement, and then plunging into the mysteries of her dance with a kind of infuriate grace and fierce delight very curious to look upon. … One of them was so good a player that it seemed needless for her to go so far as she did in the dance. … This inspired each who succeeded her to wantoner excesses, to wilder insolences of hose, to fiercer bravadoes of corsage; while those not dancing, responded to the sentiment of the music by singing shrill glees in tune with it, clapping their hands, and patting Juba, as the act is called.45 For Howells, it was the combination of women not only satirizing the female ballet dancers in the musical extravaganzas with their “immodest” clothing and exaggerated mannerisms but it was also their ridicule of the male personae that unnerved him. This production was quickly followed by The Forty Thieves: or, Striking Oil in Family Jars, in which they took advantage of the high popularity of the cancan with the American public. One of the descriptions of the time is very clear about what got the audience excited. The next things that caused great laughter was the dancing Of Ali Baba’s jackass, also the forty female thieves who, at the word of command, placed a cigarette in their mouth, lifted their foot, ignited a match on the heel of the show, and lit their forty cigarettes. In the last scene two females do the can-can in a style that awakens the greatest enthusiasm and in a manner that savours of the true Jardin Mabile …. In this last scene which is intended to be a representation of a fancy dress ball at the famous Parisian establishment, the can-can is danced by Miss Lydia Thompson and several ladies of the ballet. This scene is decidedly the best of the piece …46 What Offenbach had started the previous season with his opera bouffe, Le Grande Duchesse de Ge’rolstein starring Lucille Tostée, was now the “must see” dance of Broadway. Some of the kinds of movement most associated with the cancan such as high kicks, ruffling of skirts while hopping on one leg, doing a circular motion from the knee down, kicking gentlemen’s hats off their heads,

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extending one’s leg high in the air and then holding it there with one hand while the dancer circles or rotates on the support leg, teasing male audience members by bending over, lifting one’s dress over one’s head and shaking one’s derriere, concluding with an enthusiastic jump in the air that ends in a split on the floor – all of this made for wide popular appeal at this time. Thompson’s burlesques were so profitable at Niblo’s Garden that she was able to top the monthly gross of her previous competitor, The Black Crook.47

1870s–1890s: A Country’s Division Gives Way to Increasing Modernity The period from the 1870s to the mid-1890s was a time of flux, experimentation, and novelty. There was a tension between staying with the tried-and-true and looking into creating something different. The aftermath of the Civil War and the increasing urbanization of America created a strong Thomas Wolfe sense that “you can’t go home again.” The country was 100 years old. Prosperity was quickly returning. With the physical expansion of the continent and with it being interconnected with the telegraph and the railroad from coast to coast, there was a much stronger sense of identity that was emerging in the American psyche. With the Wound Knee Massacre in 1890, the United States army slaughtered over 150 Ghost dancers, thereby signally an end to a centuries long battle between the citizens of the United States and the Native peoples of this North American continent resulting in a stalemate that left most Indians sequestered on to hundreds of reservations. Slavery was abolished but racism was not. What started off as a period of hope during the period of Reconstruction (1865–1877) was soon thwarted and violent conflicts and new forms of subjugation by EuroAmericans of African-American peoples continued. The Civil War also stalled the equal rights movement that began with the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments at the first women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. After the war, however, women received a much-needed push from the remnants of what had been the Abolitionist movement. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Candy Stanton now picked up the mantle as they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 with the expressed purpose to seek a voting rights for women amendment to the constitution. In addition, recent advances in technology were having a direct impact on the way in which the scenographic imagination could be constructed on the American stage. For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, gas lighting replaced centuries-old candle and oil lamp illumination. By the end of that same century, electricity was the primary means of stage lighting design. Even the way in which theatre and dance was conceived and presented was changing. Directors now replaced stage managers and producers replaced actor-managers. What the American theatre, and dance in particular, did not yet have was a strong sense of its own artistic possibility. By the turn of the century, that would change and, when it did, it would be rapid, helped along by the World War I.

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There are several movements that affected stage dance during this time. One of them came from France with the work of Francois Delsarte. Born in 1811, he was educated at the Conservatoire National de Musique et d’Art Dramatique in Paris in the late 1820s. It was there that he began his lifelong research to better understand human expression and aesthetics, which some called “Applied Aesthetics.” Employing the notion of the Catholic Trinity, he constructed an elaborate system of physical gesture, facial expression, and posture that combined scientific observation with spiritual theory. “Like ballet, Delsarte placed the body in an imaginary circle and designated horizontal motions within it-forward, oblique, lateral-which intersected with certain vertical body ‘zones’ – upper, middle, lower.”48 He divided the body into three zones: the head (intellectual), the torso (emotional), and the lower limbs (physical). Movement could be performed in opposition, in parallel, and in succession. Gestures could be moved away from center, toward the center and/or be in balance. With this as a base, he was able to help public speakers, singers, and actors to better understand their body instrument as a means of physical expression. His work was brought to the United States through the efforts of American actor, playwright, and director Steele MacKaye in the 1870s after studying with Delsarte. His primary focus was on helping actors achieve a more relaxed and true-to-life performance. To that end, expanding upon his mentor’s work, he developed “a system of expression based upon principles of relaxation that came to be known as harmonic (or esthetic) gymnastics.”49 His “Harmonic Gymnastics” proved to be very popular in many theatrical circles of the time. His student, Genevieve Stebbins, an actress, went even further. She balanced his relaxation exercises with what she called “energizing” techniques. “She developed the concept of human motion patterning itself on what she considered the basic motion in nature-the spiral curve, or spiral wave-motion (what we might call a spiral successional movement).”50 Stebbins was conscientiously moving the Delsarte system toward a “modern dance” basis. She distinguished her work from that of ballet and sought a basis for understanding of dance movement that went back further than the European courts of the Renaissance to that of the Greeks and the Orient. With this work, she developed what dance critic and historian Jack Anderson called “pantomimic interpretations of stories, poems, or ideas and ‘statue posing.’”51 These forms of danced movement studies relied upon a keen and observant appreciation for the human body as an object for aesthetic pleasure. The emphasis was on discovering a movement vocabulary that best represented the idea being expressed rather than on repeating a set vocabulary from a preconceived dance aesthetic. To that extent, ballet, folk dance, ballroom dance, and tap dance were viewed as “established,” while this new “aesthetic dance” or “interpretative dance” was viewed as dynamic, exploratory, “modern.” While it would take another generation to bring the fruits of this development to the musical theatre stage in the form of dances created by artists like Loie Fuller, Maud Allen, and Ruth St. Denis; nonetheless, it reflected a more self-conscious consideration on the part of musical theatre performers to

66  1866–1914

reconsider their craft. This “outside-in” approach would be contrasted later by the more “inside-out” approach to acting of Konstantin Stanislavsky. While actor/dancer training was reinvigorated by the influx of ballet dancer-­ choreographers from Europe and by the American development of movement training systems stemming from the work of Delsarte and others, there were fundamental changes going on in musical theatre that would also have an impact on the dance. One of those had to do with the growing sophistication of the relationships between libretto and lyrics with music and its realization on the stage in performance. The collaboration and popularity of the English operetta team of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, beginning with Trial by Jury in 1875 and extending to their final successful collaboration together in 1890 on The Gondoliers, this British operatic team brought an unusually high degree of musicalized theatre to the American Stage. With their overwhelming success with H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, theatre historian Bordman writes: “What made the show distinctive was the literacy and wit of its words, and the artistry and almost unprecedented melodic invention of its music.”52 Some of their most well-known and accomplished works included H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), The Mikado (1885), and The Yeoman of Guard (1884). Music and lyrics received the predominant attention by historians when talking about the musical production of Gilbert and Sullivan, but it is important to note that staging and dance were also very important to their success. Their comic operas are filled with dances: quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, lancers, as well as precision style group dancers.53 The choreographer most associated with Gilbert and Sullivan is the prolific Frederick John D’Auban. Choreographer, dancer, and teacher, D’Auban was known as a “grotesque dancer,” that is, someone who could create exaggerated characterization in his dances. He was funny. He was enormously energetic. And, he was popular with his audience and his colleagues. He choreographed burlesques, pantomimes, and musical comedies. His first Gilbert and Sullivan show was with The Sorcerer in 1877. It is estimated that throughout his long 50-year career that he choreographed over 150 productions.54 With the increasing use of dance in operettas and book musical comedies, it was inevitable that the role of a “dance director” would become more and more a vital and important part of how musical theatre dance would be created, coordinated, and performed.

The Fin de Siècle Period and the Changing Musical Theatre Dance Landscape The end of the nineteenth century was filled with keen anticipation for the future and yet there was a foreboding sense that “not all is well with the world.” The old forms of musical theatre entertainment from operetta to burlesque, from extravaganza to pantomime continued to find an audience. However, America’s oldest musical theatre form – the minstrel show – was being replaced with other forms that responded more to the changing dynamics of the time. Those were

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vaudeville, the revue, and early musical comedy, including the recognition of African-American artists on their own terms. These forms were more urbane and yet they could attract a wide audience on the road. Their formats allowed for more flexibility in responding to what was contemporary. A stereotypical caricature was giving way to more of a satiric commentary on the shifting demographics of the country. Women’s fashion reflected the changing image that women had of themselves as independent-thinking human beings who did not have to apologize for their own political points of view, sensual pleasures, and artistic aspirations. While racial tensions continued to be expressed in policies that ignored the plight of most African-American families and that exploded in violent outbreaks, there was also a concerted effort on the part of many AfricanAmerican artists to present alternatives to the Stepin Fetchit caricature of the previous generation. Americans sensed a change on the way. This was most directly reflected in the dances and the attitudes toward dancers. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, there was an upsurge in social dancing that was radically different from that of the past. There was a new sound that was heralding a new way of moving. Just as with the generation before who replaced the staid, upright, and “proper” dance of the minuet, with their intimate and wild abandonment of the waltz, young people now were attracted to the “animal dances,” made popular by their African-American counterparts. These dances were accompanied by a brash, earthy, and profane ragtime. Self-conscious containment gave way to abandonment. Set steps were at times replaced with improvisation. Paying attention to what others thought as you danced was superseded by a narcissistic focus on oneself and one’s partner. The harbinger for this shift in social dance was foreshadowed by the popularity of the Cakewalk, a throwback from the past and a premonition of what was to come, especially in terms of musical theatre stage dance and its relation to contemporary social dance. The Cakewalk has its origins in slave plantation dances, in which slaves would perform for each other while slave owners would judge the winner of the dance contests. Originally known as the chalk line walk, this was dance in which the dancers followed lines on the floor, walked erect, and carried a pail of water on their heads. You were judged by how much water was not spilt along the way.55 While the Cakewalk originally was performed as a couple dance in which the African-American performers might poke fun at the dances of their EuroAmerican slave owners, it was eventually taken up as a popular all-male dance in the minstrel show. It was a dance that could accommodate competition between performers and, at the same time, it was an excellent dance for large production numbers that would either begin or end a scene or an act. Eventually, it found its way on the Broadway musical theatre stage in The Creole Show of 1890. This production was a mix of the past and the future in the sense that it utilized a conventional minstrel structure but employed a singing and dancing chorus of sixteen women and did away with the denigrating use of blackface. It concluded with a Cakewalk led by Dora Dean and Charles

68  1866–1914

Johnson, a couple that would go on to enjoy a successful career in vaudeville. In describing the origin of the Cakewalk, Johnson recalled that it “was originally a kind of shuffling movement which evolved into a smooth walking step with the body held erect. The backward sway was added, and as the dance become more of a satire on the dance of the white plantation owners, the movement became a prancing strut.”56 It continued to grow in popularity in subsequent AfricanAmerican musicals, but it exploded with Clorindy, the Origins of the Cakewalk in 1898. Built around the talents of the comic team of Bert Williams and George Walker, the composer Marion Cook, teamed up with the well-recognized poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, to write the show. Though much of the original show was jettisoned in favor of easily recognized African-American stereotypes, the combination of the syncopation of the ragtime rhythm and the energetic sophistication of the dancing won them a mixed-race audience. This was “the first African-American dance to become popular in the white world,”57 contributing to the “dance craze” that would define social and musical theatre dance. It became a staple in any African-American musical of that time – they had to have a Cakewalk. The fever for this dance extended beyond the stage. There were Cakewalk competitions. White dancers wanted to learn how to perform this dance. The interest in the dance extended to all echelons of society – even to the famous New York Vanderbilts. There is the famous story of Bert Williams and George Walker, arguably the most popular African-American musical theatre performers known for their Cakewalking abilities, who called on the Vanderbilt mansion and left the following letter. Dear Sir: In view of the fact that you have made a success as a cake-walker, having appeared in a semi-public capacity, we, the undersigned world-renowned cake-walkers, believing that the attention of the public has been distracted from us on account of the tremendous hit which you have made, hereby challenge you to compete with us in a cake-walking match, which will decide which of us shall deserve the title of champion cake-walker of the world. As a guarantee of good faith we have this day deposited at the Office of the New York World the sum of $50. If you propose proving to the public that you really are an expert cake-walker we shall be pleased to have you cover that amount and name the day on which it will be convenient for you to try odds against us. Yours very truly, Williams and Walker58 Throwing down their gauntlet was reminiscent of the challenge dances between the African-American Master Juba and the Euro-American John Diamond in the

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1840s. In that competition, Master Juba was triumphant. Unfortunately, this challenge was not accepted by the Vanderbilts leaving Williams and Walker as the undisputed standard bearers of the Cakewalk. What a turn-around from the pre-Civil War days when African-Americans used the Cakewalk as a way by which to subvert their racist slave-owners control over their bodies by superimposing a Euro-American form of couple dancing. Now, predominately white Broadway audiences looked to their African-American entertainers for a new kind of music and dance to challenge the conventional offerings from their European imports and American imitators. Ragtime and the Cakewalk provided just the right amount of hip sensuality that reflected how young America was beginning to think of itself. Its sounds were jazzier and syncopated and its movements were brash, loud, and energetic. The strutting, the high kicks, and the improvisatory quality of the Cakewalk caught the spirit of the times. It was a dance that allowed for a “conversation” between the races. What could never happen in the streets could happen on the stage and in the dance halls. Now, whites were vying with African-Americans to “win the cake.” The popularity of the Cakewalk, the growing interest in ragtime and jazz and the success of this dance on the Broadway stage fostered a growing sense of give and take between the performers on stage and their peers in the audience. A new craze of “animal dances” was about the sweep across the American landscape and the Broadway stage would be its cultural barometer. Everything from the Texas Tommy, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, Eagle Rock, the Bunny Hug, and many others were about to dominate the American popular consciousness. Exhibition ballroom dance joined with the dance craze on the stage to bring the frenetic energy of couple dancing into the forefront of American entertainment. Dance historian Mark Knowles observes that “most of the dances were based on the one-step, or trot, as it was also called, a fairly simple movement in which one step was taken on each beat of music. The fun came with how the dancers embellished it. … The elegant, erect posture of previous couple dances gave way to the slouched, hunched-over gait of a lumbering animal, and the smooth circular motions of the waltz gave way to the jerky movements of ragtime trotting.”59 In addition to these so-called animal ragtime dances, there were others like the tango and the rumba, the hesitation waltz and the Castle Walk, Apache dances and the maxixe, and many others. The dance craze began in the early 1900s and hit its stride in the years immediately before and after World War I. It was voracious. It was intense. Some people devoted all of their leisure time to learning and doing these new dances. Broadway was keen to take advantage of them and insert them quickly into their musical comedies and revues. For example, George Washington Smith’s son, Joseph C. Smith, was a popular musical theatre performer and choreographer at this time. He is credited with choreographing the first Turkey Trot in the musical, A Certain Party, in 1911, “the first official use of ragtime dance on the Broadway stage.”60 With his many performances here and in London, he was clearly seen as an advocate for inserting ragtime dances onto the musical theatre stage.61

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Ragtime music and dance are intertwined because the music was intended to be an instrumental accompaniment to the dances. The music and its dances originated in saloons, bars, and dance halls, most associated with the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. First introduced with the walkarounds and cakewalks of the early African-American musicals of the 1890s, they soon attracted a wide audience of young people who were looking to express the openness and curiosity of a generation better educated, with disposable wealth and leisure time, who openly critiqued conventional women’s roles in society and who were intensely interested in all things technological. In addition, ragtime dances challenged the dull social conventions of the past and promoted a freer relationship between the sexes in a public setting. This was a generation forged in the post-Victorian era between the stock market crash of 1893 and World War I. Authority in many areas of life was being questioned. And in dance, the dancing master was replaced with an individual sense of self-expression while the syncopation in the ragtime music caught the upbeat frenetic pace of modern life. Many of these dances were popularized by exhibition ballroom dancers who performed in roof gardens, parties of wealth patrons, salons, musicals, cabarets, vaudeville, and so on. Some of them were recognized for their technical skills, others for their stage personalities, and others as originators of new dances. Some of the exhibition couples included: the successful musical theatre dancers Clifton Webb and Bonnie Glass, the well-known musical theatre director and polyglot John Murray Anderson and his wife Genevieve Lyon, the up-and-coming Fred and Adele Astaire, and many others. There were African-American couples as well such as the elegant couple Margot Webb and Harold Norton, and Dora Dean and Charles Johnson. George Walker and his wife Ada undoubtedly paved the way, particularly with their performance of the Cakewalk for example. Many of these dances found their way to the Broadway stage in a variety of different ways. Certainly, the popularity of the Cakewalk opened the door for many of these ragtime or animal dances in musicals. In 1912, both Charles Dillingham and Florenz Ziegfeld produced the musical Over the River. It included everything from the tango to the turkey trot, which “consisted of a fast, marching one-step, arms pumping at the side, with occasional arm flappings emulating a crazed turkey.”62 In addition to John C. Smith, it also included Lillian Lorraine and a chorus performing to a piece entitled “Chop Stick Rag” and a much-admired exhibition dancer named Maurice Mouvet, who rose to international fame a few years before with his performance in Paris of his own sizzling version of an Apache dance. These Apache dances originated in the Montmartre cafes in Paris in the late 1800s by outlaws and robbers who were called “Apaches.” These couples performed risqué dances called quadrille réaliste and they “included a developpe’ with the foot raised to ear level, multiple sweeps of black-stockinged legs, swaying of the hips, and backward thrusts of the torso and pelvis, all done in a great flurry of energetically shaken lingerie and white petticoats.”63 But, the pièce de résistance​​for this musical had to have been the performance of a new Irving Berlin song – one that Knowles describes as “the

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anthem of the animal dance craze”64 – and introducing the dance, the grizzly bear. The song: ‘Everybody’s Doin’ it Now. Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it See that ragtime couple over there Watch them throw their shoulders in the air Snap their fingers, honey, I declare It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear, there!65 George-Graves describes the dance. “The Grizzly Bear was an imitation of a dancing bear, in which the dancers would take clumsy, heavy steps to the side on toes while making an ungraceful bend at the knees. The couple, facing each other, hugging so that their chests met and their arms flopped over each other’s shoulders, would move forward and backward in this ungainly manner. During the dance, the dancers would yell out, ‘It’s a bear!’ They might also turn back-to-back with their arms up, bent at the elbows, fingers curled like a playful attacking bear.”66 The following year, the Texas Tommy, a dance that permitted a breakaway to occur between the couple so that individual improvisation could take place, was popularized in the musical, The Darktown Follies in 1913, with Johnny Peters and Ethel Williams. This dance would later give way to the Lindy Hop. While the Texas Tommy has its origins in San Francisco, it is a dance fraught with an anti-bourgeois attitude. Nadine George-Graves writes: “Tommy was a slang term for a trench soldier at the turn of the century. A ‘Texas Tommy’ was a female prostitute who worked the ‘trenches’ in the early 1900s.”67 One of the performers, Ethel Williams, described the dance in which “there were two basic steps-a kick and hop three times on each foot, and then add whatever you want, turning, pulling, sliding. Your partner had to keep you from falling-I’ve slid in the orchestra pit more than once.”68 This musical was a triple header for dance in that it also introduced an equally popular Ballin’ the Jack. This dance was “a serpentine, circular, shuffling dance that had its roots in the plantation ring shout.”69 According to the Stearns, the phrase ballin’ the jack is a railroad expression in which the term jack refers to the train while ballin’ refers to the trainman’s hand signal to start moving; consequently, the phrase “means traveling fast and having a good time.” 70 This dance was similar to the Shimmy, a dance that emphasized the alternating back and forth and up and down of the shoulders, and a dance form that remains popular today. Some songs and their accompanying dances are clearly elaborated in the lyrics to the tunes. Here, the song written by African-Americans Chris Smith and Jim Burris, spelled out exactly what the dancers are to do. “First you put your two knees close up tight Then you sway ‘em to the left, then you sway ‘em to the right

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Step around the floor kind of nice and light Then you twis’ around and twis’ around with all your might Stretch you lovin’ arms straight out in space Then you do the Eagle Rock with style and grace Swing your foot way ‘round then bring it back Now that’s what I call ‘Ballin the Jack’” 71 This dance was so exciting to watch that within months, it made its appearance in the Zieg feld Follies of 1913 and soon afterward the Charles Frohman musical, The Girl From Utah. And finally, two of its tap dancers, Eddie Rector and Toots Davis, extended the tap dance vocabulary to flash steps that could be used to end a number and bring the audience to their feet. Stearns described them this way. Over the Top consists roughly of a figure-eight patterns in which the dancer jumps up on one leg and brings the other around and forward beneath it with an almost self-tripping effect; Through the Trenches is a more or less stationary running step, bending at the waist with arms flailing as the outer sides of the feet scrape alternatingly from front to back.72 While other ragtime dances followed, like the Gaby Glide, the kangaroo dip, the shiver shake, the Hoochie-Coochie, the Weevil Wiggle, the Lemon Squeeze, the Chicken Scratch, the Eagle Rock, and many, many others, the Fox Trot was no doubt the most popular at the time and continues to be popular today.73 Its origin is clouded in some mystery. Some historians attribute it to a Southern plantation dance known as the Buzzard Lope. Some attribute it to vaudevillian Harry Fox. Some to a suggestion made by Jim Europe, the Castles orchestra leader, when they changed their Bunny Hug dance to the Fox Trot and performed it in 1913 in the musical The Sunshine Girl. The Fox Trot was one of many dances that evolved from the two-step type of dance. In this case, the rhythm is broken up and is performed with a slow-slow-quick-quick step combination. The Castles were able to instill vitality to this dance without losing a sense of grace and ease. But then, they were able to “lift” many of the ragtime dances to a level of acceptability by the predominately white middle-class audiences of the Broadway stage because they emphasized an elegance and a kind of etiquette that did not feel strained or artificial. In an interview he gave while doing The Sunshine Girl, the Castle’s biographer Eve Golden recounts the story that “When asked about the social propriety of dancing the tango, Vernon snapped, ‘Vulgar people will make any dance vulgar. Even the waltz is not nice when vulgar people dance it.’” 74 Of course, one has to wonder who are these vulgar people to which he is referring. Historian Nadine George-Graves reminds us that “ragtime dance was not just a form of expression of the body through space but was also the embodiment of contemporaneous negotiations

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regarding race, gender, sexuality, religion, morality, generation and class …” 75 Whatever its rich, complex and troubled origins, it was the Castles who made this dance so popular on and off the stage. It is important to note that the popularity of these dances did not necessarily eliminate that of some of the older social dance forms, particularly that of the waltz. As a matter of fact, 1907 saw the huge success of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow and the national popularity of its second act closer – the Merry Widow Waltz – which reinforced that the more conventional approach to ballroom dance was still popular as well. The Castles had a huge influence on social dance and theatrical dance during the 1910s. While their influence on social dance on the musical theatre stage of their time was enormous and while their legacy continues even today, the actual time of their partnership was actually rather brief. They come to fame in Paris in 1911 and ended with Vernon’s death in 1918 at the age of 30. Within those seven years, they rose to become the face of ballroom dance here and in Europe. They performed and popularized many Ragtime dances. They added their own take on popular dances of their day, like the Tango, the Hesitation Waltz, the Maxixe, and the Fox Trot. They created what was to become their signature dance, the Castle Walk. In their dance manual, Modern Dancing, Vernon described this dance. First of all, walk as I have already explained in the One Step. Now, raise yourself up slightly on your toes at each step, with the legs a trifle stiff, and breeze along happily and easily, and you know all there is to know about the Castle Walk. To turn a corner you do not turn your partner round, but keep walking her backward in the same direction, leaning over slightly-­just enough to make a graceful turn and keep the balance well-a little like a bicycle rounding a corner. If you like, instead of walking along in a straight line, after you have rounded your corner, you can continue in the same slanting position, which will naturally cause you to go round in a circle. Now continue, and get your circle smaller and smaller until you are walking around almost in one spot, and then straighten up and start off down the room again. It sounds silly and is silly. That is the explanation of its popularity!76 This description by Vernon reflects the casual nonchalance with which he approached social dance. He was not a trained dancer, but he was a natural mover. And, it was that grace with which he moved that caught a sense of the idealized confidence that his peers wanted for themselves. In addition, Vernon and Irene loved to dance with each other. There was a real and genuine joy that emanated from them and it was palpable to all who witnessed them dancing together. That quality is infectious, not only to one’s peers on the social dance floor, but also to a musical theatre audience that sees the dancing on the stage and walks out of the theatre feeling like “I can do that!” The admiration for this couple was important for social reasons as well. Irene was reflecting in her life choices and public image a

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“modern woman” who would come of age in the 1920s following the passage of the nineteenth amendment giving women the right to vote. The joy that they expressed as they moved across the stage on the dance floor reflected an aspiration that the changing roles for the “new woman” could be accommodated by that of the “new man.” While the ideal was far from reality, dance on the musical theatre stage and on the concert stage, often expresses aspirations to be strived for rather than the disappointments of reality. With the help of their socialite friend and business partner, Elizabeth Marbury, they opened their own dance studio, the Castle House, as well as several cabarets including the famous, Castles in the Air. They had their own Castle House Orchestra led by the incomparable and talented jazz musician, James Reese Europe. Irene in her own right was a one-woman fashion trendsetter. When she bopped her hair, people took notice and imitated her and as a result it became the trademark for the 1920s flapper. There were Castle recordings, clothes, books, articles, and other paraphernalia. They were able to capitalize on their commercial and artistic appeal at the same time. Through the efforts of their agent, Elizabeth Marbury, they were able to build an image that captured the essence of the 1910s for those coming of age at that time. While their biographer makes an excellent case that the Castles were themselves “the personification of ragtime,”77 their contribution came at a price, particularly when one considers the watering down of the Africanist aesthetic inherent in the Ragtime dances themselves. Their “whitening” of these dances to make them more palatable for the middle-class audiences they appealed to meant that; “They moved the form away from the African improvisational tradition to a European codified technique.”78 This “taming” of the dances that came out of the African-American experience may have been an inevitable transition on the Broadway stage from the blatantly racist interpretations in the minstrel and early vaudeville period to the maturation of musical theatre dance that was to take place in the musicals of the 1920s.

Musical Theatre Dance in Perspective As Ragtime dances became popular on the dance floor, they would be inserted into musicals, even musicals that were already running. Americans, and their European counterparts, particularly in England and France, were “dance crazy.” It was as if a tsunami of pent-up energy and creativity had been let loose all at once. This sense of an oncoming confrontation with the Modern was reflected not only in the popular music and dance of the period but also in other art forms as well. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, published in 1895, was a premonition of a future that was quickly coming upon them. Even as Gilbert and Sullivan’s last comic operetta, The Grand Duke, was being performed in 1896, signally the close of a long-standing Victorian Era,79 four years later Sigmund Freud would publish The Interpretation of Dreams, which would signal a revolution in the visual and performing arts throughout the twentieth century. Chekhov’s The Sea Gull in 1896 not only instigated the establishment

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of the Moscow Art Theatre with Konstantin Stanislavski as its acknowledged head but also spurned an overthrow in how acting was conceived for the modern stage. In the visual arts, Picasso’s paints “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907 and Matisse creates “The Dance” in 1909 and consequently the visual arts are forever changed. In 1913, it was the “Armory Show” that introduced Postimpressionism and Cubism to a New York audience and in architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright was changing the fundamentals of how to think about our urban landscape and our domestic living arrangements. New art forms were making an impact and finding audiences as well. From 1905 to 1917, photographer and curator Alfred Stieglitz ran his Fifth Avenue 291, the most prestigious art gallery of its time. Through his indefatigable efforts, he was able to present the work of fellow photographers and thereby create a fine arts perspective on the artwork of this still new technology. He also advanced the best in avant-garde art, including that of his wife, Georgia O’Keefe. Along with photography, film was quickly becoming the popular art form of choice for Americans in the cities and small towns. Films by Charles Chaplin, Cecil B de Mille, D.W. Griffith, and many others took quick advantage of the commercial opportunities available with this technology. What the stock theatre companies and touring companies were able to do throughout the nineteenth century, the film industry was able to accomplish within one generation. By 1912, over 5,000,000 Americans were attending the cinema on a daily basis.80 Dance was not left out in this revolutionary way of thinking about the visual and performing arts. As a matter of fact, in many ways, it was on the vanguard of change. While Americans and Europeans sought more opportunities to dance in new ways that reflected the changing social mores, they were seeing that reflected not only on the popular stages of musical theatre, operetta, vaudeville, and revue but also on their concert stages as well. From the end of the Romantic Period to the opening decade of the twentieth century, ballet, while still popular with the musical theatre audience, fell into an artistic decline reflected in cliché production styles and techniques defined more for its tricks than any true artistic expression. That is, until the Russians came to the West. In 1909, impresario Serge Diaghilev brought the Ballet Russe, a troupe of Russian ballet dancers to Paris. The West had not seen ballet like this before. It was dynamic. It was technically beyond anything they could even have been imagined. Men shared the spotlight with women. Classical ballet could share the stage with new ballets that pushed the envelope of Modernism. Dancers, like Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Serge Lifar among a host of others, created an excitement in their audiences for classically trained dancers performing in a Modernist style. Audiences could see the best of the nineteenth-century choreographies in the work of Marius Petipa as well as the emerging new aesthetic defined in the dances of Michel Fokine and Leonine Massine. Scenography for these ballets employed the talents of Léon Bakst, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and many other major early twentieth-century painters and designers. The music was no less remarkable.

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The range of style extended from the beautifully delicate compositions of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to the strident and jazz like rhythms of Igor Stravinsky works. Diaghilev’s famous saying – “Astonish Me!” – could be taken as the overarching aesthetic for the company, even if it presented some work that was too avantgarde for some members of the audience. The Diaghilev Ballet Russe became the “must see” cultural event of the 1910s. For example, the premiere of the Stravinsky composed and Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed Le Sacre du Printemps caused a near riot on its opening night in May 29, 1913. The combination of discordant harmonies and complex rhythms combined with the harsh percussive and Modernist movement vocabulary of the choreography created a viscerally startling performance that precipitated a negative response by many members of the audience. Nonetheless, this Russian ballet troupe held the imagination of Paris and the West, until the death of Diaghilev in 1929. Modern ballet was being created in Europe and would soon hit the shores of the United States to create not only an Americanized version of ballet that would have international implications but would also find its way to the center of musical theatre choreography and vocabulary.

Solo Dance Artists Ballet was not the only concert dance form that had an impact on musical theatre dance. Emerging from a coalition of influences from the work of François Delsarte and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze to the renewed interest in the “classical” dance of the Greeks and aesthetic dancing, there developed a kind of concert dance that was heavily dependent on solo women artists challenging the limitation of theatre dance and struggling to define dance as a fine art. Self-expression and exploration of dance’s potential as a theatre art independent of its association with opera, operetta, or musical comedy would drive this kind of dance innovation. The pioneers in this field found it equally appropriate to perform in private salons or parties or on the concert stage as it was to perform in vaudeville, revues, and music halls. To their credit, they helped to lead musical theatre dance into areas of experimentation in form and vocabulary and to extend the notion of the female dancer beyond that of social dance partner, risqué cancans, or leg shows, ballet and minstrel dances like hoofing and cakewalking. There were many examples of women dancers who took this path and among them were Maud Allan, Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis. While much of their work was performed in Europe, each had many imitators who brought their dances and their ideas back to the American stage. In addition, just as with specific dances, like the waltz and the cancan or with performers like the Castles, there was a fluid give and take between the musical theatre stages in Europe, particularly in England and France, and those of the United States. That was certainly the case here with the solo dance artists. Maud Allan was born in Canada but raised in San Francisco. She left her family in 1895 to study music and the piano in Berlin. While she was there, her

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brother Theo was accused of committing “the crime of the century;” that is, the murder of two young women. After a long much publicized trial and the eventual failure to obtain an appeal from the United States Supreme Court, he was hanged on January 7, 1898. At his request, his sister was encouraged to continue her studies and not to return home. She did but unfortunately, her talent in music was not enough to warrant a career as a concert pianist. While on a visit to Italy, she had an experience that completely changed the trajectory of her life. While visiting a gallery in Florence, she came upon Botticelli’s Primavera. She wrote in her autobiography, “… as I stood before it, entranced by the rhythm and the flowing lines of the dancing graces, all my indefinite longings and vague inspirations crystallized (sic) into a distinct idea. Art is a method of expression, the expression of feelings and thoughts through beautiful movements, shapes and sounds. To try to express in movement the emotions and thoughts stirred by melody, beautiful pictures and sculpture had become my ambition.”81 Allan’s response mirrored that of her contemporary, Isadora Duncan, who, when she left San Francisco, brought reproductions of this painting with her and hung them up wherever she went. While living in New York in the 1890s, Isadora created dances inspired by this painting, including La Primavera that her biographer, Ann Daly, states continued to be a part of her repertoire well into 1909. This was “a painting that had been ‘done into dance.’ Duncan enacted a number of the figures in the painting, including Venus’s compelling enigmatic gesture, but it was Flora’s costume that she chose to copy. …. Gauzy anklelength dress, painted with flowers and ringed with blossoms at the neck and head ….”82 Daly further makes the observation that this painting brought together Greek culture and Nature in ways that resonated with Isadora. She writes: “It suggested to Duncan ways of translating the private freedom she felt as a child frolicking au naturel on the beach into a public discourse: Greek gods and goddesses, she discovered, were forces of nature, and depicted as such in painting. Why not do the same in dance?”83 What was so visceral for Duncan was immediately apparent to Allan as well and she was willing to put herself on the line for her inspired work. There is a famous story about the time when she was chastised by Count Zichy of Hungary for her public performance and she responded that it took a great deal of courage to perform for strangers in a darkened theatre. He flippantly replied that she makes it sound like the same kind of courage it would take to dance in a lion’s cage. She challenged them and “the upshot was that Maud, ‘robed as Primavera,’ arrive at the appointed time and, before Count Zichy and his cronies, entered and immediately began to dance in the lions’ cage into which ran, shortly after, ‘two little cubs, gaboling and playing like a pair of kittens …;”84 He paid the 10,000-mark wager, which she promptly donated to a hospital. Such was the power of the inspiration incurred from this painting and her commitment to dance. Botticelli’s Primavera resonated with each of these dancers in the ways that allowed each to resurrect dance from classical perspective

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that did not rely on the ballet vocabulary. Each sought a justification to explore movement anew. They also were attracted to the sense of liberation and opportunity that women felt on the cusp of a new century when social restrictions were being loosened, when higher education was opening up and when artistic venues allowed for a freedom of expression that was unprecedented. At the age of 30, Allan left pursuing a concert pianist career for life as an aesthetic dancer. With no formal training but with the encouragement of friends, particularly that of Marcel Remy, fellow bohemian and composer for her most famous dance, The Vision of Salome, Maud Allan became, at least for a few short years, an international star as the Salome dancer. After an inauspicious beginning when critics described her inaugural performances in 1903 with the following: “Her feet-Miss Allan dances barefoot like Miss Duncan-don’t always obey the dancer’s intentions”85 or even five year later, when she had achieved international recognition, a critic would write that Allan is the kind of dancer who is “more mime than dancer and is less convincing in the ‘virtuosity of her whirling legs’ than in the forcefulness of her uncommonly refined gesturing.”86 She did not let the criticism dissuade her. She continued to work, to refine, and to present her “mood settings,”87 her “renditions,”88 her dances wherever and whenever she could. Throughout her apprenticeship and beyond, she was continually compared to Loie Fuller, who many critics regarded as too commercial to be taken seriously, and Isadora Duncan, who many regarded as the gold standard for the emerging new modern dance style. While Allan initially presented her dance, The Vision of Salome, in Vienna in 1906, it wasn’t until it was picked up by Alfred Butt and presented at the Palace Theatre in London in 1908 that her version of this femme fatale reached international standing. Butt was the Sol Hurok of the London stage and was recognized for presenting major artists to the London audiences of his time, including musical theatre dancers, Fred and Adele Astaire, and Russian ballet star, Anna Pavlova. What this venue provided for Allan was recognition, fame, and money. This 20-minute dance was two years in the making and she was able to combine a sexual allure that was perceived more as art than low-class entertainment. One account describes her dance in the following terms. Swaying like a witch with yearning hands and arms that plead, Miss Allan is such a delicious embodiment of lust that she might win forgiveness with the sins of such wonderful flesh. As Herod catches the fire, so Salome dances even as a Bacchante, twisting her body like a silver snake eager for its prey, panting hot with passion, the fires of her eyes scorching like a living furnace …89 With this formula, Allan was able to capitalize on an appeal to the erotic that passed as artistic aspiration. This was not like the leg shows of the ballet girls, nor those who populated the burlesque. She was at the right place at the right time. In this dance and in some of the other dances in her repertoire, Adams was able

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to define a common thread that would be used by her peers and imitators alike. Historian Judith Walkowitz characterized it this way. What we see is “a solitary, autonomous, unfettered, mobile, weighted, and scantily clad female body whose movements delineated emotional interiority, shifting states of consciousness, and autoeroticism.”90 Her popularity was brief – less than two years – but it was the summit of an accumulated time when feminism meets the aesthetic in a mutually recognized appeal. The brashness of the cancan gave way to the pretensions of artistic representation of the sensual. While this brand of the dancing female body would enjoy a brief period on the musical theatre stage, it would lay the foundation for what would happen later in a Fosse and post-Fosse musical theatre dance world. According to Walkowitz, Maud Allan, and particularly her Salome dance which was a part of a much larger “dance revolution,” helped to contribute to an increasingly strong sense of cosmopolitanism both here and in Europe that was re-gendered since it was “traditionally coded as masculine, and rendered it a cultural practice widely available to women.”91 Allen was a part of a much larger social, political, and artistic change in which women were not only attending the performing arts in larger numbers but were also taking a lead in how they wished to be portrayed on stage. The character of Salome was used and abused throughout the fin de siècle period and yet she provides an excellent vehicle for the solo woman artist who wished to “take stage” and to define how that should be done on her own terms. Though mentioned briefly in the Biblical accounts, the figure of Salome was catapulted to a high stature during this period for several reasons. Certainly, the notorious account of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, written in 1891 spawned an interest in this story among many of his fellow avant-garde artists and his detractors alike. It simply tells the story of Salome dancing before her stepfather Herod at a dinner party and, when he asks her to tell him what she would like from him as a way to express his appreciation, she asks, at the behest of her mother Herodias, for the head of John the Baptist. Herod reluctantly agrees. The playwright does not describe the dance at the center of the play but he simply writes: “Salome dances the dance of the seven veils.”92 After its initial ban when none other than Sarah Bernhardt was to have played the title role, the production history of the play was constantly challenged by factions who felt that it was blasphemous and overtly erotic. While it was published in 1894 with its now famous drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, it did not receive a full production until 1896, when it was presented at the Theatre de la Comedie Parisenne and directed by Aurelien-Marie Lugne. Unfortunately, Wilde was imprisoned at the time having been convicted of sodomy. He would never see his play performed. Richard Strauss was intrigued by Wilde’s play and wrote his operatic version of the play, which had its premiere in Germany in 1905. It, too, enjoyed a precarious production history and, when it premiered in New York on January 22, 1907, on the directive of J. P. Morgan, it was forced to close immediately afterward. It would reopen later at the Manhattan Opera House with Mary Garden singing and

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dancing the role and under the professional eye of Oscar Hammerstein in 1909 to a successful run – one that took it on tour in the United States and abroad. What Wilde was able to do was to transform Salome from simply an object of male desire to a woman with her own sense of agency. Former New York City ballet dancer, Toni Bentley, describes how Salome is both misogynistic and feminist at the same time. She writes: “With the separation of a proscenium, a woman, while remaining in her usual role of object, could enact a paradoxical transition: she became the author of her own objectification, and the dark anonymous audience becomes her object.”93 It seems that Wilde was able to give Salome words, Strauss music and Allan and her imitators a moving, dancing body. Her influence on American musical theatre stage was not direct but indirect. She toured the United States in 1910 but, by all accounts, it was not successfully received “primarily because by that time the ‘fad’ for aesthetic dancing-and, more specifically, for ‘Salomania,’ as the New York Times so aptly labeled a dance style that had attracted over 400 hundred performers-had run its course. Ironically, Maud’s sensational success in London, because it spawned so many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic, precluded her own success in the United States.”94 If Allan created the Salome for the artistically pretentious, there were others who directed their interpretation to other audiences. One of those was Ashea Wabe, known as “Little Egypt,” who embodied the workingman’s Salome. She started her career as an Egyptian “hootchy-kootchy” dancer at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. With her extraordinary success at the popular Olympia Vaudeville Theatre, she, too, generated hootchy-kootchy imitators of all kinds. Others, included Daisy Peterkin, also known as Mlle. Dazie, “performed Salome in a skit based on Aubrey Beardsley’s designs”95 in the inaugural Follies of 1907 produced by Florenz Ziegfeld at the Jardin de Paris in New York. With her success, she quickly opened a school to teach others how to do their own Salome dances and thereby “glutting the aisles of American variety theaters with half-naked young women dancing with a mute, papier-mâché head.”96 Of course, the most well-known Maud Allan imitator was Gertrude Hoffman, who was sent by producer Hammerstein to London to study Allan’s Salome and bring it back to the States. She “premiered her Allan take-off, set to Strauss’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,’ in New York on 9 July 1908 and was so successful that she toured the country with it for twenty-five weeks.”97 This was an experienced dancer, rehearsal director, and choreographer. Like Duncan and Allan, she, too, was from San Francisco and, by the time she was fifteen, she had established her professional credentials in the American theatre as an excellent comedienne vaudevillian dancer who could mimic such well-known personalities of the dance such as George M. Cohan, Eddie Foy, Anna Held, and Ruth St. Denis. She would follow her performing career by forming the Gertrude Hoffman Dancers, who enjoyed considerable success in the 1920s musical. Dance critic and historian Elizabeth Kendall writes that, while Hoffman’s Salome had “begun as an imitation, became the first coherent dance creation since Isadora

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Duncan had left the country in 1900 and Ruth St. Denis in 1906.”98 Kendall asserts that Hoffman set in motion a second wave of Salome dancers that insinuated themselves on to the Broadway stage and into every small town in America that had a stage that could accommodate touring shows. This “indicated to the whole country that the forces of Art and Sin had conquered Broadway and were claiming the future.”99 There were literally hundreds of imitators who capitalized on the Salomania phenomenon. One of Maude Allan’s peers was a solo artist who also took on the Salome figure but who also contributed in many more ways to the recognition of women as choreographers of their own dances. That was Loie Fuller. She originally presented a more chaste version of Salome in 1895 but it was not well received. Later, in 1907, she returned to the Salome figure and presented La Tragedie de Salome at the Theatre des Arts in Paris. Though she was forty-five at the time, this version was far more successful in large measure because of the sophistication of the scenographic elements of the production for which she was well known. Her feather costume comprised 4,500 real feathers, and she used 650 lamps and fifteen projectors to turn the entire stage into a sea of blood when John is decapitated. This was a Salome light show worthy of a World’s Fair- and there, among the amperes, was the shadow of Loie Fuller, naked.100 Fuller was born in Fullersburg, Illinois, and grew up in Chicago. While Fuller served her apprenticeship in the theatre as an actress and vaudevillian, and even did a stint with Buffalo Bill, it was her role in the musical A Trip to Chinatown in 1892 that set her on her path to dance. Just before that, while in England, she served as a replacement for actress-dancer, Lettie Lind, in Carmen Up to Date, a musical burlesque send-up of Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen. In that role, Fuller learned to perform as a skirt dancer, a form of dance “conceived by John D’Auban,”101 choreographer for many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas and the one who developed this style of dance with ballerina Kate Vaughan, who built her reputation on it. In a subsequent acting role in Quack, M.D., she was able to make the connection between movement, costume, and lighting. In her “Serpentine Dance,” which was inserted into act two of A Trip to Chinatown, she was able to put all of these elements together. This inauspicious performance was important because it demonstrated that American audiences were open to looking at dance that was not simply about personality and novelty. Dance historian, Camille Hardy, concludes her assessment of Fuller’s contribution to this show by observing that “the production, a milestone in itself, set an important precedent. Broadway was willing-albeit modestly and with gainful objectives-to support experimental dancing.”102 To better appreciate Fuller’s contribution to theatrical dance, we need to look more carefully at the “Serpentine Dance.” Choreographer and historian Ann Cooper Albright reiterates what Jody Sperling, a Loie Fuller imitator, had to say about Fuller’s contribution. “Hitherto, the skirt dance consisted of the graceful

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manipulation of a full skirt by the dancer. By adding substantially more fabric to the width of the skirt and introducing novel lighting effects, Fuller shifted the skirt dancer’s emphasis from displays of pretty refinement or leg-revealing suggestion, instead concentrating on creating abstract visual imagery.”103 In addition to the associations with the skirt dancing vogue, dance historian Sally Somner reminds us that this “Serpentine Dance” also had its early associations with the Nautch Dance, which was very popular particularly on the vaudeville stage. Like the Salome dance, there was an element of eroticism associated with the performance of this dance as well.104 In Fuller’s hands, the sensuality married abstract liquid imagery and replaced the titillating eroticism of its predecessor. There is no doubt that the incorporation of electrical lighting effects into the choreographic conception of the dance was as important as the movement choices for the dancing body in a costume designed for movement. In that respect, she is often credited as a precursor to the dance-architectural experiments of the Bauhaus or those of American modern dance choreographer and visual and aural artist, Alwin Nikolais. Her previous experience in the theatre gave her the scenographic tools to think about dance as a modern theatre art. Consequently, the imagery created in her work was associated with the Modern Art concept popularized by American artist Ben Shahn’s notion of “form is the shape of content,” or specifically in her case, Art Noveau. In addition to the use of props and specifically designed costuming and incorporating the new technology of electrical lighting into her conception and execution of dance, there is another element that would have a serious impact on musical theatre choreography in the coming decades and that has to do with the notion of dance as representation and dance as presentation. The Romantic ballet offered American audiences an opportunity to see dance as a part of an easily understood narrative, which they could follow. The popularity of everything from the burlesque cancan dancers to the ballroom social dance couples allowed them to view dance as a display of the alacrity of the performer to audience connection – immediate, exciting, and direct. With Fuller, there was a sense of mystery, illusion, and poetic imagery that required the audience to engage in a very different way. Biographer Felicia McCarren articulates this when she points out that with Fuller’s dance, the question is more “how the dancer manages such anonymity when she is not hiding behind the character, costume, or speeches of conventional drama; how she manages to make herself an object though she is also, ultimately, the only subject of her dance. Fuller is both signifier and signified.”105 This tension between the dancer as personality, or the dancer as actor, versus the notion of dancer as “simply” a dancer, even when “hidden” among material and light and shadow, will be a conundrum that will not be easily resolved on the musical theatre stage until the development in the late 1960s when the concept musical takes center stage. Nonetheless, Fuller was able to lead the way with her artistic vision as a solo artist.106 Fuller’s contribution to the development of theatrical dance was not just scenographic. Her movement vocabulary required that her audience look “not

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to the poses at the end of a musical phrase, but rather to the motion between phrases, not to the decorative arrangement of arms and legs, but to the sequence of movement from center to periphery and back again.”107 This focus on looking at the dance being created by the dancer was further accented by the insistence of Fuller to turn the house lights down or out while she performed. This certainly helped to reinforce the illusory aspects of her dance performance but it was also meant to help the audience to look at the human body and/or the shapes being created and dissolved by the moving human body on its own terms. This suggested that dance was not just about the outer expressivity of the dancers as performer but also that dance can have an interiority that can awaken an imaginative response from the audience. This idea is expressed in the writings on the dance of Loie Fuller by Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé when he compares the language of poetry and the language of dance as striving toward the capacity “to make present without representing.”108 This aspiration is all the more intriguing when you consider that Fuller often performed successfully in vaudeville, music halls, and musical theatre venues. Her dances were able to appeal to a wide audience and to a coterie audience looking to define a Modern art aesthetic for dance. While much of her career was spent in Europe, she continued to have a strong influence on the development to dance on the musical theatre stage as well as the concert modern dance idiom. If Maud Allan represents one end of the female solo artist movement that favors the typical musical theatre audience of her day and if Isadora Duncan favors the effete, then Loie Fuller and contemporary, Ruth St. Denis, are located somewhere in between. Fuller came at solo dance performance from a theatrical perspective – movement as a form of theatre. St. Denis, while theatrically trained, placed her emphasis on the female dancing form. She often situated her dances within highly theatricalized settings, paying particular attention to costume, scenography, and the use of supernumeraries when on tour. Whatever the dance, she was center stage, she was the focus, and she was the queen. However, she was able to bridge the gap between popular and fine art and to that extent she helped to point the direction for the development of musical theatre dance and musical theatre choreography that was beginning to take shape in the 1920s. One aspect of St. Denis’ appeal had to do with the broad public interest in all things exotic. Into that category of interest, you would find exhibits, lectures, and performances of any culture that might be described as Oriental, which translated meant anything Middle Eastern or Asian. From the 1890s on, American business interests were expanding across the globe and it was becoming competitive with other major world industrial powers such as Great Britain, France, and other primarily European countries. American artists traveled abroad to study and to learn about these cultures and then they would bring them back in a form that was often sanitized for an American audience. Sometimes, what was brought back was blatantly racist and derogatory. Nonetheless, for artists like Ruth St. Denis, there was a genuine curiosity, one that was to continue throughout her life. In her case, it was motivated out of a spiritual quest to better

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understand how the perennial questions are addressed in various religious traditions, specifically in terms of their ritualistic expression, and there was a strong sense that the feminine experience could best be expressed in a modern dance idiom informed by age-old traditions. St. Denis knew how to frame her dances within theatrical contexts that made them appealing to a wide range of audience. Born in 1879, St. Denis studied and performed various forms of dance and movement studies from an early age. These included social dance forms, skirt dancing, ballet with Marie Bonfonti, and, of course, Delsarte acting. By the time she was 13, she was dancing in vaudeville and dime museums. Soon, she was performing and traveling with Broadway producer and director David Belasco’s productions in New York and on tour in the United States and Europe. Her life and career took a drastic turn while she was on tour in Buffalo, New York. Her biographer Suzanne Shelton recounts this now famous story. On a spring evening in 1904 the DuBarry company arrived in Buffalo, and Ruthie set out with Pat in search of a boardinghouse. Passing by a local drugstore, Ruthie spied in its window a poster advertising Egyptian Deities cigarettes. It depicted the goddess Isis, solemn and bare-breasted, seated beneath an imposing stone Doorway inscribed ‘No better Turkish cigarette can be made.’ Riveted by the poster, Ruthie suddenly knew “that my destiny as a dancer had sprung alive in that moment. I would become a rhythmic and impersonal instrument of spiritual revelation rather than a personal actress of comedy or tragedy. I had never before known such an inward shock of rapture.”109 She purchased that poster and hung it up in whatever location she was at until she finished the tour of the play, Dubarry. Along the way, she visited museums and libraries to learn as much as she could about Egypt. She shared her vision with her family for a new form of theatre that placed dance at its center. Though her family had limited means, they believed in her vision and supported her two-year efforts to realize her dream. She took odd jobs, all the while developing a wide interest in dances based on the dance traditions of India, Japan, Egypt, and other Eastern and Mideastern cultures. She performed small sections of her dances in whatever venue she could find. As dance critic Walter Terry notes, “she continued her researches and while she rehearsed her ‘scenes’-she thought of them as ‘scenes’ rather than ‘dances’…,”110 she was developing a kind of dance-drama. She was not thinking in terms of choreography as we understand it today. At last, with her performance of several of her dance-dramas, The Incense, The Cobras and Radha on March 22, 1906, at the Hudson Theater, she was recognized by members of the public and critics for creating a new form of theatre. While most were attracted to the scenography and to her dancing, many often left confused about the intended content; nonetheless, there were others who understood that they were witnessing the birth of a different way of conceiving theatre dance. For St. Denis, theatre and dance were essential complements to each other.

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To get a sense of what this kind of danced theatre looked like at the time, let’s look at a description of Radha. The scene is a temple. A light falls on the immobile, bronze figure of Radha. It is dim and blue, and the figure takes on a mystic, half-real, halfdream semblance of life. Priests are present. They move through ancient rituals as they seek guidance from the figure of the goddess. Suddenly, a miracle occurs. Their faith rewards them, for the eyelids of the statue move, then a breath causes the bronze bosom to move, and the statue comes alive and steps down from the dais to teach, in dance, the pathway to heaven, to nirvana. The five senses are the key. Sight is satisfied by the luster or pearls, the jewels which bedeck her body, and she devours their luminosities. Hearing is caressed by the tinkle of bells which she wears on her fingers, and she leans into the beauty of sound. She selects garlands of flowers and presses them against the contours of her body, feels the loveliness of her limbs, lies on the floor, prone, and slowly brings her fingers up to her lips. With the sense of taste, she raises a bowl to her lips and drinks. The heady wine arouses her, and she almost reels in ecstasy. And then the total desires of the senses take over, and in a wildly sensual climax, the goddess, dressed in gold and with a great golden skirt swirling about her, gives herself up to the ‘Delirium of the Senses’ in a dizzying dance spinning ecstasy. Spent, she falls to the floor. Next, she discards the golden skirt of earthly value, and returns to the dais where she assumes again the posture of serenity and chastity. She has delivered, perhaps in fact, perchance in vision, her message of the Renunciation of the Senses. This is her sermon, told in exotic terms but none the less profound.111 With that, St. Denis moved from vaudevillian dancer to concert dancer. She did not abandon Broadway and vaudeville but she changed her aspiration from that of being an actress or singer to a dance artist who utilized all of the tools available to her to create dance-dramas that were accessible to a wide public. While she had been approached by the famous German director Max Rinehardt to perform the role of Salome in his version of Wilde’s play, she declined. Instead, she went on to create “her goddess cycle: Radha, the Hindu Shiva; Egypta, the Egyptian Isis; Ishtar of the Seven Gates, the Babylonian goddess; and the White Madonna, the Christian Virgin.”112 While her work at this time is often described as music visualizations, I think danced drama is more accurate. She started with a concept or idea that she researched and then pulled together elements of costume, props, scenery, and lighting with movement and gesture to create and evoke a world, often a world that had exotic appeal to her audiences. In some ways, she anticipated the conceptual choreographic approach of later choreographers like Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune. In addition, rather than relying on a preconceived vocabulary like ballet or jazz, she searched for a movement vocabulary that would reflect the subject of her danced dramas.

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Musical Theatre Dance is About to Grow Up The 1890s into the early 1900s were a time of transition for the musical theatre and the musical theatre dance. Spectacle for its own sake was losing its hold on the audience’s imagination. They had become “jaded with more color than content.”113 For the first time, the lyric theatre was beginning to define itself according to genre, particularly the operetta, the musical comedy, and the revue. The French, English, and Viennese comic operas and operettas vied for the attention of the musical theatre audience. The effects of Ragtime were felt on the vaudeville circuit.114 Musical theatre dance was infused with the spin-off from the dwindling minstrel show. Tap dance and soft shoe combined with classical ballet, acrobatics, and a variety of “specialty” acts and “ethnic” dance, into a disquieting collage of movement styles and vocabulary. By 1910, the newspapers had declared that America was “dance crazy.” This flux in the musical theatre created both imaginative and trite productions. What it lacked were focus and direction. Stage managers/directors, like Max Freeman, R. H. Burnside, and Herbert Gresham, were experimenting with structure and form. What the new century was going to usher in were various means by which to pull together this rich tapestry of dance forms that competed for the attention of the musical theatre audience. One of those means had to do with the structuring of the dance itself in some coherent fashion. That would begin in the period before World War I with the popularity of precision dance. The second would have to do with the person who actually organized and choreographed the dances on the musical theatre stage. That function was often left to the Dance Director and it, too, had its origin just before the war while coming to fruition soon afterward.

Notes 1 The most direct influence of the French approach to ballet technique and choreography can best be summarized in the work of French dancer, choreographer, and theoretician, Jean Georges Noverre of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth-­century America. In his influential book, Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760), he advocated for dance technique to be performed in the service of the narrative or the theme of the ballet rather than simply to show off the virtuosity of the individual performer. The Italian approach to ballet during the mid-nineteenth-century America might be reflected in the work of the Italian choreographer, dancer, and writer, Carlo Blasis. While he is most famous today for solidifying the ballet position known “Attitude,” which was derived from Giovanni da Bologna’s famous Renaissance sculptural piece, Mercury, it is his codification of ballet technique which he summarized in his book, Code of Terpsichore (1830) that had the most direct influence on how ballet was performed at the time. He was able to combine a poetic sensibility with his scientific understanding of the human body in a way that strengthened the technical basis for ballet performance. Please see the following article for an excellent analysis of his work and its impact on nineteenth-century ballet. “The Code of Terpsichore The Dance Theory of Carlo Blasis: Mechanics as the Matrix of Grace” by Gabriele Brandstetter in Topoi (2005). 2 George Freedley, “The Black Crook and The White Fawn,” Chronicle of American Dance from the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1948), p. 65.

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3 Ibid., p. 69. 4 David Ewen, Complete Book of the American Musical Theater (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1970), p. 46. 5 Freedley, The Black Crook and The White Fawn, 1948, pp. 69–79. 6 Bradley Rodgers, “Redressing the Black Crook: The Dancing Tableau of Melodrama,” Modern Drama, Vol 55, No 4, Winter 2012, p. 496. 7 New York Times, September 13, 1866, See: https://www.documentcloud.org/ documents/786052-83458904, accessed April 29, 2022. 8 Franklin Walker and Ezra Dance, Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown Being Heretofore Uncollected Sketches written by Mark Twain (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knoff, 1940), pp. 85–86. 9 Ibid., p. 71. 10 International Encyclopedia of Dance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), Vol 1, p. 461. 11 Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York, NY: Random House 2010), p. 227. 12 Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Marie Bonfonti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1984), p. 51. 13 Ibid., Barker, p. 51. 14 Ewen, Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre, pp. 46–47. 15 George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Faun,” Chronicles of the American Dance from the Shakers to Martha Graham, edited by Paul Magriel (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1948), p. 79. 16 As quoted in Laurilyn J. Harris, “Extravaganza at Niblo’s Garden: The Black Crook, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 13:1 (Summer 1985), p. 7. 17 Kristina Gintautiene, The Black Crook: Ballet in the Gilded Age (1866–1876), PhD dissertation, New York University, 1984, p. 175. 18 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 23. 19 Bordman, p. 23. It is interesting to note that much of his early life, even the date of birth, is similar to another musical theatre star performer of the next century – George M. Cohan. 20 Bordman, p. 24. 21 Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1984), p. 80. 22 Laurence Senelick, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox 1825–1877 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1999), p. 140. 23 Senelick, p. 141. 24 George Ellington, “Ballet Girls in New York a Century Ago,” Dance Magazine, January 1964, p. 32. 25 Barzel, “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” p. 67. 26 Ellington, “Ballet Girls in New York a Century Ago,” p. 32. 27 Barzel, “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” pp. 65–70. 28 Ellington, “Ballet Girls in New York a Century Ago,” p. 33. 29 Ibid., Barber, p. 230. 30 Jennifer A. Rieger has written an excellent work, “The Minuet: Neoclassicism in Motion,” on this topic. MFA Thesis, York University, May 1987. John Weaver was the preeminent dance theorist of the eighteenth century. Through his many writings, including An Essay towards an History of Dancing in 1712 and Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing in 1721, as well in the librettos for his choreographies, Weaver advocated for a strong narrative structure and clear characterization in his pantomimic ballets. He consciously tried to establish quality theatricality for the ballet so that it might stand on its own merits independent of operatic or burlesque pantomimes. 31 From Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America assessed on July 22, 2022 at: http:// xroads.virginia.edu/˜HYPER/DETOC/ch1_11.htm

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32 Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. ( Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co., Inc., Pub., 2009), p. 34. 33 Ibid., p. 44. 34 David Price. Cancan! (London: Madison, NJ: Cygnus Arts, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), p. 25. 35 It is interesting to note that Offenbach’s first musical offering in the United States was La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, which contributed significantly, according to theatre historian Gerald Bordman, to popularizing the opera bouffe form in this country. This musical was performed at the same time as The Black Crook, opening on April 12, 1867, at the Theatre des Varieties and playing for a significant 156 performances. 36 Price, pp. 110–111. 37 Price, p. 115. 38 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre A Chronicle, Second Edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 25. 39 Leonide Massine created a wonderful ballet based on the music of Offenbach and his cancan called Gaite Parisienne. It is still revived today and it creates a vivid sense of the cancan dance within the context of this time period. 40 Kurt Ganzl. Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 86. 41 Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 122. 42 Ibid., p. 123. 43 Allen describes that burlesque dancers performed exaggerated imitations of the Negro dances popular on the minstrel stage. 44 Ibid., Allen., p. 137. 45 William Dean Howells, “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly, May, 1869, p. 614. 46 Ibid., Ganzl, p. 107. 47 Ibid., Allen, p. 18. 48 Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 25. 49 Jack Anderson, The World of Modern Dance: Art Without Borders (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 15. 50 Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, 1979), p. 23. 51 Anderson, p. 16. 52 Bordman, p. 47. What is also interesting to note is that during this same theatre season, what Gilbert and Sullivan were doing for musical literacy with music and words, Harrigan and Hart were doing for comedy in the comic burlesque series The Mulligan Guard series and the bizarre Kiralfy’s were doing with spectacle in such productions as their Enchantment (1879). American musical theatre was being inundated with an incredible amount of musical theatre lyric and performance talent at this time. 53 John Sands’ article on Dance Arrangements based on the Savoy operas is an excellent look at the relationship between dance arrangement and the dance itself. It can be accessed at: http://diamond.boisestate.edu/gas/articles/arrangements/dance_music. html. 54 Wikipedia on John D’Auban at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D%27Auban, accessed July 21, 2011. 55 Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today, Second Revised Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1988), p. 92. 56 Emery, p. 208. 57 International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol 2, p. 25. 58 Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 35–36.

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59 Knowles, p. 61. 60 Knowles, p. 67. This author also points out that in the following year, Smith appeared in the musical Over the River, which some claim introduced the grizzly bear. 61 This video clip includes ragtime dancing from the 1997 musical, Ragtime. See: https:// youtu.be/WDFzSB7qNOk 62 Stearns, p. 96. 63 International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol 1, p. 95. 64 Knowles, p. 83. 65 Knowles, p. 83. 66 George-Graves, p. 61. 67 Nadine George-Graves, “Just Like Being at the Zoo: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance,” Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig (Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 58. 68 Ibid. Stearns, p. 129. 69 George-Graves, p. 59. 70 Stearns, p. 98. 71 Stearns, p. 98–99. 72 Stearns, pp. 127–128. 73 There is a YouTube video, “Dances of the Ragtime Era 1910-1920, Excerpt from How To Dance Through Time, Vol II, that illustrates examples of how certain dances during this period were danced. See: https://youtu.be/LCkkOqXUaZo 74 Eve Golden, Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), p. 60. 75 Ibid., George-Graves, p. 68. 76 Golden, p. 99. 77 Golden, p. 3. 78 George-Graves, p. 64. This article is an excellent critique of ragtime dances from a cultural studies perspective. 79 It is interesting to consider the incredible changes that occurred on the musical theatre stages of the United States and England during the 63-year period of Victorian Era from 1837 to 1901 with that of the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth from 1952 to 2022. 80 Bernard Grun. The Time Tables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book, 1982), p. 465. 81 Felix Cherniavsky, Maud Allan: Part 1: The Early Years, 1873–1903, Dance Chronicle, Vol 6, 1983, p. 26. 82 Ann Daly, Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 93. This is the single best source for the legacy of Isadora Duncan’s dance on American culture. 83 Daly, p. 92. 84 Cherniavsky, p. 214. 85 Felix Cherniavsky, “Maud Allan: Part I: The Early Years, 1873–1903,”1983, Dance Chronicle, Vol 6, p. 30. 86 Felix Cherniavsky, “Maud Allen Part III: Two Years of Triumph 1908–1909,” 1983, Dance Chronicle, Vol 7, No 2, p. 119. 87 Cherniavsky, “Maud Allen Part II: First Steps to a Dancing Career, 1904–1907, 1983, Dance Chronicle, Vol 6 No 3, p. 205. 88 Cherniavsky, p. 205, from Part II. 89 Felix Cherniavsky, “Maud Allen, Part III: Two Years of Triumph, 1908–1909,” 1984, Dance Chronicle, Vol 7, No 2, p. 122. 90 Judith R. Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918,” accessed July 30, 2011 at: http://www.historycooperative. org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi from The American Historical Review, Vol 108, Issue 2, Paragraph 6.

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91 Judith R. Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918,” accessed July 30, 2011 at: http://www. historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi from The American Historical Review, Vol 108, Issue 2, Paragraph 2. 92 The first documented dance of the seven veils is probably in reference to that of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, who descends to the underworld to retrieve her husband-son Tammuz. As she approached each of the seven gates through the underworld, she must disrobe until she stood naked at the end of her journey. For an excellent cultural critique of the Salome figure in European and American culture, I suggest that the reader look at Something in the Way She Moves by Wendy Buonaventura. 93 Tony Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 34. 94 Cherniavsky, pp. 192-193 in Part 2. 95 Bentley, p. 39. 96 Bentley, p. 39. 97 Bentley, p. 39. 98 Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 76. 99 Kendall, p. 76. 100 Bentley, p. 44. 101 Camille Hardy, “Art Dancing on Broadway: Loie Fuller in A Trip to Chinatown,” in Musical Theatre in American: Papers and Proceedings of the Musical Theatre in America, 1984, pp. 123–132. 102 Hardy, p. 131. 103 Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), p. 21. There have been several book length studies about Loie Fuller and her dance over the past several years. For those who are themselves choreographers and at the same time interested in dance history, this is the best. Albright combines historical documentation and dance theory with the pragmatic experience of constructing and performing some of the dances of Loie Fuller all in one volume. 104 Sally R. Sommer, “The Stage Apprenticeship of Loie Fuller,” Dancescope, Fall Winter 1977–1978, Vol 12, No.3, p. 30. 105 “Felicia McCarren, Stephane Mallarme, Loie Fuller, and the Theater of Femininity,” Bodies of the Text, edited by Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 218-219. 106 Loie Fuller sued Minnie Renwood Bemis for copyright infringement when she attempted to “steal” the Serpentine Dance. While Fuller lost at court, it is helpful to read about his case not only for its legal standing but also as a way in which to better understand how dance was viewed at that time. Essentially, she lost because her dance did not engage in theatrical conventions associated more with theatre than with dance; that is, it did not contain recognizable character, plot, or emotional development. Many have written on this topic including Ann Cooper Albright and Richard Nelson Current and Marcia Ewing Current, among others. 107 Albright, p. 32. 108 Albright, p. 43. 109 Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981), p. 46. 110 Walter Terry, Miss Ruth: The “More Living Life” of Ruth St. Denis (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1969), p. 44. 111 Terry, pp. 55–56. 112 Bentley, p. 46. 113 Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, p. 118. 114 Ibid., pp. 118–119.

4 1914–1929 The Dance Director: Front and Center

Introduction: An Overview of the Period The brief 15 years described in this chapter was a compact yet intense period of change and self-definition for America. In many ways, it was the culmination of many factors that began with the Reconstruction and extended through the Gilded Age into the Fin de siècle period that preceded World War I. New advances in technology quickly becoming a major player in the world of business, social reforms for labor, advancement in children’s education and the position of women, and the effects of moving from a predominately agrarian society to an urban economy, accommodating one of the largest influx of immigrants in American history along with the dramatic shift of African-Americans moving to Northern cities – all of this created a country that was marred by labor unrest and racial and ethnic violence, financial insecurity, political alliances, and a dramatic new way of thinking of itself. Sandwiched between a destructive world war and a devastating economic depression, there was a strong sense that time was moving fast and only promised to move faster yet. Many would be left behind while those on top did not necessarily feel the confidence expected from “having made it.” The challenges were many but so were the opportunities. With the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, in Sarajevo, by Bosnian Serb assassins, World War I was soon declared. While many in America had serious reservations about the United States entering into a war not of their making, repeated German submarine attacks on American vessels, and the impact of discovering the Zimmerman Telegram, forced the United States to declare its entry in April of 1917. The war itself would not come to an end until November 11, 1918. Musical theatre during this time, and dance in particular, reflected a kind of back and forth between old-style operetta with its waltz dance forms and DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-5

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musical comedy that tugged at aging Cakewalks and new-style fox trots and ragtime dances. Many Americans wanted a divertissement that would stave off the impending problems caused by the outbreak of this war and the news of what was going on in Russia with its initial revolution in 1905 that would culminate in the Communist takeover in 1917. In addition to the dances previously discussed, the tango enjoyed wide popular appeal as well. Certainly, the success of dancer L’Argentina in The Land of Joy in 1917, when she “stopped the show” with a heel dance, a table dance, and an impassioned tango, reflected a genuine interest by some in the audience for the continuing appeal of the Apache dance craze. The impassioned back and forth of an embrace and a flinging of one’s partner out and away from oneself reflected more than the amorous desires of some audience members. The Castles, notwithstanding, dance could also express conflict, unresolved desire, and violent ambiguity and the tango may have done that for some. One of the biggest hits in 1914 was the Vernon and Irene Castle vehicle, Watch Your Step, in which composer Irving Berlin emphasized the appeal of ragtime music with Vernon Castle singing and dancing “I’m A Dancing Teacher Now.” He was even able to offer up a waltz with a rag feel to it, “What is Love?” Of course, the show ended with a production number choreographed to “The Syncopated Walk.” Ragtime meets the upper crust with the Castles and unleashes a pent-up demand for dance that reflected the youthful exuberance of an era – an era so well documented in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Between 1914 and 1929, Americans were weaning themselves away from a European-dominated view of musical theatre to one that was a diversified, new, brash, and energetic indigenous form. Americans had experienced the first ever World War in which nearly ten million soldiers lost their lives as well as seven million civilians. We concluded this short 15-year period with the Great Depression marred with a persistent 25 percent unemployment rate and with a great social disruption and political uncertainty that did not get fully resolved until the early 1940s with the United States entrance into World War II. Nonetheless, between these two cataclysmic events, Americans did experience incredible highs as well. This was the period when Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and Henry Ford mass produced thousands of cars for American consumption. Women cut their hair, raised their hemlines, and wore cloche hats and flapper dresses. They could excel in sports, take on jobs that they had previously been denied, and could even smoke and drink. Alcohol became the marijuana of this generation1 and marathon dancing drove people literally to exhaustion. While the eighteenth amendment created prohibition, the nineteenth amendment secured women the right to vote. Film began to make serious inroads into popular entertainment taking audiences away from the touring shows and vaudeville. With the death of Scott Joplin in 1917, ragtime drew to a close to be soon replaced by a syncopated, hip and sexy new sound – jazz. The now-dated and truncated ballet spectacles were being challenged by a slicker more contemporary

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and avant-garde ballet from Russia represented by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and two of its dashing superstars – Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky. In the wake of the strides made by Georg II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and his acting ensemble, the actor-manager system of the early ninetieth century was being replaced by stage managers now turned directors. Right in the heart of this period – 1923 – New York witnessed the revolutionary acting methodology of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre at the Jolson Theater and Eleonora Duse, one of Martha Graham’s favorite actresses, known for performing in plays written by the controversial playwright Henrik Ibsen was on her last tour in the United States, and the landmark American expressionistic play, The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, was produced. The New Stagecraft was represented by the ideas of Gordon Craig and the stage designs of Norman Bel Geddes, Lee Simonson and Robert Edmond Jones, among others. The prestigious Theatre Arts Magazine published the best criticism and thoughtful essays on theatre and dance. Stylized movement was explored in avant-garde productions with choreographer Michio Ito being a major part of that effort. The crossover between theatre and dance was intentional – from the establishment of curriculum in schools and conservatories to what was explored on the stage from the most commercial to the most avant-garde. The role of an individual being solely responsible for coordinating all of the artistic and technical choices available to successfully produce a musical theatre event was becoming even more important. In terms of dance, this developed into that of the Dance Director. Sometimes, the stakes were so high that producers, like Charles Dillingham and Flo Ziegfeld, broadened some of the responsibilities of the director to include those of the producer. Social dance continued to have an impact on the dance of the 1920s but there was also a strong appeal to develop the role of the chorus as a featured act as well as its continuing role as a framing device for specialty acts and star performers. There were also harbingers of things to come in dance as evidenced by the development of aesthetic or art dance, best represented in the performances of strong, creative, women solo dancer-choreographers, from Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan to Loie Fuller and Ruth St. Denis.

Precision Dance While large, extravagant ballet productions, and Amazon marches were popular on the American musical theatre stage since 1866 and many of them incorporated aspects of precision work in some of their choreography, Modern Precision Dance2 for musical theatre and revue stage productions has its origins with one man – John Tiller. Born in 1851 in Manchester, England, into a wealthy cotton manufacturing family, he demonstrated early in his career that he had a unique combination of strong business savvy, meticulous administrative skills, and a love for music and theatre.3 Even as he was growing his large family of ten children, he managed a dual career in his family’s business and in the theatre. While

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directing at the Comedy Theatre Manchester, he also began teaching dance to children. Later, he was invited to bring in some of his pupils, which he billed as The Four Little Sunbeams, to perform in a pantomime, Robinson Crusoe, in Liverpool. Precision, articulation, and simultaneous movement were drilled into his young protégés. All the work they put in paid off. His choreography and performance won a great deal of praise. Soon afterward, he and his wife Jennie were able to open the Tiller School in Manchester and develop the Tiller Group dancers who quickly were seen in musicals, revues, and pantomimes throughout England. Soon afterward, he was able to substitute the cotton business for dance direction. Tiller capitalized on an aesthetic that reflected the times. There was marching and tapping and kicking and all of it was rehearsed so that the 16-member chorus was clean, precise, and attractive. He and his wife not only worked with the girls in rehearsals and performances but they managed their private lives as well. No drinking. No smoking. There were captains for each troupe who reported back to the Tillers when they were on tour and the Tillers in turn kept the parents informed. There was a paternalism to their relationship with the girls that was motivated by a genuine concern for their well-being. Tiller loved the theatre but he was very aware of the sordid reputation that ballet and musical theatre performers had in the public’s mind. The drilling of the dance routines mimicked his notion that discipline and commitment to a group of people larger than oneself was to be valued. He was not about creating stars. He was about creating a chorus line that would itself be the star. Some of the productions that featured the Tiller Girls included the Nifties of 1923, the Zieg feld Follies of 1924, and the 1927 production of The Three Musketeers. If imitation is a form of flattery, it is obvious that the Tiller formula resonated not only in England but also in Paris, New York, and around the world. There were precision line choruses at the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge in Paris. American choreographers, like Gertrude Hoffman, Allan K. Foster, and Albertina Rasch, incorporated precision dance into their work on the Broadway stage. Even though this kind of dance waned by the 1930s, it continues to be a part of the New York scene today as evidenced by the continuing popularity of the Radio City Rockettes and, in many communities across the United States, in the form of Dance Drill Teams and competitive dancing. Precision dance was an attractive style of dance throughout much of the first part of the twentieth century for several reasons. To begin with, its popularity coincides with the rise of Tin Pan Alley. This was both a place and a metaphor. Located around West 28th street, this was a location for songwriters and music publishers. Dominated by the desire to capture the contemporary, these artists and business people feverishly defined and redefined what it sounded like to be novel, current, “with it.” Many of these composers were able to interpolate into currently running musicals and revues the songs that they wrote. Some of those composers included Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, George M Cohan and many, many others.

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This idea of inserting unrelated songs and wholesale dance routines into productions was not unusual. For revues and long-running musical comedies, this was a way by which to keep the show fresh and to encourage audiences to come back to see the new and revised version of the production. Many Americans were enthralled with the advantages of mass production and the technology that made it possible. The efficiency, the quickness with which this product could be manufactured and distributed, the desire to adapt to the rising numbers of Americans and immigrants moving into our cities by providing mass transport, efficient housing, and a smorgasbord of entertainment that was designed to meld all of this diversity into one commercial entity created a desire for songs that captured the youthful energy of the time and for dances that appealed to different aspects of that same young, ambitious, and carefree generation. The precision drill-­ dancing chorus reflected these values back to their audiences in exciting and interesting ways. The mannequin-like manipulation of the female body in choruses of sixteen look alike attractive young performers who could quickly reconfigure the stage space in kaleidoscopic effect was not only theatrically appealing but it also validated that the benefits of mass production, mass media, and mass consumption could ideally be had by any of the audience members. Machines, typewriters, fast-paced transportation, and communication media were standardizing the American way of life. The rise in public relations was bringing the same values into the domesticated way in which Americans designed their homes, planned their cities, bought and preserved their food, shopped in department stores, read newspapers and short stories, and sought their entertainment. Clearly, technology as performance is not restricted to our current obsession with all things digital; it has been a part of America’s fascination with material culture and its built-in obsolescence since the nineteenth century. When the precision line chorus climaxed their routines with a march to downstage center, all in a line, and started to kick in unison, with each kick getting higher and higher, they did not stop until the audience was applauding and they were able to “stop the show.” This was the age of the performer. The precision line dancer was the perfect metaphor for America’s delight in the combination of mechanics and mathematics with that of movement and energy. Technology brought this into our homes; entertainment fed our imaginative hopes and desires. But, what about our individuality? What about romance? For that, we need to re-examine ballroom and social dancing. The constant appeal of keeping up with “the new dance sensation” encouraged ballroom dance artists like the Castles and many others to find, discover, or create new ballroom dances that could jump back and forth from the stage to the ballroom. Keeping up with these dances created an overwhelming sense of being current, being with it, being hip. In addition, there was room in many of these dances to accommodate for some improvisation and that encouraged a stronger sense of individual expression. Precision dance addressed the other side of that equation. The long lines of either 16 or 24 dancers tapping simultaneously, or marching in long lines and forming geometric shapes, or mirroring each other

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using many props and costuming paraphernalia appealed to that sense of seeing on stage how many Americans were working during the days. These social dances were about how Americans played when the sun went down and romance and passion were in the air. This was musical theatre designed to show off new music, new dances, and new stagecraft. Until we conscientiously started to think about the musical’s narrative ability and its potential to combine fine art aspiration with popular art’s ability to communicate to a wide audience, then we seem to have reserved this time during and after World War I as a “wild and crazy” time to make discoveries, experiment, and explore in small increments, what the potential would be for each of the elements that make up musical theatre production. The generally loosely tied story lines of the musical comedies and operettas of the period and the flexibility of the revue format and the vaudeville stage provided a lot of room for this kind of approach to popular staged entertainment. In terms of dance, there were some artists who were able to begin the process of looking at the big picture. They were beginning to see dance and movement not so much as individually stand-alone segments of entertainment strung together in willy-nilly fashion but as units that affect how the audience experiences the totality of the evening’s entertainment.

The Charleston and Its Sister Forms What the waltz had been to the later part of the nineteenth century and the cakewalk for those during the Fin de siècle, the Charleston was for the 1920s jazz age. It was a dance that caught the spirit of the times in terms of its improvisational exuberance. Just before it became “the dance” for the decade, it was preceded by a dance that had some of the same sassiness but was far simpler in its execution. That dance was the Shimmy. The Shimmy has its origins with a French chemise also called a “shimmy.” There is the story that “at one performance, singer Gilda Gray, who restlessly twisted and slithered while she performed, was asked what she was doing. She glibly shot back, ‘Shaking my shimmy!’ and launched a new dance, the Shimmy. Performed in a tasseled or fringed dress it looked like the height of abandon: everything appeared to be going in every direction at the same time, and it became Miss Gray’s signature piece.”4 With Ms. Gray’s performance in the Zieg feld Follies of 1922, this dance, which consisted mainly in the shaking of the shoulders, became a national phenomenon. Of course, the origins of the dance were contested by none other than Mae West, who claimed to have introduced it a production of Sometime in 1919. We do know that it was a dance that was largely responsible for the success of another musical offering that year; the Rudolf Friml composed show, Tumble In, choreographed by the prolific choreographer, Bert French. According to the Stearns, the Shimmy has its beginnings even earlier in the African-American experience in dances like the Shake and the Shim-Me-Sha-Wobble, and others.

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“Twenties dance reveled consciously and unconsciously in the general alertness about how the body looked, and its new separation into parts. The most popular vernacular dance forms of the day, the Charleston and the black bottom, were both variations on the whole person as one long stick, with hinges, and potentially flyaway arms and perhaps legs.”5 This was a dance about limbs going every which way – drumsticks on speed. To some, it crossed the line with flappers “flicking her knees and closed with peekaboo insouciance.”6 The dance itself is quite simple. Dance historian, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, describes it succinctly when she writes that it has “at least these three steps: the spiraling cross kick (step L and kick R, step R and kick L, while swinging arms in opposition), the jaybird or knee-in as a pose or side step, and the instep touch/knee raise to the side. Most Charlestoners adds shoulder and hip-shaking movements from the Shimmy.” 7 Its origin is clearly imbedded in the African-American experience but how this particular dance took shape and eventually became the signature dance for the decade is unclear. Some give credit to Ned Wayburn and his work in the Zieg feld Follies of 1923, others to David Bennett and still others to Julian Mitchell for his staging of “That Charleston Dance” in The Chocolate Dandies in 1924. Most agree that its popularity has to do with the success of the African-American musical, Runnin’Wild in 1923, which presented the song “The Charleston” by James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack which was introduced by Elizabeth Welsh and danced by the entire chorus with an exuberance that included an infectious hand clapping and percussive footwork. While the song introduced the dance to the Broadway audience, the dance itself had been seen before in other shows but had not caught on and, according to Johnson, it had its origins in the dance halls of Charleston, South Carolina, and with the migration of blacks from the South to Harlem in the early part of the twentieth century, along came the dance.8 Some dance historians take the dance all the way back to the Ashanti people’s ancestor dances.9 There are many reasons for trying to understand why this dance did not go the way of so many – here today, gone tomorrow. Jazz dance historians Jean and Marshall Stearns point out that it had a strong masculine appeal, one that superseded that of other social dances of the time and therefore, it was seen as appropriate for a “real man” to perform.10 This was important because in many people’s eyes, the male chorus in revues and musical comedies were often viewed as effeminate. This was in sharp contrast to the operettas, like The Student Prince (1924) and Desert Song (1926) in which there were choruses of men who did strong military marching songs. At the same time, there was a flirtatious and liberating quality when performed by young women. It was a dance that could easily be performed as a solo, as a part of a duet, or in a large chorus line. It could be made more complicated by adding ballroom styling or tap dance steps. It could also be an excellent way to “bring down the house” by performing the dance to raucous music and encouraging the audience to clap, stamp their feet, or get up and dance as well. While the most popular, the Charleston wasn’t the only dance that caught the imagination of the musical theatre audience at that time.

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The incomparable Ann Pennington introduced the Black Bottom on the Broadway stage in the George White Scandals of 1926. Ray Henderson, B. G. DeSylva, and Lew Brown wrote the song itself and the lyrics may well strike a contemporary ear with an odd combination of racism and hip-hop sensibility. Some of them are: Oh, the black bottom of the Swanee river. Sometimes like to shake and shiveer, But it makes the darkies feel like struttin’ around, I watchin’! They found a way to imitate it; I know they exaggerate it, But I wish you could the dance they found! Every high brown gal and her bon-bon buddy Go down where the tracks are muddy To do a step that soon will be renowned! They call it black bottom, a new twister, Sure got ‘em, oh sister! They clap their hands and do a raggedy trot, it’s hot! Old fellows with lumbago, With high yellers, away they go! They jump right in and give it all they’ve got! They say that when the river bottom covered with ooze, Start in to squirm, Couples dance, here’s the movement they use, Just like a worm! Black bottom, A new rhythm, When you spot’ em, You go with ‘em! And do that black bottom all the day long!11 In addition to this tune, they also wrote a now standard piece entitled “The Birth of the Blues.” At 424 performances, this production was one of the most successful for the 1926–1927 season. It is interesting to note that this dance, which is closer to a melancholic blues feel, was “jazzed up” for this revue. Jazz dance historian Constance Valis Hill identifies four simple movements that actually make up this dance – a syncopated walk, a slow shuffle, a side step, and the Camel Walk.12 Cohan-Stratyner adds that this dance also included “the stance, in what is now known as ‘jazz hands’ with knees bent outward.”13Of course, there is the prerequisite clapping of hands and slapping of the buttocks to add additional percussion to the movement. What started as a slow sensual bluesy piece became an extrovertish tah-dah kind of dance. Originally, this dance was

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a transition or breakaway dance, like Truckin’ which “was a variation that was a pigeon-toes rhythmic shuffle or slight, quick hopping. The index finger pointed up and shook in double time in the direction the dancer was moving (usually four shuffles to each diagonal), while the shoulders rose and fell.”14 But when put into the hands of many white dance directors, there seems to have been an attitude that “one-size-fits-all” approach to African-American social dance forms and that the presentational mode was the preferred way of performing the dance. Keep it upbeat. Keep it optimistic. Keep it crowd-pleasing. According to jazz dance historians, the Stearns, there was a different version of how the dance came to be included in this edition of the George White Scandals of 1926. Some suggested that African-American dancer, Freddie Taylor, taught the dance to Ann Pennington; others said that George White had purchased the dance after he saw it performed in a Harlem show two years earlier. The last major breakout dance for this decade was the Varsity Drag introduced by Zelma O’Neil in the musical, Good News, in 1927. The music for this show and its title song, “Varsity Drag,” was written by the same trio that had created the “Black Bottom”; however, the only lyrics in the song that say anything about how to do this dance are: “down on your heels, up on your toes.” That’s it. Nonetheless, this is a musical best described by musical theatre historian Gerald Bordman as “the quintessential musical comedy of the ‘era of wonderful nonsense.’ The decade’s jazz sounds, its assertive, explosive beat, its sophomoric high jinks were joyously mirrored in a hilarious, melody-packed evening.”15 With ushers wearing college jerseys and the orchestra pit shouting out college cheers, this was a musical that captured the carefree youthful theme of college sans serious cares. Choreographer Bobby Connolly was able to get his dancers to exude an infectious, optimistic energy that helped the show achieve its astonishing success. This is all the more incredible when you also understand that this was the same theatre season when equally accomplished choreographer, Sammy Lee, choreographed the historically important show, Showboat (1927), at the Ziegfeld Theatre. One musical is the ultimate in divertissement and the other confronts head-on issues of racism and miscegenation. One provides the most current popular Charleston-like dance with the Varsity Drag and the second does a 50-year retrospective of dance from the waltz to ragtime. One closes out the decade with a social dance that becomes the last Charleston-like fad dance of the decade and the second points to dance as a way in which to visually support a life span of experiences for its principal characters. The first brings the dominance of social dance as a primary characteristic of musical theatre dance to a close and the second suggests condensing how that phenomenon could be used to summarize America’s past two generations. The first has a 557-performance run and the second matches it with 572. The audience at the time was not monolithic. It wanted to play and it was willing to take a serious look at aspects of American culture that could be harsh, difficult, and painful. It would take some time but it would be a premonition of the changing status of dance on the musical theatre stage in the coming decades.

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Vaudeville and Dance In vaudeville, this was reflected in the very structure of the programming. For example, vaudeville bills, which might be structured around a five, seven, or nine act schedule, are laid out around an act or performer, who is considered the headliner. There would also be at least two featured players, one of which, “must provide the chief comedy note of the bill, and that act is always scheduled to appear next to the last turn,16 which was the prized position on the bill. The opening and closing acts for the bill were filled with dumb acts, which would include performers whose acts would not be interrupted by patrons entering or leaving the theatre. These might include animal acts, mimes, circus acts, acrobatics, and so on. Flash acts often preceded or followed intermission. These were acts that often required more scenographic elements. This is where a condensed version of a popular musical comedy might be performed. Song and dance acts or dance routines by hoofers might appear as the second act following the opening or the second act after intermission. These acts usually required the audience’s attention and were often performed by recognized family acts like the Four Cohans or the Seven Little Foys, or duets like Vernon and Irene Castle, or Fred and Adele Astaire, or recognized solo artists like Bill Robinson or Eddie Cantor. Vaudeville provided dancers and their fellow artists with the opportunity to develop their 7–12 minutes of material and to perfect how to communicate from one audience after another. Song and dance man, James Cagney, claims that “vaudeville … has had the greatest single effect on my life, both as an individual and as a performer.”17 Like many vaudevillian, repetition, trial and error, “stealing from the best,” and persistence informed their shared ethics. Cagney reminiscence will resonate with many dancers when he recalls that “… I studied them all and tried to take away from each something of the skill and persistence that characterized their best work. Frequently in coming into a new theatre to rehearse, I’d work out with the acrobats. I was simply trying to learn something about all phrases of the business, even though it was the dancing that principally intrigued me.”18 This was a venue for beginners as well as the most accomplished. Some of the kinds of dancing one would see on the vaudeville stage could include acrobatics, prop dances, eccentric dance, ballet and toe dance, soft shoe and tap dance, ballroom, comic routines, aesthetic and modern, and many others. Whatever type of dance, “a successful vaudeville dance act had to be masterfully paced; graced with an imaginative or at least interesting entrance; a rousing, applause-assured exit; and no dead time in between.”19 This formula was geared toward capturing and keeping the audience’s attention for the duration of your act or routine. It did not ask a lot from the audience but it did require a lot from the point of view of the performer. Every moment on stage needed to be invested with a specific intent. There was no room for letting down your guard. This keen attention to performance did not mean that all acts or routines needed to be the same. There could be and were a wide variety of dance styles that the audience found interesting.

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One of the most popular dance acts in vaudeville and musical theatre was Bill “Bo Jangles” Robinson. While he is most likely remembered today for his film roles in the Shirley Temple films and in the famous African-American film, Stormy Weather, most of his career was spent performing in vaudeville and on the musical theatre stage. He got his start as part of a comedy team known as Cooper and Robinson in which they would perform comedic skits and conclude with a dance. We are so used to seeing Robinson formally dressed when he is dancing but when he was a part of this vaudevillian team, his persona was that of a fool costumed in “a clown outfit with a tutu worn over long pants and a derby perched atop his head.”20 What really established him as the “World’s Greatest Dancer” was his success with his “Stair Dance,” which he premiered as a solo artist at the Palace Theatre in New York in 1918. Since Robinson was breaking with the “two colored” rule, that is, that African-American performers could not perform solo but had to have a least one partner on stage with them, he was taking a risk. He had been successful on the vaudeville circuit for over 15 years and now he was attempting to establish his own credibility as a dancer. There is the long-standing story Robinson “discovered” the stair dance while performing when he recognized some friends in the audience. On the spur of the moment, he decided to dance down the steps that connected the stage to the house to greet them. The audience loved it and he decided to develop and incorporate the stairs into his act. While he was not necessarily the first to use stairs in their act, he was certainly the first to make it his signature dance. He even attempted to get it copyrighted but to no avail.21 Tap dance historian Constance Valis Hill is precise when she observes that “what distinguished his from all others was its perfection in sound and movement. Tapping a different rhythm for each step, each one reverberating a different pitch, he transformed an awkward gimmick-driven prop into a rhythmically symphonic drum dance.”22 What distinguished his style of tap dance was that he performed high on his toes and gave it what the next generation would call, “swing.” On a different aesthetic note, there were dancers like Denishawn. In the years following World War I, there was no more popular “art” dance act than those performed by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and their Denishawn Company. They were able to make the new emerging modern “art” dance accessible for a wide audience because they understood and took advantage of whatever theatrical devices were available. Their dances were often couched within a narrative that the audience could quickly identify with and they wrapped that narrative and its accompanying movement inside a colorful and elaborate scenographic environment. This was a dance company that saw dance within the widest position lens – informed by Delsarte and Dalcroze, inspired by dance in myth and world cultures, open to dance as popular and fine art – and viewed dance as a part of a much larger liberal arts and humanities tradition and unafraid to explore new mediums like the burgeoning film industry. Within a short period of time, the Denishawn Company included many of the twentieth century’s most significant dance artists, including Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, Jack Cole, and the

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incomparable Martha Graham. Denishawn joined other “class acts” like Anna Pavlova and Sarah Bernhardt and others who performed in vaudeville. They brought a kind of cachet to this form of the theatre and they did not feel that their fine art accomplishments should close them off from wide public exposure. Among the works that Denishawn performed on the vaudeville circuit included a Ted Shawn choreographed ballet, Xochitl, which featured Martha Graham and among her partners, Charles Weidman. According to former Denishawn dancer, Jane Sherman, this was the first modern American dance based on an AztecToltec theme. This was an elaborate dance-drama with scenery and costumes designed by Mexican artist Francisco Cornejo with original music by Homer Grunn, who is reputed to have been descended from Aztec ancestors. It is the story of the brutal and violent attempted seduction of Xochitl by the Emperor of the Aztec nation. The title means “flower” and was danced by Martha Graham. There is the requisite erotic scarf dance performed by Graham that inflames the Emperor’s desires. Before he has a chance to rape her, he is interrupted by Xochitl’s knife-wielding father. She stops her father and pleads for the Emperor’s life. This causes a change of heart and he offers to marry her, thereby making her the Empress for the Toltec people. She accepts. There is a dance of celebration and, as they ascend to the throne together, the curtain closes.23 This melodramatic dance appealed to an audience interested in exotic cultures and who enjoyed a dash of sensuality with their “cultured” artistic expression. It was a dance that stayed in their repertoire throughout the 1920s. In addition to these elaborate dance-dramas, the real star of Denishawn was Ruth St. Denis herself and she would contribute what she called “musical visualizations” to the repertoire. Two of the most interesting were the solo dances often performed together – Brahms Waltz and Lieberstraum. These were dances that had a melancholic and meditative quality about them that arrested the audiences’ attention. The first was performed to “Brahms’s Waltz No 15, Op. 29” and her biographer, Suzanne Shelton, describes its unadorned quality as “a simple sequence of swooping waltz steps and walking steps on half-toe with dramatic undertones.”24 As she finished this dance, center stage, the music would cross-fade to Liszt’s “Liebestraum” with a shift in lighting from pink to blue. A starkly intimate dance of unrequited love, this dance often moved her audiences to tears. “In three-quarters profile, with her head inclined over one ear, she danced a question-and-answer pattern of search and rejection.”25 Without the drama of Graham’s signature piece, Lamentations, St. Denis was able with gesture, breath, and simplified movement to stir comparable emotional responses from her audience. Not all vaudevillian dance needed to be “in your face” to be warmly received by the audience. Sometimes, they simply needed to be invited into a genuine and honest display of a more intimate nature. It helped, of course, that this was performed by a beautiful and self-processed woman confident in herself and comfortable with her body. But, at the same time, this was the time when “art dance” in the guise of personalities, like Maud Allan, Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Gertrude Hoffman, Mati Hari, and many others, were introducing audience of all kinds

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to women as agents for their own choreography and performance and who were carving out an as yet undefined “modern” dance that spoke to a generation that was acknowledging women’s political rights and their varied forms of feminist expression in other areas of cultural, social, and artistic life.

The Dance Director Emerges: Julian Mitchell and Ned Wayburn In musical comedy and revue, the structuring of the dances was more complicated. In vaudeville, each act was responsible for its own material and the producer for that venue placed the act within the context of the other acts that had been booked for that particular run. It had more to do with the type of material the performers were doing rather than the material itself. In musical comedy and revues, the dances also had to serve certain functions, such as a comic break, or a novel props dance, or a huge production number, or a framing device for the stars, but they also had to have some connection to the plot of a musical comedy, even if tenuous, or the theme in a revue. The responsibility for that fell on the Dance Director. It was his job to help locate the talent, to choreograph the in-house chorines for the show, to coordinate multiple dance choruses from other agencies or dance schools, and to provide segue for scene changes or transitions from one number to another. They often worked closely with the set and costume designers to come up with interesting and new ways of designing the sets and costumes so they could be incorporated into the choreography of the dances. They also had to stay current with the latest dance fads and with the changing fashions of their day. Dance was oftentimes a vehicle for the audience to identify with what was the chic way to dress or present oneself in a social setting. Finally, there were also the arbiters of taste. Some were scrupulous about who should perform and how they should be presented; others took license with the prevailing “devil may care” attitude that followed in the wake of World War I and created dances that were risqué and salacious. Many tried to negotiate between the two and became a barometer for staying just a few steps ahead of where the public wanted to go in terms of its interests and tolerance. The emerging middle class was seeking to define itself and the musical provided it with a medium in which they could see their dreams and aspirations played out on the stage. America no longer wanted to mimic its European counterparts. They knew more of what they didn’t want; but, not so much what they did what. That is where the improvisational nature of the jazz idiom and the loosely constructed musical theatre forms allowed for a more easy-going opportunity for Americans to define who they were and what they wanted to be. It would take a Depression and another World War to complete this process but, in the meantime, Dance Directors served as a conduit by which to begin to learn how to produce and coordinate musical theatre production when we finally matured in terms of our musical theatre abilities. One of the first to lead this effort was the stage manager/director/choreographer, Julian Mitchell.

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Born in 1854, Julian Mitchell began his long professional career in the musical theatre as a dancer at Niblo’s Garden. By the time of his death in 1926, he had directed and/or choreographed over 75 musicals. He began his directing career in 1884 staging Charles Hoyt’s musical farce comedies, such as A Rag Baby, A Tin Soldier, A Texas Steer, and A Trip to Chinatown. He worked on several Weber and Fields productions. By 1886, he added operetta to his credit with The Fortune Teller. Two of the most famous operettas credited to his direction were produced in the same year, 1903. They were The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland. He is also noted for the direction of many revues, including the Zieg feld Follies.26 His staging of A Rag Baby (1884) ushered in the “Age of the Stage Manager.”27 Before that, actor-managers or producer-managers staged the musical production. As the economic burden for production increased, actor and producer-­ managers began to split their responsibilities into artistic and business categories. Mitchell’s directing of A Rag Baby formalized this split and the role of the stage manager began to anticipate the role of the director.28 At first, staging was more technical than interpretive. Often, it merely involved the staging of the playwright’s written directions. In many cases, the performers were responsible for their own staging for songs and dances. By the time Mitchell began working in the operatic form; he was directing and choreographing most of the movement.29 By 1903, theatre critics were writing about his direction and choreography. … The eye is dazzled by a splendid success of marvelous stage pictures and groupings that show what a past master of stagecraft is Julian Mitchell …. They dance and march and whirl in one continual, bewildering succession of movements, dazzling attractive and immensely pleasing …. The innumerable intricate movements executed by the chorus under Mr. Mitchell’s supervision, added another large feather to the already well-plumed cap of that resourceful stage manager.30 In addition to his direction, Mitchell was recognized for his choreography, particularly in the areas of tap dance and precision dance. Julian Mitchell was the prototype for the musical theatre director/choreographer that would dominate the American musical by mid-twentieth century. All of this success is all the more astonishing when you know that, though he started off as a very successful dancer himself, by the early 1890s, he was losing his hearing. This did not discourage him. As a matter of fact, it may well have inspired him to move from performer to dance director. Writer Eve Golden observed that “Mitchell used his senses of sight and touch, taking off his shoes to ‘hear’ the beat of the music and the chorus dancers. A joke current at the time had a piece of scenery crashing to the ground, and Mitchell yelling, ‘Which one of you girls is off beat?’”31 He was prolific because of his restless imagination and because he, and his beautiful wife – the talented Bessie Clayton – were mild mannered and affable.

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In his role as choreographer, Mitchell introduced several staging techniques that influenced future musical theatre choreographers. Much of his experimentation occurred throughout his association with the Zieg feld Follies from 1907 to 1914. Mitchell was the first choreographer to “discard the English idea of the chorine as mere decoration.”32 He rejected the depersonalization of the dancer, which was very popular with choreographers who wanted to standardize all movement and make each dancer look the same. Further, he encouraged the individual personality of the dancer to come through their performance.33 His fascination for movement, color, and line encouraged him to experiment further. Musical theatre scholar, Gregory Dennhardt, illustrates this with a description of one of Mitchell’s dances in the Zieg feld Follies of 1907. … He brought his acts on and off at breakneck speed, creating a riotous collage of light, color, and motion. The production climaxed with the appearance of sixty-four Anna Held Girls dressed as drummer boys. The girls lined up across the stage and began to beat their drums. Then, they marched down a flight of stairs that connected the stage with the auditorium, paraded up the aisle across the back of the house, and back to the stage. This was revolutionary in its dissolution of the barrier between actor and audience.34 Mitchell was one of the first choreographers to break the fourth wall. Mitchell was as enthusiastic as Ziegfeld to break the mold and to find new ways in which to present the dancers by marrying innovative movement with stage technology. In one of their first collaborations on a show titled, The Parisian Model, he worked with the young mimic and dancer, Gertrude Hoffman, in a number in which she was featured “in an extraordinarily daring dance routine, in which she and 16 other girls lay down and kicked their legs in the air. On their ankles were tied large bells, which chimed with the orchestras, and the girls revolved on a special turntable in a manner that anticipated Busby Berkeley’s presentations on the screen.”35 In another production on which they collaborated, Moulin Rouge, they took advantage of Ziegfeld’s love for animals and their ability to attract as one of their stars the Danish ballerina, Adeline Genée. In one of their daring scenes, they “showed a hunter blowing his horn and a pack of hounds hurtling across the stage followed by red-coated riders on horseback. Suddenly, Genée appeared, also on horseback, at a wild gallop; then she dismounted to execute a highly erotic dance in riding boots.”36 In this particular case, showmanship is made up of one dose technical novelty, one dose erotica, and an even larger dose of humor. Later, he would also incorporate audience participation techniques into the choreography. They also wished to test the limits or probity of their audience’s sensibilities. In the same production, for example, in the title number, Parisian Model, “one by one, walking very slowly, six stately and beautiful girls walked onto the stage wearing cloaks that completely covered them from their necks to the floor.

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They stood for a moment behind some discreetly placed easels that hid them from the shoulders to the thighs. Suddenly they flung off their cloaks and showed-to the audience’s shocked amazement-naked shoulders and legs.”37 This testing of the limits of nudity in performance would become a theme not only in the collaboration between Mitchell and Ziegfeld but in other revues series as well. He exhibited a restless need to challenge convention and to innovate. In many ways, his work mirrored the times in which he lived. America during this Fin de siècle period and thereafter was becoming more and more urbane, cosmopolitan in its outlook, open to technological innovation, as well as different social ideas. Mitchell was infected with this energy and willingness to go beyond convention and this was evident in his ability to direct and choreograph in all performing mediums of his day. Mitchell focused attention on the importance of staging, choreographic designs, and establishing a strong general directorial vision for each production. He was the conduit through which the sporadic approach to the nineteenth-­ century actor-manager and/or producer-manager gave way to a more unified and conceptual methodology. Other choreographers and directors were perfecting what Mitchell introduced during the first two decades of the twentieth-­ century musical theatre but there was one who dominated the field, and that was Ned Wayburn. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1874, Ned Wayburn began his professional career as a supernumerary at the Chicago Grand Opera House in 1893. While in Chicago, he studied at the Conway Conservatory of Dramatic Art. Cohen reports that there were three teachers at the school who probably encouraged Wayburn’s interest in “directing movement on stage. Prof. C. H. Jacobsen taught ‘Classic and fancy dancing;’ Col. Th. H. Monstery taught ‘fencing and military drills’; and Mrs. Ida Simpson-Serven lectured on ‘Voice and physical culture.’” 38 Many of the principles of movement taught at the Conway Conservatory were based on a Delsartian understanding of the human body as a performative medium. In numerous interviews, Wayburn acknowledged his indebtedness to Delsarte’s theories and Cohen further observes that Wayburn utilized Delsarte’s laws of Inflection, Velocity, Attitude, Precision, and Opposition.39 Delsarte’s emphasis on purposeful gesture and on the importance of breathing informed his teaching and choreography throughout his career. Facial expression and “posing” in interesting and beautiful ways were part of an aesthetic that he shared with some of the “art” barefoot dancers of his day. The human form was inherently beautiful and he meant to make it a lifelong study to understand how that beauty could best be conveyed on the musical theatre stage. After leaving the conservatory, Wayburn entered vaudeville as a performer. In 1899, he was given his first opportunity to stage a musical entertainment entitled By the Sad Sea Waves. This was Wayburn’s first opportunity to work with a professional chorus and one of those young girls in that chorus, Gertrude Hoffman, would become a colleague of his and an established dance director in her own right.

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Throughout his theatrical career, Wayburn was responsible for directing and/ or choreographing over 70 musical theatre productions. That does not count the hundreds of other shows and prologs and the individual and group acts that he choreographed and directed. He worked with all of the greats and near greats when it came to musical theatre dance of the early twentieth century. This included: Fred and Adele Astaire, Chester Hale, Florence O’Denishawn, George M. Cohan, and many others. In 1905, he founded the Ned Wayburn Studio for Stage Dancing; in 1925, he authored a text on theatrical dance, The Art of Stage Dancing. Wayburn died on September 2, 1942.40 Like Jean-Georges Noverre, John Weaver, and August Bournonville, Wayburn directed, choreographed, performed, taught, and wrote about dance. While these predecessors focused on ballet, Wayburn focused on commercial musical theatre movement. For Wayburn, he put his emphasis on developing musical theatre dance routines. Drawing from the popularity in musical theatre from The Black Crook going forward, ballet spectacles, Amazon drills, cancan dancers, precision dance choruses, and others, he placed a strong emphasis on symmetry, line formation, group geometric shaping, and the clever use of props or costumes. Wayburn built his approach to choreography on that of his predecessors and updated these to conform to the aesthetics and technology of his day. Rather than focus on one or two productions a year, he lived at a time when musicals and revues were at their height. Once they achieved success on the Broadway stage, they were quickly moved to tour in order to make room for the next show. Novelty was king. Whatever was the latest fad in dance, fashion, or comedy was easily inserted into a production. Consequently, dance could not have a long gestation period. It had weeks, not months, to develop. Routines became the shorthand for this new fast-paced conveyer belt approach to musical theatre production. In his book, Wayburn explains the specifics of the dance routine as he saw it. The average routine consists of ten steps, one to bring you onto the stage, which is called a travelling step, eight steps in the dance proper, usually set to about 64 bars of music, or the length of two (2) choruses of a popular song, and an exit step, which is a special step designed to form a climax to the dance and provoke applause as you go off stage.41 Routines were certainly about the right steps in the right order to create the right effect. They could be rehearsed quickly and inserted into a production in an efficient and effective manner. It was about ingratiating yourself to the audience and, if you did your job well, they replied in kind, with applause. But, in addition to the steps, Wayburn drilled into his dancers that it was important to practice, practice, practice. It was also important for them to see the best of what others were doing on the stage as well. You could not develop yourself in a cocoon. The audience travelled from one show to the next and you needed to do so as well if you were going to reach your potential and be the best you were capable of

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becoming. He was fond of reminding his dancers that “you must learn to throw your personality into the dances.”42 Musical comedy dance for Wayburn was as much a science as it was an art. Using movements from what he called modern Americanized ballet, acrobatics, tap dance and soft shoe, ballroom, musical comedy dance, and others, he created a theatrical dance technique that was specific to a dancer’s role and function within a musical theatre entertainment. While there are many variations for each of these dance styles, two are particularly interesting. One is a style called “legomania” or eccentric dance. This was a kind of tap dance that incorporated acrobatic features like kicks, turns, and aerials. The second had to do with his modern Americanized ballet in which he made the audacious claim that, after a year of study with him, you could perform ballet on the stage. What is important to note is that his understanding of the ballet vocabulary “was limited to a dozen categories of steps, all of which were performed pizzicato and terre à terre quickly and sharply. The most frequently employed traveling steps were bourrées performed opened or closed, turning or moving straight in any direction. Wayburn frequently used a combination step that he called ‘point step forward’ that was really another form of bourrée. Various kinds of piqué turns were also used as a traveling step.”43 While he was able to take advantage of the popularity of ballet with this approach, he clearly honed it down to a few steps lifted from the classical ballet vocabulary and aimed for the superficial and easily recognizable movements that would be appealing on the musical theatre stage. All told, he generally worked in three kinds of dance – chorus work, individual specialty acts, and features.44 In each, clarity, precision, and uniformity guided his standardization of dance technique. Wayburn knew how to work effectively with lots of dancers and performers at the same time. One of the methods that he used had to do with how he organized the dancers. Adapting methods associated with the ballet troupe and precision chorus, he developed his own way of organizing dancers. To demonstrate the efficacy of his approach, Cohen wrote that After The Mimic World and The Midnight Sons (1909), Wayburn began to differentiate the female chorus into three to five groups based on height and to assign specific techniques to each graded dancer. The shortest women, known as ‘ponies’ were taught tap work and modern Americanized ballet; the tallest, A-dancers or ‘show girls,’ were assigned a technique which proscribed most dancing. The middle-sized groups, which could be split into two smaller classes, were the utility dancers who worked in the soft-shoe musical comedy technique. This system of differentiation was maintained for the remainder of Wayburn’s career. The hierarchies involving soloists and chorus differentiations were combined in the show that Wayburn staged for Florenz Ziegfeld. By the time that he staged the Follies of 1922, an entire cast could be placed on stage in such a way that their grades were legible to the audience.45

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Wayburn’s approach to choreography was reflected in his dance technique and in the way in which he manipulated lots of people on the stage. While processionals, military drills, and precision line dancing were his forte, he worked in other styles as well. In The Art of Stage Dancing, Wayburn exudes a genuine enthusiasm for musical theatre dance and yet, in an opening statement in chapter three, he belies an attitude that calls into question the very title of his book and sets him apart from his predecessor, Julian Mitchell. “Modern stage dancing is different from social and ballroom dancing in that it is the kind of dancing that one can commercialize.”46 While Mitchell was very aware of the business responsibilities in musical theatre production, he nevertheless continued to advocate for artistic integrity in his approach to directing and choreography. Wayburn placed the emphasis on musical theatre production as show business and the “bottom line” was not far from his primary motivation as director and choreographer. Nonetheless, his eclectic interest in movement of all kinds, including the way a costume flowed on a dancer, the varied possibilities with props, the novel scenographic possibilities made possible with the new technologies available in set and lighting design were a part of his palette. In that way, he was a Loie Fuller writ large. While she placed her emphasis on the individual solo human body, Wayburn was interested in the human form as a part of a large group with a large canvass on which to choreograph. This was most reflected in the variety of his work from the peculiar and anachronistic Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses (1903), the pantomimes like Humpty-Dumpty (1904) and The Pearl and the Pumpkin (1905), revues like The Passing Show of 1913, The Century Girl (1916), and the Hitchy-Koo of 1920 and musicals like Box O’Tricks (1918), Poor Little Ritz Girl (1920), Lady Butterfly (1923), and Smiles (1930). As prolific as Wayburn was in genre, it is his work with Ziegfeld that continues to stand out today. He collaborated with Ziegfeld on special revues like Miss 1917, and on Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, a late-night risqué revue offered to high-paying customers atop the New Amsterdam Theatre and of course on several editions of the famous Zieg feld Follies.47 His predecessor had been Julian Mitchell, who helped Ziegfeld find the formulas that would become so important to the Follies continuing success. One historian compares the difference between them with the following observation. “The staging of the early Follies had been largely the work of the brilliant Julian Mitchell with Ziegfeld more in the role of promoter, but New Wayburn, who had joined the organization in 1915, was equally talented and possibly an even better organizer. Rehearsal discipline become increasingly rigid, and Ziegfeld’s mania for perfection of detail, pacing and balance fused the myriad elements of the revue into a perfect unit.”48 While his assessment may sound harsh on Mitchell, it is important to note that he and Ziegfeld were discovering what the Follies could be and inventing it as they were going along. By the time Wayburn came into the picture, both he and Ziegfeld had over 20 years of theatre experience from which to pull from and the economic resources to give full vent to their imaginations. In addition, each man shared a vision of how they viewed women in the context of the musical. For Ziegfeld, it was about

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“glorifying the American Girl.” While his leads and specialty acts could be about mature self-possessed women, the chorus was reserved for “girls.” It was about a type, a look, a kind of arrested development that captured the female form as a shared fantasy vision before she finds a voice and steps out of the chorus to become her own person. For Wayburn, he is clear when he asserts that “the text of a musical show is woman. Woman-of all sorts of all sizes, all temperaments, all attractions-woman. The chorus girl is the principal part of this text.”49 In this regard, he shares Ziegfeld’s idea of the female in the chorus as a “girl” and allows for the lead or special act to assert herself as a woman, an individual, and he anticipates the attitude articulated over and over by the man who would completely redefine contemporary ballet and make a significant impact on musical theatre choreography – George Balanchine, who famously said: “ballet is woman.” Wayburn had perfected two strategies for incorporating dance specialty acts into his production. One was a simply insertion in which the act was simply incorporated into the scene. The second was a contrivance that was less jarring and appeared to be more seamless and that was called a montage, in which he would combine several acts together and wrap them around a show within a show format. This could accommodate a wide variety of dance specialties. Since dance of all kinds was enjoying a wide popularity with the audiences, it was not unusual to make topical references to what was current at the time. For example, the dances and personalities of the Diaghilev Ballet Russe provided lots of jest for comediennes (like Fanny Brice) and for dance directors to develop montages on Russian dancers. Wayburn did this in the Zieg feld Follies of 1916, in which the butt of the danced satire was directed at Vaslav Nijinsky in a montage called “The Blushing Ballet.” It began innocently enough with excerpts from the ballet, “Les Sylphides,” but quickly descended into a raucous satire on the ballets, “Scheherazade” and “Le Spectre de la Rose.” It included Nijinsky’s famous leap performed by eccentric dancer Don Barclay, and the African-American comedian, Bert Williams, playing Nijinsky’s Golden Slave called “Le Nègre” and concluded with Ziegfeld’s preeminent comedienne, Fanny Brice, dressed in harem pants singing an ode to Nijinsky with lines like “His gymnastical style, beat the Castles a mile” and “And I am gonski, when he does the Faunski.” One sight gag after another and the audience was left in tears. Comic dancers and dancing comedians provided Wayburn with the talent to construct a series of movement sequences that built on one another and created a series of climaxes that begged to be topped. He and Ziegfeld knew their audiences, knew their performers and knew how to take advantage of the scenographic palette available to them by some of Broadway’s best set, costume, and lighting designers of their day.50 Broad humor and extravagant staging were a part of the Wayburn-Ziegfeld collaboration but they could also narrow things down to their essence and nothing reflects this more than the development of “the Ziegfeld Walk” that became a fundamental ingredient to the success of the Ziegfeld Showgirls. Thinking in terms of moving tall, beautiful women from a tableaux vivant tradition to one informed by the applied Delsartian principles of movement and posing, Wayburn

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was able to find just the right simplicity of movement to allow for the audience to feast on the impeccable gowns and the fantastic environment created by set designer, Joseph Urban, to create a dream-like erotica that captured the imagination of the men and women alike. In Stratyner’s excellent book on Wayburn’s approach to dance, she describes the Ziegfeld Walk in the following manner. ‘The Ziegfeld Walk’ was a slow promenade down a staircase or a system of platforms at an oblique angle to the audience. The footwork was simple-a step forward with the outside foot, followed by a closing step with the inside foot. The step forward took place on the first beat of a fourcount measure, and the closing step on the third. …. When performing the ‘Ziegfeld Walk,’ the dancer angled her body in the opposite direction from her movement path.51 By moving at an oblique angle to the audience, the dancer created a series of independent “pictures” as she descended or ascended stairs or platforms, not unlike the impression created by looking at a series of photographs capturing motion by those of Eadweard J. Muybridge. Wayburn married the aesthetic aspiration of the solo modern dance artists of his time with the voyeuristic erotic public daydreams of an audience eager for fantasy and an adult escape that was sensually delightful. Jazz provided the soundscape and Wayburn with Ziegfeld provided the human female body as “motion pictured.”

1920s Dance Directors and Choreographers John Murray Anderson was one of the most eclectic and innovative dance directors who wore many hats throughout his career including designer, director, and choreographer. He followed the new stagecraft and “was the first to use draperies and draw curtains in a musical show rather than heavy scenery like wings and drops.”52 In his work with the Greenwich Village Follies, for example, he staged “ballet ballads,” like one featuring former Denishawn dancer, Marjori Peterson, in a piece inspired by Oscar Wilde’s short story, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” or the following year, there was one inspired by Indian love lyrics entitled “The Garden of Kama,” which was choreographed by Michio Itō and featured Martha Graham as the Dancing Girl.53 It is difficult to tell what parts of these kinds of dances Anderson choreographed and what parts were the responsibilities of the dancers themselves. David Bennett had a long career as a choreographer on the Broadway stage. His professional career as a dancer director began in 1902 with a production of The Wild Rose.54 Though not as eclectic a choreographer as either Deas or Royce, Bennett devised elaborate tap dance sequences for the musicals he directed. Unlike his predecessors, who prided themselves in simple, military style precision in their tap sequences, Bennett sophisticated his dances with more complicated combinations, more intricate choreographic patterns and meticulous

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attention to idiosyncratic detail. His success with the 1924 production of RoseMarie was typical of his work. This musical, with music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Barbach, was an important landmark in the continuing development of the book musical. Program notes indicate an attempt by the authors to integrate the varied aspects of the musical into one unified whole.55 Bennett was able to take advantage of this intended integration in several dances throughout the show. One of the most successful was the “Totem Tom-Tom” chorus number. In this production number, the female chorus were dressed as tom-toms and executed innovative choreographic patterns that were suggested by an analysis of the lyrics and the music. While a full integration of song, book, music, and dance was yet to be achieved, Rose-Marie contributed to its eventual design and structure. If Bennett had not been so limited in terms of a selected dance idiom, he may have been able to contribute more to the musical theatre dance world. Sammy Lee was another dance director who exerted a tremendous influence on the musical theatre dance of the 1920s. Lee had worked on the Broadway stage as a professional dance director since The Firefly in 1912. He was probably the most successful choreographer of the 1920s, particularly from a commercial standpoint. His creative output was extensive. Some of his more recognizable productions include: Lady, Be Good! (1924), No, No, Nanette (1925), The Cocoanuts (1925) the hilarious vehicle for the Marx Brothers, Oh, Kay! (1926), Rio Rita (1927), and Showboat (1927). Lee was an innovator in choreographic techniques to the extent that he placed a high premium on novelty for its own sake. An example is the way Lee would break up the precision drill aspect of the chorus numbers in order to obtain a more intricate visual design.56 Lee had many commercial successes with his choreography throughout the 1920s but there were two that stood out. One was Lady, Be Good (1924), starring Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. While most of the critics focused on the dancing of Fred and Adele Astaire, who did most of their own choreography, they appreciated how Lee was able to frame them with his chorus. They also commented on the energy of his chorus and the intricacy of their tap dancing.57 But, the production that was to become a landmark musical was the Flo Ziegfeld produced and Joseph Urban designed Show Boat (1927). This was a show that was composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II based on the 1926 popular novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. The heartfelt storytelling of the Kern-Hammerstein II collaboration about the lives of their multiracial characters on the show boat, Cotton Blossom, was further embellished with elaborate scenographic detail that only Ziegfeld could contribute. The story line of the main characters extended over a 50-year period from 1887 to 1927. The cast for the show included Euro-American and AfricanAmerican performers. In addition to the leads, the chorus was comprised of “thirty-six white chorus girls, sixteen white chorus boys, sixteen black male

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singers, sixteen black female singers, and twelve black female dancers.”58 Many would acknowledge that for its day, the show did not shy away from some of the racial conflicts reflected within the show’s time period; it even addressed the very controversial issue of miscegenation. What was surprising was that they chose Sammy Lee, primarily known for his tap dance choreographic abilities, to choreograph this production. Yet, he met the challenge and was able to create dances that reflected the 50-year period covered in the show – everything from skirt dancing, the two-step, clog dancing, waltzes, the cancan and, of course, tap dance, among others. The audience not only heard the shifting musical tastes that reflected America in the 1880s to the 1920s but they could actually connect kinesthetically with the shifting popular dance forms as well. One critic summed it up by observing that there were two Show Boats, “the one Show Boat was the singing and speaking one, and the other, equally important one was the dancing Show Boat.”59 In 1927, this was high praise indeed! Dance was moving closer and closer to becoming essential to the story line of a musical; a musical that did not have to rely upon telling a backstage story about performers who sing and dance.

George M. Cohan: The First Triple Threat Performer and Then Some George M. Cohan, the early twentieth-century “song and dance man,” is more often associated with the “song” part rather than the “dance” part of that affectionate title. Unlike the rigidity and the commercial emphasis of Ned Wayburn or the experimentation of Julian Mitchell, Cohan’s approach to dance can best be characterized as musical comedy in its purest form. “His principal contribution was the Americanization of musical comedy theme and his ability to stage his musicals in a fast-paced, fluid, and slick style.”60 Born on July 3, 1878, Cohan was initiated into the vaudeville circuit as a member of The Four Cohans. By the time he was 23 years old, he had written and presented his first musical comedy, The Governor’s Son, in 1901. Throughout his career, he was the composer-lyricist-librettist for over 25 musicals.61 Early in his career, Cohan defined for himself the basic elements for a successful musical comedy. These elements included “a fast-paced story, plenty of good singable tunes, exciting emotional content, and humor. To this, he added his own special ingredient, dance. For Cohan, dance was the essence of musical comedy.”62 He best expressed his motto in his autobiography. “Speed! Speed! And lots of it; that’s my idea of the thing. Perpetual motion.”63 His choreography was known for its humor as well as its speed. Any dance style was adaptable to the Cohan musical as long as it was vibrant, optimistic, rhythmic, and entertaining. While Cohan is not credited with originating new choreographic techniques or with introducing a different movement vocabulary, he personified in his own performance and in his musicals the “song and dance” unity often associated with the best of the musical theatre genre. His emphasis

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on the musical as popular entertainment set a standard by which the genre would be judged throughout the twentieth century. The rhythm and speed of the Cohan musical anticipated the jazz sound of Gershwin; his musical comedy dance set the tone for the big tap musical and the pace for the jazz dance of the black musical; and, his patriotism encouraged American-born composers and writers to use native subject matter and explore new forms for musical composition. Cohan’s primary contribution was one of inspiration and enthusiasm for an American musical theatre. His work on the Broadway stage was significant in terms of its output and his influence. Beginning as early as 1904 in Little Johnny Jones, he introduced the now standard, “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “The Yankee Doodle Boy.” With the first, he was able to create a Broadway dance anthem not unlike “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from Annie, Get Your Gun, or “One” from A Chorus Line, and with the second, he forged a link with musical theatre dance’s first significant song and dance man – John Durang, also proud to be an American and acknowledge his Yankee roots. Two years later in George Washington, Jr, he gave us one of the most patriotic marches with “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” This would be put to great use in a few years to stir up support for America’s entry into World War I when, in 1917, he also composed “Over There” as American soldiers were literally boarding ships for Europe. For his time, there was an eclecticism to his work as well. For example, in the 1914 musical, Hello, Broadway, he bridged the gap between two generations of social dance when he incorporated the “Old Fashioned Cake Walk” with the “Barnum and Bailey Rag.” He further modernized the revue format with this show by eliminating the need for a plot and relied upon the actors to assist in scene and costume changes in full view of the audience. It created a kind of “smartness” that suggested that the audience could join in with seeing the theatrical conventions being assembled, used, and discarded when done. In the 1910s and 1920s, Cohan wrote, produced, and performed in well over 50 musicals, plays, and revues. There wasn’t a season when a Cohan vehicle was not represented. While he may have “aged” by the end of the 1920s, he certainly did not lose the affection and respect of those who supported the musical theatre.

The African-American Musical and Dance The year 1921 witnessed the beginning of the direct influence of AfricanAmerican dancers and choreographers on the American Broadway musical stage. Shuffle Along became the “parent of all those all-Negro revues that sprouted out with such fertility on Broadway throughout the 1920s.”64 Shuffle Along set a trend. It also caused controversy. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake wrote the lyrics and the music and Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles wrote the book. Walter Brooks is credited with the direction and Lawrence Deas with the choreography. Green refers to Shuffle Along as “the longest-running book musical produced, directed, written, and

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acted by Negroes.”65 Thus, the controversy concerning the significance of this musical still puzzles some musical theatre historians. While one will refer to it as a revue, the other will credit it as the first successful all African-American book musical on Broadway. White critics and historians of the period shroud much of our information concerning African-American theatre achievements during the 1920s in inadequate and/or racist commentary.66 Nevertheless, critics from the past and historians of today credit Shuffle Along with introducing the incredible talent of Florence Mills and with introducing a high degree of expectation for AfricanAmerican dancing by the Broadway audience. Choreographer Lawrence Deas was able to combine individual specialty routines with comedy dance and an enthusiastic chorus in unique and interesting ways. Deas’ choreography combined with Blake’s music introduced a more vibrant, sensual kind of jazz dance. One of the most exciting dances in the show was a “dance fight-with tumbling” performed by Miller and Lyles.67 Eccentric dancing and a variety of tap dances that were popular on the vaudeville circuit were also included. Deas was able to take advantage of the Bert Williams-like stage personality of Florence Mills by designing comedic dance routines with bits of stage business that would later become standard fair in many musical theatre productions. One of these standard bits of stage business that was so popular was that of the chorus girl routine in which the girl at the end of the line just could not perform in unison with the others. This devise was later to be picked up by Fanny Brice in the Zieg feld Follies. While Deas is credited with much of the original choreography, his principal talent was his ability to recognize the particular individual talents of his performers and to incorporate those into the songs and dances within the show. The principal contributions of the musical Shuffle Along to the development of musical theatre dance were twofold. The first is that it whetted the taste for the Broadway audience for more African-American musicals and revues. Many succeeding African-American musicals were measured against the Shuffle Along production to determine their artistic and popular appeal. Second, Shuffle Along introduced a harder, more frenzied kind of jazz music and accompanying jazz dance style that was to influence not only later African-American musicals but many musicals that were to follow. Though jazz dance was intermittently successful throughout the 1920s musical period, it would not be until the 1950s that jazz dance would begin to exert an overriding influence on the developing musical theatre dance vocabulary.

The Impact of the Revue The war years and its immediate aftermath were an odd combination of experimentation with production style and technology, and with form. In terms of the first, the revue format was beginning to nudge out vaudeville as the “classier” of the two. There were many reasons why this happened. Vaudeville

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placed its emphasis on the entertainer, who could consistently deliver and repeat that several times in one day. Although vaudeville had its stars, the emphasis was on the audience “getting its money’s worth.” In many ways, it mimicked the format currently used in entertainment and reality television programming today. Second, vaudeville placed its emphasis on finding what worked and “taking it on the road.” The act didn’t change; the audience did. A vaudevillian could continue to use the same act for years before they would be forced to change or update what they were doing. Finally, the producers served more as business managers brokering the taste of the audience with those who could satisfy that taste. The formats for vaudeville remain pretty much the same whether they were high-end theatre or geared more toward working-class establishments. It rewarded variety, consistency, and “giving the customer what he wants.” During the war years, and throughout the 1920s, the revue form changed the nature of the entertainment. This required an investment in personal, money, and talent. There were many different kinds of revues. While George Lederer’s The Passing Show in 1894 is often credited with introducing this form of entertainment to the Broadway audience, it really started to take off in the 1910s through the 1920s. The Schubert Brothers took the name of The Passing Show and produced several editions beginning in 1912 and ending in 1924. During that same period, John Murray Anderson directed his own Greenwich Village Follies. He was known for grandiose conceptual ideas that were unique and theatrical like what he did in the 1919 edition in which there were production numbers that “included one with the cast as marionettes, a Javanese scene, and a stage strewn with red roses.”68 Earl Carroll’s Vanities began as the Shubert’s were winding down in 1923 and continued until 1940. Former dancer, George White, provided a 20-year run for his George White Scandals beginning in 1919 and specialized in presenting the latest dance crazes and an enormous variety of tap dancing. Many of these revues introduced major musical theatre dance stars like Marilyn Miller in The Passing Show of 1915 or Florence O’Denishawnn in Hitchy-Koo of 1918. Of course, Ziegfeld set the gold standard. As mentioned in the previous section on Ned Wayburn, he was truly a man of his time. He may not have invented the revue but he knew how to popularize it and how to make it a uniquely American institution. He was able to combine just the right ingredients of an idealization of American female beauty with the scenography of extraordinary designers like Joseph Urban with a wide range of comedians from Bert Williams to Fannie Brice, each of whom added just the right amount of dance to their very physical comedy routines. For Williams, he was able to do everything from the cakewalking that he had perfected with his previous partner, George Walker, to his very funny pantomimes, to his eccentric dancing with clown-vaudevillian Leon Errol. In the 1916 edition of the Zieg feld Follies, while Williams spoofed Shakespeare’s Othello, Fanny Brice did a terrific send up of Nijinsky, which was described earlier. However, this was not her only danced comedy act. Modern

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dance did not go unscathed by the satire of Brice. She was an equal opportunity offender of delicate sensibilities.

Professionalization and the Princess Shows These inter war years also witnessed the professionalization of the musical theatre. In 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was formed. The Broadway musicals most prominent composers from Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern to James Weldon Johnson and Victor Herbert were instrumental in forming this organization in order to create a forum in which to provide for copyright protection and to negotiate for royalties for their work. By 1919, actors had formed Actor’s Equity and chorus members formed the Chorus Equity as a way by which to gain representation for musical theatre performers in negotiating with their overbearing and often unscrupulous producers. These actions were consistent with the broader labor movement in the United States that sought representation for the labor force with their employers. These actions not only helped to secure a more livable wage and reasonable working conditions for musical theatre performers, but they also helped to establish the professional credibility for performers within the wider society. The Princess Theatre was a 299-seat theatre, one of the smallest houses on the edge of the theatre district. Originally developed by Elizabeth Marbury to present new one-acts, its mission expanded to include full-length plays. One of the earliest was the first Jerome Kern Princess show, Nobody Home, in 1914. This was a musical about the machinations of the character, Vernon Popple, a society dancer, trying to win the hand of his love interest, Violet, from her dominating aunt and outlandish husband. The show provided an opportunity for some dance – from the Cakewalk to the Chaplin Walk. Though not often associated with dance, Kern actually wrote to include dance in many of his shows. Earlier that same year, for example, he solidified his reputation as a Broadway musical theatre composer with two fox trots tunes, “You Never Can Tell” and “Same Sort of Girl” and a paean to an old-fashioned style of dance, “Why Don’t They Dance the Polka Anymore?” in the musical, in The Girl from Utah (1914). Kern’s intent with this show and those that followed was to strive to write songs that could come logically from the characters in the libretto and not to simply interpolate a tune or a dance number to simply “liven up” the show. This aspiration was noticed by some of Kern’s peers and soon there would be others striving to create strong story lines with well-developed characters whose motivation to sing and/or dance would come from the plot or from the needs of the character.

The Book Musical and Dance The commercial and artistic success of Jerome Kern’s Showboat in 1927 has shadowed many musical theatre historians’ perspectives when viewing the 1920s musical theatre decade. While most acknowledge that Showboat set a precedent

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for the future writing of the Broadway musical, the dance, as a structural component, has not been given the same serious, consistent consideration that has become essential until the 1930s with the contribution of George Balanchine in his collaborations with the Rodgers and Hart musicals. In the 1920s, however, there was experimentation. There was also an eclectic interest in all forms of dance that could be seen in a theatrical context. But, there was no one visionary or collective as there was with certain composers and lyricists, like Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and others who were interested in discovering if the musical theatre itself could expand beyond the ephemeral popularity of its stars, gimmicks, or fashions of the day. The book musical of the 1920s was surrounded by the enormous popularity of such musical theatre forms as the revue, the spectacle, and vaudeville. For many musical theatre artists, these other musical theatre forms offered a means by which to experiment with new and novel ideas. For many, the revue, the spectacle, and vaudeville circuit became their mainstay in terms of their theatrical livelihood. Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and Al Jolson were far more successful, for example, in these other musical theatre forms than in the developing book musical. While serious musical theatre composers, like Jerome Kern, and Ira and George Gershwin, were attempting to fuse the varied elements of the musical theatre into one artistic whole, choreographers, dance directors, and dancers were beginning to exert their influence on the developing musical theatre world. Some of the more influential directors and choreographers of this period were Edward Royce, J. C. Huffman, David Bennett, Sammy Lee, Bobby Connolly, and Albertina Rasch. As just one example, let’s look at the musical theatre hit from the 1920–21 season, Sally. The prolific Guy Bolton wrote the book and the music was composed by Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern. This extravagant Florenz Ziegfeld production was made more elaborate with the exquisite set designed by Joseph Urban. The subject matter for this musical theatre vehicle for Marilyn Miller was simple and trite. The principal character of Sally, “a dishwashing waif,”69 pretends to be a famous and successful Russian ballet star and eventually, through a myriad of complications, rises to become the star of the Zieg feld Follies and marries the man of her dreams. Director Edward Royce was able to take advantage of two star dancing performers – Marilyn Miller and Leon Errol. The production seesawed between huge production numbers and staged “torch” songs. The popularity of the Russian ballet of the period provided Royce with the opportunity to balance the classical ballet against the contemporary revue style dance of the Zieg feld Follies. Green notes that Sally was the fourth longest running Broadway musical of the 1920s.70 The show contained all of the structural elements for a successful Broadway musical of the period. The Cinderella tale of a small-town girl making good was an excellent vehicle for the talents of Marilyn Miller. Director Edward Royce was a perfect choice for bringing these entire elements together into one unified whole.

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The year before, he had directed and choreographed the musical, Irene, which went on to become the longest running Broadway musical until the 1937 production of the revue, Pins and Needles.71 Before his work on Irene and Sally, Royce had established a solid reputation, particularly as a choreographer, on both the London and New York stage. He recognized the value of dance as a means by which to generate an excitement in the audience, particularly with elaborate production numbers. While dancers who performed in the shows Royce choreographed were not particularly known for their individual virtuosity, he did realize the importance of starring individual performers, like comedian and eccentric dancer, Leon Errol, in Sally, and surrounding them with precision-trained dancers. The emphasis in the choreography was on general patterns and design rather than on complex individual movement. In this respect, Royce’s work resembled the work of the early ballet choreographers of the Renaissance Period. His approach would later be picked up and developed by director-­choreographers like Busby Berkeley in the 1930s film musical. What Royce and other choreographers of the 1920s understood was that dance could stand on its own merit and, when necessary, be inserted into a musical to sustain the interest of the audience; however, they also saw that dance and movement could be utilized to make interesting and exciting transitions between scenes. In that regard, since so many of the musicals of their time had very loosely drawn plots, they could overlay a choreographic style to the production. In a way, this became a harbinger of what choreographers in the 1960s would do with the development of the concept musical. While it would take another decade and more for composers, librettists, lyricists, and directors to see the vital contributions that dance could make if considered at the beginning of the creative process, the groundwork was laid in the 1920s for that to happen.

Notes 1 In 1920, the 18th amendment was added to the American constitution, which banned the production and sale of liquor. Soon afterward, many people, particularly the young, sought to challenge the authority of the government and patronized “speakeasies:” that is, after hours bars that catered to the young with jazz music, flamboyant dancing, and plenty of liquor. This would come to an end in 1933 when Congress passed the 21st amendment that essentially repealed the 18th amendment. In the 1960s, a similar situation occurred in the United States when drug laws, which banned the production, distribution, sale, and use of marijuana, were equally challenged by young adults as a way in which to distinguish themselves from the values of their parents. The difference here, however, is that the drug continued to be illegal well into the beginning of the twenty-first century. 2 Modern Precision Dance routine placed the emphasis on a chorus, usually of women, who performed each step exactly the same. Often, the choreography emphasized easily recognized geometric shapes. 3 There is a discrepancy in his year of birth. The International Encyclopedia of Dance, Vol 5, p. 246 cites 1851 while the Tiller website at: http://www.tillergirls.com/John_ Tiller_Page.htm cites 1854. 4 Don McDonough, Dance Fever (New York, NY: Random House, 1979), p. 44.

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5 Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 195. 6 McDonough, p. 44. 7 Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, “A Thousand Raggy, Draggy Dances”, “Social Dance in Broadway Musical Comedy in the 1920s”, Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 221. 8 Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1989), pp. 85–91. 9 Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance: A History of dancing to Jazz, from Its African Origins to the Present (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1968), p. 112. 10 Stearns, p. 112. 11 International Lyrics Playground, accessed on August 9, 2011, at: http://lyricsplayground. com/alpha/songs/b/blackbottom.shtml 12 Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 78. 13 Cohen-Stratyner, p. 223. 14 Nadine George-Graves, “Just Like Being at the Zoo; Primitivity and Ragtime Dance,” Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p, 58. 15 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 427. 16 Marian Spitzer, “The Mechanics of Vaudeville,” American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, edited and with commentary by Charles, W. Stein (New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf, 1984), p. 173. 17 Fred Astaire and James Cagney, “A Pair of Hoofers,” American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, edited and with commentary by Charles, W. Stein (New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf, 1984), p. 239. 18 Astaire and Cagney, p. 240. 19 Richard Kislan. Hoofing on Broadway: A History of Show Dancing (New York, NY: Prentice Hall Press, 1987), p. 25. 20 Hill, p. 63. 21 Jim Haskins and N. R. Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson (New York, NY: William Mirrow and Company, 1988), pp. 99–101. 22 Hill, p. 64. 23 Jane Sherman, The Drama of Denishawn Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), pp. 59–63. 24 Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981), p. 161. 25 Shelton, p. 161. 26 Stanley Green, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1976), pp. 288–289. 27 Dennhardt, The Director-Choreographer in the American Musical Theatre, p. 14. 28 Ibid., pp. 14–17. 29 Ibid., pp. 17–22. 30 “At the Theatre,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 24 October 1903. 31 Eve Golden, Anna Held and the Birth of Zieg feld’s Broadway (Louisville, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 95. 32 Dennhardt, The Director-Choreographer in the American Musical Theatre, pp. 34–35. 33 Robert Baral, Revue: A Nostalgic Reprise of the Great Broadway Period (New York, NY: Fleet Publishing Corp., 1962), p. 45. 34 Gregory Chris Dennhardt, The Director-Choreographer in the American Musical Theatre, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1978. pp. 34–35. 35 Charles Higham, Zieg feld. (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1972), p. 57.

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36 Higham, p. 67. 37 Higham, p. 57. 38 Barbara Naomi Cohen, The Dance Direction of Ned Wayburn: Selected Topics in Musical Staging, 1901–1923. PhD dissertation, New York University, 1980. p. 16. 39 Ibid., p. 21. 40 Green, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, pp. 437–438. 41 Ned Wayburn, The Art of Stage Dancing (New York, NY: Belvedere Publishers, Inc., 1980), p. 90. 42 Wayburn, p. 91. 43 Stratyner, p. 17. 44 Barbara Stratyner, Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, Studies in Dance History, No. 13, Society of Dance History Scholars, 1996, p. 14. 45 Cohen, The Dance Direction of Ned Wayburn … pp. 52–53. 46 Wayburn, The Art of Stage Dancing, p. 23. 47 For a more in-depth description of the Midnight Frolic, See: https://www.mcny.org/ story/ziegfeld-midnight-frolic 48 Randolph Carter, The World of Flo Zieg feld (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 78. 49 Ned Wayburn, “The Chorus Girl-Old and New,” Theatre Magazine, May 1920, p. 404. 50 Stratyner, pp. 33–36. 51 Stratyner, p. 56. 52 Kendall, p. 178. 53 Kendal, p. 179. 54 Robert Darrell Moulton, “Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue on the New York Stage, 1925–1950,” Unpublished PhD dissertation University of Minnesota, 1957, p. 35. 55 Green, p. 360. 56 Moulton, p. 42. 57 Frank W. D. Ries, “Sammy Lee: The Broadway Career,” Dance Chronicle, 1986, Vol 9, No 1, pp. 23–30. 58 Ries, p. 68. Curiously, what is missing is sixteen Black male dancers. It begs the question: why? 59 Ries, p. 66. 60 Dennhardt, The Director-Choreographer in the American Musical Theatre, p. 27. 61 Green, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, pp. 78–79. 62 Dennhardt, The Director-Choreographer in the American Musical Theatre, p. 14. 63 George M. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway (New York, NY: Harper Brothers, Publishers, 1924), p. 1. 64 David Ewen, p. 480. 65 Green, p. 384. 66 Marshall and Jean Stearns in their book, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, cite numerous examples to substantiate this point of view. 67 Stearns, p. 133. 68 Bordman, p. 341. 69 David Ewen, Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 462. 70 Stanley Green. Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1976), p. 376. 71 Ibid., p. 334.

5 1929–1943 Depression Ferments New Visions: Ballet and Modern Dance

Tentative First Steps While musical theatre historian, Ethan Mordden, tends to downplay the 1930s musical in terms of making significant contributions to the overall development of the American musical, he does in fact acknowledge the importance of two innovations. The first is the invention of the revolving stage which, among other things, allowed for smooth transitions between scenes, and the second was dance. He writes: …the development of choreography from decoration by hoofing zanies to illumination theme by specialists in ballet and modern dance. … real dancing had always been on site. What was new, now, was its application – by George Balanchine, Charles Weidman, Madame Rasch, Jose’ Limon, and others – to the content of the shows. Dance suddenly started to express what the book, music, and lyrics had no vocabulary for. The job description of the choreographer expanded.1 What he is pointing out is that the production of a musical was now able to place a higher value on nonstop movement. If the musical revue and most musical comedies were constructed more like a string of short stories, technical innovations like the revolving stage, and more sophisticated use of dance would now be able to create musicals that were more like novels – one chapter makes a smooth transition to the next. While it would be several more years before this ideal of seamless transitions and dances that carried the plot forward would be realized, the groundwork was now laid on the American musical theatre stage during one of the most difficult times for the American public – the Depression of the 1930s. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-6

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Despite a turbulent and uneven history, the Broadway musical came to fruition as a major artistic force not only on the American stage but also on the world stage in the 1920s and 1930s and dance made important contributions along the way. Popular dance forms, such as tap, jazz, and social dance, were incorporated into the 1920s and 1930s musical as a significant part of their productions. It encouraged the recognition of such musical theatre talents as Bill Robinson, Fred and Adele Astaire, and Ray Bolger, among many others. By the late 1930s, the ballet and modern dance concert stages were exerting an influence on the choreographic concepts and the movement vocabulary of the musical theatre stage. This paralleled the further experimentation of the integration of story line and character development into the musical theatre production. Through the efforts of prominent choreographers like George Balanchine, particularly in his collaborations with the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and specifically in their musical, On Your Toes (1936), and Katherine Dunham, particularly her dedication to popularize authentic African- and Caribbean-based movement in Broadway’s African-American musicals, such Cabin in the Sky2 and revues, musical theatre dance was quickly moving toward a central position in the musical theatre.3 By the 1940s, through the efforts of composers, like Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, later Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and others, the integrated book musical was becoming the standard by which the maturing of this art form was being recognized. The popularity of Stanislavsky’s ideas regarding a psychologically truthful performance, the American experimentation with the scenographic ideas of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig as they developed their ideas of a “total theatre,” the burgeoning of the socially conscious dramatists via the efforts of the Group Theatre and the Federal Theatre,4 the rise of the Independent Theatre movement that encouraged the development of Expressionist drama and the “new stagecraft” as represented in the work of designers like Edmond Jones and Arch Lauterer, the incorporation of dance into professional actor training programs5 – all of these trends and more – pushed the American musical from a popular art form dictated by entertainers with gimmicks, producers with lavish melodramatic spectacles and tin pan alley “tunesters” to a vital theatrical medium that incorporated both fine art pretensions with popular art appeal. Initially, this was reflected in linearly constructed narration. Nonetheless, there were interesting and original story lines, with varying degrees of character development and depth. There was also experimentation between the literary or dramatic values of the script and the use of musical motifs in the scoring of the text. For the most part, composers and lyricists initiated this increasing maturation of the American musical. The early Princess theatre shows of Jerome Kern and his collaborators, P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, demonstrated that this idea could be both commercially and artistically successful. The 1929–1930 theatre season, despite the Stock Market crash on October 28, 1929, and the increasing popularity of film musicals, looked very similar to

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the seasons in the previous decade. True, there were fewer shows, thirty-two, which contrasted with the high of fifty-three during 1927–1928 but the kinds of shows were much the same. However, by November, the Dow had lost nearly half of its value, and the country slid quickly into the worst Depression it had ever experienced. Broadway shows continued to offer its audience interestingly constructed dances, like those of Busby Berkeley, who directed and choreographed The Street Singer (1929) as vehicle for Queenie Smith. This was regarded as a dance show that featured the now familiar “endurance dances” that Berkeley was famous for but, in addition, he was also known for creating complicated rhythms for his tap dances. For example, dance critic, John Martin, “describes how Berkeley worked with multiple rhythms by having various parts of his chorus work in three-four time or f ive-four time as the orchestra played four-four time. Similar rhythmic complications gave new and interesting sounds and effects through accent and syncopation.”6 There is no doubt that he also enjoyed collaborating with designers to create interesting stage environments in which he explored his visually imaginative use of geometric shapes with his dancers. For audience members today, they can see examples of this in the stunning cinematic display of the Hollywood movies he made in the 1930s. There were still revues but they were gradually becoming smaller and more intimate. Rather than a series of loosely connected independent acts, the intimate review had a common theme or topic that ran throughout the show and all of the sketches, songs, and dances were a part of it. For example, the Arthur Schwartz/Howard Dietz musical revue, The Little Show, featured some smartly written sketches by George S. Kaufman but the dance choreographed by Danny Dere and performed by Clifton Webb and Libby Holman, that caused the most stir was “Moanin’ Low.” As Mordden describes, it was “a dance of death. … The pair played high-yaller blackface, reminding us that, … Broadway liked to locate kinky romance in Harlem. After singing the number, Holman, awoke the sleeping Webb. The two performed an erotic apache, and, at the close, he strangled her.” 7 While dances in the revue format could still rely on tap dance and toe ballet as a “go to” style, they were also exploring other ways in which dance could push the envelope or make social commentary. Most of the dances in the first season were choreographed by dance directors and choreographers like Jack Haskill, George Hall, Le Roy Prinz, and Seymour Felix. At times, as in the case of Sons O’Guns (1930), Bobby Connolly, a tap dancer, would serve as the director-choreographer and Albertina Rasch would contribute several ballets. Throughout the 1930s, it was not uncommon to have two, and in some cases, three choreographers – one to create ballets, another tap dance, and a third to furnish whatever was needed for the show from ballroom dance to character dances.

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What is interesting is that the first musical of the 1930s was the Gershwin Strike Up the Band, a satire on international politics, big business, and war. George Hale choreographed the show. This musical opened the door for more politically oriented shows to come. Hale continued his collaboration with the Gershwins on their second politically satiric Of Thee I Sing (1930) that closed out that year. Ira and George Gershwin were rewarded for their efforts with this show by becoming the third longest-running musical of the decade and the first musical to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama. George Hale was an excellent choice as the choreographer for both musicals. He had the endorsement of the New York Times dance critic because, from John Martin’s point of view, he was a welcome change from other choreographers of the time who seemed to place their emphasis on novelty and speed. Rather than having the dances “steal the show,” Hale worked to incorporate the dances into the dramatic needs of the show.8

Ballet Steps More Firmly into the Broadway Musical Ballet has been a part of the Broadway musical since its beginning. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was dominated by European dancers and choreographers. Audiences would have a plethora of responses. Some found these ballerinas ethereal and romantic; some saw them as curiously exotic; some were shocked by their perceived overt sexiness in movement and in costume. While there were periods when ballet was more dominant on the Broadway stage than others, it never disappeared. At the turn of the century and throughout the early years of the twentieth century, Americans fell in love with social dancing of all kinds. There was a symbiotic relationship between the performers and the audience. Sometimes, the dances came from the performers on stage and the audience quickly wanted to learn how to do these dances. Sometimes, the dances came from the bars, dance halls, and other places where the young would congregate and make up their own dances that might then migrate to the musical theatre stage. This forced the ballet, which was now in competition with this social dance craze, to reassess its relevancy to the musical theatre stage. Fortunately, this was a time when the Diaghilev Ballet Russe created a revolution in ballet with their appearances in France beginning in 1909.9 The furor and excitement that the Parisians experienced with this innovative and unusual ballet company from Russia was infectious. They introduced highly technically capable dancers to the stage, such as Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spessivtseva, Ida Rubenstein, Alicia Markova, and Bronislava Nijinska. Between 1912 and 1926, one of their lead dancers, Anna Pavlova, and a company of her dancers made annual tours around the United States. She brought elegance and seriousness to her performances that generated a love for Russian ballet and a desire for many dancers who saw her to study the Cecchetti method of ballet training.10 They

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presented unusual, modern, and, in some cases, controversial dances with choreographers like Michel Fokine, Léonide Massine, George Balanchine, and, the most controversial, the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. They generated dances that incorporated the artistry of some of the best designers of their day: Leon Baskt, George Braque, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, along with a stable of the most avant-garde composers like, Claude Debussy Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. The Ballet Russe made their first American tour in 1916. The response by many critics was mixed. While some were impressed with the scenography of the ballets, others were shocked by sexually explicit dances, like L’Apres-midi d’un Faune,11 which is interesting because a few years earlier in 1906 following American modern dancer, Maud Allan’s premier of her dance, The Vision of Salome, there was such an enthusiastic response by Europeans and Americans that it set off a rash of imitators doing their own version of this dance that was referred to as Salomania. Nonetheless, most critics recognized the artistry in the choreographies and the technical proficiency of the dancers. The popularity of the Ballet Russe was so widespread in fact that American performers like Gertrude Hoffman who, after seeing the Ballet Russe in Paris, returned to the United States to create her own production called “La Saison de Ballet Russes” and the comedienne Fanny Brice and fellow comedian Bert Williams’ did a take-off on Scheherazade in the 1916 Zieg feld Follies called “The Blushing Ballet.” Theatre historian, Arthur Jackson, makes the point that by the early 1940s, audiences for Broadway musicals were now accepting that contemporary ballet is an important ingredient in defining musical theatre dance and he credits the work of Albertina Rasch and George Balanchine as laying the foundation for ballet’s centrality.12 Throughout the 1930s into the early 1940s, there were many choreographers and dancers who brought ballet to the musical theatre stage. These would include Léonide Massine’s “Ballet of Dreams” in Woof, Woof (1929) and choreography by Alex Yakovleff for The Land of Belles (1935) and Music Hath Charms (1935), choreography by Gluck Sandor in the Earl Carroll Vanities (1931), among others. When Diaghilev died in 1929, members of his dance company went on to form the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Original Ballet Russe. Many of Diaghilev’s dancers and choreographers immigrated to the United States and began to teach and to help form ballet companies. All of that is a backdrop to the growing interest in the Broadway audience moving away from toe dancing to genuine ballet. The two ballet choreographers that made the most significant impact on musical theatre were Albertina Rasch, who wanted to create an American ballet, and George Balanchine, who wanted to explore what contemporary ballet might become on American soil. Both were eager to work with American dancers and choreographers. Both were intrigued by the diversity of dance on the musical theatre stage and they were very receptive to the jazz music that they found there; they were attracted to the energy, enthusiasm, and optimism they found in the musical theatre of their time.

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Albertina Rasch Born in 1892, she began studying ballet with Carl Raimund, the ballet master for the Opera House in Vienna.13 In addition, she was fortunate to have studied with the famous Italian ballet teacher, Enrico Cecchetti.14 Cecchetti placed a great deal of emphasis on discipline and vigorous repetition. These qualities Rasch would later adopt for her own dancers. Eventually, she worked her way up to becoming a Premiere Ballerina at the Vienna Ronacher Theater. When she was eighteen, she was offered the opportunity to perform at the Hippodrome Theatre in New York City. Her first appearance on the Broadway stage was in the Shubert extravaganza, The International Cup (1911) under the direction of R. H. Burnside.15 This was a musical that pulled out all of the stops in terms of scenic effects. In “The Ballet of Niagara,” Albertina Rasch was cast as Ioneta, one of the leads. The plot line for the ballet centered on a feud between two Indian tribes, the Neutes and the Senecas. An old shaman said that to appease the War God, a maiden, Ioneta, must be sacrificed by going over the Niagara Falls in a canoe. To save her, the chief of one of the tribes agrees to sue for peace and all ends well. Apparently, the scenic effects of the waterfalls and its popular mist were created as a part of this ballet.16 The show ran for 333 performances.17 In Albertina Rasch’s first Broadway show, she was given the opportunity to dance a lead in a show that was definitely a hit. At the age of 19, this first experience on the Broadway stage must have created quite an impression on this young immigrant from Vienna. Later that same year, she was performing in the Schubert production, The Revue of Revues (1911), and by 1912, at the age of just 20 years old, she formed the Albertina Rasch Dancers. For the next several years, she and her dancers performed in vaudeville houses around the country. When not touring, she was performing as a Premier Ballerina at the New York Metropolitan Opera House.18 Her training in classical ballet, her flair for theatricality, as well as her strong business acumen worked to her advantage when setting up her own dance school and creating several Albertina Rasch Dancers corps to meet the demand. Her Broadway musical theatre debut as choreographer began in 1925 with the George White Scandals.19 Her career as a choreographer was off to a solid start. In 1927 alone, she choreographed five musical theatre productions. Of those, Rio Rita, running for 494 performances, was the undisputed hit of the season. This production also served as the opening of Ziegfeld’s new theatre, which had been designed by Joseph Urban. Rasch shared choreographic responsibilities with tap dance legend, Sammy Lee. When discussing Rasch’s contribution to this, her first book musical, critics …commented on the combination of the striking costumes by John McCarthy and the choreographic patterns devised by Rasch: the waltzing couples in rose and gold who frankly sang ‘When You’re in Love, You Waltz,’ and the passionate character dancing in the Mexican production

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number, “The Kinkajou,” which had dancers moving in intricate patterns and steps with whirling multicolored shawls that matched their swinging skirts. The Rasch Dancers were framed for this particular number by the famed Ziegfeld girl, one hundred in all. The most unusual dance was the ballet in the first act, designed entirely in black and white, featuring very intricate but delicate pointe work. Rasch was always interested in bold effects …20 Later, in 1927, she was given the opportunity to create a jazz ballet in the Zieg feld Follies. In 1928, for his operetta, The Three Musketeers, Ziegfeld gave Rasch the chance to be the sole choreographer for the show. Among the dances that she created was “a ballet de cour entertainment in Act II. She staged a pastiche of period dances, including a gavotte, a minuet, and a pastoral playlet that featured Harriet Hoctor … While Rasch could not escape featuring Hoctor’s backbend on pointe and incredible technique, she disguised the more obvious acrobatic nature of the steps by incorporating them into a graceful adagio number.”21 Rasch was given many opportunities by Ziegfeld to not only use her training in ballet but to conceptualize production numbers that included his Ziegfeld girls and other members of the cast and to explore more contemporary idioms, such as jazz dancing. She also had a sense of humor that she brought to the creation of some of her dances. This last opportunity solidified Albertina Rasch as a major Broadway choreographer as she stepped into the 1930s. One of America’s first musical theatre historians, Cecil Smith, felt that she was “the first important musical-comedy choreographer, in the modern sense.”22 He went on to elaborate on Rasch’s accomplishments. He emphasized her ability to embrace the idea that she could accommodate the commercial needs for musical theatre and make those adjustments in her ballets without compromising her classical technique. He emphasized that she broke up unison movements with what he called “artful counter points of individual movement.”23 Finally, he underscored the fact that she could integrate the graceful smoothness in ballroom dance to create a “sleekness” of style.24 To this could be added that she enjoyed creating comedy ballets as well and did not see this as compromising the quality of her work and, from working with tap dance directors like Sammy Lee and Bobby Connolly, she learned about the value that intricate rhythm patterns could play in her choreography to make it more interesting and more modern. At the top of the decade, she was very fortunate to work with Fred and Adele Astaire on their musical, The Band Wagon (1931). This really was a dance show. In addition to “The Beggar Waltz” (described in the previous chapter), there was “Flag”, “Hoops,” “I Love Louisa,” and “New Sun in the Sky,” but the one that was the most dramatic was “Dancing in the Dark.” Following a solo sung by John Barker, …he revolved offstage, and the melody was picked up by an offstage chorus. Meanwhile, the stage setting was transformed into a slanted mirror

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surface with Albertina Rasch’s dancers posed on it in long black and silver dresses … The dance had an almost hypnotic effect as the chorus swayed and glided in the long dresses, forming themselves into sculptured poses that they extended into arching backbends. Tilly Loch then appeared on high, moving down from stage center on a series of slanted platforms until she reached stage level. She wore a draped gold dress … which was reflected in a series of mirrors. Although she was in a floor length gown, she danced on pointe so that she could create the illusion of gliding as she traveled across the stage. The dress, which included a train, limited her movements but created some striking effects that were further enhanced by thrusting-upward arm movements in a very restricted space. It is highly probable that Rasch was here using a number of ideas she had learned from Mary Wigman …25 This is an excellent example of how important the collaboration with the show’s visionary director and set and lighting designer, Hassard Short, was to the “choreography” of all of the elements of this incredible ballet. John Martin, the dance critic for the New York Times, held Albertina Rasch and her dances in such high esteem that he devoted an entire article to her work. He compared her work to the quality of German concert modern dancers, Harald Kreutzberg and Mary Wigman. In summary, he felt that she had extended the musical theatre dance vocabulary and raised the standard for dance and choreography on the Broadway musical theatre stage. This is high praise indeed coming from one recognized as “the dean of dance criticism.”26 Rasch continued to work on several more Broadway musicals up through the Cole Porter musical, Jubilee (1935). Soon afterward, she was under exclusive contract with MGM. When she returned to choreograph on Broadway in 1939, it would be for the Kern-Hammerstein Very Warm for May (1939). There would be several other musicals between then and her final Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark (1941). This was a musical that challenged dramaturgically what a Broadway musical could do. Many would say that this was indeed the pièce de résistance of her work on the Broadway stage. This was a top-of-the-line musical with the best talent working at that time. Moss Hart wrote the script. Kurt Weill provided the score and Ira Gershwin the lyrics. Moss Hart shared directing responsibilities with Hassard Short. The lead character, Liza Elliot, was played by Gertrude Lawrence. In the musical, Liza Elliot is having both personal and professional problems and decides to see a psychologist. She reveals her dreams and memories and, as she does, with the assistance of the revolving stages, she moves in and out of her dreams. Of course, Rasch choreographed the dream sequences; however, there was an ongoing collaboration with both Hassard Short and Moss Hart. Logistically, there had to be. One of the dancers, Dorothy Bird, described “turntables within turntables spun in different directions on either side of the stage, while dancers wearing dazzling costumes flew on and off the stage.”27 Even Time magazine had a photo

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of Gertrude Lawrence and dancers in the clown dream number with part of the caption reading: “A psychoanalytical show with four revolving rings”28 Clearly, the technology and lighting were crucial to the look and choreography of the whole show. There were four dream sequences that needed to be staged – “Glamour Dream,” “Wedding Dream,” “Circus Dream,” “Childhood Dream.” The directors, choreographer and designers knew that they were attempting to create a book musical in which the drama drove the play and the music and dance had to come from the character, Liza. It was to be a play with music and dance. Brooks Atkinson responded to the creators of this musical with this observation. “To create something that apparently does not exist in the life around us is the theatre’s special skill. It is intimately related to the dance from which the theatre derives. It is also the thing that distinguishes the genius of the theatre from the genius of the screen …”29 Atkinson’s acknowledgment that the theatre derives from the dance is prescient when you consider the role that dance would soon play with the rise of the choreographer-director. This is one of those rare times when directors, choreographer, designers, technicians, and actors pulled together a seamless production because they understood that each of them had something important to contribute. This is a play that dictates that music, dance, and scenography come out of the life of Liza Elliott. The passage between our waking life and our acts of memory or dreamscapes is not so clearly delineated. Rasch has had a lifetime to develop her craft as a choreographer. In this production, she could afford to humbly be at the service of something larger than herself and she and her colleagues produced a musical that was to have repercussions for the remainder of this decade, and beyond. They were rewarded with a 476-­performance run indicating that the audience was now ready to take this leap with them.

George Balanchine Like his contemporary, Albertina Rasch, George Balanchine was foreign-born but fell in love with the United States when he immigrated in 1933 at the behest of impresario, Lincoln Kirstein. Like Rasch, he was attracted to the popular dances, the musical theatre, and the jazz music and dance of America. He was encouraged to come to the United States to develop an American ballet but, like Rasch, he is famous for saying, “But, first a school.” Finally, both were very aware of the modern dance movement at the time and they did not necessarily see a “competition” between modern dance and classical ballet. As a matter of fact, each incorporated aspects of modern dance into their conception of a modern ballet. While firmly based in classical ballet, particularly as a form of training, neither wished to be hampered or boxed in when choreographing dances for musical theatre, or film, or even dance on the concert stage. George Balanchine was born on January 22,1904, in St. Petersburg. Coming from a family of artists and soldiers, his mother being a pianist and his father

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a composer, Balanchine was encouraged to audition at the age of nine for the Imperial Ballet School. Once accepted, his education was eclectic. He was awed and inspired by the performances of Elizaveta Gerdt and Tamara Karsavina and was thrilled to be studying under one of his idols, Samuel Constantinovitch Andreyanov. In addition, he took classes in mime, acting, history, make-up, and music.30 For a time during the Russian Revolution of 1917, the school was closed but, when it reopened, the 14-year-old Balanchine resumed his studies. In 1921, he graduated and was admitted into the corps de ballet. Soon afterward, he initiated a series of programs called “Evenings of the Young Ballet.” He contributed several ballets to these programs and his early choreographies reflected the influence of Marius Petipa and Kasyan Goleizovsky. “From Petipa were derived such characteristics of Balanchine’s mature work as the frank delight in the classic dance for its own sake, the elegant grace of deportment of the dancers, the conception of ballet primarily as a means of giving pleasure and not as a vehicle for transmitting a portentous message”31 and from Goleizovsky “the development of an art of pure dance, one exalting the human body and revealing itself not in a chain of stereotyped steps but in fluid, unfolding action.”32 There was a brashness to the nonconforming Goleizovsky, whose ballets echoed the dance of Isadora Duncan. His dancers performed in bare feet and wore costumes that revealed the human body.33 These ideas informed the impressionable Balanchine and soon, in 1924, after having married Tamara Geva, they defected to join the most talked about ballet company in the world, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in Paris, where he was given full rein to experiment and create ballets that broke the mold, that challenged the status quo, that would form the foundation for what was to become “the Balanchine aesthetic.” Immediately, he began choreographing for the company. One of his earliest choreographies, Barabau, may have foreshadowed some of his early work as a musical comedy choreographer. “Most of the dancers wore false noses, padded bottoms, and coarse peasant garb. Barabau brought a fresh breath of pure garlic to the ballet stage. It was probably the first ballet that was funny enough to set an audience to laughing aloud.”34 At the same time, he choreographed two of his most iconic dances that are still being performed all over the world today. The first is Apollo, a ballet based on the god, Apollo, and his relationship with three Muses. Esteemed poet and critic, Edwin Denby, elaborated on the significance of this Balanchine creation. Apollo is a homage to the academic ballet tradition, and the first work in the contemporary classic style, but it is a homage to classicism’s sensuous loveliness as well as its brilliant exactitude and its science of dance effect. … Since the piece is about the gods of poetry, and how they learned their art, it seems, too, to be describing concretely the development of the creative imagination. … So Apollo can tell you how beautiful classic dancing is when it is correct and sincere; or how the power of poetry grows in our

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nature, or even that as man’s genius becomes more civilized, it grows more expressive, more ardent, more responsive, more beautiful. Balanchine has conveyed these large ideas really as modestly as possible, by means of three girls and a boy dancing together for a while.35 And the second, also still in the repertoire and performed all over the world, is the highly dramatic, Prodigal Son. First performed in 1929, his biographer writes: This Prodigal Son had a biblical theme, but as seen through Russian eyes and filtered through Russian souls, and, as Balanchine choreographed it, one that was expressed in a thoroughly twentieth-century manner. His choreography was symbolic and expressionistic. It conveyed the central significance of each action and situation poetically-though the poetry was often the poetry of the grotesque-but never with a literal or naturalistic gesture. For this ballet, Balanchine turned away from the classical vocabulary … This time his palette of movement contained borrowings from gymnasts, circus performers, and acrobats. … Such steps and movements had not been seen on the ballet stage before, but they had been introduced by Balanchine not for show but to communicate inexorably the heart of the matter. There are few modern works, in any art form, that can match this ballet’s horrifying sense of degradation or the tenderness and wonder that the scene of redemption and forgiveness at the end achieves.36 These ballets signal the range of Balanchine’s choreography, whether on the concert stage or the musical theatre stage. He was a master of the comic, the serious, and the abstract. Some have compared him to Picasso and this “Picasso of the Dance” was soon to invade and alter musical theatre dance on the Broadway stage. Following Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Balanchine spent several years in London choreographing for the Cochran’s Revues and putting together Les Ballets 1933, his first ballet company. Eventually, the American balletomane, Lincoln Kirstein, invited Balanchine to the United States to create an American ballet. Balanchine immigrated to the United States at the time when modern dance pioneers, like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Mary Wigman, and others, were creating their own dance techniques – techniques that would challenge the preeminence of the ballet technique that dominated the concert stage. His predecessor, Albertina Rasch, had worked creatively and persistently to bring professional level ballet to the musical theatre stage and to adapt the ballet to the needs of the musical theatre world of the 1930s. When he arrived, like Rasch, he quickly started his own ballet school and, for a time, collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Company. That relationship soon disintegrated because

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Balanchine, then only in his early twenties, was still very much interested in experimenting with balletic choreography and the Metropolitan Opera would have none of it. His introduction to Broadway musical theatre was choreographing for the Zieg feld Follies of 1936. This was a show whose intent was “Glorifying the Broadway tempo and style.”37 He now jumped in with both feet working only with the best in musical theatre dance and performance. The director was the legendary former dancer-choreographer, John Murray Anderson. Choreographer Robert Alton contributed several dances. The Nichols Brothers performed their exquisite acrobatic rhythm tap routines. Comedienne Fanny Brice satirized American modern dance in a sketch she entitled “Modernistic Moe” in which “she Martha Grahamed all over the stage yelling: ‘Rewolt, Rewolt—oy, am I hungry.’”38 Balanchine contributed several dances including Words Without Music: A Surrealistic Ballet, starring Harriet Hoctor. Set designer, Vincent Minelli, who claimed that this was the first surrealistic ballet performed for a Broadway audience, described it this way: Three dancing figures in green are seen at the opening, standing at the top of a ramp which angled down toward the audience. Three black-clad figures, lying at an angle from the dancers, suggest their shadows and repeat the dancers’ movements from their prone positions. It was a striking effect which has been done hundreds of times since. The number ended with the men who had cast the shadows losing Harriet to the black silhouettes when they rise from the ground and spirit her away.39 This ballet was well-received by critics and audiences alike. Unfortunately, the ballet that he created for Josephine Baker, 5 A.M., was not accepted by many in the audience, nor the critics. This was a sensuous dance with Josephine Baker accompanied by four white male dancers. Balanchine had walked smack into American racism that was virulently opposed to seeing blacks and whites performing in the same dance together.40 In his first Broadway show, he was exposed to America’s best musical theatre talent and to America’s original sin, one that would continue to rear its ugly head for many years to come. Soon, Balanchine would be on a roll. Beginning in 1936, Balanchine choreographed four Rodgers and Hart musicals in a row – On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938), and The Boys From Syracuse (1938). On Your Toes was a musical that changed how people looked at dance on the musical theatre stage because it was front and center in terms of plot line and character development. Briefly, it tells that story of a former vaudevillian dancer, now high school music teacher, Phil Dolan, who becomes involved with Russian ballerina, Vera Baranova. Dolan tries to get the Russian ballet

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company to perform a jazz ballet that one of his students wrote, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” The musical is filled with tap dance, comedy ballets, and jazz-ballet at the end that also includes frantic tap dancing by Ray Bolger. One of the major dance numbers was the “Princess Zenobia Ballet,” a send-up of Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade. While the two principal dancers, Tamara Geva and Basil Galahoff, performed their roles with integrity and straight faces, Ray Bolger, covering for one of the dancers who could not perform, entered only to cause chaos within the chorus.41 Dance historian Beth Genne’ points out that Throughout On Your Toes, Balanchine contrasts ballet with tap dancing to tell the story of the clash and eventual meeting of cultures. Balanchine’s takeoff on Fokine’s Scheherazade … has Junior trapped on stage with the male corps de ballet. Panicked, he reverts to his vaudeville roots, hoofing alongside his horrified colleagues’ sautes, with hilarious results. … On Your Toes, wickedly funny, crystallized in dance what would now become a central aesthetic concern of musical-theater and film-musical dance: the relationship between Old World dance (read ballet) and New World dance (read jazz dance) as well as music.42 Of course, it is the final dance in the musical, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” that brings all of the different strands of the plot together in a jazz-ballet that also includes mime and tap dance. Again, Genne’ observes and comments on the significance of this dance. Balanchine creates a ballet d’action to tell us a story in a modernized form of mime and dance. Again, a romantic ballet plot is given a modern setting: a lonely hoofer yearns for a beautiful dance-hall girl, only to lose her when she altruistically stops a bullet meant for him. … This dance established the American jazz ballet, a genre that would be developed on both Broadway and in the movies in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. In ‘Slaughter,’ Balanchine fused the skills of the AfricanAmerican tap dancer and the chorus girl kick line with elements of ballet movement with the context of a short-form ballet d’action.43 It is important to note that Balanchine relied upon African-American Buddy Bradley’s assistant, Herbie Harper, to help Ray Bolger learn how to perform rhythm tap for this role.44 Beginning with his work with Josephine Baker in the mid-1920s and throughout his career, Balanchine recognized and acknowledged the contribution of African-American dance to not only his work in musical theatre but also in his work on the concert stage. This musical, Balanchine’s choreography in particular, was well received by critics and audiences alike. Theatre

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Arts Monthly critic, Edith J. R. Isaacs, succinctly offers this assessment of the significance of this musical and its dancing. …with On Your Toes, we may have come unknowingly upon a successor to the old musical form, a musical show that is not a comedian’s holiday, but a dancer’s, or, let us say, not a jesting but a dancing comedian’s holiday. On Your Toes is that. The best talent, the highest vitality, most of the beauty and all of the gayest humor is not in the words but in the design and movement of the dance. … But although it has always been obvious that a large share of Ray Bolger’s humor is in his legs, and Tamara Geva’s talent in her toes, and although ‘choreography by George Balanchine’ might indicate that something creative and beautiful would be added to the conventional pattern of dance routines, that is not enough to make you realize, until the rapidly-paced show is over and you begin to think about it, that what you have seen is an innovation. Nor is this only because On Your Toes is a dancers’ show … because the audience recognizes both the skill and the satire, although it is never expressed in words but only in a heightened movement, an exaggerated ballet position, a burlesqued composition, a costume out of line, an overdone arabesque. And again, even more, because the audience enjoys its own appreciation and applauds the performance with zest. When you have the artists and the audience, you have a theatre form; and here they are—dancers, choreographers, dancing chorus and responsive audience. So perhaps … we are making a fresh start in a new direction, one in which the progress of the comic dance is quite in line with what is taking place in every other part of the whole dance world.45 This is not only high praise indeed for a particular musical in which she makes the case that the direction of the musical going forward is fundamentally altered because of the quality of the dancing and how it is seamlessly incorporated into the story line of the musical but she is also placing the significance of this achievement in line with what is going on in ballet in the wake of the Diaghilev Ballet Russe and in the creation of an American modern dance movement headed by artists such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, and others. From this point forward, musical theatre dance is now recognized not only for its commercial popular appeal but also for its fine art aspirations. This show had a significant performance run of 315 performances. Balanchine followed this up with another Rodgers and Hart musical, Babes in Arms (1937). Like its predecessor, the lead characters were the children of vaudevillians and the musical was structured with the same show within a show framework. While Balanchine contributed several dances to

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this show, including a dream ballet, it was the technical brilliance of the Nicholas Brothers that deserves special recognition. They relayed to Marshall and Jean Stearns what their perspective was on their dance and its relationship to Balanchine. ‘Mr. Balanchine watched us practicing for a long time and then got an idea—he told us, he didn’t show us,’ says Fayard. ‘There were eight chorus girls bending over, and I started out running, doing cartwheels and flips and leaping in a split. Then the girls lined up with their legs apart, and Harold slid into a split beneath all of them from the rear and snapped back up as he came out in front. We did it on each side of the stage.’ Many people assumed that the Nicholas brothers were trained ballet dancers.46 In the mid-1930s, its 289 performances were regarded as a hit show. I Married an Angel (1938) was the third outing for Balanchine with Rodgers and Hart. In this show, the character of Willy wants to marry an angel. When his wish is granted, the show steps into a whirlwind of fantasy with the beautiful and talented Vera Zorina playing the role. This gave Balanchine an opportunity to go “over the top” with a surrealistic ballet. Director Joshua Logan recalls: And Balanchine had an evil brainstorm for it. All New York was awaiting Salvador Dali’s first visit to America. Balanchine stole his thunder by revealing, in the ballet, all the tricks of surrealism before Dali arrived … The ballet was puzzling enough and even more so when Balanchine told me it was based on Othello. One man carried his head under his arm throughout it. I asked Balanchine who that man was supposed to be, Othello or Iago. With his usual sniff, he answered, ‘Both.’47 At this point, one might think that Balanchine had gone over the edge; however, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson felt that this ballet was the high point of the show and declared that his overall assessment was that “musical comedy has met its masters” and that Zorina was “the Angel that Broadway needed.”48 Apparently, the audience agreed and gave the musical a longer run than On Your Toes – 338 performances. The Boys from Syracuse (1938) would end this four-musical run between Balanchine and Rodgers and Hart. Based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Rodgers and Hart were able to capture much of the comedy and joie de vivre in Shakespeare’s play and bring it forward into a delightful twentieth-century musical. Among the various numbers that he choreographed, two stood out. The director of the show, the incomparable George Abbot created the character of the Sorcerer, who is not in Shakespeare’s play. This convention allowed for Balanchine to create “dream ballets” that did not arrest the show. In one,

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Dromio E. requests that the Sorcerer “show” him his brother, Dromi. The ballet begins with Dromio E. looking into a crystal ball and the dance begins. The brothers meet in this dream ballet in which “their movements dramatize the mirror quality of the men’s actions. When the dance ends with one Dromio leaving the stage, neither is aware that he has actually seen his twin.”49 In another section in the musical, Balanchine creates a very imaginative pas de trois for Antiphone E. and a courtesan and his wife. In it a single man dances with two women, one on pointe, and the other in tap shoes. Often all three bodies interweave, they separate with the male dancer accompanying first one and then the other. … The dance courageously combined tap, ballet, and adagio. Labeled ‘sensuous’ and ‘beautiful’ by some critics but ‘controversial’ by others, it translates the language of the musical into a visual experience for the audience… The dance is also distinguished by the fact that its choreography not only interweaves these three dancers, their bodies sensuously interacting, but also gives an impressionistic interpretation of what is happening on stage. The dance captures the essence of Antipholus E., who finds both the Courtesan and his wife attractive.50 Despite its comedy and superb direction and choreography, this production at 235 performances was not able to attract the same traffic as the previous three musicals. At this point, Balanchine moves into a period in which he rides the inevitable roller coaster of success and failure. With his next musical, Keep of the Grass (1940), at 44 performances, he experienced his first flop despite the fact that he was able to create a modern dance for the up-and-coming charismatic Jose’ Limon. In the same year, with Irving Berlin’s Louisiana Purchase (1940), running for 444 performances, he was able to recover with the season’s biggest hit. With the help of his wife, Vera Zorina, he was able to create dances that critics called “imaginative” and “arresting.” This back and forth continued until Courtin’ Time (1951), which would be Balanchine’s last musical.51 Between those, however, he directed and choreographed the musical, described as a “Negro fantasy,” titled Cabin in the Sky (1940). Based on an African folklore, it told the story of Little Joe trying to get to heaven; however, Lucifer, Jr. sends the sensual Georgia Brown, played by Katherine Dunham, to tempt him from his goal. 52 It is difficult to sort out how much of the choreography came from Balanchine and how much of it came from the accomplished choreographer and dancer, Katherine Dunham. The general consensus is that Balanchine was responsible for the staging of the show while he and Dunham shared artistic input into many of the choreographic numbers. 53 While some critics praised Balanchine for using Katherine Dunham and her dancers as a way in which to offer an alternative

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to the more typical social dancing and tap dancing in Black musicals,54 there were others who were blatant in their racist reviews. John Mason Brown writes: “It dancing, as brilliantly directed by George Balanchine and executed by Katherine Dunham and a stageful of writhing negroes, can mount to orgiastic climaxes of extraordinary vigor,”55 or Burns Mantle’s “The dance numbers are properly wild, sometimes a trifle orgiastic, in George Balanchine’s best Egyptian ballet manner.”56 Clearly, Martin was very aware of Dunham’s concert work and feels that Balanchine may have tried to superimpose his European ballet aesthetic in an area in which he had little or no knowledge. Either way, the show received mild response from the audience giving it a 156-performance run. In the 1930s and early 1940s Broadway musicals, Rasch and Balanchine were prolific in their output and each was in high demand as choreographers. Each had the intention to create an “American” ballet and, in many ways, they did. Speed, precision in execution, openness to incorporate other movement vocabularies into their ballet base, a respect for the musical theatre genre, and sense of humor that permitted them to create satiric comment in some of their ballets without compromising professional technical execution by their dancers were all ways in which they were contributing to what would later become an “Americanized” ballet.57 Along the way, they opened the awareness of their colleagues who wrote the music and the librettos for musicals to the possibility that dance could be considered essential when creating a show. Rather than an entertaining divertissement, dance could indeed advance the plot and reveal aspects of character or environment that can complement the other elements of musical theatre production. At the same time, because of their high standards for performance and the creative and imaginative choreographies they created, this acted as a draw for dancers who might otherwise not want to leave the concert stage for the musical theatre stage. These concert dancers would not have to “sell out” their standard for quality dance and, at the same time, receive a financial reward that their peers in concert dance could only dream about receiving. What they had started in the 1930s and early 1940s, the next generation of choreographers would build upon and enrich musical theatre production with yet another level of dance performance and creation.

Modern Dance With musical theatre productions today being choreographed by modern dance choreographers, like Twyla Tharp in Come, Fly With Me (2010), Bill T. Jones in Fela! (2009), Garth Fagan in The Lion King (1997), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in West Side Story (2020), and many others, we take for granted that musical theatre choreographers can make the transition from the modern dance concert stage to the Broadway musical theatre stage but it hasn’t always been so. The history of modern dance and its relationship to musical theatre dance has been circuitous and oftentimes underappreciated. A part of the reason for that lies in its origins.

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Many people in the United States would acknowledge that modern dance in America begins with Isadora Duncan and those in Europe might point to Rudolph von Laban and Mary Wigman. These are certainly iconic and important figures, but the origins of modern dance actually begin in a much murkier and nebulous past. The question – What is modern in dance? – begins in the late nineteenth century when people started to ask themselves – what causes us to move?, what shape would that take?, do you have to be a professional to participate in “modern dance?” To begin answering such questions requires fundamental curiosity, persistent observation, and scientific examination. People like François Delsarte, who made his observations of how people expressed their emotions through physical gesture, facial expression, and bodily alignment, developed what became known the Delsarte System. This system had a huge impact on the physical culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as well as on the work of actors, like Sarah Bernhardt, and dancers like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. At around the same time, there was Dalcroze eurhythmics, created by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. This was a method that could teach some of the basic principles of music through movement and bodily exercises. His work had a strong impact on German expressionistic modern dancer-choreographer, Mary Wigman, and American modern and musical theatre choreographer, Hanya Holm. Finally, the Physical Culture movement at this time came together as a confluence of different factors – German gymnastics movement in American schools, the women’s movements that were working to open opportunities for women in education, in work, in politics, and in various avenues of self-expression, a revival of interest in the classics, particularly in Greek and Roman cultures, and the early beginnings of what was called aesthetic or interpretive dance. Isadora Duncan and several of her contemporaries become the ideal emblems of what it could mean to be a woman who had agency not only in her dancing body but in her life as well. Dance historian Elizabeth Kendall points out that dancers like Isadora Duncan “embodied a change in the very perception of a human figure; after them human beauty was no longer pictured in portraits or theatrical postures but in flashes, glimpses of something vulnerable and alive and caught in musical motion.”58 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the words – modern dance – encompassed everything from the social dancing of Vernon and Irene Castle to the controversial ballets of Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky to solo art dancers from Loie Fuller to Harald Kreutzberg. What made it so broad was the influx of dancers and choreographers trying desperately to reflect and respond to the speed with which the world around them seemed to be changing. They knew what was conventional in ballet and mime and social dance. They, however, were looking for something else, something more immediate, something that might even reflect the dangerousness they felt while being pushed along by quickly shifting political events, dominating technologies, and growing urbanization. One of the changes that directly affected dance, and women in dance in particular, was

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a growing appreciation for the female body and particularly the female body in motion. Performing opportunities for women in dance were limited to ballet and musical theatre; both which were more often than not dominated by men and by men’s interpretation of what women, or “girls,” should look like and what they can or cannot do on the stage. Again, Kendall succinctly points to who these women were. They were ballet girls possessed of those ‘unballetic’ qualities of the New American woman-her ‘great fund of life,’ her self-absorption, her fearlessness, her unbounded imagination, and her often monstrous daring. It was the combination of the ballet girl’s body with the American untamed spirit that produced our first solo dancers and our first native art form.59 Some followed in the footsteps of dancer-choreographers like Gertrude Hoffman, who joined many other women dancers to create their own version of Maude Allan’s, “The Vision of Salome.” Hoffman premiered her version in New York in July of 1908. By October of that same year, there were 24 other women performing their own version of Salome in New York alone.60 Others, like Loie Fuller, who began her career as a skirt dancer in vaudeville, became much more interested in creating movement pieces with the help of props, costumes, cloth materials, and especially lighting. Although she performed in the United States, she became an internationally renowned dancer when she performed in Paris and throughout Europe. She quickly became the subject of poets, painters, and sculptors and was associated with the Art Nouveau movement of the early twentieth century. While women dancers, like Hoffman, Fuller, and others, continued to work within a musical theatre umbrella, Isadora Duncan carved her own identity on the concert stage. Inspired by the Greeks and the paintings of Sandro Botticelli and the music of composers like Chopin, she proceeded to develop a dance that was uniquely her own. Dressed in light flowing fabrics that could reveal the shape of the body and performing on a stage devoid of scenery or props, and assisted by a pianist rather than a full orchestra, she directed the audience to focus on the “body in motion” dancing to the accompaniment of a solo pianist. Her “choreography” was often composed of deceptively simple childlike movements, like running, skipping, jumping, and walking, but what she felt was primary in her dance was “a vision of one’s body as the center of the universe-or the stage-[which] generates absolute clarity in the position of that body and the intent of its gesture.”61 Duncan stripped the accoutrement of theatrical and ballet dancers – no tap or pointe shoes, as a matter of fact, no shoes at all, no leotards and tights, no formal gowns, no gaudy fashion dresses of the day, no tutus, no headdresses, no formal gowns, – just the body simply dressed, moving. …Isadora had found the elements of her art: its musical patterns, its gestures, its three-dimensional melody. Her dances were rhythmic statements

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that complemented the music; questions and answers and repeats and surprise thoughts paced according to the musical forms. They existed in formal space. … Isadora’s dances had become no mere pictures but structures of motion.62 In many ways, Isadora Duncan did for dance – modern dance – what Savion Glover would do for tap dance in the 1990s; bringing everything back to the basics so that we might see more clearly. In many ways, she became the apogee of all those who had preceded her. With her, we begin to define a new dance form – modern dance. This was different from the modern social dances of Vernon and Irene Castle or the modernist ballet coming from the Diaghilev ballet. This was a new form of dance that would be defined and redefined by each succeeding generation whose responsibility was to respond to their immediate realities, all the while acknowledging the work of those who came before, but whose primary duty was to reinvigorate movement with an honesty that only the individual can discover for herself. As we move into the 1920s and 1930s, modern dance begins to take shape and own its distinctive qualities from other forms of dance. One colleague of mine, when asked by an incoming college freshman what they teach in a modern dance class, responded – “you know what jazz is, right? You know what tap is, right? You know what ballet, folk and ballroom is, right? Well, modern dance is everything else those are not.” That kind of nebulous and evasive response to defining modern dance is not limited to the educational setting. It is bewildering when reading musical theatre books, essays, and critiques in which ballroom dancing couples, like John Hyams and Leila McIntyrle, performing their Ragtime Whirl in 1914 The Dancing Duchess or Irene and Vernon Castle performing their famous “Syncopated Walk” in 1914 Watch Your Step are linked with Florence O’Denishawn performing her “ballet like” dances in Hitchy-Koo of 1919 or Michio Ito performing Japanese, Hindu, Gypsy, and Greek dances to music by Brahms and Debussy for the musical revue, Pinwheel Revel, in 1922. And, all are described as modern dance! John Martin, the New York Times first full-time dance critic, writes that modern dance oftentimes has more to do with attitude than it does with technique. Martin further observes that modern dance “establishes the principles of form and technique or physical vocabulary that arise from the ideas of the dance itself.”63 This notion of discovering a movement vocabulary that comes out of the dance idea itself is crucial to understand one very important aspect of how modern dance has influenced musical theatre dance. While a traditional balletic approach tends to place the emphasis on music for its inspiration, traditional modern dance has relied upon an idea and/or a movement phrase for its inspiration. While ballet-based choreographers, like Albertina Rasch and George Balanchine, tend to accept the conventions of the musical theatre of their respective eras and adapted the ballet vocabulary to meet those preconceived notions of what dance in musical theatre could be, modern dance choreographers, like Hanya Holm and Helen

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Tamaris, challenged the conventions of musical theatre and explored dance from the perspective of plot requirement, character development, and dramatic function, but with a difference. They did not approach rehearsals with a preconceived notion of a “technique” that could be superimposed or adapted to any particular show; rather, they would engage with the dancer-actors to make discoveries of what movement style would best serve the needs of the show. As a result, with the exception of Agnes de Mille, modern dance choreographers, rather than ballet choreographers, tended to insinuate themselves into the very conception of a musical theatre production.64. The groundwork for these 1940s and 1950s modern dance choreographers in musical theatre began in the 1930s with former Denishawn dancers, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Martha Graham. Before this time, one of the founders of Denishawn, Ruth St. Denis, “made history as the first dancer to present a program of solo dances on a Broadway stage”65 on January 28, 1906. Ten years later, she and her dancing partner, Ted Shawn, and their company of dancers were touring on the vaudeville circuit in the same year as the Diaghilev Ballet Russe were touring the United States.66 They first presented music visualizations of what we today would call world dances from India, Egypt, and even Native-America, while the second presented ballets that challenged classical ballet with a modern sensibility in technique, choreography, and design. In both cases, the Americans found these productions to be exotic and, in some cases, erotic. By the time we get to the 1930s and early 1940s, modern dancer/choreographers were beginning to explore how best to present their concert work on the musical theatre stage and how some of them might be able to contribute to the choreography as well. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman got their first opportunity with the Shubert production of Americana (1932). In this revue, the Humphrey-Weidman dancers presented several of their modern dance concert pieces. Among them were Humphrey’s “The Shakers,” and “Water Study,” and Weidman’s “Ringside.” In addition, Charles Weidman shared choreographic responsibilities for other dances with John Boyle. Many of the reviews were very positive regarding the assessment of their dances with the New York Times drama critic citing that these dances give a new prestige in the theatre.67 “Water Study” is a dance in which the dancers lie on the stage floor and mimic the waves of the ocean in variations. It is performed without accompaniment. Shubert placed the dance, which is usually performed on a bare stage, within a cellophane set that could enhance the subject of the dance. “The Shakers” is a dance that presents an abstracted version of the Shaker’s religious ritual in which the men dance on one side of the stage and women dance on the other. The dance itself is dramatic, yet austere. While this dance too is performed on the concert stage without accompaniment, Humphrey makes a concession to Shubert and permitted the use of a simple drum pattern to underscore it.68 Even Weidman’s comic “Prize Ring” was enthusiastically received by the audience. Both Humphrey and Weidman did not have to compromise in any significant way their concert versions of these dances for the musical revue audience. While dance critic, John Martin, was

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initially hesitant about the transfer of these dances to the musical theatre stage, he was quickly won over. In referring to the seven concert pieces, he writes “All seven … are characterized by taste and form, at least, and several of them by a good deal more.”69 Weidman stepped out from his modern dance mode and choreographed a jazz dance for some of the revue’s dancers called, “Satan’s Little Lamb.” While Moulton writes that “this was the first appearance of a major modern dance concert work in a revue,70 Martin provided some historical context when he writes” …the dances staged by Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman … have opened up something of greater importance …They have opened a new field to the dance, and a new field to the revue; and in doing so have opened even the most optimistic, as well as the most skeptical, eyes to the appeal of good dancing to the ordinary audience. It is impossible to skip lightly over all these intermediate steps that have led to this introduction of fine dancing into the revue. Several seasons ago Agnes de Mille did a first-rate job of the dances in ‘The Black Crook.’ Gluck-Sandor last season introduced a concert dance, “Mask and Hands,” with conspicuous success into the “Vanities,” and has created a ‘blues’ ballet for the current edition. No considerations of the subject can afford to overlook the great contributions which have been made by Albertina Rasch in a score of productions. But never before has there been such a revolutionary move in the field as that made in ‘Americana.’ 71 While Humphrey was less taken with the culture surrounding the Broadway musical revue and much preferred the concert stage, Weidman was able to land comfortably in both worlds.72 He went on to choreograph several more musical theatre productions, such as As Thousands Cheer (1933), which was composed by Irving Berlin and directed by Moss Hart. This production used newspaper headlines as a part of its scenography and presented a revue that was pointedly satiric, yet humorous. Weidman choreographed three dances, including a homage to the newspapers Lonely Heart columns (similar to our dating apps today,) “Lonely Hearts Column,” which featured the future modern dance choreographer, José Limón.73 With a 400-performance run, As Thousands Cheer had much to cheer about. Weidman went on to choreograph several other musical theatre productions including Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), I’d Rather Be Right (1937), New Faces of 1943 (1942), New Moon (1944), and Jackpot (1944). There were other modern dance choreographers, like Michio Ito, who choreographed What’s in a Name? (1920), Cherry Blossoms (1927), and The Mikado (1927); Jack Cole was just beginning his Broadway musical theatre career with May Wine (1935) and Keep ‘Em Laughing (1942); African-American modern dancer/ choreographer and dance anthropologist, Pearl Primus, choreographed Caribbean Carnival (1947); among others. This brings us back to Katherine Dunham.

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Cabin in the Sky was directed by George Balanchine and, while he also received sole choreographic credit, there is some controversy about how much Katherine Dunham may have contributed to the choreography and how much of Balanchine’s work may be now termed appropriation. What is important to know is that Balanchine was committed to doing this show and working with his fellow Russian composer friend, Vernon Duke. He invested his life savings into this show and he sought out Katherine Dunham and her dancers. He “tried to do in dance what Porgy and Bess had done in opera: portray the lives of rural African-Americans in a dance form that grew, in part, from a fusion of FrancoRussian and Africanist dance.” 74 Dunham was the perfect collaborator. She was a dance anthropologist as well as a performer/choreographer. Her background included ballet training, as well elements of dance from the Caribbean basin, modern dance, African-American dance with some South American ingredients as well. Moulton describes in some detail the construction of her dances and how they might differ from other modern and jazz dance contemporaries. Dunham treats jazz in an entirely different fashion than [ Jack] Cole. She recreates the old dances by extracting the elements that will best serve her purpose, and then works with those movements. She exaggerates them, repeats them over and over, and reshapes them, not into a historic replica, but into a dance based on the original source material to express a specific point of view. … she works with the material directly, rather than using it as an impetus to inventing new movement.75 While we do not have access to the original choreography for this show, I think that we can see how the collaboration between these two dance artists was feeding off of each other. After seeing Josephine Baker perform in Paris in the mid-1920s and his later collaborations with other African-American dance artists like Herbie Harper and the Nicholas Brothers, Balanchine was open to learning and incorporating an Africanist aesthetic into his own movement vocabulary. From Dunham’s point of view, she certainly would have been excited to work with one of Broadway’s then-choreographic legends, particularly on her first Broadway show, but she balanced out their artistic relationship with her own extended professional background as a performer and choreographer in her own right and she brought to this project years of academic study of the dances of the African diaspora and the Caribbean. In an interview with tap and jazz dance historian, Constance Valis Hill, she discussed how Balanchine might have an idea for a dance and then “he would go through the whole scenario and say where the dance was. That was the first musical I had ever done. And I was quite willing to have him give as much as he could. He never bothered me about the exact step of the choreography. And unless it interfered with the story, he wouldn’t stop me in any theme in the way I would want to do it.76 This was truly a labor of love for both but it was not without its controversies. Some of the backers for the show were concerned that they were not seeing

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more upbeat tap numbers and other kinds of dances that they associated with conventional African-American musicals. They even went so far as to threaten to replace Balanchine as director; however, Balanchine and the composer and designer, Boris Aronson, resisted their racist notions and, in the end, they prevailed. While Cabin in the Sky was generally recognized for its groundbreaking accomplishments by some of its critics, and its 156 performances suggest that it was a modest commercial success, there were other critics whose comments revealed an inherent racism that characterized African-American dancing in musicals as either tame, smiling tap dancers, or energetic social dance performers, or representative of their savage origins in the African diaspora. But, again, John Martin was much more precise in his assessment. Balanchine has wisely allowed the dancers throughout to make use of great quantities of their own type of movements, many of them right out of the vocabulary of their concert repertoire. Frequently, however, he has forced them into his own patterns, and in the process, they have lost flavor. … Is this once more the exigencies of the Broadway medium, or would the result have been more pungent if Miss Dunham had been responsible for the choreography, even without so much knowledge of musical comedy routine?77 Nonetheless, Dunham went on to perform and choreograph several Broadway musicals. Among them were Tropical Revue (1943), Carib Song (1945), Blue Holiday (1945), and Bal Negre (1946). John Martin pinpoints the challenges inherent with bringing in a modern dance approach to musical theatre choreography. What works well on the concert stage may not work on the musical theatre stage. Of course, it is not just the commercial pressure to provide “a hit,” concert modern dance can allow for multiple performances of a particular dance over an extended period of time to marinate and develop the potential for that dance before determining whether it can or should stay within the repertoire. The expediency with which many musical theatre productions must rehearse may allow little time to experiment with the actor-dancers to try out various choreographic solutions to problems or aspirations for a particular musical number. Musical theatre at its best brings together all that its artists can provide while at the same time being tempered with a keen antennae for what is happening in the culture at the time in which they are working and the sensibilities of their audience. While it can be argued that modern dance’s influence throughout the early twentieth-century musical theatre was sporadic and not as readily apparent as that of jazz, tap, or ballet, it did in fact have an enormous impact on the success of a number of significant musicals and as we move into the remainder of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, its impact on the choreographic approach and design to a production will become increasingly significant.

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Notes 1 Ethan Mordden, The Broadway Musical of the 1930s: Sing for Your Supper (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 2–3. 2 Cabin in the Sky was co-choreographed with George Balanchine. 3 In Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s excellent book, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), the author quotes Katherine Dunham as saying that “Balanchine liked the rhythm and percussion of our dances,” ... referring to her own African-American Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Gottschild makes the point that Balanchine was the perfect catalyst for defining and shaping American ballet. “The groundedness and rhythmic sense that he inherited from the Georgian (Russian) folk dance tradition was the open door that allowed him to embrace the Africanist rhythmic landscape of this adopted homeland.” 4 Tim Robbins’ 1999 movie, The Cradle Will Rock, chronicles in detail the Federal Theatre project and its impact on the American public. 5 When not on tour, Martha Graham was teaching movement for the actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse. 6 Robert Moulton, Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue on the New York Stage from 1925 through 1950. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1957, p. 46. 7 Mordden, p. 25. 8 Moulton, pp. 54–55. 9 For an excellent source for a timeline overview of the Ballet Russe. See: https:// www.loc.gov/collections/ballets-russes-de-serge-diaghilev/articles-and-essays/ timeline-of-ballets-russes/ 10 For a brief history and description of Enrico Cecchetti and his influence. See: https:// www.cecchetti.org/about/history/ 11 See Lynn Garafola’s Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe for a more detailed description. 12 Arthur Jackson, The Best Musicals from Showboat to Sweeney Todd: Broadway – Off-­ Broadway- London (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1979), p. 43. 13 Karen Nelson, “The Years 1975–1929: Dance Arrives in New York,” Proceedings from the Dance History Scholars. Fifth Annual Conference, Harvard University, February 13–15, 1982, p. 55. 14 From an interview with Mrs. Konnie Worth, former assistant choreographer to Rasch, August 4, 1982. 15 Stanley Green, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1976), p. 346. 16 See this website for contemporary images and descriptions of the ballet – https:// hypercommon.com/2020/09/the-ballet-of-niagara/ 17 Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of the 1910s Broadway Musicals (New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), p. 36. 18 From an interview with Mrs. Worth. 19 Green, p. 346. 20 Frank W. D. Ries, “Albertina Rasch: The Broadway Career,” Dance Chronicle. Studies in Dance and the Related Arts. Vol 6, No. 2, p. 104. 21 Reis, pp. 106–107. 22 Cecil Smith, “A Quarter Century of Musical Comedy Dancing,” Dance Magazine, April 1956, p. 58. 23 Smith, p. 58. 24 Smith, p. 58. 25 Ries, pp. 115–116. 26 Ries, pp. 116–117. 27 Dorothy Bird, Bird’s Eye View: Dancing with Martha Graham and on Broadway (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), p. 162. In her book, the writer describes many of the backstage antics and personal challenges that she and other members of the cast experienced.

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28 Time Magazine. February 3, 1941. 29 Brooks Atkinson, “Struck by Lightning: Comments on the Theatre Wonders of Lady in the Dark,” New York Times. September 7, 1941, p. 158. 30 Bernard Taper, Balanchine: A Biography (New York, NY: Times Book, 1984), pp. 44–45. 31 Taper, pp. 57–59. 32 Taper, pp. 57–59. 33 Taper, p. 59. 34 Taper, p. 83. 35 Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry. Edited by Robert Cornfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 170–174. 36 Taper, p. 110. 37 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times. January 31, 1936, p. 17. 38 Robert Baral, Revue: A Nostalgic Reprise of the Great Broadway Period (New York, NY: Fleet Publishing Corp., 1962), p. 92. 39 Vincent Minnelli and Hector Arce, I Remember It Well (New York, NY: Berkeley Publishing Corp., 1974), p. 79. 40 As related in Beth Genne’ Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Musical, Balanchine had seen Josephine Baker perform with her troupe, Revue Negre. He was fascinated with her performance and would become friends with her (some would say they were lovers). He would choreograph for her and teach her ballet. He did not anticipate the reception she would receive in the United States, particularly because of her international star power abroad. 41 There is a wonderful anecdote regarding how Balanchine worked with the ballet dancers to keep them playing this dance straight while Ray Bolger was performing his antics. See Holly Van Leuven’s book, Ray Bolger: More Than a Scarecrow. 42 Beth Genné, Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Film Musical (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 85–86. 43 Genne, p. 86. 44 Stearns, p. 167. 45 Edith J. R. Isaacs, “Spring Dances In: Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts Monthly. June, 1936. Vol XX, No. 6, pp. 415–416. 46 Stearns, pp. 280–281. 47 Joshua Logan, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 1976), p. 103. 48 Logan, p. 106. 49 Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 33. 50 Dash, p. 34. It is interesting to note that part of this description recalls his early balletic work, Apollo. 51 In 1944, Balanchine would experience his longest-running musical with Song of Norway in 1944. It ran for an incredible 860 performances. 52 This basic plot line will be duplicated in the 1950s musical, Damn Yankees. 53 This is an area that will be explored in the next section of this chapter on modern dance. 54 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times. October 26, 1940, p. 19. 55 John Mason Brown, New York Post. October 26, 1940. 56 Burns Mantle, New York Daily News. October 26, 1940. 57 To complete this ambition would require the input from some American choreographers such as Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Eugene Loring, and others in that next generation of artists. 58 Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. xiii. 59 Kendall, p. 10.

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60 Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 39. Hoffman was an excellent mimic. Her Salome was related more toward a comic act for revues and vaudeville rather than creating an art-dance to express herself. Later, she found a way to stay in the musical theatre world in the 1910s–1930s by forming her Tiller-like chorus of “girls” known as Gertrude Hoffman Girls. 61 Kendall, p. 66. 62 Kendall, p. 67. 63 John Martin, America Dancing: The Background and Personalities of the Modern Dance (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, Incorporated, 1968), p. 66. Also, Martin’s discussion about dance theory as it relates to the early beginnings of modern dance in his book, Introduction to the Dance, is well worth reviewing to gain a clearer understanding of how modern dance contrasted with other concert dance forms at the beginning of the twentieth century. 64 It is worth noting that some might describe de Mille as a ballet choreographer with a folk vocabulary but with a modern sensibility. It is this eclectic quality, among others, that marks her incredible contribution to the development of musical theatre dance. 65 Paul A. Scolieri, Ted Shawn: His Life, Writings, and Dances (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 96. 66 Scolieri, p. 96. 67 Doris Humphrey, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First – An Autobiography. Edited and completed by Selma Jean Cohen. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), p. 116. 68 Most of the reconstructions of this dance that I have seen have retained the use of a simple, regular drum beat. 69 John Martin, New York Times, October 16, 1932, p. XII. 70 Moulton, p. 135. 71 John Martin, New York Times. October 16, 1932, p. XII. 72 Humphrey agreed to co-choreograph the country and folk musical revue, Sing Out, Sweet Land, in 1944. Several years later, she got pulled into working with Weidman on The Barrier (1950) after the original director quit. She finished directing the show and co-choreographing this Langston Hughes musical adaptation of his very successful drama, Mulatto. Unfortunately, it could not find an audience soon enough before closing after only four performances. 73 Moulton (1935), p. 137. 74 Genne’, p. 112. 75 Moulton, p. 122. 76 Constance Valis Hill, “Collaborating with Balanchine on Cabin in the Sky: Interviews with Katherine Dunham.” Edited by Ve’Ve’ A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson in Writings by and about Katherine Dunham (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 246. 77 John Martin, New York Times, November 10, 1940, Sec. IX, p. 2.

 149

Lizzie Kelsey as Stalacta in The Black Crook by José María Mora, c. 1847 – 18 Oct 1926, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Francis A. DiMauro

150 

Cakewalk circa 1890s, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0

Castle Innovation Waltz. Vernon Blythe Castle, 1887–1918; Irene Foote Castle, 7 Apr 1893–26 Jan 1969, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Saul Zalesch

 151

Cancan Dancer Matchsafe, France; cast silver, enamel; 4.8 × 3.3 × 1 cm (1 7/8 × 1 5/16 × 3/8 in.); gift of Stephen W. Brener and Carol B. Brener; 1978-146-259; CCO 1.0

152 

Josephine Baker in a studio 1, licensed under CC BY 2.0

 153

Alice Pike Barney, Ruth St. Denis, 1910, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in Memory of Their Mother, Alice Pike Barney, 1952.13.58

154 

Fred Astaire, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 155

“¡Tango!” by Armando Maynez, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Antony Tudor is seated at the top of the ladder. Below him is Ruthanna Boris. Todd Bolender is caught in a jump. Jerome Robbins is seated on the floor to the right of the ladder and George Balanchine is on the floor down center. Photographer may be Martha Swope

 157

Fancy Free. Choreographed by Jerome Robbins; KCB Dancers, Photographer: Steve Wilson

Matilda, the Musical. Credit: Destination NSW

158 

Big Fish. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Photo credit: Paul Kolnik

High Button Shoes. Joan Marcus Photography

 159

Once on This Island. Joan Marcus Photography

Hamilton: An American Musical. Joan Marcus Photography

6 1943–1957 Integration: Dance Narrates

Pent-Up Restlessness Meets Optimistic Opportunity The after-war years in the United States were greeted with exhilaration and optimism. The iconic Life magazine photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on Times Square on V-J day, August 14, 1945, captured the mood and the hopes of many Americans. It wasn’t just the end of a war – a war that saw almost 50,000,000 deaths with 300,000 of those being Americas – it was also the end of a decade’s long Depression that witnessed nearly one of four Americans without a job, and of those who were able to keep their jobs, half of those saw their take home pay cut in half. Many Americans looked forward to finding a job, getting married, having children, and buying or building a home. Prosperity for many came rather quickly and many couldn’t wait to buy and drive their own car. Eisenhower’s superhighways were being built and, with that, Americans hit the road. When they came home, they had swapped the radios that had been so important throughout the Depression for television sets. Soon, the programming of their favorite vaudeville and musical theatre performers could entertain them in their own homes. In 1945, when they went to see shows on Broadway, they were treated with a wealth of possibilities. If they were interested in musicals, there was Jerome Robbins’ Billion Dollar Baby (1945) or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945). If Shakespeare were their preference, they could see a production of Hamlet or two different productions of The Tempest; for drama, Dark of the Moon; for comedy, Kiss Them for Me; even Martha Graham’s dance company performed their spring concert series on Broadway. Actors, dancers, directors, writers, designers, and more swapped their military uniforms for a chance to either start or resume their artistic lives. From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, there was DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-7

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an explosion in stage productions and film and the new medium of television as well as in the visual arts, and music, … and dance. Musical theatre dance was not left out of this incredible renaissance. Beginning with Agnes de Mille and her Oklahoma! (1943) to Jerome Robbins’ groundbreaking West Side Story (1957), this decade and a half witnessed an abundance of choreographic talent like Michael Kidd, Gower Champion, Helen Tamiris, Robert Alton, Bob Fosse, Hanya Holm, Anna Sokolow, Dania Krupska, among many others. It’s as if all of the ingredients that would foster a mature choreographer, who could not only place dance in the center of musical theatre creation along with the composer, lyricist, librettist, and director and could extend it dramaturgically, realized the potential for musicals to employ dance and movement to contribute in ways that could reveal aspects of narrative and character that could not be expressed otherwise, exploded all at once. In the decades leading up to this time, we moved from a period in which we had dance directors who would choreograph the chorus in whatever specialty they were proficient and rely upon the leading actors to come up with their own choreography to a period in which the choreographer would take on the responsibility for the whole show. In the work of people, like George Balanchine and Albertina Rasch, we saw the beginnings of incorporating dance into the story line that was essential and not a mere divertissement. By the mid-1940s onward, New York City was becoming the mecca for dance from all over the world. The dance division for the New York Public Library begun in 1944 would soon become the world’s largest repository for dance materials of all kinds. Dance studios and dance programs in universities were proliferating not just in New York but throughout the country. By 1948, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s dream to found the New York City Ballet became a reality, one that would require Balanchine’s full attention and his permanent divorce from the musical theatre stage. The American Ballet theatre was giving American choreographers the opportunity to create ballets that reflected the American experience. In 1938, Eugene Loring choreographed “Billy the Kid” and followed that up in 1940 with “The Great American Goof.” Agnes de Mille contributed her “Three Virgins and a Devil” in 1940 and Jerome Robbins’ “Fancy Free” in 1944. American ballet dancers were still performing the European and Russian classics but now they were also contributing their own dances to the ballet repertoire. Modern dance was seeing its own growth with the development of modern dance companies building on the previous success of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. In the immediate after-war years, other modern dancer-­ choreographers, like Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Hanya Holm, José Limón, and others, were extending the movement vocabulary of dance and growing an audience as well. Oklahoma! was an exceptional success artistically and commercially. Its theme of farmers and ranchers competing for limited resources, as well as competition for Laurey’s attention from Curly and Jud, provided just enough tension and

162  1943–1957

conflict to keep it interesting and yet, at the conclusion, there is a rapprochement that allows for former enemies to put away their differences “for the land we belong to is grand,” a sentiment that echoed the patriotic fever that drew many Americans to support the war effort in Europe. For many, there was one kind of musical theatre before Oklahoma! and then, there was another kind of musical theatre afterward.1 It was a demarcation line to be sure but, it wasn’t just good timing, there was also a preparation that preceded this unique musical theatre experience in the years immediately beforehand. Theatre historian Ethan Mordden makes a strong case for the antecedents that paved the way for this kind of “realistic” musical to be created and appreciated by the audience in 1943. He discusses the contributions of Cabin in the Sky (1940) with choreography by George Balanchine and Katherine Dunham, Pal Joey (1940) with choreography by one of Broadway’s most talented and competent choreographers, Robert Alton and starring Gene Kelly, and Lady in the Dark (1941) choreographed by Albertina Rasch. In each of these musicals, the choreography was central to the overall concept of the shows. For Cabin in the Sky, it rested on the authenticity of the movement and dance that could convey the environment and the feel for this fantasy parable of African-American life. For Pal Joey, the dancing lead character, Joey Evans is an amoral second-rate singer-dancer, a womanizer who, in the end, is left all alone with no job, no friends, and no woman. What keeps the audience interested in this guy is the clever way that Kelly was able to use his dancing to comment on the character. Dance critic, John Martin, observed that “Gene Kelly is not only glib-footed, but he has a feeling for comment that both gives his dancing personal distinction and raises it several notches as a theatre art.”2 With Lady in the Dark, the dance was an essential contrivance to take us from the “realistic” world of the character, Liza Elliott, into her dream world. The phantasmagoric imagery in these dream sequences allowed Rasch to take from a wide movement palette in order to explore her submerged desires and fears. Mordden concludes with the following assessment: The very motion of Cabin in the Sky’s folk-ballet staging will have impact in the development of choreography as an indispensable element in the elaboration of atmosphere, spirit, attitude. The naturalist of Pal Joey will have impact on the gradual disappearance of stock characters and formula dialogue. But the very structure of Lady in the Dark will have impact in a renegotiation of the relationship between script and score, of how much dramatic weight the song-and-dance portion of a show will be asked to carry, of how the performers relate to the score separately and together, of how song relates to dance.3 The time was right for dance to take its place as a central contributor to authoring a musical alongside the librettist, the composer-lyricist, and the director. No longer “hired help,” the choreographer now is front and center.

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Agnes de Mille Agnes de Mille makes several suggestions for those who wish to choreograph a musical and they are simply, or not so simply, “to move the dance and to make it interesting.”4 She also valued the notion that “the choreographer must ‘preserve’ above all the attitude and culture behind the dance gesture.”5 On the surface, these statements can be taken as an easy bromide for the naïve; however, when you examine them in light of de Mille’s accomplishments in the musical theatre and in the ballet world, they become more like a distillation of a lifetime in dance. De Mille’s biographer, Carol Easton, summarizes her unique contribution to American dance on Broadway and in ballet with the observation that she was able to combine the technique of ballet with a grounding in folk dance and the openness associated with modern dance.6 Agnes de Mille came from a family of artists. Her father was a well-known Broadway playwright, William C. de Mille. Both of her grandparents, Henry Churchill de Mille and Matilda Beatrice de Mille were actors and playwrights in the late nineteenth century. After Matilda’s husband died, she went on to become a screenwriter for the nascent film industry. Her uncle was the most famous in the family as the legendary film director, Cecil B. de Mille. After seeing a performance of ballerinas, like Anna Pavlova and Adeline Genée, she knew she wanted to dance; however, she was discouraged from taking dance lessons by her parents and was not able to begin her studies until she completed a degree in English at UCLA. Once she did, she became obsessed with making up for time lost. She soon was given the opportunity to choreograph her first professional musical theatre assignment and that was for the revival in New Jersey of the musical often credited with formally beginning the development of the American musical, The Black Crook. By all accounts, her choreography was received well with some commenting on her comic abilities and her overall sense of theatricality.7 In 1932, she was given the opportunity to choreograph her first Broadway musical, Flying Colors. In this production, de Mille was brought on board as an equal to the producer, director, and composer. Among the dances she created for this show was one called “Smokin’ Reefers.” This dance comprised of 32 women dancers – 16 were white showgirls and 16 were African-Americans with limited experience. Although the song was about smoking marijuana, de Mille made it into a dance about voodoo ritual;8 however, before the musical hit Broadway, de Mille was replaced by Albertina Rasch. The only piece of choreography of de Mille’s that made it to Broadway was “Smokin Reefers.”9 The following year, she made her way to England to study with Marie Rambert and was befriended by Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton. Again, she was invited to choreograph a Cole Porter book musical called Nymph Errant (1933) about “a youthful English woman on a quest to lose her virginity. It starred Gertrude Lawrence.”10 She had eight dances to create including “a Greek Dionysian ritual set in the Acropolis, another jazz number set in Harlem, another

164  1943–1957

danced on a satin pillow in a Turkish harem.”11 Clearly, de Mille was not intimidated by subject matter. All the while, she was also creating solo ballets for herself and a group ballet, “Three Virgins and a Devil,” but it was her 1942 ballet, “Rodeo,” which held its premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House that was to change her life. Attending that evening were Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. They were working on a musical based on Lynn Rigg’s play, Green Grow the Lilacs, one that would soon become, Oklahoma! The ballet received an astounding 22 curtain calls. Immediately, they knew who should choreograph their show. The ballet had struck a nerve that went beyond the ballet world. “Rodeo is refreshing and as American as Mark Twain, wrote Alfred Frankenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘It is much the kind of ballet that Mark Twain might have written if his mind had run to ballets…’”12 De Mille would soon be recognized as a Broadway celebrity. On one level, Oklahoma! is about a farm girl, Laurey, and her attraction to two very different men – the cowboy Curly McLain and the farmhand Jud Fry. There is also the additional romance between Will Parker and Ado Annie. It takes place in the Western part of the United States in which farmers and cowboys were competing for jurisdiction of the land that would soon acquire statehood. What is missing in the musical, of course, are the Native-Americans, whose land was being usurped without asking.13 Beginning with Showboat (1927), Hammerstein II clearly did not shy away from controversial topics and he was looking for more ways in which to bring the musical play up to the same level that straight plays of his day were considered – that is, serious theatre. Richard Rodgers had ended the relationship with his long-time lyricist, Lorenz Hart, and could see the direction that Hammerstein II wanted to take the American musical. Oklahoma! would be the first of many collaborations between these two men. Their musicals dominated Broadway during the 1940s and 1950s alongside the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Hammerstein II had realized his ambition. Rodgers and Hammerstein II were initially attracted to the work of Agnes de Mille because they could see that she had the background to create movement that would come out of her knowledge of folk dance and ballet. She could provide the right atmosphere for the show. And she did with Act One’s paean tribute to “the big city life of ‘Kansas City.” She was able to create the exuberant opening to Act Two with “The Farmer and the Cowman.” To be certain that the square dances were authentic, she brought in an expert, May Gadd, then head of the American Country Dance Society,14 to teach her and her dancers. Throughout her career, de Mille had a great deal of respect for folk dance of all cultures. She used these as a basis to create a more genuine representation of the characters in the musicals she choreographed and these were in fact the kinds of dances that Rodgers and Hammerstein expected. What they did not expect is “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.”

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De Mille cast performers who could dance and act. In that regard, she pushed against the more conventional approach in which the directors and producers would cast the chorus based on looks rather than dance ability. The choreographer was left with the job to teach them how to dance. It is not surprising that in that situation, dance directors and choreographers were put into the position of teaching easily assessable “routines” rather than creative choreographies. De Mille expected each dancer to bring their unique personalities and movement qualities to the rehearsal and she would then use that material to create the dances for the show. This not only gave more depth in serious dances and more color and life to joyful or happy dances, but it also made it easier for her and the director to meld dance in and out of scenes more smoothly. This was very important in Oklahoma! because, unlike previous musicals in which the plot was set up as a backstage musical or a story set in a cabaret setting, in this musical they had to find other ways by which to “justify” how or why these cowboys and farmers would break out into dance. She even went so far as to create a character in one of these dances, “Many a New Day,” in which she gave dancer, Joan McCracken, a movement that resembled a Martha Graham fall to the ground. She played on McCracken’s comic ability to create a character in the dance that had not originally been in the scenario.15 One of her other strengths was her strong sense of comic timing. The dream ballet is the one dance that many point to as the dance that changed musical theatre dance. Hammerstein II had written a scenario for the dance and expected de Mille to simply make that into a musical visualization; even Rodgers had written the music and expected her to choreograph to that as well. In the ballet world, de Mille was used to the collaboration between composers and choreographers in which the choreographer might ask the composer to lengthen a section of the music or even create a new section that could better underscore a choreographic idea. For this dance, de Mille “took Hammerstein’s outline and created a fleshed-out portrayal of Laurey’s subconscious thoughts and fears. Her dream was bizarre and frightening, filled with scantily clad can-can dancers, an attempted rape, and the murder of the musical’s hero.”16 Curly’s nonthreatening and romantic wholesomeness is contrasted with the earthy ruthlessness of Jud Fry. A romantic pas de deux with Curly is interrupted when the postcard girls that Jud has pinned up on his wall come alive and attempt to entice Laurey to join in with their sexy alluring movements. When Jud is rebuffed by Laurey, there is a struggle between them that is interrupted by Curly. There is a fight between the two men that results in Jud killing Curly and dragging Laurey off stage.17 The response by the critics and audiences was overwhelming. Oklahoma! was more than a hit, it was an “event.” Oklahoma! went on to perform for an astonishing 2,212 performances. The accolades for de Mille were as gracious as they were for Rodgers and Hammerstein and the director, Rouben Mamoulian. Choreographer and scholar Liza Gennaro points out that it was the uniqueness of how de Mille pulled from pantomime, ballet, and modern dance that

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made her dances standout. She attributes her ability to build solos and duets on the basis of the personalities and uniqueness of each individual dancer that made the difference.18 Directors would never think that one-size-fits-all for the actors and de Mille made it clear that the same would hold for the dancers. Basically, de Mille is a storyteller, one who can tell stories clearly in movement but it is not just plot that she is interested in, characters are at the center of her contribution. We fall in love with characters far more than plot and de Mille showed how that could be done through movement and dance. Again, Mordden sums it up: “Here at last was the reason all those ballet people had been choreographing musicals: to do in dance what the script and score could not do in words and music. To consult a character’s feelings.”19 From this point forward, the indefatigable de Mille continued on to choreograph 14 other Broadway shows including One Touch of Venus (1943), Brigadoon (1947), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), The Girl in Pink Tights (1954), 110 in the Shade (1961), Come Summer (1970), and several others. She also choreographed ballets, presented programs on television and became a very prolific writer authoring ten books including her autobiography, Dance to the Piper (1952), a book length photo essay, American Dances: A Personal Chronicle in Words and Pictures (1980), and a biography, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1992). De Mille explained her take on how choreography should serve the show. In a musical play … the dances would have to suit the book; they would have to build the author’s line and develop his action, adding an element not obtainable through acting or singing and necessary if for no other reason than their dynamic effect. The problem of preserving character, period atmosphere and style would be a tough one since the bulk of the play would be performed realistically in a style as divorced from dance gesture as speaking is divorced from singing. Transition was accordingly going to have to become a fine art, for if the audience could not be swung from dramatic dialogue through song into dance and back again without hitch, the dance would be destroyed. The choreographer was going to have to learn surgery, to graft and splice.20 In this regard, de Mille was able to extend some of the efforts that her predecessors, particularly Balanchine and Rasch, were attempting to do toward the end of their Broadway careers. De Mille also adopted some of the ideas from her modern dance contemporaries, like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, to begin with an idea and then find the movement that would best express that idea.21 In 1947, Rodgers and Hammerstein called on de Mille to direct and choreograph their fourth collaboration, Allegro. While the nature of this show was unlike anything that either of these men had done before, de Mille accepted the offer thereby becoming the first woman to direct and choreograph a musical.22

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Allegro tells a tale about an idealistic young doctor, Joseph Taylor, Jr., from the time of his birth until he turns 35. It is a story about how he progresses from one stage of life to another and meets obstacles that challenge his fundamental sense of morality. In the end, he leaves his unfaithful wife and a prestigious job at a hospital in a big city and returns to his small hometown to begin his medical practice with his nurse. This was more of an experimental show that might have been more successful if it had been produced off-Broadway. The stage is bare except for some varied levels of platforms. The scenography is nonrepresentational. There is a Greek chorus that weaves throughout the story commenting on the action. Mordden makes the case that this is the first “concept” musical anticipating such musicals as Follies or Cabaret.23 In a word, Rodgers and Hammerstein deconstructed the musical and interrogated many of its long-standing conventions. Intellectually and artistically, this was certainly a challenge that de Mille felt was worth taking. The open spaces and the abilities to move performers in a nonstop fashion with little scenery, except for the use of projections to shift time and locale, sound like a choreographer-director’s wish. The visuals for this production would be just as important and essential as the music and book, and Rodgers and Hammerstein understood that and, for that reason, they invited de Mille to become co-creators with them. The production personnel grew to include “eighteen principals, twenty-two dancers, and thirty-eight singers; thirty-five players in the pit; and, … forty stagehands to run the show.”24 The logistics for the show was beyond that of the average Broadway musical. For the first time in which someone would take on both directing and choreography, this was a heavy lift. In addition, de Mille did not have a full script to work with at the beginning of rehearsal and Hammerstein continued to add and delete scenes throughout the entire process. Most of the time, Rodgers and Hammerstein worked from a story that had already been published or produced in some form. In this case, it was an original script and one that in some ways mirrored Hammerstein’s own personal life. The production required some interesting staging and scenographic techniques to distinguish clearly when are we in the fantasy world and when are we in the real world. Even with these obstacles, de Mille was able to create, along with vision from the set designer, Jo Mielziner, a cinematic fluidity that set a high standard for future musical theatre productions.25 While Allegro did not achieve the incredible success of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s previous musical, it did run for a respectable 315 performances. Finally, one of the most interesting choreographies that Agnes de Mille did was “The Civil War” ballet for the Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg musical, Bloomer Girl (1944). This was a musical that was set in Cicero, New York, in 1861. It tackled both the women’s movement and the abolitionist movement. Toward the end of the second act, there is this ballet choreographed by de Mille that chronicles the soldiers leaving their families to fight in the war. The majority of the ballet reveals the trials and tribulations of the women left behind. The ballet concludes with all but one of the men returning home.

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This was a dance that de Mille had in mind before she was offered the opportunity to choreograph the show. With her husband and some of her fellow dancers engaged in fighting in World War II, the possibility of loss or injury was right under the skin for many of the women left behind. For de Mille, this feeling was visceral. She needed to find a way to express that, not only for herself but also for all those left behind, women especially. De Millie created this very powerful stand-alone ballet that resonated deeply with many of the performers, production staff, and audiences. She returned to her folk-dance background and added vocabulary that would come from modern dance but, in addition, she continued to explore the use of gesture in her choreography. She distinguishes the use of gesture for the actor from that of the dancer. She writes: “It is the actor’s art to mimic exactly with a full awareness of all the overtones and significances. The dancer, on the other hand, explodes the gesture to its components and reassembles them into a symbol that has connotations of what lies around and behind the fact, while the implications of rhythm and spatial design add further comment.”26 From the beginning, de Mille demonstrated a fundamental interest and respect for folk dance. She felt that it told us a great deal about the people from that culture and/or from a particular historical period. Consequently, the baseline from which she choreographed was different from some of her peers, who might start with a particular technique in mind, like ballet, and then work to change or alter that technique to fit the purpose of the dance. As important as folk dance was, she would return again and again to gesture as the starting point. The right gesture can reveal aspects of character, emotion, and the relationship between the individual and the community. This was certainly true in this dance. De Mille gets a lot of mileage out of a fairly limited movement vocabulary in the “Civil War Ballet.” The choreography’s reliance on gesture, stillness, walking, and folk dance means that there is very little technical dance movement within its structure. The few dance movements that de Mille uses stand out for the expressionistic quality they demonstrate. Through the use of repetition, she is able to produce different emotional effects with the same dance step or gesture. This is particularly evident in the soldier’s gesture that opens the second section of the ballet, which is repeated first by one woman, then the woman in black, and finally by the entire group at the ballet’s end. The gesture first signals a call to arms, then becomes a tragic movement, before finally evolving into a celebratory one. The progression of this one gesture encapsulates the broader emotional development of the dance.27 In her previous musicals, she would work to best integrate the dance, even if she had to create secondary characters not originally in the show into the dances in order to add color, depth, or humor but, in this case, “De Mille had not molded her choreography to suit the needs of the show-she convinced her collaborators to accept her vision.”28 In this case, it worked. The show ran for 654 performances. Apparently, the audience was receptive to seeing their emotional reality reflected in this dance. It was not so far removed from the theme of

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women’s exerting their identities and the commitment to racial parity. For many, these issues were just under the surface and the musical demonstrated a mature respect for where the audience was at the time. One did not always have to offer Broadway audiences clever divertissements, particularly when they are actively engaged with serious issues of life and death.29 Throughout her life, she held her good friend, Martha Graham, up as the pinnacle of what modern dance could achieve. She kept notes during their lifelong relationship that ultimately resulted in writing her autobiography of her friend and mentor called Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. Early in their relationship, de Mille shared some of her fears regarding her abilities as a choreographer and was quickly admonished by her friend. There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have a peculiar and unusual gift and you have so far used about one third of your talent.30 Certainly, the field of musical theatre dance has been unalterably changed because de Mille took what she was told and lived it to the fullest.

Jerome Robbins As with Oklahoma! (1943), West Side Story (1957) broke open a new way of seeing dance on the musical theatre stage. This really was a dance musical. Dance was so central, not only in terms of plot development, but also in terms of characterization, in terms of setting locale and place, and in terms of capturing a time in the 1950s when being young on the West side of New York could explode in an instant into uproarious laughter and turn on dime into an act of violence. This is a story told from the point of view of being an adolescent. The story is based on an updated musical version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The musical had a long birthing process from its original title, East Side Story. Nearly ten years before, it was based on a conflict between a Jewish family and an Irish Catholic family. The collaborators, besides Jerome Robbins, who directed and choreographed, were Leonard Bernstein, who composed the music with Stephen Sondheim contributing lyrics with a book by Arthur Laurents. What originally started off as a conventional book musical in the late 1940s became a caustic, exuberant, dangerous tale that needed to be experienced primarily in dance and music. Of course, there would be a script and songs to engine the show forward in a linear fashion but the heart of it was in its dance

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and music. Why? Because this was a musical about being young in a world that is often tough, mean, and oblivious to you and your presence. Family now becomes a gang and the question at the heart of the show is where does love fit in when you are always spoiling for a fight? In this case, it gets killed at the end of the show. Not a happy ending. This was a musical that was initially conceived by Jerome Robbins and to better understand how this came about, we need to look at his incredible success with the ballet Fancy Free.31 The ballet was choreographed and performed by a young up and coming ballet 26-year-old dancer. In many ways, Robbins’ maturation to this point was pretty straightforward. While he had taken some dance lessons while in high school, he did not begin to take his studies seriously until he studied and performed with Gluck Sandor. This was very fortunate because Sandor was not only a modern dancer and choreographer but also an actor, director, and visual artist. His eclecticism would reinforce Robbins’ wide-ranging interests in and out of the arts. At his studio, he was exposed to modern dancers José Limón and Charles Weidman, started studying ballet and was soon enrolled in a choreography class with former Martha Graham dancer, Bessie Schonberg. By 1938, he was performing and choreographing at Camp Tamiment in upstate New York. As one of his biographers, dance critic, and historian, Deborah Jowitt acknowledges: “If Robbins hadn’t known before how to pick up materials quickly, throw together a routine, adapt to a variety of styles, make a point succinctly, and understand the importance of timing, he learned it now.”32 All of this by the age of 20. In the following year, he was creating two pieces for the Schubert’s Straw Hat Revue (1939) in which he was dancing and co-choreographing a humorous take-off on the animosity between ballet and modern dancers called “Piano and Lute,” and, the following year, he was back on Broadway dancing for George Balanchine in the musical, Keep of the Grass (1940).33 In 1941, Agnes de Mille gave him a break by casting him in the role of the Devil in her ballet, Three Virgins and the Devil, for the ballet company that would soon be named, the American Ballet Theatre. He performed with Lucia Chase playing “the Greedy One,” “Annabelle Lyon,” “the Lustful One,” and Agnes herself playing “the Priggish One.” He was cast because he had an intricate sense of jazz rhythms. “The role was a brief cameo-two crossovers, twirling a flower in one hand, a leer, and some byplay with Lyon, after which she leapt up on his back to be carried off to the Devil’s lair,”34 From all accounts, he stole the show. By the end of the year, he was promoted to soloist in the company and in the year after that to principal dancer. In 1943, he was asked if he could come up with a small ballet. A close friend of his suggested that he look at paintings by Paul Cadmus – The Fleet’s in and Shore Leave – for inspiration. New York was a port city with sailors everywhere. There has been a tradition in musical theatre, starting with John Durang, of sailors doing the Hornpipe and, with the tight-fitting sailor outfit and the flared bell bottom pants, the outfit could not make for a better dance costume. With Leonard Bernstein composing the music, Robbins wrote a scenario about three

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sailors on leave in New York City. He cast Harold Lang and John Kriza and himself as the sailors and Muriel Bentley, Janet Reed, and Shirley Ecki for the female roles. He was also able to attract Oliver Smith to design the set. The competition between the three sailors and the women they were able to pick up for a night on the down results in humorous antics and acrobatic competitions of all kinds.35 There was no doubt that this was not simply “a little ballet.” It lit a fuse that altered the future direction for American ballet and generated the quick ascendency of Robbins’ career in ballet and on Broadway. The dance reviews by two of America’s most well-informed dance critics – John Martin and Edwin Denby – were laudatory and to the point. Martin began his review with: “To come right to the point without any ifs, ands, or buts, Jerome Robbins ‘Fancy Free’ … is a smash hit.”36 He further elaborates: “The ballet concerns three sailors who pick up two girls and contest for the privilege of not having to be the odd man. Each of them tries to outdance the others, and-all of them succeed!”37 Denby starts with: “Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free …was so big a hit that the young participants all looked a little dazed as they took their bows. … But besides being a smash hit, … Its sentiment of how people live in this country is completely intelligent and completely realistic. … It is a direct, manly piece.”38 Robbins and Bernstein wasted no time contacting the successful librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write a book for a musical based on this ballet. They worked quickly and efficiently. With the legendary George Abbot directing and Jerome Robbins choreographing, they were able to open the musical on December 28, 1944, just eight months after the ballet’s debut! The story line was expanded to include the three sailors and now three women and together, while the men are on a 24-hour leave, they travel to many of the well-known sites in New York City like Times Square, Coney Island, Central Park, and even the Museum of Natural History. Abbot and Robbins made the perfect pairing. They were both exacting in their direction to the actors and dancers respectively. Abbot liked to work fast. So did Robbins. Abbot did not suffer fools gladly. Neither did Robbins. They expected the performers to be professional and, once something is set, they would not put up with any variation in performance. Abbot was the senior member of this group – Robbins, Bernstein, Comden, and Green. He describes their collaboration this way. We all worked together on this show in the way I love to work: each putting forth his opinion, yet remaining objective, and sub-ordinating everything to the main end; working with happy excitement, with passionate enthusiasm, with a wonderful feeling of warmth and togetherness.39 While Robbins admired much of the way in which Abbot would direct the show, he was not receptive when Abbot wanted to intervene in his choreography. In one instance, Robbins had choreographed in which “this dance sequence was conceived as a phantasmic Coney Island confrontation between Gabey and

172  1943–1957

Ivy, followed by its real-life version.”40 Abbot insisted that the ballet be split in half and inserted the ballad, “Some Other Time.” Abbot could be as direct and exacting as Robbins. … his detailed instructions to actors made the machinery of comedy work. Abbot would say, “Walk three steps downstage. Pause. Say the line,” … remembered the critic Howard Kissel. “And they’d get the laugh.” He had no patience with the Stanislavsky method-the legend goes that once, in answer to an actor’s query about his motivation for crossing the stage at a certain point, the director had snapped back, “Your salary”41 Robbins could be just as blunt; however, he did have a great deal of respect for how the Stanislavsky method was being taught by people like Sanford Meisner and how actors like Joanne Woodward and Marlon Brando would use it in their acting. In his own work as a director and choreographer, he placed a great deal of emphasis on the dancer-actor-singer to do their homework on the background and motivations for their characters and, at the same time, he could be dictatorial when it came to choreography and staging. Nonetheless, On the Town played for 463 performances. Throughout the remainder of the 1940s and 1950s, Robbins continued to move back and forth from the ballet stage to the Broadway musical, all the while growing more confident in his choreographic abilities. In 1945, he teamed up again with George Abbot for the musical, Billion Dollar Baby. He was able to attract several dancers who had worked with Agnes de Mille in shows she choreographed – among them were James Mitchell and Joan McCracken. It was on this show that the famous legend was started about him giving notes and castigating the cast on stage all the while backing up until finally, he falls into the orchestra pit. No one came to help him. He had to climb out on his own.42 There are many stories of dancer-actor-singers who loved and hated him at the same time. All recognized his enormous talent and ability to get the best out of a performer; the manner, however, could be caustic and mean. In 1947, he received his first Tony Award for choreography for the musical, High Button Shoes. It was in this musical that he choreographed the now famous “Keystone Kops Ballet.” Jowitt describes in some detail what this dance looked like. It starts innocuously in Atlantic City, with a singing chorus of girls in bathing attire …But the number escalates into a hilarious chase, replete with the double takes, and missed connections, … A squad of bumblingly acrobatic Keystone Kops straight from a Mack Sennett silent movie mixes in. …Robbins hit on the idea of adding a … family of crooks-Father, Mother, and Baby-who are trying to steal the loot themselves. … Before long, everyone in the ballet is tiptoeing in and out of Smith’s row of bathhouse doors, emerging in odder and odder combinations, one of which includes a stray gorilla.43

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Critic Murray Schumach writes: “If anything approaching the pandemonium of this ballet occurred on a city street the riot squads would be summoned forthwith.”44 Robbins had a gift for comic timing and for finding the humor in a ballet or in a musical theatre dance. In the following year, he was given the opportunity to direct and choreograph Look Ma, I’m Dancing (1948). Two years later, he’s appointed Associate Artistic Director for the New York City Ballet. He is now working alongside George Balanchine on a regular basis. He will soon work with Balanchine on the staging for The Nutcracker, which has now become not only an annual event for the New York City Ballet but the standard by which other ballet companies measure the merit of their own choreography and performance of The Nutcracker ballet. Within the next few years, he was getting opportunities to direct and choreograph. Some of those musicals included The King and I (1951), Wonderful Town (1953), Peter Pan (1954), and The Pajama Game (1954). At the same time, he was working with Bernstein and others on an idea he had for an original musical. After a ten-year gestation period, it would be realized and many would ascribe to its landmark status. When Robbins was in his early twenties, he had ideas of how musical theatre could grow and evolve into a more cohesive unit. He wanted to take the musical beyond what the early Jerome Kern Princess shows had done and what Kern and Hammerstein II accomplished with Showboat, and even what the Rodgers, Hammerstein II, de Mille’s Oklahoma! had accomplished. In a conversation with Bernstein, he tried to articulate what he had envisioned. He imagined ‘a new form for theater and ballet … [one] that employs three mediums of expression: dance, music, and voice. The form … is a real braiding of these three mediums, not a matter of placing them in layers one on top of the other.’ In other words, not a book musical, not a thinly disguised revue, not an operetta-not even a musical-play-with-a-dream-ballet … whose stars were singers but emphatically not dancers-but a new creature entirely.45 You’ll notice that he uses the word voice rather than text. In many ways, Robbins was looking for a way to “do narrative” but without a script, more like a ballet d’action. He is looking for a poetic way to create “an experience” rather than to tell a story interrupted, no matter how cleverly, by song and dance.46 West Side Story was as close as he was able to realize his vision. Robbins was able to demonstrate in a visceral and kinesthetic way what was in his mind with his production of West Side Story. …The first sound after the curtain rises on the Jets hanging out is a finger snap. As the snaps accumulate, the audience understands not just the guys’ nothing-to-do, looking-for-trouble mood but also their solidarity. {…} In this turf war, bravado, stealth, fear, playfulness, and anger meet in combat,

174  1943–1957

revealed in actions that shrug their way into dance and as quickly drop back into everyday behavior. A walk becomes a saunter, acquires a bounce, becomes an easy-going chassé or a soft-edged turn in the air. By the time you notice that the two groups of boys are dancing, you’ve understood the restless animosity that powers that movement, and it becomes as interesting as the steps. By the time the Jets sing their song of unity, you know the premise as well as you would after Shakespeare’s brawling between the Montagues and Capulets in Verona’s piazza.47 There were significant differences between the source material for the musical, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and the musical. One important difference was that, unlike the play, the musical was very specific in regards to time and place. This informed the music, the dance, and aspects of characterization. Second, instead of feuding families, the musical made it about competing youth gangs. This opened up a world of possibilities for choreographic design and a seamless dramaturgical way by which to slip from fantasy to reality (think of the Dance in the Gym scene) and move from staging to choreography (think of the fight scene). Third, while the families in Shakespeare’s play are implicated in the tragic ending for their children, here, it is based on a psychological deficient on the part of the parents. In West Side Story, parents are absent, and what we are asked to look at is more sociological – the environment where they live in, the inherent racism built into creating artificial “families” with other like-minded adolescents. Fourth, one of the points that Shakespearean scholar Irene Dash points out is the observation that “the expansion of dance, replaces the expressiveness of language.”48 Instead of Romeo’s “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun,” we have Tony at the opening of the fire escape singing and repeating over and over her name, “Maria.”49 In Shakespeare’s play, we have the use of hyperbole and elevated language to express the feelings generated between Romeo and Juliet; in the musical, we have music and song, but we have more-we have staging. Again, Dash writes: “Sondheim explained that Jerry taught him the importance of staging any song he wrote, even if the director discarded his suggestions. … song and staging have taken the place of Shakespeare’s dialogue.”50 Throughout the musical, director-choreographer Robbins would blur staging and dancing so that it all seemed of one piece. His decisions about staging always came out of asking fundamental questions: what is this scene about? What do each of the characters want and what obstacles prevent them from getting what they want? Where does the action take place and what bearing does that have on what is going on? With these kinds of basic but necessary questions, Robbins was able to wed together the dramaturgical pragmatics of what he’d observed and learned from George Abbot with his reliance on the Stanislavski approach to acting that gets at motivation and complexity in the clashing objectives of the characters within a scene. Robbins strove to cast for those who were triple threats – those who could dance and sing and act. While we might take this idea as standard practice today, in Robbins’ day, many musicals were still cast with singer-actors and dancer-actors.

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This was important to him not only because he wanted a show that flowed from beginning to end with minimum starts and stops; but, he also wanted that capability in the performers to ease from dancing to singing to acting and, better yet, to be able to do all three at the same time as if it were “natural” to do so. The impact on the audience and critics of the time was immediate. Brooks Atkinson wrote: Although the material is horrifying, the workmanship is admirable. […] Pooling imagination and virtuosity, they have written a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving. […] Using music and movement they have given Mr. Laurents’ story passion and depth and some glimpses of unattainable glory. They have pitched into it with personal conviction as well as the skill of accomplished craftsmen.51 The musical hit a nerve with many in the audience of its day and continues to do so now as well. Robbins and his collaborators were able to convey through dance, music, and voice the travails of growing up in America. The musical reaches beyond the 1950s in New York City. Moving through adolescence to adulthood is seldom an easy transition in modern America with its obsession for individual achievement over community responsibility and its ostrich-like response to those who are disenfranchised. The rapidity with which our culture changes then and now can leave many behind. The only major difference between then and now is the amount and deadliness of the violence we inflict on each other. Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim came through a period of unimaginable violence perpetrated on their families and distant relatives in the Holocaust. At this point in their creative lives, they were not “playing around.” They wanted to create a musical theatre piece that would speak deeply to those who would understand (like adolescents in each succeeding generation) and to those who were not afraid to remember (like some parents and elders). Robbins went on to direct and choreograph outstanding musicals like Gypsy (1959) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). His work in the ballet world was no less exceptional, they included outstanding ballets like Dances at a Gathering (1969), Glass Pieces (1983), Brandenburg Concertos (1997), and many more. His legacy will continue not only in the revivals of his musicals and ballets but at the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection at the New York Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, the world’s largest dance library in the world.52

Hanya Holm Of the choreographers mentioned thus far, Hanya Holm was most unique in the history of musical theatre dance in several important ways. Like Balanchine and Rasch, she, too, was born in a country other than the United States. Unlike these two, however, she entered the musical theatre dance field with a modern

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dance background. This difference signified more than simply a different physical approach to dance. As previously mentioned, Balanchine and Rasch adapted their ballet perspective to the needs of the musical theatre. No matter how eclectic their approach or how influential other dance forms were in their choreographies, ballet remained, for the most part, their base or starting point in their approach to musical theatre choreography. Holm, on the other hand, was not so much interested in advocating for a particular dance idiom in relation to musical theatre choreography. Holm’s approach to theatre dance was heavily influenced by the thinking of her teacher and mentor, German modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman, who critically noted: Opera, operetta, the musical, and drama use the dance as incidental event, as an element creating an atmosphere, or to loosen up the scenic action and to serve as adornment. Only in rare cases—as in Gluck’s operas, which broke with past tradition—­is dance visualized as an organic part of the musical plot from the very beginning. Having sold my soul to the dance, I deemed it important to let it have a place beyond its usual dancing ‘interlude’ in the musical theatre! Of course, one cannot generalize. But the stage works of Gluck, Handel, and a few other composers who lean toward the scenic oratio rather than the grand opera, leave sufficient room for a meaningful elaboration of their scenes through the medium of the dance.53 Wigman’s idea that dance should evolve as an organic part of the plot and production needs became an important cornerstone in Holm’s approach to musical theatre choreography. The result was that Holm attempted to create a movement vocabulary particular to each individual production rather than to superimpose a particular idiom or style of dance onto a show regardless of the show’s needs. Like one of her predecessors, Bobby Connolly, Holm was interested in broadening the movement vocabulary for musical theatre choreography and the technical basis for the musical theatre dancer. She differed from him, however, not only in terms of her dance training and background but also in terms of her approach to the basic elements of dance itself. For example, rhythm fascinated Connolly and, in his dances, he explored this aspect of dance, particularly in his tap dance choreographies. Holm, on the other hand, was intrigued by the element of space and her success in the musical theatre and on the concert stage demonstrates this point. To appreciate her unique contribution to the musical theatre, it might be important to understand the importance of the German modern dance movement and, particularly that of dancer Mary Wigman, on Holm’s early career. The modern dance movement in Germany perplexed many American observers in the early 1930s. Its emotionalism, its angularity, its dependence on improvisation, and its emphasis on group versus solo virtuosity were unnerving and confusing for many Americans. One such critic, Andre’ Levinson, attended

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the 1928 Congress of German Dancers in Essen, Germany. He reported that “the modern German dance is fiercely aware of its racial originality. It isolates itself in bitter pride from the rest of the world and proclaims its novelty by renouncing all tradition.”54 For Levinson, the German rejection of classical ballet, their use of masks to submerge individual ego, and their enthusiasm for “movement choirs” was deeply confusing, even unsettling. Two of the major exponents for German modern dance at that time were Mary Wigman and Rudolph von Laban. While Wigman attempted to forge a new movement vocabulary on the stage, Laban created a means by which to record and score movement on paper.55 Levinson distinguished one from the other with this observation. If Mr. Von Laban, as a theorist, represents the spirit of abstraction, Mrs. Wigman, at the opposite pole of German aesthetics, favors creative intuition. Laban, the pedagogue, tries to convince us by reason, Wigman, the demagogue, to fascinate us by an appeal to instinct. Laban sees in the profession of the dancer an apprenticeship to mastery, Wigman a vocation leading to a priesthood. The haughty hard-featured brunette vaticinates like a Sybil, lunges like an Amazon, revolves like a dervish.56 In his view, Wigman’s work was grotesque and threatening. Summarizing his feelings concerning Wigman’s students, which would have included Holm, he wrote that her pupils “seek their effects in a rupture of the harmony of the body, in an elegant deformation. For these romantics, the ugly is (as it has always been) the beautiful.”57 Not all of the American observers were as scathing as Levinson. In 1930, on the anniversaries of Laban’s fiftieth birthday and Wigman’s tenth year as a professional dancer/choreographer, Germany held a series of celebrations and the dance critic, Schlee, was there to report on the events. As she observed, German dance was experiencing a tremendous change. During the 1920s, “lay-dances” and “movement choirs” – dances in which there were large groups of people performing unison, gymnastic-like movement – were very popular. Dance was designed for the masses, not for the stage. What Schlee noted was a growing self-conscious attempt to refine the experiments of the previous decade in order to define a stage-worthy art form. Expressionism in German modern dance was beginning to wane. For many German artists, Expressionism was not so much an artistic vogue, but rather “a matter of regarding the work of art as an outlet and medium of spiritual and religious experience.”58 Wigman elaborated on the importance of this change and proposed that: The dance must find its way into the theatre. We have no uniform religion now to which to dedicate the dance. But in every person there is a deep religious sense that springs from a vision of the infinite. It deserves a common expression. The young actors of today are ready to take this greater meaningfulness into their work, they scorn the superficial make- believe

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of the present theatre. The theatre lags behind the needs of the people. Managers say that the dance and dramatic arts must be kept separate, yet the new dance is close to the expression the theatre must eventually accept. Meantime actors must earn their living.59 Holm had been drawn to this charismatic woman as early as 1923. At that time, she was a grown woman herself, with a husband and child. Her interest in Wigman’s work turned to passion, and she divorced her husband, painter-­ sculptor Reinhold Martin Knuntze, to pursue her studies. Holm discussed this period in her life with writer Walter Sorell. “It was after seeing a recital of Mary Wigman that I resolved to become a dancer. (This decision coincided with my divorce.) It was to be another kind of marriage for me,” she stresses, “one to last forever. I personally find it difficult to understand that anyone completely dedicated to his art can also devote himself to another person.”60 Holm credited this intense desire to forsake all in order to study dance to the early influences of her mother’s side of the family, which contained poets, musicians, and painters, and to the quality of her elementary education at the Konvert der Englischen Fraulein. Holm was born to Marie and Valentin Eckert in Worms, Germany. They had named her Johanna Eckert.61 At the age of ten, she began to study piano, and while still in high school, she studied music at the Hock Conservatory in Frankfort-am-Main. During her school years, she also performed small walk-on parts professionally for director Max Reinhardt. By the time she graduated, she had chosen music as her main area of interest. Subsequently, she enrolled as a music student at the Institute of Emile JaquesDalcroze. Along with the traditional music curriculum, she was introduced to eurhythmics. This experience of music as a physical and kinesthetic reality sparked her imagination and set in motion her increasing desire to study dance.62 Her study at the Wigman school in Dresden opened up a new world of experience for Holm. From Wigman, she learned a technique, an appreciation for the value of improvisation as a compositional tool, varied choreographic approaches, and confidence in herself as a performer. Wigman described one of Holm’s first choreographies. On the occasion of one of our improvised dance evenings a short, delicately built girl showed her first study. “Egyptian Dance”—so it said on the program. Certainly it was derivative, there was something assimilated of seen and experienced images about it. And yet behind all this one could see an already sure feeling for style, a sense for clear organic structure and, in spite of the faults of a beginner, the ability to meet the demands on technique and body. The creative will and the ability to shape were well balanced and stood the test.63

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From 1923 through 1928, Holm performed with the Wigman dance company. This had been Wigman’s first dance group, which, unfortunately, was forced to disband due to financial exigencies. Afterward, Holm taught at the Wigman school and began to explore her own choreographic abilities in depth. In 1928, she directed and choreographed Euripedes’ Bacchae at an open-air theatre in Holland. The following year, she was invited to choreograph and dance the role of the Princess in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat in Dresden. By 1930, she was ready to co-choreograph and perform with Mary Wigman in an antiwar pageant entitled Das Totenmal. Later that year, Wigman made her historic visit to the United States and laid the foundation for the opening of a branch of her school in New York. Holm was chosen to direct the operations of that school.64 Holm came to the United States in 1931. For the next five to six years, she devoted herself to acclimating her sensibilities to the American experience, to developing the Wigman school, to establishing her credibility alongside American modern dancer/choreographers like Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham, and to discover her own unique choreographic potential. For Holm, the differences between her homeland and that of her adopted land were dramatic. Consequently, her approach to all artistic activity, including dance, would be equally different. Holm explained some of those differences in a series of lectures given at Columbia University. There were, above all, the haste and vital drive of the American artist in contrast to the marked sense of tolerance and patience for slow and gradual growth of the European artist, who would more easily dare develop through error and trial, with less fear of failures on his way to himself. Also, in such lectures Hanya pointed out that the age and youth of the respective cultures here and there imply vast differences and the American grew much faster in the mechanical and industrial fields than the European countries, which, on the other hand, were burdened with dissent and wars—and both having their specific influence on art and artist.65 By 1936, these differences had had their effect on Holm’s work. She adapted Wigman’s teachings on dance to her experience in the United States. The result was not German modern dance, but, rather, a unique approach forged by her American experience. Consequently, she dissolved her association with Wigman and opened her own school for dance. She, and a small group of dancers, made a college circuit tour. In 1937, she joined the prestigious dance faculty at Bennington College for the summer dance program. In the same year, she created her first major modern dance work in the United States. This work, Trend, was divided into varied sections entitled “Mask Motions (a) Cur Daily Bread,” “(b) Satiety,” “Episodes,” “The Effete,” “Lucre Lunacy,” “From Heaven, Ltd.,” “Lest We Remember,” “‘he’, the Great,” “Cataclysm,”

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“The Gates are Desolate,” “Resurgence,” and “Assurance (a world primal again).” In this dance, Holm created a panorama of solo and group dances that showed a society being destroyed by its false values which could only be reborn when these were banished in a cataclysm of some sort, reflecting the inner conflicts and divisions of the society. The trajectory of the dance was thus plotted as a long descent, then a brief transition and slightly longer affirmation. Among the interesting elements associated with the work was the sustained use of recorded music, at a time when this was very unusual for modern dance, and the inclusion of two uncompromisingly advanced selections of Edgard Varese in the final two sections, “Ionization” and “Octandre.”66 In this dance, Holm maintained the seriousness of subject matter associated with her German modern dance roots. At the same time, the dance demonstrated her sensitivity to the use of space as a choreographic element. What she adopted from her American counterparts, however, was the de-emphasizing of exaggerated facial expression and an expanded use of lyric movement to counterbalance the strong angularity of her spatial configurations. The dance was successful for Holm and important for the continuing development of American modern dance. It was the “first truly collaborative and functional setting” created for modern dance by artist/designer Arch Lauterer.67 Holm recognized that scenic and lighting design could be incorporated in unique and interesting ways that complimented her exploration of the use of theatrical space with human movement. New York Times dance critic John Martin recognized its significance to modern dance when he “awarded it his annual citation for the best choreography of the year.”68 Trend established Holm as an important force in American modern dance and demonstrated her appreciation for the “theatrical” nature of dance. For the next several years, Holm focused on her work as a modern dance choreographer, performer, and teacher; however, by 1948, she started to expand her interest into the musical theatre. Her first foray into musical theatre was Ballet Ballads, three experimental dance compositions “combining song, dance, and narration done under the sponsorship of the American National Theatre and Academy.”69 With music by Jerome Moross and lyrics by John Latouche, a different choreographer choreographed each of the three works, and each employed a singer and a dancer. “The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett” was the third of these works; and in it, the performers “sang and danced to a series of Davey’s tall tales: his marriage to a mermaid, his saving his country from Halley’s comet.” 70 Holm described the setting for the dance. We had a basic set consisting of three bleachers built of solid iron. Steps led into the iron construction so that the dancers could be easily moved. All three bleachers were identical, but two of them where the steps were

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visible formed a horseshoe, the centerpiece turned to the steps that lead upstage and served as entrance to the platform that gave us enough space to move around. And center upstage there was another entrance coming from underneath the steps which I used to great advantage in the bear hunt. I could also easily stage the mermaid scene, with the mermaid coming out of the water and slipping behind Davey. Then we built a house in the center of the stage during the Indian scene. Shortly, everything was used in absolutely organic fashion with no real changes whatsoever, but the miraculous thing was that the set, rigid as it seemed, changed with the mood in relationship to the action that took place.71 Holm’s interest in movement extended beyond the dancer and included the singer, the set, and the lighting. Martin noticed this attempt to unify all of the elements and noted that “she alone of the three choreographers has managed to mix the singers with the dancers, without making them look as if all their feet were left ones.” 72 Fellow critic Walter Terry of the New York Herald Tribune added that she “has done a magnificent job of choreography, highlighting dance when action was required and subduing movement when it was right for song or acting to take the lead. ‘Davey’ may be loose dramatically, but thanks to Miss Holm its looseness of structure is transformed into disciplined agility.” 73 This highly experimental form of musical theatre was successful enough to run for two months, closing on July 10, 1948. By the end of the year, her credentials as a Broadway musical theatre choreographer would be solidly established with the opening of Kiss Me, Kate. Neither Holm nor any of the other collaborators on this show could have anticipated the phenomenal success of Kiss Me, Kate. Its 1,077-performance run made it the third musical comedy at the time to top the 1,000 mark.74 Awarded the 1949 Antoinette Perry Award for the best musical play, its incredible popularity was extended to an international level. One musical theatre historian commented that: In Kiss Me, Kate the ideals that musical plays have been striving for were triumphantly realized. Here was a book with remarkable lifelike, believable protagonists, with every character having a sensible and important bearing on the plot, with every song perfectly related to the action and more often than not advancing it. Here were lyrics and dialogue that never cheapened themselves for effect, that remained literate and witty and touching throughout.75 The critics at the time of its opening at the Century Theatre on December 30, 1948, must have recognized its importance as well. Garland of the New York Journal American started his review with: “If ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ isn’t the best musical-comedy I ever saw, I don’t remember what the best musical-comedy I ever saw was called.” 76 Morehouse of the New York Sun wrote that it was “the

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best song-and-dance show of the season and one of the best Broadway has had in ten years.” 77 Cole Porter’s music, the Spewack’s book, Wilson’s direction, and the performances of cast members, like Alfred Drake and Harold Lang, were recognized with superlatives. Hanya Holm’s choreography certainly was not slighted. Howard Barnes reported that “Hanya Holm’s choreography weaves brilliantly through the tale of a bickering husband and ex-wife trying out ‘Taming of the Shrew’ in Baltimore.” 78 Later, he added that “Miss Holm has devised syncopated ballets and stately dances to give ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ terpsichorean distinction.” 79 Morehouse compared the dancing of Harold Lang to that of Gene Kelly and recorded that the first act finale, “Kiss Me, Kate,” was a rousing success. Specifically, he felt that “the choreography of Hanya Holm is up to the finest we’ve had since Agnes de Mille began asserting herself.”80 According to theatre critic William Haskins, there was the suggestion that Holm adapted some of her previous work in modern dance to the musical theatre stage. He observed: Hanya Holm’s dances are individual and effervescent, demanding great skill without ever suggesting a muscle-flexing contest. They have the rare gift of making each dancer look as if he had a purpose in what he does. Tops is the insinuating routine for ‘Special Face.’81 Musical theatre historian Laufe recognized Holm’s contribution to the success of the musical with the following observation: Among the further attributes that gave Kiss Me, Kate its popular appeal were the choreography by Hanya Holm, ranging from vigorous tap routines to specialty dancers Fred Davis and Eddie Sledge, to nimble solos by Harold Lang and colorful ensemble numbers by the attractive chorus line.82 Holm’s choreography exhibited a wide range of styles, and she conscientiously worked to integrate the dance into the fabric of the musical. There was no great ballet number as such in the show, but there was dancing almost everywhere, all of it firmly integrated with the purpose of achieving a total theatrical impression. The dancing became the impetus and driving element in this musical and provides the means for transitions in pace, mood, and style. The range of the dance forms used was impressive. It embraced classic ballet, modern dance, jitterbug, soft-shoe, acrobatics, court, and folk dance.83 John Martin, arbiter of modern dance criticism, also bestowed his approval on Holm’s work in Kiss Me, Kate. He perceived that she also retained “the taste, the formal integrity and the respect for the movement of the human body which

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belong to the concert stage, without in the least disturbing the equanimity of the paying customers.”84 Further elaborating on her ability to incorporate the dance to the requirements of the musical, he wrote: The choreography is at all times completely of the texture of the show. Nowhere from the rise of the first curtain to the fall of the last, is there a characteristic Holm movement; she has apparently not been tempted in the least to superimpose herself upon the production but has given her attention wholly to bringing out the pointing up what is inherent in it.85 With Kiss Me, Kate, Holm had established herself as serious musical theatre choreographer. She was not the first modern dancer to work in the musical theatre. There were others such as Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn contributing dances to the Zieg feld Follies, and Charles Weidman to several revues including the most popular 1930s musical, As Thousands Cheer (1933). Helen Tamiris choreographed Up in Central Park (1945), and Annie Get Your Gun (1946). What made Holm’s contribution unique at the time was that she was able to incisively focus on the American experience and establish her credentials as an American artist in two forms of American art – concert modern dance and the musical theatre. From her modern dance work, Holm brought into her musical theatre choreography a new awareness of the theatrical potential for the use of space. … by using fewer dancers than most musical productions, she filled the space with dance movement rather than with people dancing. There seems no adequate way to explain the phenomena. It might be said that where other choreographers place the dancers in space, Holm uses space as an active element in the dance. This was especially true of the tango-like “So In Love.” Holm filled the stage in continuous swirling movement using only eight women and one man. Each dancer defined many small arcs with the arms, the legs, and the torso. These in turn combined with the arcs defined by the other dancers to describe larger circles. In turn, these circles became larger and filled the stage area, and still increasing seemed to involve the entire theatre. The spectator felt that he had been involved in a long continuing spiral in space. The dance was designed not for the audience to view, but rather in which to participate. The effect was empathetic as well as visual.86 Holm consciously manipulated the dynamics of the dance so that the audience would experience a kinesthetic response. The visual stimulation, so characteristic of other choreographer’s work, such as Balanchine, was combined with a spatial awareness, which extended beyond the dancers to include the sets and lights. In a similar fashion, Holm worked to integrate an American vernacular dance

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form, the tap dance, with her modern dance ideals. Dance historian Moulton describes how this was accomplished. Against the realistic setting of the stage door of a theatre, Holm placed a tap dance. But it was a tap dance with a difference. In this tap dance, Holm gave the first hint of how she would eight years later revitalize old musical comedy forms in her dances for My Fair Lady. She remolded the tap dance to fit her own ideas of space and form. Rather than de-emphasizing the stamping feet, the speed, and the introverted space as the ballet-tap combination had, she re-emphasized them. She used three Negro dancers, whose orientation had obviously been in the nineteen-thirties. She did not change their steps, but expanded them in a triangular formation with the emphasis shifting with lightning-like clarity from one dancer to another. What had been syncopation was now intricately organized sound. The dancers shot along sharp diagonals, cutting through space. Steps became themes that expanded to full stage variations. It was not a tap dance in the style of the nineteen-thirties, but rather a modern dance that had used this material as a point of departure. The dance caught the essence of tap dancing without being a tap dance. In true nineteen-thirty style, the dance “brought down the house.”87 Holm had studied America’s favorite dance forms well, and, with the musical variety provided by Porter’s score, she was able to experiment with most of them in Kiss Me, Kate. In “Too Darn Hot,” for example, she created a short dancedrama from that Cole Porter jazz sound that would include jazz, modern, social, and tap vocabularies that might be reminiscent of the style of dance associated with Jack Cole. Theatre historian Ethan Mordden exclaimed “… for Kate is the most relentlessly danced show since On the Town, with full-out spots after six numbers, plus a ‘Rose Dance’ and a pavane, covering everything from ballet to jitterbug.”88 Her choreography made a vital contribution to this musical’s success, and because it was notated, its historical importance is still available for future generations to study89 What makes Holm’s work on Kiss Me, Kate so significant in terms of the history and development of musical theatre dance are three key points. The first has to do with Moulton’s observation concerning Holm’s use of space. Musical theatre choreography up to this time often worked within a two-dimensional design. Holms’ work encouraged the development of the awareness of space as a more active aspect to choreography. Second, rather than superimpose a particular technical base on the dancers, she strove to incorporate their individual talents within her choreography design. Finally, she refrained from “stamping” the choreography with “signature” movement and, instead, she chose to develop the movement vocabulary from the context of the show itself. This “self-effacing” approach to musical theatre choreography would in fact become her “signature,” although it was seldom recognized as such by her contemporaries.90

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Holm’s career as a musical theatre choreographer continued into the mid1960s. She balanced her choice of show between those that were artistically unusual and challenging, such as the commedia dell’arte musical The Liar (1950) and the Cole Porter musical, Out of this World (1950), based on the love affair of the Roman gods and goddesses with those that were more conventional in subject matter and construction, such as My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960).

Other Choreographers Make Their Own Contributions Between 1943 and 1957, there were many other choreographers who contributed to the growth and popularity of musical theatre dance. Beginning in 1947, best choreographer awards were given for the first time to Agnes de Mille for Brigadoon (1947) and Michael Kidd for Finian’s Rainbow (1947). Gower Champion began his long career choreographing and later directing musicals starting with Lend an Ear (1949), which also won a Tony Award. The veteran Broadway choreographer, Robert Alton, who had choreographed the original production of Pal Joey in 1940 with Gene Kelly playing the lead, received a Tony Award for his choreography for the revival of Pal Joey (1952). Donald Saddler won the Tony Award for Wonderful Town (1953) and Bob Fosse received his first Tony Award for The Pajama Game (1955). While most of those choreographing on the musical theatre stage throughout the 1940s and 1950s came from a ballet, tap, or ballroom dance background, there were others, like Hanya Holm, who came from the modern dance concert world. Anna Sokolow, for example, choreographed the Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’ Street Scene (1947) as well as several Broadway plays such as Red Roses for Me (1956) and Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real (1953). Modern dance choreographer, Helen Tamiris, was very prolific on the Broadway stage choreographing 18 musicals between 1943 and 1957.91 Among those musicals that she choreographed were Up in Central Park (1945), Annie, Get Your Gun (1946), Touch and Go (1950) for which she won a Tony Award in choreography, Carnival in Flanders (1953), and Plain and Fancy (1955). In many of her shows, she provided opportunities for other modern dancers to perform. Her husband and modern dance choreographer, Daniel Nagrin, performed lead dance roles in many of her shows; fellow modern dancer and choreographer, Valerie Bettis, was a lead dancer in the revue, Inside USA (1948), and African-American modern dancer and choreographer, Pearl Primus, played the role of Dahomey Queen in the revival of Show Boat (1946) that Tamiris choreographed. Much like her peer, Hanya Holm, she did not try to superimpose a technique on to the dancers in her shows but explored with each of them how the characters they played would fit into the story being told in terms of their gestures and their movement.92 There was a sharp division between some of the accomplished modern dance choreographers regarding their attitude about working on the Broadway musical theatre stage as somehow diluting and taking away from the artistic quality of their concert choreographies. Afterall, modern dance was still working to receive the

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acknowledgment as being a serious dance art form in comparison to the more conventionally accepted ballet. Others felt that modern dance should not silo itself from more commercial enterprises as long as they could remain truthful in their search for movement vocabularies that would best express the intent of the musicals that they were working on. This dichotomy would continue throughout much of the 1950s and early 1960s.93 One of the most exciting and successful choreographers of this period is Michael Kidd. He had studied at the School of American Ballet. He was made a soloist with Ballet Theatre in 1942. Soon, he was performing in Eugene Loring’s “Billy the Kid,” and Antony Tudor’s “Pillar of Fire,” and Jerome Robbins’ iconic “Fancy Free.” In 1945, he also tried his hand at choreography with “On Stage!,” a ballet that concerns antics that occur at a rehearsal for a ballet set on an empty stage. It was a highly theatrical dance that, as dance critic, John Martin writes in his complimentary review, “contains some extremely able choreography and some fine dancing, but it also employs conversation (dialogue is too formal a word), its characters play the piano and smoke pipes and cigarettes and act generally like human beings.”94 It is understandable why Kidd would be encouraged to look for an opportunity to choreograph musicals on Broadway. That opportunity came in 1947 with his first Broadway musical, Finian’s Rainbow (1947). He went on to choreograph Guys and Dolls (1950), Can-Can (1954), and Lil’ Abner (1954). He received a Tony Award for Choreography for all four of these musicals! Like many of his peers, he grounded his choreography in the dramaturgical detail by analyzing the script, finding out what the purpose of the dance was to serve, and connecting his choice of movement to his understanding of each of the characters in the musical. To this, he would add a high degree of energy and pull from, not only his ballet background, but also his familiarity with modern dance, social dance and acrobatics. There was a youthful optimism to his dances that was infectious. When he later moved to Hollywood, this gleeful boyishness meshed with his colleague, Gene Kelly. Like Kelly and Astaire, he often liked to begin with pedestrian movement of some kind and then let that evolve into dance movement that might be abstracted but not so far removed that it would lose that quality or feeling that anyone in the audience couldn’t do the same – if given the chance. This is best demonstrated in the scene from the movie, It’s All Fair Weather (1955), known as the Trash Can dance, performed by Michael Kidd, Gene Kelly, and Danny Daniels.95 In an interview with Michael Kidd, Barbara Berch Jamison was able to capture a sense of what his kind of dancing was like. His work even from his first ballet, “On Stage,” which he created and danced for Ballet Theatre nine years ago, has an earthiness, a clarity, and a wry humor that appeal to all kinds of audiences, classic dance devotees as well as Saturday-night moviegoers, discriminating first-nighters and popcorn-crunching kids. “Which is exactly the response I want,” Kidd admits. “Dancing should be completely understandable-every move, every

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turn should mean something, should be crystal-clear to the audience. And if you can make them laugh or cry, move them emotionally, make them respond to the dancer as a real person doing something believable within your theatrical framework-well-you’ve done a job.”96 Michael Kidd moved back and forth between Broadway and Hollywood and never looked back at the ballet world. He was able to create dances that immediately pulled the audience in. He did not shy away from difficult subject matter, as he did with the racism at the heart of Finian’s Rainbow, but at the same time, he elevated the humor and comedy inherent in the commedia-like characters in musicals such as Guys and Dolls. As a matter of fact, Daily News critic, John Chapman, opened his review with: “The big trouble with Guys and Dolls is that a performance of it lasts only one evening … I did not want to leave the theatre … I wanted to hang around, on the chance that they would raise the curtain again and put on a few numbers they’d forgotten-or, at least, start Guys and Dolls all over again.”97 High praise indeed! It is a strange twist of fate that Jerry Robbins was originally slated to choreograph this musical before being replaced by Michael Kidd.98 It was exhilarating to be a dancer on the Broadway stage in the 1940s and 1950s and the audience was invited to share in their enthusiasm. Dance was moving away from some of the clever gimmicky of the Zieg feld Follies and their imitators toward a growing maturity. Beginning with George Balanchine and moving forward, the musical theatre was attracting more and more choreographers from the ballet and modern dance concert stage. The musical was always able to attract ballet and modern dancers to join their social and ballroom dancers, tap dancers, eccentric dancers, and others to perform in vaudeville and revues and musical comedies. The difference now is that choreographers from the concert stages were being attracted to work on the musical theatre stage. No doubt, the fact that they could make more money doing Broadway and the fact that they could cast some of their own dancers was an incentive. But, it was much more than that. The dancers themselves were coming to the musical theatre with more training, more confidence, more demanding in terms of asking for more challenging movement technically but also in terms of commitment to character. Starting with Agnes de Mille, she expected her dancers to be excellent actor-dancers. Their involvement in carrying the theme and, at times, gravitas of the show, was dependent on their acting as well as dance abilities. By the time we get to the casting for West Side Story, Robbins could expect to find the triple threat – the dancer-actor-singer. While it would be several more years before that ideal could be reached for performers other than the leads, the barre was raised and both performers and audiences wanted to see it become a reality. Beginning with the work of Balanchine, the late work of Rasch and that of de Mille and others, composers, librettists, and producers were seeing the advantages of bringing choreographers into the center of thinking up and creating a musical. Just as a character can go so far with language and, at some point, it fails him, then he can sing; now when language and song can take a character

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so far, she can dance. With dance, musicals can now think beyond dance as divertissement, or provide a backstage story line and that becomes the excuse for people to break into dance. With dance joining song, libretto and music, there are more stories that the musical can tell. The characters can become richer and more interesting. Dance can join music to set the mood, establish an environment and go more in-depth with a character’s psychology. It was a two-way street. The choreographer could demonstrate what the potential was for creating and enriching a “new” musical theatre and, at the same time, concert choreographers could see that the medium of musical theatre could broaden and expand their movement palette. In addition, they could see that there could be an advantage to collaborating with so many other artists to create something that can speak to all kinds of audiences – from the most sophisticated to those coming to the theatre perhaps for the first time. Musical theatre has always had this ability to appeal to a wide breadth of audience; now, what was happening was the realization that musical theatre could go deeper and present more complex themes and not have to give up its popular appeal. If audiences connect with one or more characters, they will be more willing to take the journey. Now, the musical has a wealth of talented dancers and choreographers who can literally move us into areas we didn’t even know existed.

Notes 1 See Gerald Bordman’s succinct assessment in his American Theatre: A Chronicle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 534–536. 2 Clive Hirschorn, Gene Kelly: A Biography (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 81. 3 Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 62. 4 Delwin B. Dusenbury, “A History of the American Musical Theater: American Musical Theater Production Problems,” Dramatics, Date and Issue Not Known, p. 28. 5 Dusenbury, p. 28. 6 Carol Easton, No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), p. 3. 7 Kara Anne Gardner, Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 4–5. 8 Easton, p. 90. 9 Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1930s Musical (New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), p. 226. 10 Gardner, p. 8. 11 Easton, p. 102. 12 Agnes De Mille, Dance to the Piper (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), p. 245. 13 Warren Hoffman does an excellent job of discussing some of the problems inherent in producing Oklahoma! today and who has been disenfranchised or ignored. See his book – The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical. 14 Gardner, p. 27. 15 Agnes de Mille would work out meticulous notes for her dances but she always allowed for incidental “accidents” to occur in which she would notice something quirky, or interesting, or revealing that a dancer may do and then she would find a way in which to incorporate that into the dance. In this case, McCracken affectionately

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became known as “the Girl Who Fell Down.” Biographer, Lisa Jo Sagolla does an excellent job of describing this in her biography, The Girl Who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken. 16 Gardner, p. 30. 17 The original idea is that the audience can only imagine where he is dragging her off to; however, in some contemporary productions of this dance, there is a clear staging that suggests that he intends to rape her. 18 Liza Gennaro, Making Broadway Dance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 34–35. 19 Mordden, p. 77. 20 De Mille, Dance to the Piper, p. 242. 21 For a more elaborate discussion on how modern dancers thought about choreography, I refer you to Doris Humphrey’s The Art of Making Dances. 22 According to Gardner, it would be another forty years before the next female choreographer would be offered the opportunity to direct. 23 Ethan Mordden, Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1992), p. 95. 24 Mordden, p. 97. 25 For a detailed analysis of Agnes de Mille’s contribution to Allegro, I refer you to Kara Anne Gardner’s Chapter “Staging Allegro” in Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance. 26 Agnes de Mille, Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World. Edited by Mindy Aloff (Tallahassee, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), p. 152. 27 Ryan Donovan, “Acts of Recognition: Gesture and National Identity in Agnes de Mille’s ‘Civil War Ballet’”, Studies in Musial Theatre 67:3 (2012), pp. 325–333. 28 Gardner, p. 79. 29 There is a video copy of this dance available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0394844/ 30 Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), p. 256. 31 It is interesting to note some of the parallels with A Chorus Line, which was essentially conceived by director-choreographer, Michael Bennett, and Hamilton: An American Musical that was created by a musical theatre hip hop artist, Lin-Manuel Miranda. What is also interesting to note is that, just as with West Side Story, the principal creators for each show were in their 30s – old enough to have the professional experience to create a Broadway musical but also not so old that they could not remember what it was like to be young, adolescent, and engaged with a world that offered you serious challenges to meet before you could get on the other side of your maturity. 32 Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 30. 33 Greg Lawrence, Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York, NY: G. P. Putman and Sons, 2001), pp. 36–39. 34 Amanda Vaill, Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2006), p. 64. 35 See Deborah Jowitt’s description of the origin of the ballet and a detailed description of the dance in her book, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance, pp. 74–87. 36 John Martin, “Ballet by Robbins Called Smash Hit.” New York Times, April 19, 1944, p. 27. 37 John Martin, p. 27. 38 Edwin Denby, “Fancy Free.” New York Herald Tribune, April, 19, 1944. 39 George Abbot, Mister Abbot (New York, NY: Random House, 1963), p. 200. 40 Vaill, p. 112. 41 Vaill, p. 109. 42 Vaill, p. 127. 43 Jowitt, pp. 132–133.

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44 Murray Schumach, “Bleeding Lips Ballet: An Excursion into the Past for Robbins’ High Spot in High Button Shoes.” New York Times, November 30, 147, p. X3. This piece is an excellent description of the dance as seen by the audience and those backstage. 45 Vaill, p. 103. 46 In Arthur Laurent’s book, Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals, he acknowledges the unique contribution that Robbins brought to the West Side Story that they did in 1957 but he goes on to say that simply reproducing the “steps” of his choreography in subsequent revivals leaves something missing. In his 2009 revival, he brought on board Lin-Manuel Miranda to advise on how to make the Jets and the Sharks more “equal” by introducing Spanish for the Sharks. He also states plainly that in this version, the “goal was musical play rather than a danced retelling of a legendary tale.” 47 Jowitt, p. 279. 48 Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 88. 49 In some productions of West Side Story, the fire escape and the balcony area are staged to move along with the actors. In that way, dance and movement continue, even in a book scene. 50 Dash, p, 101. 51 Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: The Jungles of the City.” New York Times, September 27, 1957, p. 14. 52 See: https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division 53 Mary Wigman, The Language of Dance, trans. Walter Sorell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), p. 23. 54 Andre’ Levinson, “The Modern Dance in Germany,” Theatre Arts Monthly, February 1929, p. 143. 55 It is important to note that in many ways Mary Wigman was to European modern dance what Martha Graham was to American modern dance. Each developed originals movement vocabularies. Each explored subjects and themes that were outside the mainstream. Each placed a strong emphasis on women’s experiences in their choreographies. Finally, each was charismatic both in performance and in the studio. The legacies of both continue to inform modern dance practice today. 56 Levinson, p. 151. 57 Levinson, p. 144. 58 Schlee, “The Modern German Dance,” Theatre Arts Monthly, May 1930, p. 420. 59 C. Madeleine Dixon, “Mary Wigman,” Theatre Arts Monthly, January 1931, p. 42. 60 Walter Sorell, “Hanya Holm: A Vital Force,” Dance Magazine, January 1957, p. 22. 61 Holm changed her name when she joined the Wigman dance company. 62 Walter Sorell, Hanya Holm: The Biography of an Artist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), pp. 1–3. 63 Sorell, p. 17. 64 Sorell, pp. 24–29. 65 Sorell, p. 41. 66 Don McDonagh, The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (New York, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1976), p. 77. 67 John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, Inc., 1965), p. 66. 68 Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York, NY: Dance Horizons, Inc., 1949), p. 164. 69 Robert Moulton, Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue on the New York Stage from 1925 through 1950. p. 169. 70 Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, p. 562. 71 Sorell, Hanya Holm: The biography of an Artist, p. 111. 72 John Martin, New York Times, May 16, 1948, Sec. II. p. 1.

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73 Sorell, Hanya Holm: The Biography of an Artist, p. 109. 74 Abe Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1977), p. 119. 75 Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, p. 566. 76 Robert Garland, New York Journal American, December 31, 1948. 77 Ward Morehouse, The New York Sun, December 31, 1948. 78 Howard Barnes, New York Tribune, December 31, 1948. 79 Barnes, December 31, 1948. 80 Morehouse, The New York Sun, December 31, 1948. 81 William Haskins, New York World-Telegram, December 31, 1948. 82 Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals, p. 119. 83 Sorell, Hanya Holm: The Biography of an Artist, p. 112. 84 John Martin, New York Times, January 9, 1949, Sec. II, p. 1. 85 Martin, p. 1. 86 Moulton, Choreography in Musical Comedy and Revue on the New York Stage from 1925 through 1950, pp. 170–171. 87 Moulton, p. 172. 88 Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 256. 89 Kiss Me, Kate was the first musical to have its dances labanotated and copyrighted. 90 Ray Miller. “Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare: Balanchine, Holm, and Robbins.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 311–312. 91 Before choreographing on the Broadway stage, Helen Tamiris was an accomplished modern dancer and choreographer. She was very attracted to African-American life and would incorporate, some would say appropriate, African-American themes into her concert choreography. One of her earliest was Negro Spirituals. She was a strong advocate for anti-racism and this came out in her 1937 How Long Brethren? This dance received the Dance Magazine’s first award for Group Choreography. 92 Joanna Gewertz Harris, “From Tenement to Theater: Jewish Women as Dance Pioneers: Helen Becker (Tamiris), Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow.” Judaism. Summer 1996, Vol 45, No. 3, pp. 262–264. 93 During the Depression, Helen Tamiris was instrumental in administering and choreographing for the Federal Dance Theatre funded by the WPA. For a more detailed description of this important but often overlooked contribution that American dance made in the 1930s, please see: “Tamiris and the Federal Dance Theatre 1936–1939: Socially Relevant Dance Amidst of the Policies and Politics of the New Deal Era” by Elizabeth Cooper in Dance Research Journal, Autumn 1997, Vol 29, No. 2, pp. 23–48. 94 John Martin, “On Stage!” Scores First Ballet Hit.” New York Times, October 10, 1945, p. 23. 95 For a video clip of this dance, See: https://youtu.be/D1InfoCfipM 96 Barbara Berch Jamison, “Kidd from Brooklyn: Michael Kidd Leaps between Ballet, Broadway and Hollywood, creating hit dances for all.” New York Times, June 13, 1954, p. SM42. 97 John Chapman, “‘Guys and Dolls’ is New York’s Musical Comedy,” Daily News, November 25, 1950. 98 Scott Miller, Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007), p. 62.

7 1957–1968 Triple Threats Grow as DirectorChoreographers Rise

Prologue America in the late 1950s could sense that “the times they are a changing.” J. D Salinger’s novel, Catcher in the Rye (1951) had not waned in popularity as most other novels had during that period. For many disaffected youths, it became their bible. While the Korean War Armistice agreement in 1953 brought the Korean War to an end, tensions would continue to simmer. The U.S. government’s commitment to maintain a large contingency of troupes along the DMZ, or demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, demonstrated an uneasiness regarding the ever-threatening presence of China. The Cold War settled into being a “lived reality,” – a constant but subdued nervous background noise – for most Americans and many people around the world. Elementary schoolchildren rehearsed hiding under their desks to protect themselves from a nuclear attack. For many American citizens, however, it was the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision that “separate but equal” was now unconstitutional. With that decision, there was a more concerted effort on the part of many African-Americans and their white supporters to strive for a more equal society for all peoples. Protests erupted in 1957 when nine AfricanAmerican schoolchildren were blocked by angry whites from entering Little Rock Central High School, precipitating President Eisenhower to send the U.S. National Guard to escort them into the school. Dr. Martin Luther King and many others put their lives on the line with their numerous and increasingly effective civil rights actions. While optimism and hope were ushered in with the election of a young, handsome, intelligent, and captivating President John F. Kennedy in 1961, things would quickly spiral out of control immediately following his assassination three years later. Civil rights marches were becoming a weekly occurrence. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-8

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Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, expanded the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam exponentially and provoked a rising tide of protests, some violent, supported by many young people on college campuses. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was met with violent inner-city rioting and emboldened the leadership of the Black Panthers to take stronger actions. Several months later, presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, would also be assassinated. And while the landing of the Apollo 8 astronauts on the moon was the realization of President John Kennedy’s stated aspiration from his inaugural address that by the end of the decade, we could land a man on the moon, the question for many Americans, particularly its young, was asked: yes, but at what price? Artists of all kinds responded to these disorienting changes with their own skills. The rock and roll of Elvis Presley was counterbalanced by the folk music scene, particularly that of the music of Bob Dylan. The presence of the obsequious television set in each family’s living room in the 1950s would broadcast episodes of Father Knows Best, a television series filled with pablum and easily digested comforting story lines, but by the end of the 1960s, newscasts by Walter Cronkite were announcing daily the growing body count of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The movies presented an isolated yet romantic hero, James Dean, but it also gave us the shocking, unexpected murder of a hippie riding a motorcycle through the South in Easy Rider. We could divert ourselves and our families with the opening of Disney Land in Anaheim, California, or we could be held motionless and in awe at the Earthrise photograph taken by astronaut William Anders. Musical theatre had its own varied response to the swiftly changing American society of the late 1950s and 1960s. While the popularity of the film musicals was beginning to wane, the Broadway musical continued to attract audiences that wanted diversion and, at the same time, were looking toward the musical to present us with the same dramatic intensity and quality that matched what their leading playwrights of that time were doing. We wanted our own Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and Edward Albee. Oscar Hammerstein had opened the door with Showboat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Arthur Laurents with West Side Story whetted our taste yet again. We wanted more. We did not necessarily want a return to P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton’s “Bring on the Girls” however. Dream ballets revealed that we could replace the all-girl chorus line with men and women dancers who could elevate our tastes in terms of dance technique and take us into worlds we did not know could be expressed in movement. While the triple threat performer was still more an ideal than a reality at this time, we expected our dancers to have a background in ballet and jazz with another specialty based on the show they were auditioning for. We now replaced the hired help of the dance director, who would seek out predigested dance chorus routines from dance studios to insert into his shows, with choreographers who brought a much more eclectic dance experience to their work. Choreographers now would work alongside directors to analyze a script in order to best determine the place for dance and the styles that would add in the telling of the narrative.

194  1957–1968

The story of musicals and of dance in this anxious yet exciting period from 1957 to 1968 was one of weaning ourselves from our dependence on classical operettas and cheesy revues to developing strong book musicals and attempting new challenges in the telling and in the structure of that telling. 1958 held the promise of exciting things to come, particularly for dancers and choreographers. Gene Kelly returned from Hollywood to direct a Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Flower Drum Song, a musical based on a novel by ChineseAmerican C. Y. Lee. Rather than choreograph it himself, he brought in Carol Haney, an assistant on several of his musical films to choreograph. She earned her reputation with Broadway audiences with her performance of Gladys in The Pajama Game (1954). Curiously, Kelly and Haney choose a choreographic structure very similar to that used in Oklahoma!. There was the obligatory big ballet number of course and they reverted back to the separation of actors and dancers. Musical theatre historian Mordden caustically summarized the musical this way. So, after delivering ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl,’ Pat Suzuki made herself scarce and the dancers took over, simulating the eternal hunt of boy for girl, along with a touch of Chinese-American assimilation in a young Chinese girl working a Hula Hoop. Similarly, after singing ‘Sunday,’ Suzuki and Larry Blyden exited as blithely as possible as Haney brought on her troupe for more of the East-West thing in dancers bunched as three mandarins, five very Americanized Chinese women pursued by Americanized suitors, and three children in scout uniforms, everybody grouping and regrouping till the Hula Hoop kid reappears-this time with two hoops.1 In 1943, it was unlikely that you could cast enough performers who could sing and dance and act to the level that de Mille needed; however, by 1958, there were more possibilities to do so. The difficulty here was the fact that there were too few Chinese-American actors who had musical theatre experience. The result was that, in addition to Chinese-American actors, they also cast an AfricanAmerican, a Hawaiian, a Caucasian, and others who they could find to fill the roles. Composer, Richard Rodgers, recalled that “what was important was that the actors gave the illusion of being Chinese.”2 Clearly, this was an example of overreaching a well-intentioned aspiration while not having the vision nor the resources to fully realize in theatrical terms what was intended. In 1957, Jerome Robbins placed in blazing letters – conceived, directed, and choreographed by, on the marque. The audaciousness of this action proved to be an omen of what was going to happen in the coming years with the choreographer taking on the duties of directing as well. Robbins received the imprimatur from the Tonys when he won the award for choreography but lost out on the directing award to Vincent J. Donehue for Sunrise at Campobello. It would take another two years before a choreographer would be nominated for Best Direction for a musical and, when that happened in 1960, both Jerome Robbins for Gypsy and Michael Kidd for Destry Rides Again would lose to the standard bearer, George

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Abbot, for Fiorello. The following year, however, Gower Champion won the Best Director and the Best Choreographer awards for Bye, Bye, Birdie. The writing was on the wall. Choreographing a musical shares many of the same duties and responsibilities as directing a musical and as dance becomes not only more integral but also even essential to the narrative of the musical, it was inevitable that these two positions would merge. It is curious that the 1960s decade would start with a satiric look at the emerging popularity of rock and roll as personified by the enormous success of the Elvis Presley-like character in the musical, Bye, Bye, Birdie (1960) and end in 1968 with a willing embracement of rock and roll in the musical, Hair (1968). In Bye, Bye, Birdie, the musical focused on the impression that rock and roll was having on the young people and that was put into perspective with the adult figures. In Hair, there were no adult figures. All that mattered was the point of view of the young, especially those who were committed to the Hippie lifestyle. The approach to choreography of Gower Champion could not be more different from that of Julie Arenal.

Bookends: Gower Champion and Julie Arenal While still a teenager, Champion began his career as a ballroom dancer with his friend, Jeanne Tyler. He would choreograph what his biographer, John Anthony Gilvey, would call “‘story dances’ – narratives told through dance and pantomime.”3 Some of these were called “Smoke Gets in Your Eye” and “Darktown Strutters Ball.” Choreographer, Robert Alton, invited them to make their Broadway debut in his revue, Streets of Paris, in 1939. This was a revue that also featured the idiosyncratic Carmen Miranda. They performed their “Doin’ the Chamberlain” and they closed the revue with “Reading, Writing and a Little Bit of Rhythm.”4 The following year, they were performing at Radio City Music Hall, and then in the musical comedy, The Lady Comes Across in 1941. By this time, Champion was developing his own style of ballroom dancing. Biographer David Payne-Carter offers the following description: Champion developed a number of devices. One involved having all of the team’s extension radiate from a single point-that is, having the angles of all four arms and all four legs relate to one another by seeming to originate at a single point. This is an almost unavoidable compositional device when a pair is close, but it is more difficult to attain when they are far apart or when the torsos are on different planes. An example was the deep dip that became a Champion trademark. … The pose is an extended dip, much like a classic Tango dip, but the woman descends to within inches of the stage floor, parallel to it, supporting herself on one extremely bent leg while the other leg is also parallel to the floor. The male partner … straightens up, perpendicular to the floor and supports the female from their joined hands with a fully-extended arm.5

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He would continue to develop his choreographic style with his next partner, Marge Belcher, who was the daughter of one of Hollywood’s most prolific choreographers in silent film, Ernest Belcher. He had established his own dance studio, the University of the Dance, where many well-known performers from Betty Grable to Gwen Verdon studied. When Champion was discharged from the Coast Guard, Marge was establishing her professional dancing career performing on Broadway in the play, Dark of the Moon.6 Eventually, Marge and Champion would pick up where Jeanne and Champion left off and became one of America’s most popular ballroom dancing couples. They performed in several movies. One of those was in the Robert Alton choreographed Showboat (1951). Film historian Miles Kruger suggests that they may well have been the 1950s heir apparent to the previous generation’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. “Their style contains such a perfect blend of acrobatics, ballet, jazz, and comedy that the couple seems to leap from the screen and demand the audience’s attention.”7 Among those that followed was the Stanley Donen directed Give a Girl a Break (1953) that also featured Bob Fosse as a cast member. In addition to working in films, they also had a very successful career in the new medium of television performing on a number of variety shows. At one point, they even had their own The Marge and Gower Champion Show for one season in 1957. Champion’s first break to choreograph an entire Broadway show came in 1955 with the 3 for Tonight revue. He and his wife performed in this show as well.8 Although it had a modest run of 85 performances, it did introduce two musical theatre standards – “Shine on, Harvest Moon” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” – and garnered an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. In one of the numbers he choreographed, he was able to explore movement choices that would come back in future Broadway musicals he would choreograph. His two-dimensional work within limits is seen in a later number, “By Play for Drums,” … As subjects in a scientific experiment measuring the effect of music on the nervous system, he and Marge sat on two stools rapidly extending and contracting their arms and legs to the wild beat of ‘Kitty on the Keys.’ The movement conveyed the dimensionality of a cartoon-length and breadth without depth. This, of course, contributed to the number’s comic effect. Bye, Bye, Birdie’s (1960) ‘Shriners Ballet,’ with the limbs and faces of Chita Rivera and her companions appearing and disappearing from the top of a long buffet table; Carnival’s (1961) ‘Always, Always You’ with James Mitchell thrusting sword upon sword into a basket concealing all but the head of Kaye Ballard; and Hello Dolly’s (1964) ‘It Takes a Woman’ with Vandergelder’s employees popping in and out of the scene from different levels of his Hay and Feed Store would be later examples.9 Champion’s first significant Broadway musical theatre hit would come in 1960 with his directing and choreographing of Bye, Bye, Birdie.10 The musical centers around a rock and roll star, Conrad Birdie. As a last-ditch publicity effort

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before being drafted into the army, he agrees to sing a song, “One Last Kiss,” and to give that kiss to one of the girls in his fan club, who would be chosen at random. Rather than put the emphasis on this rather shallow plot line, Champion decided to put the emphasis on the score and stress the theatricality of the show. One of the devices he used in this show would come back in subsequent musicals he directed and choreographed. He felt that once a show starts that there should be no starts and stops in between; therefore, he favored a cinematic approach, one that has now become standard practice in many musicals. One example from this show to illustrate how he employed this device would be the following. As the applause started, the lights dimmed slightly. Billows of steam from the departing train filled the stage while the performers downstage turned their backs on the audience and stripped off the topcoats that concealed their Sweet Apple costumes. At the same time, the Penn Station set was being winched off stage as the Sweet Apple set was brought on. As this took place, the additional members of the company (most prominently the Mayor of Sweet Apple and his wife), maneuvered through this melee into position. The lights came up to full again on a completely transformed scenic picture, one that had literally dissolved into another.11 This is a technique that he no doubt learned from his many years in film, a technique he called the “brown out.” For his efforts, he would be the first choreographer to be awarded a Tony for both directing and choreography. What artists like Balanchine, de Mille, and Robbins had started, he was able to complete and receive the highest recognition from the theatrical community for his accomplishment. He would go on to repeat this double recognition for Hello, Dolly! in 196412 and again for The Happy Time in 1968. Throughout his career, he was careful to distinguish between working with dancers in a piece of choreography and working with actors in blocking a scene. Often, he would let the actors make choices based on their understanding of the scene and the characters they portrayed but, at some point, he would step in to shape the scene in terms of spatial relationships and in terms of the rhythmic flow of a scene.13 With dancers, he was precise and expected them to repeat the movement the same way each time. While he could be very demanding, he had this unique “ability to tailor musical numbers to performers’ specific talents ….” Nothing would be wasted. He was very observant while watching actors and dancers move and he would tailor the staging and choreography to their natural ways of gesturing and moving. In this, he shared a trait that characterized the approach that de Mille and Holm took as well. Champion expected the actors, singers, and dancers to exude energy in performance, each time. This was a baseline requirement for him.14 When he choreographed the now famous waiter’s Hello, Dolly! number, he started by exploring simple movement like walking, running, tripping, kicking,

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and so on and used those as building blocks for the dance. He found ways to build the dance through the dynamics in unison movements. Sometimes, he resorted to standard musical comedy movement like swaying linked arm in arm; sometimes, he would unabashedly use the kick-line formation. As Payne-Carter describes it – “He would assemble numbers person to person, movement by movement, working like a painter who first applies a color and then stands back, looks at his work, and applied another color.”15 Hello, Dolly! garnered over ten Tony Awards, the first time that had ever happened, including Tony Awards for Champion as director and choreographer. Biographer John Anthony Gilvey, however, sees the success of this show as one that “herald[ed] the finale of an era as the last titanic hit in a class of musicals launched over sixty years before by George M. Cohan that celebrated the innocence and boundless optimism of the American spirit. The crowning achievement of that period had been the integrated musical, in which all the elements of production-performers, music, lyrics, book, choreography, orchestrations, scenery, costumes, and technical design-converged to realize a single creative vision.”16 While many might agree with him, I think that it is fairer to say that what followed were experiments in exploring where the musical theatre might go next. Champion was meticulous about transitions within scenes as well as those that take the audience from one scene to the next. As a director, he understood that the central vision “was essential to the unity of a piece of work. … With Carnival! that unification was brought about chiefly through the scenery. … For Dolly!, his concept was a cinematic dissolve and pan shot from Yonkers into New York.”17 He worked with his designers to find ways in which to animate and either move the set or have the moving of the set implied by the use of lighting. To that extent, he loved working with set designer Oliver Smith and lighting designer Jean Rosenthal. Smith also designed for the American Ballet Theatre and Jean Rosenthal designed the lighting for the Martha Graham Company; consequently, Champion could rely on their expertise in framing the dancing body on stage to enhance the dance and movement sections of his musicals. In that respect, he foreshadowed the increasing importance that choreography would play in terms of sets and lighting choices being choreographed as well. Again, he foreshadowed what many take for granted in the musical today. His final musical for which he was awarded Tonys for direction and choreography was The Happy Time (1968).18 This musical tells the story of a wandering French-Canadian photographer, Jacques Bonnard, who returns home, hoping to recapture some “happy times” with his family and in his photography. By the end, however, he comes to accept that living a domesticated life is not for him and he continues on – traveling and taking photographs. The producer, David Merrick, saw this as memory play in the same vein as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Eventually, Champion was persuaded to join this production because of the nature of the story line and

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because he could play and investigate scenographic devices to explore the back and forth of memory and reality. The scenic designer provided him with a threetiered revolving stage. Jean Rosenthal was back on board as the lighting designer. The musical opens with Jacques on an empty stage. Then, the images of the photographer’s past emerge and gradually the revolving stage takes the audience back into the family home. “Within moments of the opening, Champion had fashioned the IMAX projections into a visual metaphor for the tricks that memory plays.”19 In the first action production number, “Without Me,” while Jacques’ nephew, Bibi, plays around with his classmates in the gym, we see projected on the screens the amateurish photos that he has taken in an attempt to impress his uncle. In the second act, there was a boyish romp in which Bibi tries to get girlie photos he had stolen from his grandfather back from his classmates. These were very clever choices to be sure. Unfortunately, the use of media tended to overpower the live performance on stage. In his review, Clive Barnes praised Champion for how he “uses beautifully free and open movement patterns, so that one scene all but swirls into the next.”20 Barnes gives credit to Champion for the quality of the ensemble and small group dancing. Nevertheless, he laments that “his quite lengthy ballet [it] does nothing to advance the plot and merely shows the ironic poverty of Mr. Champion’s choreographic abilities. Mr. Champion might do best to stick to staging at which he is a master and leave the choreography to someone else. In any event, is there still a place for a ballet sequence in the modern musical? When Jerome Robbins himself has dropped them, is anyone else brave enough to argue?”21 While Barnes is harsh on Champion’s choreography in the ballet, he does acknowledge his talent for the majority of the choreography and staging of show. What is disappointing in his critique is the lack of addressing the scenographic elements of the show and their relationship to the theme of memory and reality. Nonetheless, he does point to the fact that the dream ballet has now become old-fashioned and he wonders what is the future direction of musicals now that it has become dominated by directors and choreographers rather than writers and composers. He is not too far off on his criticism. In the same year as The Happy Time, Broadway saw the invasion of Rock and Roll and plotless musicals and a very different kind of choreography and dancing. After its off-Broadway run in 1967 with Anna Sokolow serving as choreographer, it opened on Broadway in April 1968 with Julie Arenal as choreographer. Hair caused a revolution in musical theatre production. This was a musical that was amplified – in more ways than one. The choreographer, Julie Arenal, came to this project after having trained in dance at two of the best institutions, particularly for modern dance, at the time – Bennington College and the American Dance Festival. She would soon work with famed modern dance choreographer/performer, Anna Sokolow. Following Hair, she went on to choreograph the Arthur Kopit’s play, Indians (1970) and Boccacci (1975), a musical production based on the stories from fourteenth century,

200  1957–1968

The Decameron (1975). She spent a great deal of time working in the off-Broadway world and choreographing for many New York Spanish Language companies. She also created dance pieces on concert stages and in films.22 Hair was a revolutionary musical in several important ways. It began as an off-Broadway production at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1967. When it was decided that it should move to Broadway, the celebrated Tom O’Horgan was brought in to direct and Julie Arenal to choreograph. This was a show that was born in the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway milieu of countercultural theatre and dance performance. Julian Beck and Judith Malia’s Living Theatre brought together politics with artistic sensibilities. Jerzy Grotowski and Richard Schechner were experimenting with audience-performance relationship and with environmental theatre’s uses of space. The Judson Dance Theater was shattering conventional dance movement in order to discover what is “essential” in a dance to be called, a dance. Everything in theatre and dance making was up for grabs. In the second half of the 1960s, the countercultural movement and the leftists’ critique of the Vietnam War and the more radical segments of the Civil Rights movement combined to create a volatile, exciting, and strange amalgamation of forces that would coalesce and inform the subject matter and aesthetics of the musical, Hair. This musical … consists largely of interrelated vignettes, during which the musical’s many characters examine various countercultural concerns. Loosely connected songs and sketches explore drug and sexual experimentation, Eastern spiritual and religious practices, the civil rights movement, class issues, the generation gap, and the Vietnam War.23 All of this is held together by the character of Claude Hooper Bukowski, who is hanging around with his hippie friends trying to decide if he should burn his draft card or allow himself to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. It is a musical that attacks the conventional reasoning for submitting to the draft board to go to Vietnam to kill and/or be killed, that challenges the conventional ways of thinking about sexual relationships and the taking of drugs, that smashes the complacency surrounding race relations, and that breaks some of the common conventions of theatre making. The actors invade the house and, at times, encourage the audience to come up onto the stage. It breaks the fourth wall at the beginning and throughout the musical. Rock music permeates the entire show. The band is on the stage and the actors are given mikes to sing their songs so they can be heard and so they can create a feeling of being at a rock concert with the audience. There is almost a feeling of witnessing a “happening.” There is a sense that much of what they are seeing is improvisatory. Some of it was. In rehearsal, the actors spent a lot of time playing improvisatory games, doing sensitivity training, and engaging in bonding exercises in order to bring the group together as a cohesive whole. As they rehearsed, they were encouraged to express themselves freely and then the director and choreographer would select

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something that came out of this apparent free for all and put it into the show. Dance critic, Doris Hering, observed that: It’s amazing how much variety Galt MacDermot achieved within the rock and raga idioms. As for the action (“choreography” does seem too old-fashioned a word for this production) it would take more than a single viewing (and a lot more familiarity with their personal styles) to know where director Tom O’Horgan left off and Julie Arenal came on. Perhaps that, too, is good. It means that the musical theatre may be moving out of the era we used to consider revolutionary, where dance was used to further the action, rather than interrupting it. And it is now entering the era where the action is all one.24 This is an important observation. When Gower Champion directed and choreographed Bye, Bye, Birdie, he may well have taken some suggestions from the actors or the assistant choreographers, but it certainly was not as free flowing as the way in which the director and choreographer for Hair interacted with the cast throughout the rehearsal period. While the director had an overall vision for the show, he utilized some of what he had learned from his colleagues in the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway world and that is to trust the actor to make discoveries and to come into a rehearsal open and observant to the process so that one might discover movement or vocal choices one would not have done otherwise. Scholar and writer, Elizabeth L Woolman, quotes one of the original cast member’s description of what this rehearsal process was like for her. Galt [MacDermot] would just let everyone sing. And we were basically allowed to make up our own-and then if Galt liked what we made up, we kept it. Actors like Leata Galloway had five octaves. So Galt would turn around and say, “Leata, can you give it one of your dog notes, one of your freak notes?” Or, “Can you give me a wail, Melba [Moore]?” and that would be it. Throw something out and let people do it. Then he would give the rest of us, after we had experimented, a more solid foundation. In rehearsal, Steve [Gillette, the lead guitarist] would jam and we would all dance. And the choreographer would go around and say, “Let’s do a Marjorie LiPari step!” and we would put that into the show. I had one that was my step, which was a kick thing. And we had another one which was somebody else’s. And she would grab what we were doing individually and we would all do it as a group. Hair came out of free-form rock, theatre, and dance.25 The technique that Arenal is using here is now common practice for many in the modern dance field. The choreographer understood that this production had to come out of the “lived experience” of the hippies, protestors, and artists

202  1957–1968

that she and her collaborators saw and hung out with in the West Village and the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatres. Nonetheless, the creators of this musical had as their goal to bring Hair to Broadway26 and, with that as their ambition, they further understood that they needed to walk a fine line between the conventions of musical theatre production at the time and the bringing together of new and different ways of thinking about subject matter, the uses and kinds of music needed, and the reassessment of the relationship between audiences and performers. In describing the choreography for “Good Morning Starshine” and Arenal’s choreographic approach during rehearsal, scholar Lisa Jo Sagolla, makes the point that “the dancers did not improvise their movements onstage, although the choreography was carefully-designed to make it appear spontaneous.”27 This approach may have been revolutionary at the time but it is now employed by many choreographers and dancers as a means by which they can discover movements they might not otherwise have recognized or created. With these additional insights and ideas, the choreographer can edit, select, change, or amplify those movements that could best fit into the chorographic design. Sagolla goes on to compare the dancing in Hair in this number with those of Peter Gennaro’s “Up Where the People Are” from The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Bob Fosse’s “The Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity. Unlike the cold, non-relationships that existed between dancers in Gennaro’s piece and also Fosse’s to some degree, the dancers of the counterculture are totally emersed in one another; they touch frequently and hold each other while they dance in small groups or pairs. They are clearly dancing because they enjoy their bodies, the music, and each other. There is no sense of doing what is correct, being fashionable, or displaying one’s skill or virtuosity.28 While it is a stretch to assume that the Gennaro and Fosse dancers may or may not be enjoying what they are doing at the time of their performance, she does make a point regarding the use of formal dance technique and the projection that dancers exude when performing. The purpose of the dance and the characters that the dancers are playing will certainly affect how they look when dancing, but Sagolla is making a point regarding how dancers are engaged in rehearsal with their dancing bodies and how that might translate to performance. To that end, Arenal summarizes her point of view this way. I have spent my life with all kinds of dancers and all shades of talent in the dance field – some trained and some not. My goal is to create form that expresses who people are, what they are about, their pleasure and pain, bringing a sense of communion between actors on the stage and the audience. I’m not interested in just showing tricks. I’m interested in revealing who the dancers are as people.29

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Jazz Dance: Jack Cole and Katherine Dunham The choreographers in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s were handed a legacy from those who had come before – broaden the movement vocabulary, increase the technique of the dancers and continue to find ways in which the dance can be more fully integrated into the musical. For the most part, many worked to do just that. What they could not have predicted however was how the structure of the musical itself would be challenged and transformed. They could not foresee the tremendous societal and cultural changes that would challenge the value of musical theatre as a relevant art form – leaving many to claim that musical theatre – along with God – is dead, or if not dead, then at the very least – on life support. All of this is curious when you consider that social dancing was again on the rise. What began as the jitterbug in the late 1950s with rock and roll evolved into a plethora of dances in the 1960s in which dancers did not even touch each other. Everything from the twist, the Freddie, the Hitch-Hiker, and the Watusi to doing the frug, the mash potatoes, the shimmy, the monkey, the locomotion, and many others. The young people who were doing their social dancing in the 1910s and 1920s could go the musicals and see those same dances performed on the musical theatre stage. By the time we get to the 1950s and 1960s, young people are contributing or learning from their peers, not from the musical, but from what they see on TV with shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train. There was also an explosion of interest in ballet, modern, postmodern, jazz, and tap. More studios and more undergraduate dance programs were opening up to meet the demand. When musicals that reflected their concerns, like Hair, or musicals that offered a more heated kind of jazz, like Sweet Charity (1966) or Cabaret (1966) opened, they would return to patronize the musical theatre stage. Choreographers at this time brought their best efforts to the shows they were offered. Jack Cole, referred to as the “Father of Theatrical Jazz Dance,” enjoyed a most uneven relationship with the Broadway musical. He was consistently more successful with his work on Hollywood films and in staging nightclub acts. In terms of his background, Jack Cole was one of the most versatile and eclectic dancer/choreographers of his day. He had studied modern dance at the Denishawn dance studio, ballet with Luigi Albertieri, ethnic dance with La Meri, and much more. He was voracious in learning about any kind of dance from anywhere in the world, or from anyone. He is reputed to have acquired one of the largest personal libraries on dance. He performed and choreographed with the Ted Shawn Male Dance Troupe in the 1930s and was summarily fired for his fiery temperament, a quality that would continue to dog him throughout his career.30 He then moved on to perform with the Charles Weidman Dance Group and with them he got his first theatre dance opportunity as a dancer in The School for Husbands (1933), which Charles had choreographed. His first choreography for a Broadway show was Caviar (1934) and his last was The Man of La Mancha (1965), with dozens in between.31

204  1957–1968

Following several musicals in which he was the choreographer, he was given two back-to-back musicals in which he would direct and choreograph. Donnybrook (1961) told the story of a prizefighter who, after he kills someone in the ring, retreats to Ireland to start a new life; unfortunately, he cannot run away from his past.32 This musical was attractive to Cole because it allowed him the opportunity to explore some of his Irish roots. While there was the obligatory choral Irish step dancing, he also choreographed a fight scene and a comedy dance routine for Eddie Foy Jr. One critic stated that “Cole’s dancers, as a matter of fact, may be the best since Jerome Robbins assembled his remarkable crew for West Side Story ….”33 Howard Taubman concludes his review with the following: Being a choreographer, Mr. Cole knows the importance of movement in the realization of a warm, consistent mood. Like Gower Champion in “Carnival” he puts the overture to creative use. As the band plays, figures of the story are disclosed in characteristic action behind a scrim, and these flashes modulate into a folk like dance by boys in kilts and girls in homespun. The expanded dance numbers later in the musical are no more assertive than those in the introduction. They have lightness, gaiety, an engaging formality. They form part of a total conception that springs from a unified attitude. Thanks to its ease and imagination, “Donnybrook” converts Irish clichés into an evening of warm-hearted innocence.34 The last two musicals for the 1960–1961 seasons were Champion’s Carnival and Coles’ Donnybrook!. While both received positive reviews, Carnival went on to enjoy a 700-performance run while Donnybrook! closed after 68 performances. Again, he came back as director and choreographer for the musical, Kean (1961). This musical centers on the great nineteenth century Shakespearean actor, Edmund Kean, and his travails. It starred the incomparable Alfred Drake, who was nominated for a Tony for his performance. Unfortunately, it had a modest run of 92 performances. Again, Cole did extensive research on the period of the show and that was reflected in his movement choices, particularly for the 12-minute opening that introduced the characters, setting, and some details of the plot; nonetheless, there was competition between him and some of his collaborators regarding when should dance replace song and dialogue, or vice versa, in the telling of the story. The end result was a show that was book heavy without any of the excitement that Cole’s dances might have brought to the show.35 Howard Taubman of the New York Times tips his hat to Jack Cole’s production number, “The Fog and the Grog,” but admonishes the composers for writing pedestrian songs that do little more than move the story along.36 Cole knew well how to choreograph and get the best from the dancers; being a director, however, requires a related but different skill set, one that seemed to elude him when he took on this additional responsibility.

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With the exception of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), with George Abbot directing and Stephen Sondheim composing the music and the lyrics, which ran for 964 performances and Man of La Mancha (1965), with an incredible 2,328 performances, many of Cole’s Broadway musical assignments were less than successful. Where he received much more success was in his choreographies and performances in television programming, Hollywood films, and in nightclub performances. His impact on Broadway dance is felt in his style and the influence he had on people, like Carol Haney, Rita Moreno, Gwen Vernon, and Bob Fosse, among many others. John Martin describes his style and technique this way: His art is strictly high-tension; it is nervous, gaunt, flagellant, yet with an opulent sensuous beauty that sets up a violent cross-current of conflict at its very source. The dancer … is a depersonalized being, an intense kinetic entity, rather than an individual. In this state of technical preparedness, which amounts almost to possession, he performs incredible movement, with a dynamism that transfers itself to the spectators as sheer motor enkindlement.37 His influence on Broadway musical theatre jazz dancing cannot be overstated. Writer Billy Siegenfeld points out that the artist, Li’l C, who is known for “krumping,” and Jack Cole “share a point of view about the kind of dancing generally characterized as ‘jazz’: it comes from a dancer’s feeling and is crafted so that the feeling impacts the audience in performance. Dancing is not just about the technique the body masters or about the movement itself.”38 Jazz dance on Broadway has its roots in Broadway dances of the 1910s and 1920s. According to tap dance historian, Constance Valis-Hill, she described Cole’s dance as “a stylized Lindy Hop, or jitterbug, the popular swing-era social dance of the late 1930s and early 1940s that flung and flipped partners into breakaway solos and daring air steps.”39 In what choreographer and writer Liza Gennaro calls “the second wave of jazz prominence on Broadway” were the jazz stylings of Katherine Dunham, which were based on those of the African Diaspora, and Jack Cole, who added East Indian, Latin, and other dance forms to his Lindy Hop base.40 His dances are often incorporate knee slides, isolation of different body parts, arhythmic articulations of arms, legs, and feet, asymmetrical shaping of the body.41 His contribution to jazz dance “is how he played the movement rhythms of Indian bharata natyam, Cuban rumba, and American jitterbug against swing jazz. Strutting in slow motion, sliding over the measure, pulsing in double and triple time, flick-kicking off the beat, and snapping out precision-timed isolations to the beat.”42 Cole’s dancing was the epitome of “cool.” Gennaro points out that Cole ties his form of dancing to the dancing of the 1920s–1940s that all have their origin in African dance with their polyrhythmic and polycentric movement. She also makes a connection between Cole’s movement with that of Katherine Dunham’s jazz dancing.43

206  1957–1968

Dunham succinctly traces the evolution of African and African-American dance into the wider American culture in her essay, “The Negro Dance,” and makes the argument that “in America, the inevitable assimilation of the Negro and his cultural traditions into American culture as such has given African tradition a place in a large cultural body which it enjoys nowhere else.”44 Many of the elements of an Africanist jazz dance can be found in the dancing and choreography of Katherine Dunhm. Some of those would include a call and response between the dancers and the drummers, polycentric isolations of the body, a quality of youthfulness called ephebism, giving into rather than defying gravity, making room for improvisation, and a kind of propulsive rhythm.45 Some of these qualities were incorporated into the musical theatre choreographies of Jack Cole and Katherine Dunham’s peers – like Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Donald McKayle. This second wave of jazz dance coincided with the music of Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. At the same time, there was the rise of the beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones, whose poetry readings were often performed with jazz accompaniment. Jazz music and dance reflected a kind of rebellion against the status quo, a sense that the individual’s experience takes precedence over a conforming group think. There was a kind of standoffishness with society-at-large. This was illustrated with dark sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from one’s mouth, limp wrists that signaled a kind of “nevermind,” and a poetry that was spoken in a kind of arhythmic manner, one that may be punctuated with nonliteral sounds or outbursts. While this brand of “coolness” would be dominant from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, rock and roll music and poetry would soon replace it in the wider culture but not on the musical theatre stage in terms of its movement vocabulary; that would come later when it was reconfigured into the now recognizable stylings of Bob Fosse.

Selected Shows that Shaped the Period While America in the 1960s was tormented by assassinations, the civil rights movement, experimentation with drugs by many of its young people, the ongoing war in Vietnam and its accompanying anti-war protests, and much more, this was best reflected by its young people in their music – both folk and rock, in the visual arts – in the form of pop art, and in its dance – the postmodern dancer stripping away all techniques to get to the basics of “what is dance?,” as well as in avant-garde films – like experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage forsaking narrative for visual deconstruction. For the most part, American musicals of this period were resistant to change. Most of the musicals were following tried and true musical comedy formats. Some explored more serious subjects and stretched the narrative form and melded their choreography seamlessly into the narrative. One of the most successful was Jerome Robbins’ Fiddler on the Roof (1964). Ron Field’s contribution in Cabaret (1966) pointed the way in choreographing a “concept” musical. Donald McKayle brought a keen sensitivity to a racially

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charged show and employed his modern dance background to stage the fight scene between Sammy Davis, Jr and his white opponent in Golden Boy (1965). Finally, while Bob Fosse would arrive at a superstar status in the 1970s, it was his work on shows like The Pajama Game (1955), Damn Yankees (1956), and Sweet Charity (1966) that would come to set his style that would inform much of what he did thereafter. Fiddler on the Roof (1964) tells the story of Tevye and the relationship he has with his three willful, yet loving, daughters as they venture to find someone to marry. It takes place in the village of Anatevka in Russia in 1905, when many Jews were experiencing pogroms. Robbins pressed his collaborators for a unifying theme and what they came up with was – Tradition. This became the opening song and dance for the show. It was beautifully based on a simple folk-dance walk. This was a serious musical with humor. For Robbins, he felt that it was not a musical but “a combination of an opera, play, and ballet.”46 Clearly, Robbins was looking for a different way by which to categorize a musical performance that would take the best from each of these three art forms. In fact, Robbins carefully staged and choreographed the actors and dancers and set pieces into one long ballet. Nothing was left to chance. He brought all of his previous 20 years of experience to the creation of this story, a story that resonated deeply with his family and many others. The precariousness of the Jewish fate at the time could not be symbolized any better than by the fiddler on the roof, an idea Robbins got from one of the Russian-French Marc Chagall’s 1914 paintings, “The Green Violinist.” Consequently, the whole narrative is framed delicately as if it were a dance, a dream, a spoken poem that could just as easily disappear. The range of choreographic movement evolves from a gentle waltz in “Sunrise, Sunset” to a vivacious Bottle Dance with dancers performing with bottles on their heads. Throughout a selection of slow, deliberate music, the traditional Jewish Bottle Dance is performed. The belief is that if the men can dance without dropping the bottles off their heads, the newlyweds will have lots of children. The dancers place the bottles precariously atop their heads and begin to bounce gently. Their movement gradually gets bigger as they start to walk and stamp. The dance develops into a solemn, suspenseful performance, fraught with concentration. What began as a duet, grows into an ensemble section as more men join in a series of leg swings and crossing steps. They then descend to their knees for a series of crawling steps in which they reach out with a heel and pull the body toward it, sliding along the ground on their knees. At the end of the dance, each man removes his bottle by tilting his head forward and letting it fall into his hands. Robbins intentionally ended the dance in this fashion to show the audience that there was no trick to this number; the men did, indeed, balance the bottles atop their heads throughout the dance.47

208  1957–1968

Robbins certainly knew how to “bring the house down” with an electrifying dance yet he also knew that less could be more. What began as a ten-minute ballet centered around his daughter, Chava, marrying a Russian, was abbreviated until “the pruning had had the desired results-the more he took out of the ballet, the bigger the hand it got, until some wag in the company commented, ‘By the time he takes it out altogether it’ll stop the show.’”48 Robbins did not see his choreography as “precious.” That did not mean that he didn’t put up some resistance. This was the only “ballet” in the musical and he spent a great deal of time “adding subtleties and interplay between characters and finally great sweeps of actors whirling in and out of forest scenery, careening around the distraught Tevye – all of which beautifully reflected Tevye’s state of torment. But none of the work could strengthen the ballet’s emotional impact.”49 What was important was the clearest and most direct telling of a narrative. This had always been Robbins’ mantra and, while it was a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when you just know you can make it work, and yet it doesn’t – the story was the basis to which everything else had to conform. No excuses. Even at the end of the show when the villagers are forced to leave their home, they sing a sorrowful “Anatevka” and they bow to each other and to their village, Anatevka, and purposefully but slowly move off stage leaving “Tevye and fiddler [who] walked gravely, ritually, around the circle; gradually Jean Rosenthal brought the lights down until the two of them were silhouetted against the backdrop, and as the orchestra struck two chords, they, too, bowed to each other as the lights faded to black in what the critic Frank Rich would later call ‘one of the most moving final curtains of the American musical theatre.’”50 Robbins knew that often less was more and this is just one example in which he took his own advice. For Robbins, this was certainly the pinnacle of his work on the musical theatre stage. While years later, he would be teased back to direct and choreograph Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), a retrospective of some of his best dances over his long career, Fiddler on the Roof would be the summit of his work as a director-­ choreographer. He knew the difference between taking on a show because you need the money, or because there was nothing else available at the time and taking on a show because you not only want to tell that story but also need to tell that story. When that is the case, it lifts the production to a higher level. Maybe Robbins was correct when he said that this was not a musical but some kind of combination of an opera mixed with a play mixed with ballet. However it is defined, the audience rewarded it with 3,242 performances, the longest run of a Broadway musical at that time. Cabaret (1966), on the other hand, was a risky move on the part of director-­ producer, Hal Prince. Beginning with The Pajama Game (1955), Damn Yankees (1955) West Side Story (1957), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963), Fiddler on the Roof (1965), and more, Prince won Tony Awards for most of the musicals with which he was associated. While he could rest comfortably on his past achievements, he not only wanted to challenge himself yet again, but he also wanted to challenge his audience. Cabaret was a “concept” musical.

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Rather than having a throughline with a straight narrative to which might be added an interlude or a dream ballet, Cabaret had two parallel ideas running side by side. He was inspired by a production of Ten Days That Shook the World at the Taganka theatre in Russia. He witnessed a production that had been influenced by Stanislavsky’s contemporary, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was highly critical of what he perceived as an overemphasis on realism in the theatre and advocated for using various theatrical techniques to shake the numbing expectations of the audience up so that they might see and feel aspects of a production in a more visceral way. With that, Prince encouraged his collaborators to think of splitting the stage into an area to represent the “real world” and another to represent “the mind.” The psychological tension between the “real” and the “mind” linked the psychology of individual characters but also the sociological transformation going on in Germany during the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party. As one example, he had the material for the Master of Ceremonies character, played by Joel Gray, “divided between realistic numbers performed in the cabaret for an audience on stage and metaphorical numbers illustrating changes in the German mind,”51 played directly to the audience in the theatre. As the story unfolded, the idea was that the Broadway audience would by association become implicated in the transformation occurring to the “average” German of the 1930s. Like Robbins with Fiddler on the Roof, this was a story that he felt needed to be told in 1966. He made a connection he had while when serving in the army in 1951 he would frequent a nightclub called Maxim’s, which had a dwarf MC, with the setting for Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. In addition, he saw an uncanny connection between the youth and the general population of Nazi Germany with what was happening in America in the 1960s following the assassination of Martin Luther King. In his autobiography, Prince states clearly that what drew him to this project “was the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s.”52 To help him realize this project, he called upon Ron Field to choreograph. Field, who made his Broadway debut when he was eight years old in Lady in the Dark (1941) became the first male student to be accepted into the now-famous High School of Performing Arts in New York.53 Upon graduation, he made his Broadway debut in Agnes de Mille’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949. He also was exposed to the vastly different approach to dance and choreography when he performed in Kismet in 1954 choreographed by Jack Cole.54 Field explains that “Luckily I was brought up in that wonderful era of the fifties when you were either Jack Cole dancers, a Jerry Robbins dancer, a Bob Fosse dancer, or an Agnes de Mille dancer.”55 Unlike some of his peers in modern dance who were often expected to swear allegiance to a particular modern dance choreographer, he was able to enhance his choreographic palette because of his wide breadth of exposure. He made his choreographic debut on Broadway with the ill-fated Nowhere to Go but Up (1962), which closed in one week.56 He collaborated with Prince in

210  1957–1968

1968 to choreograph the musical, Zorba. He had several opportunities to serve in the dual role of director and choreographer with his most successful being for Applause (1970) for which he won Tony Awards for Direction and Choreography. Taking inspiration from the Weill-Brecht The Three Penny Opera, Prince, Field, and the other collaborators brought a contemporary sensibility to the time and place of Cabaret. As the audience enters, they saw an unsavory Kit Kat Club cabaret setting with a background featuring a Berlin set in the jazz age.57 Suspended over the stage was a mirror that reflected the audience in the auditorium. The staging was unusual for the time. It would cycle back and forth between the realistic parts of the story line between nightclub singer, Sally Bowles, and the writer, Clifford Bradshaw and those of the performances of the MC and his “girls.” Eventually, they would entwine, much like a Möbius strip, to create a haunting story that had strong parallels with the disruption going on in American society at that time. Field worked closely with Prince on the dancing in the Kit Kat Klub as well as those outside of the nightclub performances. When Jerome Robbins came to see a run-through of the show, he recommended to Prince that all of the dancing not taking place in the club be cut, which included the telephone number and the engagement party scene. He felt that it would tighten the show. After much thought and discussion back and forth with Field, Prince decided to keep those dances in.58 If they had been cut, they felt that it would result in a show that was out of balance and distort the themes that they felt were essential to this production. Field described his approach to the choreography for the Kit Kat Club this way. For instance, Cabaret, I thought, I am a choreographer at the Kitt Kat Club, which is a second-rate club in Berlin in 1930, how would I approach this? … Now in my Germanic way, since I’m a German choreographer, I would kind of overdo it. Everything took on a heaviness, a harshness. Then I gave each girl a little story. Why she was working at the club, where had she come from, was she from Berlin, did she go with the owner, did she go with another girl, was she out to just hustle drinks? I allow their personalities to change the movement so they weren’t all doing the same thing. … I chose to make them individual.59 New York Times critic, Walter Kerr, was effusive about the performance, the work of the designers, the direction, the concept, and even Field’s contribution. He wrote: “Under choreographer Ron Field’s beautiful, malicious management, Mr. Joel Gray is superb, as are the dancers. The style is there driven like nails into the musical numbers.”60 Field took the concept idea and made it a part of his future directorial and choreographic work. He felt that with the concept musical, “you make your own rules” and consequently, “each show calls out for its own identity.”61 Cabaret was a critical and commercial success. It ran for 1,165 performances. Prince’s risk “paid off.” Indeed!

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Donald McKayle came to the Broadway musical with a strong background in modern dance both as a dancer and choreographer. His initial introduction to modern dance was when he saw a performance of Pearl Primus and immediately he began to study with Ms. Primus, Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and others at the New Dance Group, an organization that placed an emphasis not only on technique but also on social movements and political action. It was one of the few places that did not discriminate on the basis of race. Eventually, he performed with the Martha Graham Dance Company. The modern dance world was opening up to African-American dancers and choreographers during the 1950s. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the Broadway musical.62 Unlike the welcoming acceptance by modern dance artists, race presented a much more significant hurdle for McKayle when auditioning for Broadway musicals. When he showed up to audition for Michael Kidd’s Subways are for Sleeping (1961), he was stopped by the stage manager informing him that there were no roles for Negroes in the show. McKayle insisted and told him that he was here to dance and maybe after seeing him, the choreographer would change his mind. After completing the final combination, he received a round of applause from the dancers; nevertheless, he was informed that they could not use him in the show. This experience was repeated more than once for McKayle.63 Sweet karma rewarded him three years later when he was given the opportunity to choreograph his first Broadway musical, Golden Boy (1964) starring Sammy Davis, Jr. This was a musical drama that challenged many of the prejudices still very much on the surface for many members of the Broadway audience. It is the story of Joe, who uses his boxing as a way in which to deal with the racist world he sees around him. At one point, he falls in love with a white woman, Lorna, and when they kissed, it caused a reaction by some members of the audience. McKayle was not naïve about Broadway dance; after all, he performed in House of Flowers (1954), which was choreographed by Herbert Ross and Geoffrey Holder and had some exceptional dancers in its cast including Carmen de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey. Three years later, he was not only performing in West Side Story (1957) but also serving as its dance captain and in 1960, he served as associate choreographer to Bob Fosse on Redhead. McKayle’s Broadway experience and his modern dance background gave him the tools and the confidence to take this project on. One of his now iconic modern dance choreographies, Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulders (1959), provided him with the beginnings of the movement vocabulary he would apply to Golden Boy.64 Scholar John Perpener describes the dance this way: The convulsive, whip-lashing movements that he choreographed for his dancers encapsulated the dashed dreams and pained realities of men on a chain gang. The work’s dynamic thrust came from choreographic motifs that displayed the unique capability of dance movement to convey meaning.

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It is in this sense that the movement in Rainbow shows how sinew and muscle fiber, the deep structures of the human body, can resonate with their own eloquent voice to approximate verbal expression.65 For McKayle, dance should reveal something about the human spirit. It did not necessarily have to illuminate a dark place, but it did need to be meaningful in some way. In addition to his modern dance choreographies, McKayle was able to get inspiration from a deeply moving experience he had witnessing the focused commitment and, at times, dangerous training of boxers he saw at Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue.66 He was able to distill this experience into the opening number for the musical, “Workout,” which set a high bar for the emotional journey the audience would travel along with the characters in the show. As the critic Taubman tells it: “The curtain rises with no overture and only the accompaniment of a rhythmic beat to discover a gym where fighters in training shadow box, jump rope and pound punching bags. This is a stunning introduction, a tour de force.”67 The climax of the show is the prizefight between Joe and his opponent. Dance history scholar, Lisa Jo Sagolla, quotes Walter Kerr description. Almost the last thing in Golden Boy is a bloody battle in the prize ring, and I feel fairly certain that must be the most savagely effective thing of its kind ever devised for the musical stage. … Into the ring choreographer Donald McKayle throws Sammy Davis and dancer Jaime Rogers, with nothing but drums to guide them. There are instant haymakers, but on metronome beat. There are blows to the head and blows to the stomach, but they rise from the floor with such juggernaut drive because they are dictated and controlled by what two dazzling performers are doing on their feet. And for a change of pace, there is a mauling in slow-motion, with Mr. Davis seeming to sleep-dance from his corner in a cradle of wind. The view from ringside is breath-taking as Mr. Rodgers spins his last spin and drops; it is as though rhythm had died while you were looking.68 This fight scene recalls the one in West Side Story for the rumble that ends with two gang members dead. There was plenty of action in the fighting sequences between the leaders and the gang members themselves. Robbins had to choreograph a lot of movement – primary movement for the fighting between Riff and Bernardo and then again between Tony and Bernardo; in addition, he had to choreograph secondary action for the rest of the gang members. When Tony kills Bernardo, there is a free-for-all with all the remaining gang members on the stage. It was dramatic. It was intense. The music was almost operatic. But, it was not “bloody,” nor was it “savage.” In Golden Boy, McKayle could focus all of the violence on two characters, not two gangs. The intensity of the movements in the fight sequence was supported by strong drum beats that mimicked that of heartbeats. McKayle was able to choreograph the

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fight “as if ” it were real. Again, scholar Sagolla is very specific in her description of the choreography. The fight is realistically enacted with conventional boxing moves extended into dance choreography. … The fighting never looks artificial or contrived. The dancers exaggerate the energy, dynamics, and accents of the punches thrown while enlarging the shapes and pathways of the reactive movements. For example, a blow to the head yields an extended throwing back of the recipient’s head as his neck wrenches from the impact. A punch to the stomach causes the recipient to perform a sharp, violent contraction of his mid-section. When the fighters are knocked to the ground, … Instead of simply dropping to the floor as a fighter might ordinarily do, McKayle’s dancer-boxers seem to catch themselves on the way down, prolonging and developing the descent into a falling phrase of choreography that illuminates the delicacy and physical intricacy inherent in what is commonly thought of as a simple ‘knock-down.’69 It is important to keep in mind that this musical took place in 1964. The year before, Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C. and President Kennedy was assassinated. In 1963, Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway, and in 1964, the Civil Rights Bill was passed. While the show was still running, Malcolm X was assassinated. What McKayle and many of his collaborators understood was that the civil rights movement was not going to achieve its goals without a fight, a fight that would be “bloody” and “savage.” In an interview in the early sixties, writer James Baldwin exclaimed: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” 70 What McKayle was able to bring in a moving and dramatic way with his dance, “Rainbow ‘Round my Shoulder,” he was also able to intensify in a more “realistic” fashion with Golden Boy. The stakes were high. This wasn’t just another musical; it was the dramatization of the “lived experience” of many African-Americans in the 1960s. Taubman began his review with: “In two of its big production numbers, Golden Boy is a knockout, not only for its whirling excitement of its action but also its powerful punch in its comment.” 71 McKayle created choreography that advanced plot, lent depth to the characters in the story, and jumped out at the audience with an immediacy that they could feel as they left the theatre and walked the streets of New York. When people left West Side Story, they could hum Bernstein’s music and feel as though they could dance down the streets of New York; when people left Golden Boy, they had received a punch in the gut and they could walk more consciously, thinking, and paying attention to what was around them. It played for a respectable 568 performances. It insured future opportunities for its choreographer.

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He went on to choreograph A Time for Singing (1965) and I’m Solomon (1968). In 1973, he was given the opportunity to direct and choreograph the musical, Raisin, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play, Raisin in the Sun. The musical received ten Tony nominations, including one for direction and another for choreography. It received the Tony Awards for Best Musical in 1975. This was the first time that an African-American had been given the opportunity to direct and choreograph a musical. While his next venture, Doctor Jazz (1975) was not successful, he bounced back with a very successful Sophisticated Ladies (1981), which ran for 767 performances. This was a cast that included some of the best dancers at the time – Gregory Hines, Hinton Battle, Judith Jamison, and Gregg Burg. Many musical theatre histories pay homage to a “Golden Age of the American Musical.” For them, this Golden Age begins with Oklahoma! (1943) and draws to a close with Fiddler on the Roof (1964). It is easy to understand why they characterize this time period in this way – the book musical comes to maturation, dance is brought into the center of musical theatre creation, many of the songs and the music were truly glorious and, with the popularity of television programs and recording albums, many more Americans who did not live in New York could feel a part of “the magic that is Broadway.” Without taking anything away from that assessment, I think that a strong case can be made for what was happening in the immediate years following this period. We now have concept shows; we have broken open the subject matter of the musical; we’ve incorporated the kinesthetic qualities of dance, of movement, of scenic, and lighting elements; we’ve let go of some of the sentimentality of the Rodgers and Hammerstein kind of musical for the poignancy of the Stephen Sondheim musical, and much more. The late 1950s into the 1960s was certainly a time of trial and error. It may not have been so easy to recognize then the import of the musicals one might have seen during this time; sometimes, it takes the advantage of hindsight to do so, But, one of the major contributors to the changing presentations of musicals were its choreographers and its dancers. In the 1910s and 1920s, we saw the exciting give-and-take of social dance between the audience and the performers and its impact on musical theatre dance. What is happening in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s and beyond is an influx of concert dancers and choreographers, not only from the ballet stage but also from the now more established field of modern dance, to musical theatre. Their effect on musical theatre will continue to open up choreographic possibilities for the choreographer and increase the breadth of movement styles and technical capabilities of the dancers.

Notes 1 Ethan Mordden, Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), p. 198. 2 Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Random House, 1975), p. 295.

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3 John Anthony Gilvey, Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 14. 4 https://playbil l.com/production/streets-of-par is-broadhurst-theatre-vault0000002122#carousel-cell136019 5 David Payne-Carter, Gower Champion: Dance and American Musical Theatre. Edited by Brooks McNamara and Steve Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 15–16. 6 Gilvey, pp. 23–24. 7 Miles Kreuger, Showboat: The Story of a Classical American Musical (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1977), p. 185. 8 There is a short video clip of a production number from this show available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/j5N9QKSD1UI 9 Gilvey, p. 29. 10 According to Payne-Charter, the producer initially asked Fred Astaire to take on this project before it was offered to Champion. 11 Payne-Carter, p. 72. 12 This is a wonderful documentary by the artists who had created the original version of Hello, Dolly! talking about all of the elements that went into making this show. See: https://youtu.be/mhCsuPEUy9E 13 Payne-Carter, p. 77. 14 After all, for three of his musicals in the 1960s, an exclamation point was a part of their titles – Carnival!, Hello, Dolly!, and I Do! I Do! 15 Payner-Carter, p. 95. 16 Gilvey, p. 153. 17 Payne-Carter, p. 92. 18 This is a video of the performance of The Happy Time at the Tony Awards ceremony in 1968. See: https://youtu.be/en7C6cLPGsA 19 Gilvey, p. 189. 20 Clive Barnes, “Theatre: Happy Time Has Premier.” New York Times, January 19, 1968, p. 32. 21 Barnes, p. 32. 22 Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, Biographical Dictionary of Dance (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1982), pp. 31–32. 23 Elizabeth L Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 47. 24 Doris Hering, “Old Faces and New Hair.” Dance Magazine, July, 1968. See: http:// www.orlok.com/hair/holding/articles/HairArticles/Dance7-68.html. It is interesting that Hering makes the observation that Julie Arenal is listed as a dance director rather than a choreographer. 25 Wollman, pp. 51–52. 26 Wollman, p. 44. 27 Lisa Jo Sagolla, “Choreography in the American Musical, 1960–1969: The Dramatic Functions of Dance”. PhD dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College, 1992, pp. 107–108. 28 Sagolla, p. 109. 29 Rachaela, “Julie Arenal: Biography.” IMDb. See: https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0034268/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_srapm Accessed June 14, 2022. 30 Paul A. Scollieri, Ted Shawn: His Life, Writings, and Dances (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 291. 31 Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, pp.193–194. 32 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 621. 33 Glenn Loney, Unsung Genius: The Passion of Dancer-Choreographer Jack Cole (New York, NY: Franklin Wat, 1984), p. 264.

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34 Howard Taubman, “With Good Times and Smooth Style ‘Donnybrook!’ Overcomes Cliches.” New York Times, May 28, 1961, p. X1. 35 Loney, p. 269. 36 Howard Taubman, “Aiming for Size: ‘Kwamina’ and ‘Kean’ Set Ambitious Goals.” New York Times, November 12, 1961, p. X1. 37 Loney, p. 14. 38 Billy Siegenfeld, “Performing Energy: American Rhythm Dancing and the Articulation of the Inarticulate” in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches. Edited by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014), p. 268. 39 Constance Valis-Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 158. 40 Liza Gennaro, Making Broadway Dance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 145. 41 Constance Valis-Hill does a short but excellent description of his concert piece, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” in her book Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History on pp. 158–159. There is a short clip of this dance “Alan Johnson Introduces Jack Cole’s Sing, Sing, Sing at: https://youtu.be/C6Cb7YYJDxw 42 Constance Valis-Hill, p. 160. 43 Liza Gennaro, pp. 145–148. 44 Katherine Dunham, “The Negro Dance.” Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Edited by Ve’Ve’ A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 225. 45 Julie Kerr-Berry, “Africanist Elements in American Jazz Dance.” Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lindsay Guarino, Carlos R. A. Jones, and Wendy Oliver (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2022), pp. 79–92. 46 Vaill, p. 363. 47 Sagolla, p. 87–88. 48 Vaill, p. 370. 49 Richard Altman and Mervyn Kaufman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 11. 50 Vaill, p. 372. 51 Prince, pp. 130–131. 52 Hal Prince, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974), p. 125. 53 Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister, Conversations with Choreographers (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), p. 81. 54 Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, Biographical Dictionary of the Dance (New York, NY: Schirmer Books, 1982), p. 324. 55 Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister, p. 83. 56 Bordman, p. 629. 57 Bordman, p. 650. 58 Carol Ilson, Harold Prince: from Pajama Game to Phantom of the Opera (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 150. 59 Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister, pp. 82–83. Field makes the point that in the movie version, Bob Fosse chose to make each of the club dancers look alike. 60 Walter Kerr, “The Theatre: ‘Cabaret’ Open at the Broadhurst: Musical by Masteroff ….” New York Times, November 21, 1966, p. 62. 61 Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister, p. 84. 62 John O. Perpener, African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 189–190. 63 Donald McKayle, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 164.

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64 This is a video of excerpts of Rainbow ‘Round my Shoulders performed by members of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and introduced by Donald McKayle. See: https:// youtu.be/BCjW1ORie0g 65 John Perpener, p. 191. 66 Donald McKayle, p. 165. 67 Howard Taubman, “Sammy Davis in a Musical Golden Boy.” New York Times, October 21, 1964, p. 56. 68 Sagolla, p. 84. 69 Sagolla, pp. 84–85. 70 Accessed June 20, 2022. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2021/august/bestjames-baldwin-quotes-still-true-relevant-today.html 71 Taubman, p. 56.

8 1968–1975 The Concept Musical Makes Room for Dance

Tradition Cracks and Fragmentation Steps In The seven years between 1968 and 1975 were dominated by two outstanding director-choreographers. Their influence on musical theatre is still being felt today. The first was Bob Fosse. He had been building a solid reputation as a major choreographer and then director-choreographer since choreographing his first Broadway musical in 1954 with The Pajama Game. There were numerous Broadway musicals and films over the next 19 years. The highwater mark came in 1973 when he won Best Director and Best Choreographer for the musical, Pippin. Two days later, he was awarded the Oscar for Best Direction of the movie, Cabaret. Then, two months later, he received three Emmys – one for outstanding single program-variety or musical, one for directing for a variety special, and one for outstanding choreography – all of these for the television special, Liza with a Z. The other was Michael Bennett, who was a director-choreographer who left his stamp on this period with his musical, A Chorus Line, which won nine out of twelve Tony award nominations, including one for Directing and he shared co-choreographer credit with Bob Avian for Best Choreographer. It ran an astonishing 6,137 performances making it the longest-running musical of that time. In addition, it received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a rarity since there have only been ten musicals, one per decade from the 1930s to today, that have received this prestigious honor. Bennett had an auspicious beginning when he began his Broadway musical career performing in the Michael Kidd directed and choreographed production, Subways are for Sleeping (1961). Five years later, he was choreographing his first Broadway show, A Joyful Noise (1966) and by 1973, he had his first opportunity to direct and choreograph the musical, Seasaw. Bob Fosse evolved a style of musical theatre jazz dancing that was unique and that is easily recognized by dancers, choreographers, and audiences today. DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-9

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Michael Bennett moved dance from being ancillary to musical theatre production to its very center – literally. While they were outsized influences, they were not alone in altering and changing the nature of musical theatre production. Musicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s were squeezed and buffeted by many forces that were occurring in the society-at-large. This was certainly mirrored in the subject matter of some musicals. In addition, these changes were reflected in the musical’s quick embracement of rock music as a new sound for musicals and its openness to explore avant-garde theatre staging techniques that had previously been the purview of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatres. The most outlandish example would be Oh, Calcutta! (1971), a musical revue, choreographed by Margo Sappington, whose subject matter was sex and whose performers were, at times throughout the show, naked. Cabaret (1966) initiated what is now called a “concept” musical that relied more on theme and scenographic design in order to comment on Berlin in the 1930s with a nod toward America in the 1960s. While it did not go as far as subsequent “concept” musicals, like Company (1970) would do, it opened the door to think about not only a shift in what could be the subject for musicals but also how they could be performed. Then, there was the success of Hair in 1968, which provided a significant demarcation line between the “traditional” book musical and what was to follow. It was certainly not a revue either, at least not in the conventional sense. It blew open the doors of musical theatre without a care about definition, nor description. Musical theatre historian and scholar, Elizabeth L. Wollman, conflates two terms – the “concept” musical, originally defined by New York theatre critic, Martin Gottfried, with theatre historian John Bush Jones’ term, the “fragmented” musical. For her, these terms might be defined as “sophisticated productions that de-emphasize the book, and rely instead on music and movement to tell a story or elaborate on a unifying theme.”1 Consequently, the “concept” or “fragmented” musical would now play a significant role in musicals from the late 1960s onward. Bush stresses that the “fragmented” musical lends itself to introspection with characters who ask: Who am I? Character replaces plot as the essential ingredient. He succinctly summarizes his discussion by pointing out that “the fragmented musical is a theatrical realization of the architectural dictum ‘Form follows function.’”2 This idea echoes the ideas advocated by painter, Ben Shahn, ten years earlier and was an essential idea in the 1930s and 1940s in the work of modern dance choreographers Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.3 Bush provides an excellent analysis of several “fragmented” musicals like Hair (1968), Company (1970), The Me Nobody Knows (1970), Follies (1971), Godspell (1971), Pippin (1972), A Chorus Line (1975), Runaways (1978), and Working (1978).4 This “new” form of musical theatre was not solely created by its composers, lyricists, and librettists. Directors, choreographers, and designers were brought into the very heart of the musical; after all, the visual aspects of the musical were on par, and in some cases, such as the sung-through musical, more important than the literary contribution to the show.

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The increasing complexity of musical theatre production demanded a change in how musicals were put together. The model that was more often used was that of the director-choreographer that began in the 1950s and continued through the 1970s. In some cases, the director-choreographer became what in film is called the “director as auteur.” Director-choreographers Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune, Susan Stroman, and others would shape the evolution of musical theatre by emphasizing strong directorial visions over those of shared collaboration amongst their peers. Economics, the constraints of time, ego, and the idea of “total theatre” as residing primarily in the hands of a strong personality with vision – the director – encouraged this megalomania. Certainly, by the mid-1970s, production concepts, design, and movement would join plot line and character development as integral parts of the Broadway musical. Musical theatre historians Gerald Bordman and Cecil Smith regarded the period of 1927–1975 as the “Golden Age” of the American musical. Others, like choreographer Agnes de Mille and musical theatre arranger/conductor/ author Lehman Engel and dance historian Ann Hutchinson Guest, would narrow that to the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. And other musical theatre historians, like Sheldon Patinkin, Michael Kantor, and Laurence Maslon, would begin this period with the success of Oklahoma! (1943). However one delimits and values this unique period in musical theatre history, what is important is that, for a finite period of time, contributing artists from a variety of fields viewed musical theatre as a vital, necessary and important theatrical form that could incorporate the best of what modern artists were doing from a variety of different fields and, at the same time, the musical could reflect the ideals of a society that moved within one generation from the depths of a worldwide Depression to America as a major world political and economic leader. The confidence that such as transition encouraged in the American people demanded both an exuberance and spontaneity in its artistic expression and, at the same time, a critical re-evaluation of its abilities to realize its ideals at home and abroad. These lofty ambitions were reflected in the musical theatre of their day. It is no accident that during its “Golden Period,” the musical theatre was open to linear experimentation, not only in its literary and musical aspects as reflected in its aspirations by its composers, lyricists, and librettists, but that it was also open to its nonlinear aspects as reflected in its dance and design elements. As a result, musical theatre artists from a variety of backgrounds were able to contribute significantly to this aspect of musical theatre production as well.

Patricia Birch With the exception of Agnes de Mille, the contributions of women choreographers to this development have not been fully appreciated. Choreographers such as Patricia Birch, Albertina Rasch, Helen Tamaris, Onna White, Katherine

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Dunham, Anna Sokolow, Hanya Holm, as well as little known and underappreciated talents like Tilly Losch, Dania Krupsa, Catherine Littlefield, Katharine Litz, Pearl Primus, and Carol Haney made important contributions to advancing the status of musical theatre dance. One of the most prolific during this period was Patricia Birch. She began her studies at the School of American Ballet and the Martha Graham School. In 1950, she joined the Martha Graham Dance Company eventually becoming a lead soloist. In 1957, she performed in City Center’s remounting of three of Agnes de Mille’s musicals. The following year, de Mille cast her in the musical, Goldilocks (1958). After touring with the national company of West Side Story, the musical returned for an engagement on Broadway. Within a very short period of time, she had danced for three of this country’s preeminent choreographers – Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins.5 In 1967, she got her first opportunity to choreograph the Off-Broadway musical, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, which ran for 1,597 performances and eventually was moved to Broadway. This was followed by The Me Nobody Knows (1970). It was a musical about the everyday challenges of urban youth and the performers themselves were children. It won the Obie Award for Best Musical; however, it would be her next musical that would put her on the map – Grease (1972). Many saw Grease as a nostalgia musical glorifying the 1950s. In fact, there were a series of musicals in this decade that idealized the past. Some of those included: The Boyfriend (1970) set in the 1920s, No, No, Nanette (1971) set in the 1920s, Irene (1973) set in the 1910s, Over Here (1974) set in the 1940s, Tintypes (1980) set in the 1890s, and 1910s and 42rd Street (1980) set in the 1930s. The retro musical was very popular with audiences for it allowed them to come to the theatre to be entertained and not have to think about uncomfortable contemporary problems. Grease was certainly one of the most successful of these running to 3,388 performances. Birch made a significant contribution to its success. As she does with all of the musicals she works on, she conducted a lot of research on the 1950s so that she could create a more authentic feel with the actor-dancers who had to embody this period in their movement and their dancing. When she comes to rehearsal, she will often start with some improvisation. She is looking to create movement in the dances that are unique to each of the characters the actors are playing. She sees her role as a collaborator with the performers in order to find movement that is of the period and consistent with their characters. Before she solidifies the dance, she needs to understand what the purpose of this dance is in terms of serving the story line.6 In some ways, Grease is answering back to Bye, Bye, Birdie. While the latter pokes fun at the Elvis character and his fans’ adoring response to him and his music, Grease takes the characters in this musical and the music of their lives at face value. While Bye, Bye, Birdie was looking at the culture of rock and roll from the adults’ point of view, “Grease came at rock and roll from the perspective of

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the teenagers who lived it,” 7 and that makes a huge difference in how the show is directed, performed and choreographed. Historian Scott Miller reminds us that: Rock and roll was responsible for an emotional revolution in America. It began as ‘race music’ … and was initially declared unacceptable for young white ears. But it fast became the first truly racially integrated American art form, coming from equal parts black rhythm and blues and white country music. … This was the first time in America that blacks and whites shared the same culture, both consuming and creating it. … This was the most nakedly emotional music most white Americans had ever heard. And it changed everything.8 Director Tom Moore and choreographer Patricia Birch did not look at Grease as a musical comedy. The metaphor they used was “pop art” and they took that image seriously. The dances and the dancing had to be taken as earnestly as the teenagers of that time because each generation’s music expresses their ideals, their ambitions, their insecurities, their romance, and their sexual awakening. While adults may look at their “ways of behaving” as immature and not something to attach much importance to, the young people going through this period, and the music that they listen to and dance to, is very much at the center of where they are at that moment in their lives. Critics were split concerning how they viewed this musical. One review “got it.” Doug Watt of the Daily News observed: The boys are forever striking cool, sharp attitudes, the girls are full of wisecracks. And how they sing and dance in this stylishly staged and choreographed show! […] Patricia Birch’s dances are a constant delight […]9 Dance critic Clive Barnes was one who did not “get it” but who nevertheless acknowledged the contribution of the director and characterized Birch’s dances as “engagingly fresh.”10 In the long run, it may have been theatre critic Tom Buckley’s pointing out that blue-collar audiences attended the musical and many of them became repeat patrons.11 Its phenomenal attendance record was certainly a testament to that point at a time when Broadway was struggling to increase its patronage by appealing to new audiences. At the Tony awards that year, Birch was nominated as Best Choreographer for a Musical. Her competition was fellow Martha Graham dancer, Jean Erdman for Two Gentlemen of Verona and Michael Bennett for the landmark Sondheim musical, Follies. While Bennett won that award, it is ironic that the following year, it was Birch and not Bennett who choreographed the next Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music. One of the qualities in the collaboration between director and choreographer that Birch values in all of her productions is the seamlessness in staging and choreography so that it is difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. This would become a trademark of much of her work.

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In her next project with Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music (1973), she was able to test out how delicately she could collaborate with director Hal Prince on a show that is short on dance and yet begs to be choreographed from beginning to end. In his autobiography, Prince reports that “…dances don’t interest her half so much as character and movement and the total musical.”12 To illustrate how delicately cooperative their relationship was in their work on A Little Night Music, Prince described how he was tired of waiting on Sondheim to give him the music for what was to become “A Weekend in the Country” at the end of Act one, so he blocked it according to what was required in the libretto. Finally, he invited Sondheim to come in to see what they had done. Immediately afterward, “he went home that night and wrote a fifteen-minute sequence so specifically that Pat Birch was able to choreograph the company without altering the blocking.”13 It is that kind of collaboration between director, choreographer, and composer that Birch thrives on. She does not have to have a musical in which there are a set number of dance routines she can choreograph in order to be interested. She prides herself on the fact that she does not have a definitive style associated with her work. In that regard, she shares a lineage with fellow modern dance choreographers, Hanya Holm and Helen Tamiris. While she admires greatly the style of Bob Fosse, she sees her contribution as digging in to find out what the narrative requires and then working with collaborators to realize a seamless presentation that is unique to that particular show. Birch often pays tribute to what she had learned from Martha Graham in terms of working organically. Character and motivation are essential and, in that regard, she is similar to her mentor, Agnes de Mille. Where she might differ from her peers is that she sees her work as being more interpretive rather than original. She scours the text for clues and tries to understand the director’s vision for the show and then makes her own contribution. For many musicals, they do not need a choreographer who is heavy-handed. They require a much more subtle and sensitive approach; someone who sees all movement and gesture in choreographic terms and who knows how to communicate that to actors and dancers alike. Patricia Birch is one of those and her extensive career in Broadway musicals as well as in films and television is a tribute to how those qualities have sustained her throughout a long career.

Bob Fosse Bob Fosse was born a dancer, a tap dancer. Starting at the age of thirteen, he performed as one-half of a tap-dancing team called the Riff Brothers. They found gigs during what were the waning years of vaudeville. At the same time, he performed solo doing tap routines in burlesque houses. At eighteen, he enrolled in the United States Navy just as the war was winding down and he soon was performing in the sailor’s show, Hook, Line, and Sinker. After meeting petty officer, Joe Papirofsky, he was recruited to perform in his show, Tough Situation,

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and he found himself touring throughout the Pacific doing what he loved best – dancing.14 Things moved fast for Fosse after he was discharged – both professionally and personally. His first professional job on the road as a Broadway gypsy was in a 1947 musical, Call Me Mister. In the cast, he met and soon married his first wife, Mary Ann Niles. When the tour was over, they formed their own Marge and Gower Champion dance act called “Fosse and Niles.” Eventually, they were spotted by producer Dwight Deere Wiman and soon found themselves in the Broadway revue, Dance Me a Song (1950).15 Included in the cast was former de Mille dancer from Oklahoma!, Joan McCracken, who would eventually play an important role in Fosse’s career. Critic Brooks Atkinson mentions Fosse and Niles doing “steps that are clearly impossible.”16 The following year, Fosse divorced Niles and married McCracken. He continued his dance studies in NYC with modern dance choreographers Charles Weidman, Anna Sokolow, and Jose’ Limon and acting at the Actors Studio. In 1953, he was cast in the movie, Give a Girl a Break, and got a chance to dance with one of his idols, Gower Champion; but it would be his 48-second dance segment with Carol Haney that he choreographed in the movie, Kiss Me, Kate, that would draw the attention of Jerome Robbins to give him his first break as a choreographer on a Broadway show, The Pajama Game (1954).17 Fosse could not be in better hands than with George Abbott and Jerome Robbins co-directing and his friend and dance partner, Carol Haney, performing in the show. But, for a first-time Broadway choreographer, he now had to choreograph nine dances and production numbers as well as additional staging responsibilities. While he was able to master his role as choreographer for most of the show, he ran into trouble when he tried to stage a non-dancing musical number, “7 ½ Cents.” Robbins was called in to help. As Fosse acknowledges, he “learned more in a couple of hours watching him stage than I had learned previously in my whole life … And in two hours he staged this song absolutely brilliantly …. I think it was a turning point in my career as a choreographer.”18 His 48 seconds in Kiss Me, Kate was a preview of his iconic staging for the dance, “Steam Heat.” This dance was the second act opener performed by his friend, Carol Haney, a former Jack Cole dancer, and Buzz Miller and Peter Gennaro, who would later co-choreograph the dance numbers for the Sharks in Robbins’ West Side Story. Fosse biographer, Kevin Winkler, provides an excellent description of the dance. ‘Steam Heat’ begins with an unassuming syncopated beat and immediately establishes its movement vocabulary: a staccato shuffle with traces of vaudeville and cool jazz stylings, ready to explode but always tamped down and brought back to lockstep. Pushing their hats off their heads or away from their chests, the dancers approximated the pajama factory’s steam irons, hissing, clicking, clanking, and ‘boinking’ their way through

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the sounds of their workplace. The number’s trickiest hat trick requires each dancer to throw the derby up to a hand above the head (easier than it looks if the hat is weighted correctly), and then sink down onto the head with an exaggerated ‘sssssss.’ … ‘Steam Heat’ was a singular distillation of Fosse’s past influences, but given a contemporary coolness. The Jack Cole lunges, the vaudeville references and silent movie clowning, and Fosse’s own hat and knee work were parlayed into something that spoke of jazz: angular, off-kilter, and filled with the joy of showing off. The signature Fosse hand movements-the broken wrists, the splayed fingers … In one form or another, ‘Steam Heat’ would reappear in every Fosse show.19 Fosse’s first Broadway show was a critical and commercial success. It ran for 1,063 performances. When it was made into a movie, Fosse was able to recreate his dances for the film version. Fosse’s star rose quickly and his way of moving the body in his dances would now permeate not only in his shows but it would enter into the larger American culture and into the lexicon of musical theatre dancers from then on. The hat, the bent knees, the limp wrists, the throwaway finger snaps, and the out of nowhere-syncopated explosions became a part of his signature stylings. This was definitely “cool” in the 1950s. As he would move from this show to his last, he would elaborate on this basic structure – sometimes making it humorous, sometimes sexy, sometime temptingly sensuous, sometimes hip. The basics remained the same even as he grew and developed his repertoire. Fosse continued to work with George Abbott on Damn Yankees (1955), which is where he would meet his muse and his next wife, Gwen Verdon, whose Broadway star status was solidified with New Girl in Town (1957) for which she would win a Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical. By the end of the decade, Fosse directed and choreographed his first Broadway musical, Redhead (1959), for which Verdon received her third Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical and Fosse received his first Tony award for his choreography. His trajectory from his first Broadway appearance as a dancer in a Broadway revue in 1950 through his long string of musicals throughout the 1950s culminated in this Tony award, which cemented his reputation as a top-tier Broadway choreographer. In the 1960s, he would take the reins more often as the director-choreographer for his Broadway musicals and for his film work but not before he was dealt a serious blow from which he learned a life lesson. He accepted a job to direct and choreograph the musical, Pleasures and Palaces, by Frank Loesser and Sam Spewack. Three of the musicals for which Loesser was the creator were the successful Where’s Charley? (1958), Guys and Dolls (1950), and The Most Happy Fella (1956). The problem is that Fosse accepted the job without having read the script nor had he listened to the music. This was a huge mistake because he learned the hard way that you can take on a directing project that had been poorly written with lackluster music. Nonetheless, he tried but could not prevent the show from closing out of town. Right up to the deadline, he was choreographing

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“Tears of Joy,” a number that he felt would work in the show. But, that was not the only lesson he learned and Winker describes it this way. That final rehearsal before the show closed brought Fosse a valedictory. Alone on the stage with no producers or writers present, no stars or stage managers, Fosse and his dancers paid tribute to each other, … After performing “Tears of Joy” one last time, ‘the dancers, those who had been in Little Me and other shows with him, proceeded to do other numbers from those shows.’ This spontaneous performance was the purest, most meaningful way for them to say ‘thank you.’ It was just beautiful, Evans said. In a sense, this moment marked the birth of the “Fosse dancer”: fiercely loyal, keenly aware of his legacy, and willing to work endlessly to help him achieve his vision and burnish their own skills.20 The adulation of his dancers and his popular appeal not only from Broadway audiences but also from film audiences around the world is a tribute to his talent and artistry. While he had exceptional success with a musical like Pippin in 1973 and with his explicit and revealing autobiographical film, All That Jazz, he also had some disappointments. Nonetheless, these two 1970s contributions spoke to what John Bush Jones means with his idea of the “fragmented” musical. The lead character, Pippin, is on a search to find out who he is and what he should do with his life. The musical spoke to a generation who had come through the tumultuous 1960s, were tired of living in chaos every day, and were looking for what Bob Dylan called “some direction home.” The musical resonated with its audience supporting a 1,944-performance run and it also rewarded Fosse with Tony awards for his direction and choreography. All That Jazz, while it had a thin plot line, was closer to the fragmentation that Bush defined. It was a blistering introspection on a life lived in “razzle dazzle.” Theatre critic and Fosse biographer, Martin Gottfried writes: “This film of Fosse’s interpolates elements of documentary with fiction and fantasy, using musical language as in Cabaret, with the intercutting and time phasing of Lenny. As E. L. Doctorow, himself a literary time master, put it, ‘There is real-time, there is flashback time, and there is Fosse time.”21 This shifting in time and perspective was relatively new in 1979; however, it is now more common in musicals like Dear Evan Hanson (2016) or plays like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (2012). Fosse’s approach is best illustrated in David Shields nonfiction work, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). In it, he not only describes the increasing fragmentary nature of our daily lives and our quest to latch on to something that is “real” but he illustrates this in a collage format that constantly interweaves his quotes with those from many other sources. This is Fosse at his bare bones and he uses theatre and filmmaking as metaphors but, more importantly, he uses dance to explore in an intensely introspective way “what matters.”

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Fosse the man and his dance style and his insistence on getting the best from each of his dancers was generated during the 1950s and continued right up to his untimely death in 1987 while walking to a revival of Sweet Charity in Washington, DC. If the dual success of Fosse, a musical revue tribute consisting of some of the best of his work, which opened on January 14, 1999, and played for 1,093 performances, and the revival of Chicago, the longest-running American musical on the Broadway stage, which opened in 1996 and is still playing is any indication, the contribution that he has made to the American musical and to musical theatre dance in particular has yet to wane. Cultural observer, Joan Acocella, in her essay on Bob Fosse writes: “By the late sixties, Fosse was the kingpin of the American musical.”22 And, so he was, but as he moved through the 1970s into the 1980s, his inquiries became darker, more foreboding. Like many at the time, he was in search not only of self but also “what matters.” He knew that he lived in a time of increasing commercialization of just about everything and a time dominated by “me first.” But, he would continually return to the “dancing body” as the starting point. His choreography continued to delve deeper and deeper into exploring a kind of truth that he could depend on, that he could rely upon. Again, with a perceptive eye, Acocella concludes her essay with: …Though his motivation often seems naïve, he was nevertheless interested in who we actually are. What is forbidden? What is true? … His work was tacky, pushy, obsessive. He was a hophead. Yet he was a moralist, of a generation that had little hope of innocence. He was clearly drawn to innocence; its presence, or it mourned loss, is at the center of his best work.23

Michael Bennett Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1943, Michael Bennett started dancing and choreographing while still very young. He enjoyed studying all kinds of dance, including jazz, ballet, tap, and modern dance. As much as he liked dancing, he enjoyed choreographing more. There is a well-known story that, even as a child, he would play with his marbles as a way in which he could envision choreographing a musical. During the summers as a teenager, he spent time studying dance in New York City and worked as an apprentice for a theatre company.24 When he returned home in the fall, he was busy choreographing musicals. He was so committed to what he was doing that he earned the moniker “the director/intimidator.”25 While still in high school, he was cast as Baby John in a touring company of West Side Story. He dropped out of high school, did the tour, and consequently was able to meet and work for his idol – Jerome Robbins. In that show, he would also meet his lifelong friend and associate partner, Bob Avian.26 When he returned to New York, he immediately started teaching while performing in Broadway musicals. His first was in the Michael Kidd directed and

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choreographed musical, Subways are for Sleeping (1961). In the opening number for Act Two, “Subway Incident,” Bennett was able to contribute some of his street dancing moves to Kidd’s choreography.27 One of the funniest dances in the show was “Be a Santa,” “in which a chorus of Santa Clauses danced together as if performing a ballet.” 28 Right from the start, he was looking for opportunities to choreograph. Michael Kidd cast him again in his next musical, Here’s Love (1963), which was based on the well-known film, Miracle on 34th Street. It was composed and written by Meredith Wilson, famous for his musical, The Music Man (1957). While it enjoyed a modest run of 334 performances, historian Gerald Bordman damned the show with faint praise with the comment: “Everything about the show was appealing, if insistently forgettable.”29 Nonetheless, Bennett approached Kidd about letting him choreograph and perform “the Rag Doll” number. Clearly, Bennett was inching his way closer to his real goal – to choreograph a musical.30 His next gypsy role was in the musical Bajour (1964), choreographed by Peter Gennaro. Among the stars that Bennett worked with on this show was Chita Rivera. While not formally credited, he would later state that he served as assistant to the choreographer.31 Unfortunately, it could only attract an audience for 232 performances. It is ironic that the first Broadway show on which Bennett formally served as assistant to the choreographer, Ron Field, would be a musical titled Nowhere to Go but Up (1962). The usually patient and congenial critic, Howard Taubman, opened his review in the New York Times with “Don’t let anyone tell you that Nowhere to Go but Up is a little horror. Because it’s a big one.”32 It closed a week after opening. To balance out the disappointment he must have felt with this show, however, Bennett was enjoying a lot of success choreographing for television variety shows such as “The Dean Martin Show,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and “Hullabaloo.”33 This certainly helped him to hone his choreographic skills and to gain additional experience in how to work with different kinds of people and how to keep to a schedule. Finally, the opportunity to choreograph his first Broadway musical came in 1966 with the musical, A Joyful Noise. While the book was weak, the dancing was recognized as being exceptionally creative. He had some of the best dancers in the business to work with including, his dance assistant and chorus member Leland Palmer, Tommy Tune, Baayork Lee, Scott Pearson, and Swen Swenson.34 Tommy Tune described his choreography as “of the moment, very urban New York”35 and though the show closed on Christmas eve, 12 days after opening, it did bring Bennett his first Tony award nomination for choreography. He followed this show up with Henry, Sweet Henry (1967). Again, it had a weak book and the show could find an audience for only 80 performances, closing on New Year’s Eve. Bob Avian served as his assistant and pointed out that even then “Michael would always look for the opportunity to redesign the numbers he was given to do so as to take them one step further from what was required of him as a choreographer, to make character points, to make book points in the dancing, and to do it with an unusual style or approach. He was really thinking

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like a director already.”36 Again, he would receive a nomination from the Tonys for his choreography. Finally, he would become a part of a successful musical, Promises, Promises (1968). This time, there would be a strong book by Neil Simon, one of Broadway’s most successful playwrights, with music by Bert Bacharach, one of America’s most well-known composers at that time. Simply put, this was a musical comedy about a young executive lending out his apartment to his bosses at work so they could conduct their discrete affairs; all the while, he is in love with the executive dining room waitress. While there was not a lot of dancing in the show, Bennett looked for opportunities to connect one scene with the next by employing movement in creative and unusual ways. He enjoyed moving people and scenery in configurations that were unusual yet creative and in a tempo that would not interrupt the pacing of the show. The number that closed Act One was “Turkey Lurkey” starring Donna McKechnie, which was one of his outstanding dance numbers. Much of the movement came from his work on television shows like “Hullabaloo.”37 This time, he was involved with a show that ran over 1,000 performances and yet again, he received another Tony award nomination but no wins. The following year, he choreographed the musical Coco (1969) starring Katherine Hepburn. This was a challenging show for Bennett and his assistant Avian. They had a movie star playing the title role who had acting talent and charisma that spilled off the stage but she was a weak singer and she could not dance. Their solution was to move the other actors around her and let her do what she does best – act. One of the numbers that best illustrates this is “Always Mademoiselle.”38 This was the first time that Bennett had the opportunity to utilize cinematic segues, montage staging (overlapping people or set pieces with each other), and revolves.39 Again, he received a Tony award nomination. Finally, he was to now work on a show that would be regarded as a landmark musical – Company (1970). This was another of Hal Prince’s concept musicals composed by Stephen Sondheim about the precariousness of marriage in contemporary society. The fourteen-member ensemble served as the principal characters and the singing/dancing ensemble for the show. Much like Patricia Birch, Bennett focused on the individuality of each character – how they moved, how they talked, what were the physical properties they were bringing to their character portrayal. He would use that as the starting material from which to design the staging and the choreography for the show. As previously mentioned, Stephen Sondheim makes the point that when he is writing a song, it is important to stage it in your mind as you do so and then pass that off to the director or choreographer to develop it further. With that blueprint, Bennett was able to fill in the blanks.40 Bennett worked closely with Prince on every section of the show. Unlike many shows in which the dancers or chorus can go into one room and work with the choreographer and the actor/singers would go into another to work with the director, this was not possible with Company because they were one and the same. While this was a logistics problem at the beginning, it soon became an advantage – the director, authors, choreographer, and actors could work on each

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scene together to find what works best.41 Bennett did not want to run into the situation he had experienced with Coco where the actors resist movement. He wasn’t trying to lord it over them but rather he “knew it was a chance to do something different because there was so much subtext. Lots of times in musicals the characters are so shallow that you really don’t have anything to work with.”42 The opening number, “Company,” was one of the most difficult for Prince and Bennett to figure out how to stage. There was a lot of information that was coming out to the audience and it was fast-paced. Dramaturg Jack Viertel describes the challenge this way. The number is so propulsive, and it attacks the audience with so much nervous energy, that we also come to understand that this is a show about a Manhattan gripped by its careening-if sometimes pointless-pace. There’s no time to stop and think; there’s no time for anything except ‘come on over for dinner.43 Another number that required careful thought was “Side by Side.” This has more of a soft shoe feel to it. His assistant, Bob Avian, describes that in the end, Bennett came up with a simple solution that really summarized what the show was about in one eight count break when he had the husbands perform a simple step to which the wives would respond with their own, yet when Bobby performed his step, it was answered with – silence.44 With Company, less was more. Sometimes, it takes a keen perceptual eye with time to know how to prune a number or a scene to make it stronger and more direct. Viertel describes the unique contribution that this musical made to the American musical theatre. …The show was audacious in many ways: it was virtually plotless, organized around an idea instead of a story, written so that the songs commented on the action but were not exactly a part of it. But its greatest contribution … it didn’t promise a happy ending.45 Bennett collaborated with some of “the best of the best” in musical theatre and all the while, he held his own. He was able to fine-tune the delicacy required when directing and choreographing a show. So often, one of those jobs gets privileged over the other, particularly with the pressure of limited time for rehearsal. All of this would play to his strength when, four years later, he could create, direct, and choreograph a musical that would become a cultural phenomenon as well as an exceptional Broadway success – A Chorus Line. It began when Bennett asked if he could join a group of gypsies who were meeting after a show to dance and talk and just have some fun. He asked if he could bring a tape recorder with him. No one objected. He repeated this until he had 20 hours of tape. With the help of Nick Dante, Bob Avian, and playwright, James Kirkwood, they shaped the draft of a script around a group of dancers at an

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audition, who tell some of their personal backstory that relates to why and how they became musical theatre dancers told to the director who is auditioning them for his next show. Bennett workshopped the material and then asked Marvin Hamlisch to compose the music with Ed Kleban as lyricist. Public Theater’s Joseph Papp provided a space where Bennett and his collaborators and actors could continue to develop the material – adding, deleting, and honing in on the essentials for each character. After three workshops and incorporating full company songs like the “I want” song – “I Hope I Get It,” as well as “What I Did for Love,” and “One,” and more. Then, Bennett asked his assistant, Avian, to choreograph the “One” number, the chorus number that would later be reprised at the end of the show and, with the assistance of three of the company members, Avian came back half an hour later – finished. And, Bennett nodded his approval.46 Weeks later, the completed musical played to sold-out audiences at the Newman Theatre before moving on to Broadway premiering on July 25, 1975. Bennett was able to transfer much of what he had learned with Prince and Sondheim on Company (1970) and Follies (1971) to A Chorus Line. It, too, was a concept musical “in that it lacks a linear plot, substitutes characters and confession for a conventional book and is organized and held together by the concept of an audition…. A Chorus Line managed to use the splintered sensibility and ultramodern stage techniques of earlier concept musicals. … It was a concept musical in which you cared about every character onstage.”47 This was a highwater mark for Bennett. The show received 12 Tony award nominations and won nine, including for Best Musical, Bennett for Best Direction, and Bennett and Avian for Best Co-Choreographers. In 1976, it won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama award. And, of course, it went on to become one of the longest-running musicals on the Broadway stage. A Chorus Line put not only dancing, but the chorus dancer at the center of the musical. This was a significant accomplishment. The audience learns not only about the particular concerns, fears, joys, and ambitions of the characters “on the line” auditioning for a show (“I Hope I Get It”) but they see themselves as well. Most of audience will not be recognized as “stars” in their personal lives but each can be successful, at least to themselves, in pursuing whatever it is they love. A Chorus Line points to each individual who has his or her talents and hurdles to overcome. It is a reaffirmation that each “dancer” (and we are all dancers) has an important role to play in order to become a part of a something larger than themselves but without losing their individuality. There is a direct line from West Side Story to A Chorus Line. If West Side Story introduced the ideal of the singer-dancer-actor, with A Chorus Line, the triple threat became the standard. One of Bennett’s strengths was to remind actors that “every little movement” conveys so much subtext and, at the same time, he invites dancers to voice what is right under the surface when they dance. Another strength that he passed on to future director-choreographers was the fact that less is not just more, but a lot more. For most of A Chorus Line, it’s a bare stage and an audition line. Of course, it would conclude with all of the glitz we associate with production

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numbers in musicals but he shows us that the basic elements of text, music, movement, and spatial design cannot only activate the imaginations of the audience but can actually invite them into the stories being told by the characters on the stage. In a show that he directed and co-choreographed with Michael Peters, Dreamgirls (1981), he took his concept of moving the human body in space and added the set pieces to that as well. Designed by Robin Wagner, the scenography of the show was created by five computer-generated floor-to-ceiling towers made of aluminum and Plexiglass.48 Bennett always had this idea that one should first outline the “have to” for a song or production and then start to add the steps to fill in the overall concept or idea. With Dreamgirls, he added the idea of choreographing the set and lights not as something to cleverly move around so that you can simply “get on” to the next scene but rather the towers and lighting became yet another “character” in the show. By manipulating these towers throughout the show, he could show the fluidity of environments that can shape, impede, and stimulate characters to act in ways that are caring, threatening, fearful, loving, and much, much more. What he has done with this musical is extend the notion of the architecture of choreography that has been a part of his artistry from the beginning when he was playing with marbles as a child to both the human and the “plastique” elements of this stage production. The then dean of dramatic criticism, Frank Rich, had this to say at the time. In “Gypsy,” the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and his collaborators made the most persuasive case to date (1959) that a musical could be an organic unity – in which book, score and staging merged into a single, unflagging dramatic force. Mr. Bennett has long been Mr. Robbins’s heir apparent, as he has demonstrated in two “Gypsy”-like backstage musicals, “Follies,” which he staged with Harold Prince, and ‘A Chorus Line.’ But last night the torch was passed, firmly, unquestionably, once and for all. … Mr. Bennett has fashioned a show that strikes with the heat and speed of Lightning. … Linking everything together is Mr. Bennett. He keeps ‘Dreamgirls’ in constant motion – in every conceivable direction – to perfect his brand of cinematic stage effects (montage, dissolve, wipe). As if to acknowledge his historical debt to Mr. Robbins, he almost pointedly recreates moments from ‘Gypsy’ before soaring onward in his own original way.49 Bennett’s legacy would now be extended to the choreography of sets and lights in ways that not only further the plot but also reveal or reinforce the major themes of the show.

Interregnum 1968–1975 was an interregnum for musical theatre and musical theatre dance in particular. Rodgers and Hammerstein showed us how to construct musical comedies and their heirs took those lessons and made them their own in similar

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fashion. Agnes de Mille demonstrated that the dance could be integral to a musical, even when the story line is not based on a backstage musical format. We were still able to incorporate the social dances of the young from the Twist and Watusi to the Bugaloo. But, we could not ignore the events in the wider world. The Vietnam War raged on throughout this period concluding with America’s humiliating defeat in 1975 with helicopters trying to lift off from Saigon with Vietnamese hanging on (made graphically real in the musical, Miss Saigon in 1991). Youth protests came to an unexpected end with the killing of four students and wounding of nine others by Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus in 1970. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 unleashed a strong, pent-up assertiveness by the homosexual community that “they were not going to take this anymore.” The Charles Manson murdering spree in Los Angeles in 1969 put an end to the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.” The violence at the Altamont Concert contradicted the peace and love at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. And, the ignominious downfall of an American president in 1974 signified a resignation on the part of many Americans that this craziness of the past decade or so had to stop. Americans needed a breather. A time-out. Bands were breaking up. Solo introspective albums were in. Musicals responded in kind. Veteran Broadway producer, dramaturg and theatre critic, Jack Viertel, writes: Experimental recreational drugs, loud rock, quick cuts in the movies, and the scattershot delivery of bits of information on children’s shows like Sesame Street had produced a cumulative effect-people were receiving information in a different way than they had a generation before. Fragmentary storytelling was not only acceptable, it was a preferred method of communication.50 Fragmentary approaches insinuated themselves into many of the musicals from this period: Company (1970), Follies (1971), Pippin (1972), A Chorus Line (1975), Chicago (1975), Dancin’ (1978), Runaways (1978), and more. With the story line either thin or lacking all together, the musical looked to other ways in which to unify the show. They required an overall vision that could pull all of the parts together in some kind of cohesive way. Staging could take the place of plot and the director-choreographer became the linchpin that could do this. In a culture saturated in film, cinematic techniques were increasingly applied to “moving” the musical along. While we asked some poignant questions of ourselves in some of these musicals, we did not want them to linger for too long. George Abbott’s emphasis on “speed, speed, speed,” was adapted by the choreographers in offering more dance, more technique, more movement, more choreography that included performers and set pieces. For much of this time period, we reacted to a country not only at war in a land far away but also a country at war with itself – the introspection in some of these musicals reflected the lived experience of many in the audience – who am I?, which way is forward?, what values can I depend on that

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thwart the ephemeral built-in obsolescence of much of the world around us?, and on, and on. Like any art form, the musical theatre can reflect what it sees but it cannot answer the questions. They can certainly resonate in the songs, the music, the dance, and the poetry that comprise musical theatre production. We can leave the theatre feeling that we have been heard but we will have to find the answers on our own, in the streets, the home, the minds, the hearts – outside and inside.

Notes 1 Elizabeth L Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 46. 2 John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), p. 273. 3 See Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content and Doris Humphrey’s The Art of Making Dances. 4 Bush, pp. 270–291. 5 Kerry Lee Graves, The Emerging Prominence of Women Choreographers in the American Musical Theatre: A History and Analysis. PhD dissertation. Texas Tech University, December, 2001, pp. 90–92. 6 Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister, Conversations with Choreographers (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), pp. 116–125. 7 Scot Miller, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and Musicals (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), p. 26. 8 Miller, p. 46. 9 Kerry Lee Graves, p. 94. 10 Clive Barnes, “Theater: ‘Grease’ as Nostalgia.” New York Times, February 15, 1972, p. 27. 11 Tom Buckley, “‘Grease’ breaks a record on Broadway: Attracted Blue Collar Audiences.” New York Times, December 7, 1979, p. C8. 12 Harold Prince, Sense of Occasion (Guilford, CT: Applause Books, 2017), p. 175. 13 Prince, p. 176. 14 Sam Wasson, Fosse (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), pp. 33–37. 15 Robert Emmet Long, Broadway the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), p. 146. 16 Brooks Atkinson, “Dance Me a Song: A Miniature Revue with Music.” New York Times, January 21, 1950, p. 9. 17 Long, pp. 147–149. 18 Kevin Winkler, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 39. 19 Winkler, pp. 40–41. Fosse choreography for this dance has been preserved in the movie version which is available at: https://youtu.be/0szHqIXQ2R8 20 Winkler, pp. 109–110. 21 Martin Gottfried, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse (New York, NY: Bantem Books, 1990), p. 386. 22 Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2007), p. 320. 23 Acocella, p. 330. 24 Long, pp. 221–222. 25 Kevin Kelly, One Singular Sensation: The Michael Bennett Story (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1990), p. 14. 26 Ken Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 23–24.

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27 Mandelbaum, p. 28. 28 Long, p. 222. 29 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 631. 30 Kelly, p. 30. 31 Mandelbaum, p. 30. 32 Howard Taubman, “The Theatre: Nowhere to Go but Up.” New York Times, November 12, 1962, p. 36. 33 Long, p. 224. 34 Donna McKechnie with Greg Lawrence, Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 61. 35 Long, p. 224. 36 Mandelbaum, p. 39. 37 This is the link for the Tony Awards performance of this dance number. See: https:// youtu.be/izgG6C_ J33s 38 This number was performed on the Tony Awards for 1970 and can be seen at: https:// youtu.be/sj_81rkQOyk 39 Mandelbaum, pp. 51–56. 40 Listen to this short video clip of Sondheim discussing this point at: https://youtu. be/-LbQSeX0xQk 41 Prince, p. 155. 42 Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co. 2rd edition, updated (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989), pp. 122–123. 43 Jack Viertel, The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (New York, NY: Sarah Crichton Books, 2006), p. 48. 44 Bob Avian with Tom Santopietro, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey ( Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), p. 57. 45 Viertal, p. 46. 46 Avian, pp. 83–96. 47 Madelbaum, p. 190. 48 Madelbaum, p. 218. 49 Frank Rich, “Stage: ‘Dreamgirls,’ Michael Bennett’s New Musical Opens: Crossover.” New York Times, December 21, 1981, p. C11. 50 Viertal, p. 47.

9 1975–1996 The Age of the DirectorChoreographer Wanes

A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance By the middle of the 1970s, America settled into the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, and the aftermath following America’s defeat in Vietnam. Couple dancing returned to the social dance floor and Disco reined. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America took a sharp turn to the right. “I got mine, now you get yours” replaced the equalitarian ethos of the so-called “hippie era.” Accumulating wealth became the standard for success. All of this was interrupted by the devastating toll that the AIDS crisis had on young people, particularly homosexual men. Renewed attacks on the gay community were met with a fierce resistance by leaders like playwright, Larry Kramer, and organizations like ACT UP, that is the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. In 1979, a little-known group known as the Sugarhill Gang released their song, “Rappers Delight,” and by the middle of the 1980s onward, hip-hop music became mainstream with the popularity of artists like Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, and many others. Break dancing, voguing, the moonwalk, the Butt, and many other dances were created on the streets and in the clubs and picked up and played back to their fans by musicians who converted their songs to music videos that were played on a constant loop on MTV. The novel 1984 provided a cautionary tale that resonated with many that the government “doublespeak” use of euphemism for unpleasant or tragic events was no longer dystopian but actually reflected what much of contemporary society looked like and sounded like at the time. The soma drug in the novel became the cocaine drug of choice by many in the United States. On November 9, 1989, the world witnessed the unexpected – the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the Soviet Union crumbling. There was euphoria in Europe and the United States that democratic values had triumphed over the autocratic rule of communist parties DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-10

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throughout the region; thereby, bringing the Cold War to an end. Rather than looking at this unanticipated event as an opportunity for former enemies to reach out to each, old conflicts erupted. Proxy wars around the globe became the order of the day. The Oklahoma City bombing by disgruntled fellow Americans leaving 168 dead and 800 wounded unnerved many Americans. By the end of the decade, we would witness the truly horrifying – children killing children at a high school in Columbine. In 1980, Bill Gates forecasted a desktop computer on every desk and in every home. By 1990s, not only were desktop commuters common, but laptops were becoming increasingly available. Madonna and Michael Jackson not only dominated the airways but they each brought a sophistication to their live performances by combining song and dance with highly technical scenographic effects. A form of “Music Theatre” had come to rock and roll. It would be a short time before these kinds of rock and roll concert performances would permeate the Broadway musical as well. Musical theatre could choose to ignore what was going on in the wider culture and, when it did, it provided exquisitely produced musicals like Dancin’ (1978), 42nd Street (1980), Cats (1981), Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1994); at other times, it took on serious topics, both social and psychological like Sweeney Todd (1979), Les Miserables (1980), Into the Woods (1987), Once on this Island (1990), Assassins (1990), Miss Saigon (1991), Falsettos (1992), and a Showboat revival (1994). Some musicals placed dance at the center of their performance, like Song and Dance (1985), and Singing in the Rain (1985,); others made it an important part of the narrative like Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and the On Your Toes revival (1983);1 while others still had little dance at all like Evita (1978) and Sunday in the Park with George (1984). Dance continued to insinuate itself into the musical, even those that had little formal dance in the show. From Michael Bennett forward, the door blew open for the choreography of set pieces, and for a more sophisticated approach to lighting, largely borrowed from the dance concert stage, with that of the movement of actors to be carefully considered and utilized as a part of the dramaturgy of musicals as exemplified in Les Miserables (1980) and Phantom of the Opera (1988). One of the choreographers for Les Miserables, Kate Flatt, talked about creating improvisations for actors to discover movement that could be incorporated into large group scenes, about working with actors regarding body language to create more well-defined characters and character types and about choreographing small segments of dances of the period that looked like they were spontaneous.2 There were times, for example, when the actors went into a slow-motion movement sequence while a principal character was singing thus creating a secondary action that comments on the scene but that does not take the focus away from the actor singing a song which is carrying the narrative forward. The choreographer here is working with the director to create a seamless musical staging not only for the cast but for the movement of set pieces as well with lighting contributing in a kinesthetic

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and illuminating way. Theatre critic Frank Rich describes the choreography involved in the scenography of this musical. … Most crucially, the director Trevor Nunn and John Caird choreograph the paces of their players on a revolving stage so that spatial relationships mirror both human relationships and the pressing march of history. The ensuing fusion of drama, music, character, design and movement is what links the English adaptation of a French show to the highest tradition of modern Broadway musical theatre production. … In ‘Les Miserables,’ Mr Nunn and Mr. Caird have wedded the sociohistorical bent, unashamed schmaltz and Jerome Robbins’ staging techniques … with the distinctive directorial style they’ve developed on their own at the Royal Shakespeare Company.3 Rich links the rich and complex choreography in the staging of this musical with those used by Robbins in shows like West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof. To that, I would add the use of the light towers by Michael Bennett in Dreamgirls. In Phantom of the Opera, director Hal Prince worked hand in glove with associate director and choreographer, Gillian Lynne. While there was more dance in this musical than in Les Miserables, there were also the same challenges to meld large groups of people and moving sets in ways that were unobtrusive yet beautifully choreographed. In his autobiography, he explained how they would work. “… Gillian Lynne would stage numbers and Ruth Mitchell, my assistant, would rehearse scenes that had already been blocked.”4 Then, they would be blended together by Prince. For example, at one point, Lynne “created what she calls a Degas-style ballet class in the background for atmosphere and in counterpoint to another scene being played further down stage.”5 One of the most interesting scenes that required a lot of collaboration not only between the director and choreographer but all of the designers and that was the opening of Act Two, the “Masquerade.” There were 80 figures on the staircase with half of them being cast members and the other half dummies – all of them costumed to disguise the difference. Lynne then had to choreograph the cast as they moved on the staircase to also interact with the dummies and when they did so, they were able to manipulate them so that they looked just as real in their movement as the actors themselves.6 As dance and choreography became more and more an important part of musical theatre production, it was inevitable that directors and designers would learn from their experience with choreographers about the importance of movement, not only as a means of efficiency in transitioning from one scene to the next but also that “choreographing” scenes – while at the same time allowing room for the actor to interpret what that character needs or wants – could be subtly used to control pacing for the overall telling of the narrative. Building on the work of choreographer, Mary Overlie, director Anne Bogart, and Tina Landau adapted her Viewpoints theory to be used in a theatre setting. In essence,

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Viewpoints compliment Stanislavski’s analytical and internal approach to character development with an appreciation for the “plastique” features of performance. Some of the key viewpoints that actors can employ along with the director are: spatial relationships, kinesthetic response, shape, gesture, repetition, architecture, tempo, duration, and topography.7 Directors not only learned from choreographers about the “kinetic architectural” possibilities for their approach to staging but there has also been an increasing emphasis on the use of cinematic approaches to it as well. Film, television, and social media have been accused of shortening our attention span and that has not gone unnoticed in the theatre. It does not mean that everything has to be fast and glitzy to keep the attention of the audience but it does mean that each moment in a production must be well thought out and given meaning in some way. As the contributions of director-choreographers like Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, Michael Kidd, Jerome Robbins, and others began to recede, others were waiting in the wings to pick up the mantle and make their own contributions. One of those was a tall tap-dancing prodigy from Texas, Tommy Tune.

Tommy Tune Born in Wichita Falls in 1939, Tune was raised by parents who loved to dance with each other and who recognized early on his talent and love for dance. They immediately enrolled him in the Emmamae Horn School of Dance. By the time he was in high school, he was choreographing their productions of Damn Yankees and Once Upon a Mattress. He went on to earn a B.F.A in drama from University of Texas and an M.F.A in Directing from the University of Houston. When he moved to New York City, he picked up the trades, saw that there was an audition for a touring production of Irma La Douce, and was instantly hired as a chorus dancer.8 His first Broadway production was in the Sherlock Holmes musical, Baker Street (1965). This was a Hal Prince-directed show and Tommy Tune and Christopher Walken were cast to play “the killers.” He did, however, get a chance to work with the show’s choreographer, Lee Becker Theodore, who later founded the American Dance Machine in 1978, a company that housed a living museum of some of the best musical theatre dance numbers from a wide variety of Broadway musicals.9 The following year, as a result of an accidental meeting with Michael Bennett in an elevator as he was going to an audition, he was cast in Bennett’s first Broadway choreographic assignment, A Joyful Noise (1966). While the show only lasted for thirteen performances, it was the beginning of a long friendship between them. Soon afterward, when Michael Bennet was brought in to replace the choreographer for How Now, Dow Jones (1967) Gillian Lynne, he brought Tommy Tune along to play the part of “the waiter.” This was also Tune’s first opportunity to observe the way that director, George Abbott, works with a cast.

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After a brief stint in Hollywood performing in such movies as Hello, Dolly! (1969) and The Boyfriend (1971), he returned to New York to choreograph a couple of numbers for the musical, Seesaw (1973). While the show was on the road, it was clear that it had serious problems. Bennett was brought in to “doctor” the show. Soon, he replaced both the director, Edwin Sherin, and choreographer, Grover Dale. Though leary regarding the show’s potential, Bennett nonetheless saw this as potentially his big break. By the time the show opened, Bennett even took credit for the book. Two of his long-term friends and collaborators, Bob Avian and Tommy Tune, served as associate choreographers.10 Tune was cast to play the role of the gay choreographer, David, and with that, he earned his first Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical.11 At the age of thirty-four, his career as a Broadway choreographer, director, and performer was about to go into overdrive. As much as he was a choreographer, Tune was also a director, after all he had an M.F.A in directing. He was able to exercise that muscle with a unique off-Broadway musical, The Club, in 1976. Presented at the Circle in the Square Theater, it was a spoof on male attitudes circa 1900. All of the parts were played by women dressed as men. They took shots at men’s views of women at the time and at how men acted in the company of other men. New York Times critic, Mel Gussow stated succinctly that “choreographing and directing seem to suit Mr. Tune to a T.”12 It ran for 674 performances and the production received an Obie award for distinguished production. Two years later, he got his first opportunity to codirect and choreograph The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978). The musical centers around the possible closing of a brothel outside of a small town in Texas. As Long would describe, it “was basically a cartoon with indelibly typed characters.”13 Nonetheless, Tune, and his assistant Thommie Walsh, had fun with the cast by employing improvisation to not only get ideas from the cast but to later use that in putting together dances that were tied to specific characters. One example of this was in the production number, “Twenty-Four Hours of Lovin’,” which was meant to introduce the women who work at the Chicken Ranch as fun-loving party girls always up for a good time. Helped by the cast’s improvisations, Tune and Walsh shaped a number filled with grinding, roadhouse dancing, loose and sexy, with lots of hair tossing. With arms draped over their heads, the girls bump and sway across the stage. … They dance variations on the bump, the twist, the Frug, the monkey, the pony, the hitchhike, and other steps current in the 1970s Texas. … The number ends, but then picks up for an immediate encore, as the girls, perhaps wishing to hold on to the idea of sex as pleasure rather than business, joyously freestyle dance around the stage.14 While this production could have been completed by any number of choreographers, it is the ingenious way in which he used inflatable dolls in

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“Angelette March” that would demonstrate his fondest for creating dances with props. Each dancer had two dolls attached to them. All are dressed the same, “big blonde wigs, cowboy hats, sparkly red hot pants and halter tops, and fringed cowboy boots.”15 It was a take-off on the sexy outfits and movements of college cheerleaders. He had them crisscross the stage in ways that recalled some of the choreography of Busby Berkeley. Of course, it becomes a satirical comment on our double standard between these cheerleaders and those “working girls” at the Chicken Ranch. This is the dance that critic, Richard Eder, singles out as the best dance number in the musical.16 From this musical, Tune went on to direct and choreograph A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980) for which won a Tony Award for his choreography and Nine (1982) for which he won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. But, it would be his next two musicals that would best demonstrate his range as a director and choreographer. The first of these was My One and Only (1983). This was a musical that used as its premise the Gershwin musical, Funny Face. This musical takes place in 1927 and tells the story of aviator pilot Billy Buck Chandler’s machinations to attract the beautiful, sophisticated swimmer, Edith Herbert. Tommy Tune and Twiggy played the leads with a special appearance by the venerable tap dancer, Honi Coles, as Mr. Magic, who would help Tune win the affections of Twiggy. My One and Only was originally to be directed by the avant-garde director, Peter Sellars. While he brought in many interesting ideas for how to conceive this musical, much of it was too cerebral for the show and he had little appreciation for how fast and efficient you had to be when working on a Broadway bound musical. A division occurred between Tune and his colleagues, known as “the forces of The Pajama Game,” and Sellars and his colleagues known as “the forces of Brecht.”17 Sellars had little appreciation for the value of dance in a musical and eventually, everything came to a head and Sellars was dismissed. Ultimately, Tommy Tune was pressured into taking on directorial responsibilities in addition to those of choreographer and performer. To better do this, he requested that there be shared directorial and choreographic responsibilities with his friend and colleague, Thommie Walsh.18 This was a musical thin on plot but loaded with exciting visual imagery and creative choreography performed by some of the best performers of that time. Musical theatre historian, Robert Emmet Long, lists some of the dances in this show. My One and Only was full of clever musical numbers, which began as the curtain rose on a stage full of dancers with yellow raincoats and umbrellas moving to an exuberant Charleston in the rain. Another number, ‘I Can’t Be Bothered,’ featured several scat singers in tuxedos who struck playfully blasé poses; and ‘Sweet and Low-Down’ was a black-tie-and-tails strut with white canes and gloves that glowed in phosphorescent light. In the

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‘S’Wonderful’ number, Tune and Twiggy tap-danced while they were seemingly marooned on a desert island (it turns out to be Staten Island). Before being ‘rescued,’ they splashed about barefoot together in shallow water, an episode that stopped the show.19 But, the pièce de résistance was the second-act duet between Tommy Tune and Honi Coles, the most well-known and much appreciated African-American tap dancer of his generation. He had established himself with his partner, Cholly Atkins. Together, they formed Coles and Atkins, a class act.20 “Coles had a polished style that melded high-speed tapping with an elegant yet closeto-the-floor style where the legs and feet did the work; his specialty was precision.”21 He performed on the stage from the 1940s to the early 1960s. When tap dropped out of popularity, he worked as a production manager at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Even during this “dry period,” he continued to get together with his fellow tap dance artists called the Copasetics, named in memory of Bill Robinson. When the tap revival occurred in the 1970s, he, along with other members of the Copasetics, was then called upon to teach and to perform. Tune was an excellent tap dancer and choreographer in his own right but in this case, he was performing with “the master.” Tune’s biographer, Kevin Winkler, does an excellent job of describing in some detail the dance that they did. When Billy returns to Mr. Magix’s Harlem shop to seek further romantic guidance, he dismisses Billy’s suggestion about returning to the ‘High Hat’ approach … and launches into a finger-snapping, ring-a-ding-ding arrangement of the show’s title song. … Mr. Magix begins his instruction with a series of easy steps that pivot out from the heels. A bass joins in with a slow vamp as Mr. Magix throws out a step and Billy, the rapt student, repeats it. Soon they are dancing together … exhibit[ing] an extraordinary economy of movement and sound. Gliding across the stage, Mr. Magix and Billy almost appear to be ice skating rather than dancing. ‘Honi was always saying, ‘More nonchalant, Tommy, more nonchalant. Besides the sounds that you are making, it’s the spaces that count.’ So he was always getting me to hold off. It’s the way great painters leave things out, you know.’22 There was delicacy and yet a strength that comes across in their duet and the audience was aware that they were witnessing something special between the 72-year-old New York bred African-American dancer with this Texas-born prodigy who recognized that “there was about him [Honi Coles] an unpretentious gravity, the earned reward of a lifetime that had been spent paying his dues.”23 It was a kind of “passing on of the mantle” and Tune appreciated that and so did the audience, who acknowledged it with standing ovations. No less a critic than Frank Rich appreciated that this was “an understated exercise in

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precise terpsichorean pointillism, this show-stopper by two master hoofers is a rare reminder of how less can be more in a big musical.”24 This musical had a long and circuitous road from its beginning to its opening. Many were not sure it was going to “make it.” While Tune was aware of all the ways that it could “go South,” he maintained a genuine optimism that all would be well. In an interview with Don Shewey, he exclaimed: “The show itself, just the making of it is a metaphor for America. There is a drive to this country and an energy and a fearlessness that’s really inspiring. There’s nobody saying, ‘You can’t do that,’ so we just go on and do it.”25 And, do it, he did. His next musical, Grand Hotel (1989), could not be any different. The novel on which it was based was Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum. This 1929 novel was first adapted as a play and then a film before becoming a Broadway musical. It is a dense but interesting intersection of stories of characters who inhabit for various amounts of time the luxurious Grand Hotel in Berlin in the late 1920s. Some of the characters include Elizaveta Grushinskaya, a Russian ballerina unsure if she can continue dancing, Otto Kringelein, a Jewish accountant who has a terminal illness but who wants to spend his last days in an expensive hotel, the Countess and her Gigolo, who ballroom dance throughout the show, Baron Felix Von Gaigern, a handsome, attractive young man but a broke young man, and many others. There is an overarching sense that “all is not well” with the world economically and politically. Tune explains: “There was a tension in that period, right on the edge, where the chasm between people who had something and people who had nothing was widening.”26 “Tune’s Grand Hotel would be a collage-like assemblage of brief scenes, overlapping dialogue, and musical moments that fade out as quickly as they start-all moving with balletic grace and vivid silent movie imagery.”27 While this technique was risky at the time, it has now become standard practice in musicals today. Tune was looking for a way in which to capture slivers or moments of people’s lives as they pass by in the hotel setting, not unlike how living one day to the next can make one feel that the pace of change is not yours to control and the interactions you have with others, even those close to you, are almost as ephemeral as a dance being performed. One of the overarching staging conventions that he used was banquettes for acting areas and the hotel lobby’s chairs in a variety of configurations to indicate place or relationships, not unlike how they were used in Come From Away (2017) by director, Christopher Ashley, and choreographer, Kelly Devine. The advice he remembered his friend Michael Bennett giving him was “to look at it as if I could not hear a word, and know the story. The visual aspect should tell the story without having to hear anything.”28 To that end, he would insert, Marcel Proust like vestiges of dance “quotes, like the Charleston, fox trots, tangos and ballet fragments.29 For Tune, he saw the construction of this show much like building a ballet30 – a phrase here, a sliver of dialogue or song there, a crisscrossing of people you come to know with those you don’t. He would stage two or more scenes taking place together, layering and texturing the show with many entrance points and exits. The audience cannot sit back; it must engage with what is going on imaginatively and

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recognize that they may well ‘miss’ something. Again, this technique was used throughout the 2015 Hamilton: An American Musical. There is a line – Time is running out – that is repeated in the show. That sense of urgency is built into the pacing of the show. Winkler summarizes his excellent description of the show with: ‘Grand Hotel, Berlin. Always the same. People come. People go.’ Death, financial ruin, childbirth, heartbreak-no matter what happens, the door keeps revolving, always delivering new ‘people in the hotel.’”31 There is a Samuel Beckett like feel to the end of the play – “To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.”32 And, yet the revolving door into and out of the hotel continues to invite and to discharge its temporary tenants. New York Times theatre critic, Franck Rich, opens his review with this image: “Think of a three-dimensional collage-or a giant Joseph Cornell box two tall stories high – filed with smokey light, faded gilt fixtures, dirty secrets, lost mementos and ghostly people of its time and place. Then imagine someone shaking the whole thing up as if waves were tossing around the Titanic. That’s Mr. Tune’s ‘Grand Hotel.’”33 He continues to use words like “kaleidoscopic,” “hallucinatory,” and “haunted” to describe for the reader the vastness and the mercurial quality of the show and, while he tipped his hat graciously to Tune’s direction and choreography, and the designers contribution, he was underwhelmed with the quality of the script and mediocre performances of many of the actors. This assessment was not that of the Tony Awards committee, however, which gave Grand Hotel 12 nominations and five wins including the Best Direction and Best Choreography awards to Tommy Tune. The audience seemed not to agree with Rich and supported the musical for 1,018 performances. Given the fact that this was not brainless entertainment, nor a cast filled with well-known Broadway stars, I think we can find an answer in New York Times dance critic, Jennifer Dunning’s description and understanding of what she saw: There is a ballet warm-up in the musical, as well as partnered social dances like the foxtrot, bolero and traces of the of the more familiar strut and shake of Broadway show-dancing. Much has been made of the use of a pair of ballroom dancers – Yvonne Marceau, a performer of fragile, stylish beauty, and Pierre Dulaine. His sleek imperturbability, combined with the fact that Miss Marceau is frequently blindfolded, takes on a tone of dark foreboding. Some theatergoers have been puzzled by their distance from the other characters, and their repeated turns around the stage in what looks like undiluted ballroom wafting. But the dance turns lethal in the show’s last moments, when the two become potent symbols of decay and death. Mr. Tune’s artistry is best captured, however, in a single dance – a wild Charleston for the dying Kringelein, a little bookkeeper on a first and last toot, who can barely walk for all his spastic trembling. It is a stunning number, danced superbly and totally within character by Michael Jeter. Its physicality is as frighteningly far from normal human range as the Paul

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Taylor solo in George Balanchine’s ‘Episodes.’ Yet it is also an almost painfully joyous and abandoned expression of the preciousness of life.34 What accounts for this radically different view on the same musical? A part of it, I think, is that Rich was looking for a narrative that mimics the book but in traditional musical theatre terms. When he didn’t get that, he condemned the book and took issue with the performers all the while recognizing, though not fully appreciating, what Tune was working toward and what he was doing. Dunning took Tune at his word – he was creating an evening-length ballet comprised of all of the elements available to him from his musical theatre arsenal. The emphasis in Grand Hotel was not so much on narrative interrupted or extended by song but rather a mood peopled by the dreams, disappointments, fears, desires, and “ghosts” – these are us. These are our ancestors. These could be the lives of those yet to come. With all of the skills and past experience he had, Tune was able to direct through choreography and choreograph through his direction this hauntingly beautiful musical theatre piece, not unlike some of the most poignant ballets of his peers like George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins with the New York City Ballet or the modern dance theatre pieces of Martha Clarke like Vienna: Lusthaus (1986). And, that may well be a huge part of the legacy that Tune leaves with those who employ dance and choreography in their musicals – a profound sense that all can be “a ballet.” This is not a cute metaphor for musical theatre production but rather a fundamental understanding that movement can combine with music, song, design, and narrative (whether that narrative in linear or splintered in some way), in a musical theatre experience that is both moving emotionally and intellectually stimulating as well. In this regard, Tune links twentieth-­century musical theatre production with eighteenth-century choreographer-theorist, Jean-George Noverre’s ideal of the “ballet d’action.” Noverre’s attempt to elevate what was often ballet divertissements to its own independent art form was acknowledged by his peer, the star actor-playwright of the British theatre, David Garrick, who designated him as “the Shakespeare of the Dance.” Tune would, of course, go on to direct and choreograph musicals and other forms of entertainment. He continued to “walk the walk” with his own performances. But, what he did was to point the way for his contemporaries and future musical theatre choreographers and directors toward a much richer palette from which they could create their own musical theatre creations – on their own terms. The door was opened – for everyone.

Traditions Continue; Traditions Evolve; Traditions Challenged Between 1975’s A Chorus Line to 1996’s Rent and Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk, musical choreography was represented by some of the stalwarts from the previous decades. Bob Fosse presented his now iconic Chicago (1976),35 Dancin’ (1978), and concluded his Broadway career in 1986 with two Broadway musicals,

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Big Deal, for which he won the Tony’s Best Choreography award and a revival of his Sweet Charity starring Debbie Allen. Patricia Birch continued her collaboration with Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim on the most unusual yet gripping Pacific Overtures (1976), about the “opening up” of Japan by the Americans, which was staged in Kabuki style with men playing women’s roles. In 1979, Prince invited Larry Fuller to choreograph his production of the rock musical Evita (1980) by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice about the rise and fall of the Argentinian celebrity and political leader, Eva Perón and in 1995, he then collaborated with Susan Stroman to present the much talked about revival of Show Boat for which she won a Tony Award.36 It should not be underestimated that as the previous generation of choreographers like Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse learned a great deal about directing from their work with George Abbott; that this generation benefited in the same way from their collaboration with Hal Prince. Modern dance continued to be represented on the Broadway stage by choreographers like Tailey Beatty for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1977), Donald McKayle’s contribution for Sophisticaed Ladies (1981), George Faison for the revival of Porgy and Bess (1983), and Lar Lubovitch for Sondheim’s Into the Woods (1988). The period started off with the surprise hit musical, The Wiz (1975), directed by modern dance choreographer, Geoffrey Holder, and choreographed by another modern dance choreographer, George Faison, both of whom received Tony Awards for their contribution to this unique musical production based on L Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But, the surprise feature that stood out during this period was the popular return of tap dance in the Broadway musical. Henry La Tang’s contribution to the musical, Eubie!, in 1979 may be said to have kickstarted a tread ready for its acceptance. The musical was a nod back to the 1921 Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle musical, Shuffle Along. In 1981, Henry La Tang joined Donald McKayle and Michael Smuin as choreographers for the musical revue, Sophisticated Ladies, which starred the incomparable Hinton Battle. Two years later, he would win yet another Tony Award for his performance in The Tap Dance Kid (1983). That was the year when the revival of the 1936 musical, On Your Toes, played off the comic interplay between the vaudeville tap dancer, Junior, and his love interest, the Russian ballerina, Vera Barnova. It seemed that tap dance was here to stay continuing with the revival of Anything Goes (1988), the revue, Black and Blue (1989), the musical, Crazy for You (1992), finally culminating in the Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk, (1996) the Savion Glover choreographed and performed musical using tap dance to tell the history of the African-American experience from the Middle Passage to the hip hop present. While tap dance was more often than not associated with the popular revival of nostalgia musicals, Glover was able to push it forward into the present by demonstrating that it could address subject matter and styles of the current day. One of the most prolific choreographers working on Broadway between 1975 and 1996 was Graciela Daniele. Argentinian born, trained in ballet,

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a Fosse dancer and protégé, with a deep love of everything tango, Daniele has a resume that includes hits, near misses, and ambitious projects that stretch the boundaries of musical theatre and musical theatre dance. Early on, she choreographed a very upbeat, contemporary version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Pirate of Penzance (1981) followed by The Rink in 1984 pairing Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera and the more unusual The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1986). It was clear from the beginning that her musical theatre interests were eclectic. She followed these in quick succession with the aspiring, yet ill-fated Dangerous Games (1990), which she conceived, directed and choreographed but which unfortunately folded after three performances. Having received three Tony nominations for her previous Broadway choreographies, she was confident that she could write, direct, and choreograph an evening-length dance-­ theatre piece exploring the relation between sex and violence placed within her Argentinian cultural heritage. Some of the work she had done in her previous Tango Apasionado (1987) found its way into this production as well. The first act, entitled “Tango,” concerns sexual injustice while the second act, entitled “Orfeo,” “deals with human injustice and loss of dignity.”37 In an interview with writer, Marilyn Stasio, she reveals “I am tired of doing entertainment … I want to put my nails into something more meaningful. I want to show that dance is more than esthetic voyeurism. Dance is also a language; it says things.”38 But, theatre critic Frank Rich castigated her for attempting a full evening of dance à la the German Tanztheater choreographer, Pina Bausch, or the American theatre dance-choreographer, Martha Clarke, whose 1980s dance theatre pieces, The Garden or Earthly Delights and Vienna Lusthaus were widely received by audiences and critics alike and which would contribute to Clarke receiving the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Ward in 1990.39 Rich felt that this was an overreach; yet, this usually astute critic demonstrated his own limitation at looking at and understanding a musical that was attempting to stretch the boundaries of musical theatre both in terms of subject matter and in terms of placing dance at its center in conveying a narrative. While we do not know if her idol, Jerome Robbins saw Dangerous Games, he did see Tango Apasionado and wrote a note of thanks to her saying: “I found it very interesting indeed, and choreographically inventive, fierce and sexy ….”40 He concluded by saying that he hoped to see it again. High praise indeed! In 1991, she directed and choreographed, within a Caribbean setting, a musical retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid entitled, Once on this Island. And, again, she received a Tony nomination for her choreography for that musical as well as for the following two, The Goodbye Girl (1993) and the fascinating Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1996), which she also directed. This musical was based on the novella of the same name by Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is credited with popularizing the literary style known as magic realism. It was an excellently stylized dance and movement creation that imbibed the essence of its literary

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source. As an example, writer Randy Gener describes one of the dances from this show in some detail. … the best is the memorable soccer dance between the Lothario-Victim Santiago Nasar (George de la Pena) and his best friend Cristo ( Julio Monge), a pas de deux so vivid you can practically see an invisible ball being kicked across the stage. The two lithe dancers converse bodily (feet, arms, hips, rib cages spunkily counterpointing one another like minor images), but the passing of crucial information-that Santiago is doomed to die-is delayed. In this roughhouse celebration of male love, the ritualistic phrasing is so well-sustained, the playful sense of boyish competitiveness so beautifully restrained, that homo-eroticism never enter the realm of its emotions. Neither does inbred machismo, despite the dancers strutting bravado.41 And yet, it only survived a short 67-performance run. Why? Danielle sees herself “as a painter and sculptor of space.”42 In that, she shares a perspective with many of her peers but she is uniquely committed to exploring subjects that have not been the usual fare for Broadway musicals and to use dance as the primary and nuanced means to explore, interrogate and convey story and character, and much more. New York Times theatre critic, Mell Gussow, wrote this about her Tango Apasionado. It is a “a brilliant musical adaptation of that Borges world – a labyrinthine world that is, at once, erotic and bloodthirsty. As co-adapter, director and choreographer, Ms. Daniele has taken several Borges tales, extracted their essence and merged them with the passionate rhythm of the tango (music by Astor Piazzolla, lyrics by William Finn). The result is a music-theater-dance piece of breathtaking intensity.”43 He concludes by describing her as a “theatrical conceptualist.”44 That may very well be the point and one that forecasts current and future directions for musical theatre choreographers. Certainly, Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel (1981) with music by David Byrne prefigured in some ways the work of Danielle. Tharp described this work as “a full-length spectacle of the disintegration of family.”45 Dance, mime, and music with the scenic contribution of Santo Loquasto all lit by the ingenious Jennifer Tipton was the focus of this danced theatre piece, and while it found an audience for its limited run, it did not impress dance critic, Anna Kisselgoff. She acknowledged that “in these bits of phrases, meaning can come through more powerfully than in conventionally structured musical and choreographic sequences,”46 but she concludes that the piece was thin on coherence and muddled throughout. In the next chapter, we will look at the fully danced creation of Susan Stroman’s Contact (2000), described as a danced play. For Stroman, however, she was rewarded with Best Musical Award from the Tonys and Best Direction and Best Choreographer for herself. Danielle would receive a commercial and artistic success with her next Broadway musical, Ragtime (1998) for which she finally received a Tony Award for her choreography.

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From then on, however, she would bounce back and forth from commercial projects to those that continued to challenge accepted conventions of musical theatre production. In 2020, she received one of the highest accolades given by the theatre community – the Tony Lifetime Achievement Award.

Notes 1 George Balanchine was set to reconstruct his original dances from the 1936 performance of On Your Toes when he took ill and had to be hospitalized. His heir apparent from the New York City Ballet, Peter Martins, stepped in to complete his work alongside the choreographer, Donald Sadler. Balanchine died on April 30, 1983 – seven weeks after the opening. The revival proved to be very popular and ran for 505 performances. 2 See: Kate Flatt, Les Miserables: A Very Short History on its “Invisible” Choreography. See: https://www.kateflatt.com/les-miserables/ 3 Frank Rich, “Stage ‘Miserables,’ Musical Version Opens on Broadway.” New York Times, March 13, 1987, pp. C1–2. 4 Hal Prince, Sense of Occasion (Guilford, CT: Connecticut: Applause Books, 2017), p. 244. 5 Carol Ilson, Harold Prince: From Pajama Game to Phantom of the Opera (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1989), p. 350. 6 Gillian Lynne on Ballerinas and the Masquerade – Behind the Scenes | The Phantom of the Opera. See: https://youtu.be/B134Opj7LUs 7 See The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition by Anne Bogart for a more in-depth examination and application of this technique. 8 Robert Emmet Long, Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-­ Directors 1940 to the Present (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), pp. 252–254. 9 For a brief history and an up-to-date look at what is available with this invaluable resource on musical theatre dance past and present, see: https://www.adm21.org/ 10 See: https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/seesaw-3183 11 Long, pp. 255–256. 12 Mel Gussow, “Stage: Eve Merriam’s ‘Club.’” New York Times, October 15, 1976, p. 61. 13 Long, p. 257. 14 Kevin Winkler, Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theatre of Tommy Tune (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 43. 15 Winkler, p. 45. 16 Richard Eder, “Play; Best Little House in Texas.” New York Times, April 18, 1978, p. 44. 17 Winkler, p. 101. 18 Winkler, 103–107 19 Long, pp. 263–264. 20 This is a video of jazz dance historian, Marshall Stearns, introducing Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins, as they demonstrate some of the “class act” style of dancing for which they are known. See: https://youtu.be/6DJPusWF_-4 21 Constance Valis-Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 161. 22 Winkler, p. 121. 23 Valis-Hill, p. 257. 24 Frank Rich, “Stage: ‘My One and Only,’ New Gershwin Show.” New York Times, May 2, 1983, p. C13. 25 Don Shewey, “How ‘My One and Only’ Came to Broadway: A Musical’s Long Road to Broadway.” New York Times, May 1, 1983, pp. H1-2. 26 Ken Mandelbaum, “Auteur! Auteur! Tommy Tune Talks about Grand Hotel.” TheaterWeek, November 20, 1989, p. 18.

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27 Winkler, p. 137. 28 Mandelbaum, p. 18. 29 Winkler, p. 145. 30 Mandelbaum, p. 18. 31 Winker, p. 154. 32 See: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2635502-en-attendant-godot 33 Frank Rich, “Tune’s Swirling Vision of a Grand Hotel.” New York Times, November 13, 1989, p. C13. 34 Jennifer Dunning, “It’s a Different Show When Dance Takes the Lead: DANCE Dancing is …”. New York Times, May 20, 1990, p. H10. 35 As of this printing, its 1996 revival is still running and is the longest running American musical in Broadway history. 36 The show was adapted with some revisions to accommodate the racial sensitivities of the 1990s, which stood in sharp contrast with those of the 1920s. For a more detailed look at how this was done, I would refer you to Harold Prince’s autobiography, Sense of Occasion. 37 Enid Nemy, “On Stage.” New York Times, August 11, 1989, p. C2. 38 Marilyn Stasio, “That Last Step When the Tango Turns Deadly.” New York Times, October 15, 1989, p. H5. 39 Frank Rich, “Sexual Politics and Tango in ‘Dangerous Games.’ New York Times, October 20, 1989, p. C3. 40 Randy Gener, “Graciela Daniele’s garden of dancerly delights.” American Theatre, Vol 13, No. 4. 41 Ibid. Gener. 42 Ibid. Gener. 43 Mel Gussow, “Stage: Borges Stories In ‘Tango Apasiondo.’” New York Times, November 10, 1987, Section C, page 15. 44 Ibid. Gussow. 45 Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Bantem Books, 1992), p. 264. 46 Anna KIsselgoff, “Dance: Twyla Tharp’s New Wheel.” New York Times, September 23, 1981, p. C24.

10 1996–2020 Choreography and the Musical Break Open

Ain’t No Direction Home The late 1990s suggested that we may be moving into another “Golden Age” for the American musical. Musicals like Rent (1996) and Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk (1996) brought new talent – Jonathan Larson and a grown-up Savion Glover – who took the musical into new directions. For Larson, it was an unflinching look at a younger generation dealing head-on with some new realities in urban America – from confronting one’s sexual orientation to AIDS. Rock music was the sound and broken narrative was the manner for the storytelling. For Glover, he demonstrated that rhythm tap had a much wider vocabulary than some might have thought. With a rap and a hip-hop sensibility, he encouraged his audience to not only see but hear the sometimes devastating and other times celebratory experience of the 400-year African-American history in America. The stories that we tell and how we tell them demands that musical theatre dance expand its vocabulary and it choreographic structure. This last chapter ends as the global pandemic closes the Broadway theatre leaving artists stranded and disoriented. Within weeks, however, theatre and dance artists were creating videos and Tik-Tok mini-shots and others were making zoom theatre and dance performances from their homes, apartments, parks, streets … wherever it was “safe” to do their art. Some of these “performances” were very poignant and others would make us laugh. Theatre and dance artists went beyond “coping” with COVID by using their time and talent to entertain their audience – an audience behind a screen, an audience that the performers could not see, an audience they could not hear laugh or cry or applaud. It was a strange and frightening time but what many understood was that this was a sustained time for serious reflection interrogating how do we create musical theatre, for whom do we create it, for what purpose, and how, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003223368-11

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where. One of the initiatives that came out of that time was the nation’s collective response to the murder of George Floyd. Even with the very real danger of getting or transmitting COVID, thousands of citizens, most with the obsequious mask covering, marched in the streets to protest the systemic racism that resulted in this very public execution of a black man by a white officer. Now, people were not asking for change, they were demanding it. The theatre and dance communities stepped up. Many held long and sustained conversations – painful dialogues that acknowledged that marginalized communities have been underrepresented in the performing arts from producers, directors, and choreographers to performers, designers, and board members. Plans to address this ongoing problem were drawn up, and actions were being taken to meet this challenge head-on. As we get on the other side of this pandemic, there is no doubt that musical theatre will have been changed – changed forever.

Rent and Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk Rent (1996) is Jonathan Larson’s rock musical based on the opera La Boheme (1896) by Puccini. The musical explores the lives of young artists living a precariously bohemian life in New York’s East Village. They struggle to find meaning in a world that is often callous and unfeeling. AIDS, poverty, struggling to negotiate their LGBTQ+ identity with a world that often does not even “see” them, and more – all impinge on their day-to-day struggle to simply live and be accepted for who they are. The songs explore their relationships with each other; some of them become excruciatingly painful in their fierce introspection; still others reflect their dreams and aspirations. Rent was directed by Michael Greif, who went on to direct Next to Normal (2009) and Dear Evan Hansen (2016) and choreographed by Marlies Yearby. By her own admission, Yearby spent a great deal of time observing each of the cast members – how they moved, how they sat, how they walked. She felt that the musical was essentially a “celebration of the individual spirit.”1 She describes what she does “as a gesture based dance theatre.” Everyone is inherently a dancer and consequently, like those of the Judson Dance era in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Yearby recognizes that any and all movement can be employed in dance. In his review in the New York Times, Ben Brantley, made the following observation. Mr. Larson’s music has an infectious pulse that begs to be danced to. And Marlies Yearby, the show’s choreographer, brings such wit and verve to the first-act finale (the banquet number, ‘La Vie Boheme’) that you feel frustrated that it’s the only thing approaching an ensemble dance number.2 What Brantley fails to see is the choreography of movement that encompasses the musical from beginning to end. The choreographer sees gesture as the full expression of what she calls “emotional thought.” She might begin with a simple gesture suggested by the character or characters in the musical and then expand

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on that using one or more of Laban’s effort qualities. She understands that, when working with actors as opposed to a chorus of professional dancers, movement must come from something within them – a thought, an emotion, something – and then she can build from there. She does not sacrifice each character’s individuality for an across-the-board sameness. Following her work on Rent, she went on to receive the prestigious Bessie Award for her work, “Stained.” She currently directs and choreographs for her dance company, Movin’ Spirits Dance Theater.3 Much like Hair (1968), Rent spoke to a younger generation, reflecting their problems, values, and hopes. And also like Hair, its reception was more of a cultural phenomenon. For both Julie Arenal, choreographer for Hair, and Marlies Yearby, for Rent, their shared choreographic approach was to encourage and shape what were the natural gestures and movements that come from the actors rather than superimpose a style on top of their movement. Individuality was supreme in these shows and the choreographer is there to give focus and shape but not to interfere or determine in advance what the actors should be doing from one minute to the next. Rent was nominated for ten Tony Awards and it won four, including Best Musical. Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score went to Jonathan Larson. Rent was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. With 5,123 performances, it enjoyed a 12-year run. Its chief competitor for these awards was Bring in da Noise: Bring in da Funk, which was nominated for nine Tony Awards and it, too, won four, including Best Direction for George C. Wolfe and Best Choreography for Savion Glover. Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk employs tap dance as the primary language to tell the story of the African-American experience from the Middle Passage to 1996. The dance is augmented by rap and song by two vocalists on each side of the stage and upstage center are two percussionists, who play on everything from pots and pans to drums. In addition to choreographer/dancer Savion Glover, there are four other male tap dancers. Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk enjoyed a run of 1,135 performances. The musical moves from a soothing, peaceful sound of water rushing by as the ship travels slowly across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America. It gradually picks up speed and becomes disruptive with off-center beats suggesting the struggle of those in the ship’s hull and the slave masters on top. It moves through a period called “Circle Stomp” that echoes the Kongo-Angolan culture of New Orleans and the Juba dancing of the nineteenth century. The musical proceeds through a period of urbanization and the great migration of Southern blacks into Northern cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. These sections illustrate “the good times” and “the bad times” for many of the city’s black residents – from partying to being shot and killed and, more often than not, imprisoned. The second half of the musical lays bare the racism in America with humor and with anger. Finally, the last section allows for a more personal meditation through an improvisation by Savion Glover – alone on the stage. Finally, it becomes a paean to “da beat.” The “noise” can be unexplained

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conflict of the attacks by racists, the increased urbanization, mechanization, and non-stop television and film stereotypical images. The “funk” may be the collective response by a people who have not lost “da beat” – the pulsating downbeat of never giving up, never giving in, of connecting with others who share your experience but not your individual story. It ends with a celebratory “Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Beat” reprise. The show is subtitled “A Tap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat.” The beat becomes a metaphor for black identity. This becomes a discourse on survival.4 This musical is a summation of all that the still young 23-year-old Savion Glover had learned from his mentors, including the Copacetics and Gregory Hines. It is also his own personal investigation into himself, his world, his history – all of which is renewed over and over with each performance – all of which generates an emotion that informs his dancing, his choreography, and what he calls “hittin’.” People always want to know where an idea for a step comes from, where an idea for a dance comes from. It’s hard to know. I don’t think about process too much. I think about hittin’, which is what tappers do. We hit! It’s a gut thing, an artist’s thing. You know when you’re hittin’. When you’re straight layin’ it down, communicating, saying something, expressing yourself, getting on the floor the rhythm you live by that’s hittin’.5 These two musicals frame an opening for choreography moving forward. Rent reminds us that choreography that puts front and center the individuality of the performer can look as if, as one critic puts it, “nothing has been choreographed” because we are identifying with each character on his or her own terms, which awakens us to the fact that fundamentally, we are all dancers. Unlike A Chorus Line, in which we come to know each character that is auditioning; while ultimately vying for a line in the chorus in which they will forsake their individuality for something larger than themselves. Subsequently, we have a chorus of look-alike, dance-alike, smiling mannequins. Metaphorically, it reminds us that we too can hand over our individuality for a mechanized sameness by succumbing to everything from the most recent barrage of advertisements to buy the latest, the best, the most up-to-date whatever to our jingoistic response to a patriotic nodding of the head to the most recent military action that our government chooses to participate in at any given time. Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk turns our chorus line tap dancing fetish for – five, six, seven, eight, kick right, kick left, kick higher, higher still, for sixteen counts until the audience has to respond with applause – on its head. Glover picks up on Gregory Hines’ “improvography” and adds a form of rhythm tap he calls “hittin.” He allows the hip-hop culture of his generation to join in dialogue with those “hoofers” who preceded him. He doesn’t throw history to the curb. He brings it along, introducing it to the continuation of “da beat.” Much of Broadway dance has accepted – almost blindly – that the

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basis for musical theatre dance must be a strong background in ballet – under the pretense that it gives the dancer a strong technique on which to develop his or her skills. What Glover points out is that whatever foundational technique on which you base your musical theatre dance vocabulary will certainly strengthen your performance, but your performance for telling certain stories, not all stories. A ballet foundation for Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk would be a non sequitur. Its royal European roots could not convey this – for Glover – deeply personal telling of the African-American experience as understood by him and many of his peers today. So where does this leave us as we look to Broadway musical theatre from the time of these two musicals to 2020, when the pandemic forced us to hit pause and reevaluate not only what musical theatre is but what musical theatre and its dance can be? To start that conversation, let’s begin with Susan Stroman – a choreographer-­d irector who picked up the mantle from Tommy Tune and brought it into the twenty-first century with a nod to the past but also with some questions of her own.

Susan Stroman Stroman was born in 1954 in the Wilmington, Delaware. She started taking lessons in ballet, tap, and jazz dance at the age of five. She came from a family that enjoyed musical theatre; her dad would play songs from their favorite musicals on the piano. After graduation from the University of Delaware in 1976 with a major in English, she moved to New York City to start her career. Performing in the touring company of Chicago was one of her early gigs. She made her Broadway debut playing the role of Leslie Daw in the revival of Whoopee! (1979). Dan Siretta received a Tony nomination for his choreography for the show. Performing was great but, like Tommy Tune and Michael Bennett, she really wanted to choreograph. With the show, Musical Chairs (1980), she was able to move closer to realizing her professional dreams when she got the opportunity to assistant direct and assistant choreograph for the show’s director-choreographer, Rudy Tronto. While it was a Broadway credit, the show unfortunately played for only 14 performances. It was at this point that she reassessed her goals and how she would achieve them. She made a calculated decision to remove herself from being cast as a performer and instead focused on directing and choreographing for anything – industrial shows, cabaret acts, as well as regional and stock theatre companies.6 Her first real break came in 1987 with her choreography for the off-­Broadway revival of Flora, the Red Menace. The success of that production led to three other unexpected opportunities. The first was an invitation by Hal Prince to choreograph her first opera, Don Giovanni (1989) for the New York City Opera. She was asked by Liza Minnelli to choreograph her Radio City Music Hall show, Liza: Stepping Out at Radio City Music Hall (1992).7 And finally, she got the opportunity to choreograph a retrospective of John Kander and Fred

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Ebb’s work called, And the World Goes ‘Round (1991) at the Westside Theatre. This string of successful choreographies led to an invitation to choreograph the Broadway musical, Crazy for You (1992). Much like Tommy Tune’s My One and Only, this also was based on a Gershwin musical, the 1930s Girl Crazy. Dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote: For ‘Crazy for You’ is a show about dancing, whether a waltz for two across a desert under a wide-open Western sky or a scene in which miners and chorus girls dance with and on every loose prop in sight: corrugated tin-sheet roofing gets skidded across, metal trays are tapped on, pickaxes become swings and just about everything handy serves as a musical instrument, including a tire pump, a washboard and a saw.8 Later in the article, Dunning acknowledges that Stroman has “a desire to turn music into visual imagery in her dances.”9 And, so she does. From the time she was a kid, she would hear music and see images of dancers making shapes to various rhythms and often – as her idol Fred Astaire would do – dance with props. This is reminiscent of Michael Bennet as a child choreographing with marbles. Her lifelong ambition was realized and, for her efforts, she received the Tony Award for Best Choreography and a hit show, one that played for 1,622 performances. This opened the door for her to collaborate again with Hal Prince on a revival of Showboat (1994). This was not a simple project. It would ultimately engage 207 people on stage.10 Despite the fact that much of the country was still bruising from the Rodney King riots of 1992 and its aftermath, Prince was not going to ignore the racial issues that the play includes but did not address head-on in its debut in 1927. Prince looked for ways to make this musical relevant for an audience in 1994 that was much more aware and sensitive to issues of race over the 40 year period covered in the play. In addition to researching the various social dances that would be popular from 1887 to 1927, and incorporating those into the show, she was given the challenge by Prince to create a montage in dance and mime that would allow him to cover a wide range of years that would include a world war and the depression that was not accounted for in the script. In an interview with dance scholar, Kerry Lee Graves, she discussed the approach that she used for part of this montage. I found out that the Charleston was developed by the blacks in New Orleans on the levee. I had already built in a big Charleston number done by the white dancers at the end of Show Boat. But I wanted to show that the whites learned how to do the Charleston from the blacks. The montage takes place on the streets of Chicago. I was able to incorporate not only fashions indicative of the times, but also street characters – street dancers, panhandlers, a one-man band, gamblers, jazz trumpet players, etc. At the last section of the montage, I have these three black Charleston dancers

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have a wonderful time dancing for coins. They do a Charleston against the music of ‘Hey Feller’ and ‘Old Man River.” A group of white folks watch them enthusiastically and try to pick up the steps. When the scene comes later with the white ‘charlestonettes,’ some of the same moves are repeated that were done by the black dancers earlier. We have poetically seen the contribution that blacks have made to music and dance during that time.11 Critic David Richard applauded the fact that Prince and Stroman and their collaborators did not sit in awe of this classic of the American musical but rather worked to bring it forward in a way that would resonate with the sensibilities of the audience in 1994. He admits that Prince’s approach of making the show more fluid than it was originally created a musical that was more poignant and thought-provoking. He addressed the montage effect that Stroman was instrumental in creating. The choppy second act has never been a miracle of plotting. But Mr. Prince and Susan Stroman, his gifted choreographer, fill in a lot of the blanks with two pantomimed montages. The first traces Gaylord and Magnolia’s ruinous days together in Chicago. The second, a dazzling 21-year flash forward in the life and customs of the country, is a virtual March of Time newsreel, sumptuously costumed by Florence Klotz. Through it wanders Joe, a far more benign presence than the emcee in “Cabaret,” perhaps, but like him, a disconcerting herald of upheavals to come.12 Their efforts were recognized by the Tony Awards, giving Best Direction to Prince and Stroman’s second Tony for Choreography. The audience rewarded the show with 947 performances. Stroman had now solidified her credentials as one of Broadway’s most creative and versatile choreographers. She also demonstrated that she could choreograph dances that were stylishly entertaining and yet, she could use dance to address serious topics and issues as well. Certainly one of her most successful musical comedies was her direction and choreography for The Producers (2001), an adaptation of Mel Brooks 1967 movie of the same name. This was a production that received an incredible 21 Tony nominations, winning 15 of them including Best Musical and Outstanding Director and Outstanding Choreographer awards to Stroman, the first time that a woman received both awards for the same show. It went on to play 2,502 performances and was made into a movie with its two lead actors, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, reprising their roles. Stroman’s comedic skills were at their height with this musical and her inventiveness for much of the staging and choreography were much lauded. For example, she insisted on keeping the size of the cast small with 22 cast members – a far cry from the numbers in Show Boat. One of the challenges was – how to create the illusion that

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there are more performers on stage for some of the big production numbers. As one example: …But how do you do a seemingly huge number like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ with so small cast? If you are Susan Stroman, you figure out that everyone in the ensemble, as well as the six character people can double and triple during the number, starting out as Bavarian peasants, for example, and returning moments later as tap-dancing Nazi storm troopers. And, then, finally, they can make another amazingly quick backstage costume change and each come back on stage as an SS trooper ingeniously rigged up to a pair of dummies dressed as a SS trooper, all marching downstage in lockstep in front of an enormous tilted mirror, creating the illusion that there are nearly a hundred performers on stage when, in fact, there are only eighteen. And in numbers in the show that called for stageful of women … all of our women played Little Old Ladies and so did half of our men. At the same time, where the script called for a stageful of men more than half of the Hitlers on stage were chorus girls dressed as men and wearing little slapped-on Hitler moustaches.13 Ben Brantley of the New York Times began his review by stating how difficult it would be to select one comic piece of business over another. As a matter of fact, he pointed out that each scene tops the preceding one and continues like that for the full length of the show. He also points to several sections in the show where Stroman pays homage to Jerome Robbins and Busby Berkeley. This production came on the heels of her convention-breaking musical, Contact (2000). Andre Bishop, Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater, approached Stroman about doing a workshop on any ideas she had in mind to explore. This would provide Stroman with an opportunity to broaden her choreographic repertoire not only with her Broadway and off-Broadway musicals but also with her concert work. She had created a dance piece for the New York City Ballet to a score by Duke Ellington called Blossom Got Kissed in 1997 and for the Martha Graham Dance company in 1998, she created another piece, But Not for Me, from a Gershwin score. In both cases, she created narratives that formed the basis for each dance. Without the preconceptions from either the musical theatre world or that of the concert dance world, she “could play” and see where her unimpeded imagination might lead. The end result, according to dance scholar Kerry Lee Graves, is that with this work “Stroman changed the world of Broadway forever.”14 Originally, she called what she and playwright John Weidman came up with a “dance-play.” Much like A Chorus Line, she started with a group of dancer-­actors who met over several weeks to explore several ideas for narratives that could be expressed principally through dance. The music used was recorded music – not unlike what many dance companies do when creating and performing their dance works in a concert setting.

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Contact is comprised of three segments. The first is “Swinging,” which is based on Jean-Honore’ Fragonard’s painting, “The Swing” (1768). “An aristocratic suitor courting a young lady, while his male servant pushes them on the swing. When the master goes off-stage, the servant proceeds to have sex with the woman in mid-flight on the swing.”15 When he returns, they exchange jackets suggesting a knowingly playful ménage à trois. The music for this piece is a jazz recording of “My Heart Stood Still” by Rodgers and Hart.16 This short ten-minute piece is followed by a longer section called “Did You Move?” It takes place in an Italian restaurant in Queens, New York, in 1954. A married couple is seated at a table ordering food. It is obvious that the woman is a battered wife. The waiter keeps forgetting to bring them bread and each time that the husband leaves the table, the wife indulges in a freeing sexual fantasy with one of the waiters. In the course of the dance, they negotiate their way around other patrons, tables and chairs, and other objects. When the husband returns, fantasy is replaced with the harsh reality of their fraught relationship. The music for this piece is by Tchaikovsky and Bizet.17 Following an intermission, the third piece, “Contact,” inspired by the 1891 Ambrose Bierce short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” opens with a disgruntled and pathetic middle-aged man living in an apartment. Every time he moves or walks around in this apartment, it apparently disturbs the neighbor below. That becomes the last straw and he tries several times to unsuccessfully commit suicide. In a dream, he ends up at a combination pool hall and dance club, where he meets “the Lady in the Yellow Dress.” She enters the dance club and teases different men to dance with her until she loses interest and nonchalantly dismisses each. The bartender encourages the middle-aged man to “step up” and take his shot. After many near misses, he finally gets his chance to dance with her and, as they dance, he gains more and more confidence in his abilities. When he awakens from his dream, he hears a knock at the door and it is the woman in the apartment below him, the “Girl in Yellow Pajamas.” They quickly resolve their disagreement and begin dancing together as the lights fade.18 The music for this piece was varied and included songs like “Runaround Sue” by Dion DiMuci, “Simply Irresistible” by Robert Palmer, and “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman and his orchestra. This musical quickly and unexpectedly found an audience. They moved the production from its off-Broadway home at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center to the Broadway house at the Vivian Beaumont Theater also at Lincoln Center. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards, winning Best Musical and Best Choreography award for Susan Stroman. And, while it played for 1,010 performances, it unleashed a controversy that continues today –is it a musical, a dance-play, or a full evening concert piece? Some took issue with the fact that it used all recorded music and not live musicians. There was very little dialogue in the show. There was no singing by the performers. It was basically three one-acts linked together by its theme of people making contact with each other and with their fantasies. The narrative

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portions were expressed mostly in pantomime and dance. Some felt strongly that a musical should have songs and a story or, at the very least, it should be a revue with loosely related songs, dances, and sketches. It is important to recall that musicals in the early twentieth-century operettas could have little to no dancing and they would still be regarded as musicals. Even sung-through rock operas like Phantom of the Opera (1986) and Les Misérables (1987) would certainly be regarded as musicals. Other all-dancing productions like Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ (1978), Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), which won the Best Musical Tony award, or Fosse, the all-dancing musical revue that won the Best Musical Tony Award in 1999 caused little stir around this issue of being an all dance program with little or no narrative or book. The difference, it seems, is that that the performers in these musicals did sing and they did so to live accompaniment. Of course, there was Ballet Ballads (1948) composed by Jerome Moross and John Louche. These were three “dance-operas” with no spoken dialogue but fully staged in dance and pantomime. Each section had a different choreographer – Katherine Litz, Paul Godkin, and Hanya Holm.19 In addition, there are some of Twyla Tharp’s Broadway shows like The Catherine Wheel (1981), Movin’Out (2001), and Come Fly Away (2010). All of these, and others, place the emphasis on dance. As song is placed at the center of operettas and rock-operas, dance may be placed at what Pamyla Alayne Stiehl calls the “dansical.” She sees this as a crossover between conventional musical theatre and concert dance. She defines it with two components. …1) The dansical is an all-dance production created by an authoritative, authorial Broadway choreographer/director and intended as a musical theatre work for a Broadway audience. 2) The dansical puts choreography and dance at the forefront—at the expense of the components of score and book—while the production’s ‘star’ is the choreographer.20 This controversy about the line between dance and theatre, and musical theatre in particular, has been going on for a long time. Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” jazz-ballet that ends Rodgers and Hart’s musical, On Your Toes, has no singing and no dialogue and yet is an essential part of the narrative for the musical. It is necessary in terms of wrapping up several story lines in the show. The third section of Contact echoes much of the premise in the Roland Petit’s Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (1946) ballet in which a woman in a yellow dress leads a young man on to his own suicidal death by hanging.21 This controversy extends from the musical theatre stage to the musical theatre film genre as exemplified with a special project created by Gene Kelly when he released his film, Invitation to the Dance (1956) that consisted of three distinct stories, each performed in dance and pantomime, with no singing and no dialogue. Producers didn’t know what to do in terms of marketing it. It wasn’t really a musical comedy dance film, like On the Town (1949), American in Paris (1951), or Singing in the Rain (1952). Eventually, it was distributed as an “art” film.

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The 1999–2000 season in which Contact played was filled with lots of dance on the Broadway stage. It’s as if people were tired of the British invasion musicals with little or no dance. This season included musicals with all dance and (live) music like Swing (1999) choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the three-act musical revue, Fosse (1999) directed by Ann Reinking and Richard Maltby Jr. which was a series of dance reconstructions of Fosse’s original choreographies, and an all dance musical, the Tango Argentino (1999). There were additional revivals of traditional shows that incorporated a lot of dance like Annie, Get Your Gun (1999) with direction by Graciela Daniele and choreography by Jeff Calhoun and Kiss Me, Kate (1999) choreographed by Kathleen Marshall and finally, a musical play, James Joyce’s The Dead choreographed by modern dance choreographer, Seán Curran. While Contact may have been the match that lit the fuse on this question of what makes a musical a musical, the increasing role of dance beginning with Agnes de Mille and some of her predecessors and the eventual combining of choreography with directing was bound to move us further and further from a book musical with music and dance to that of questioning the necessity of narrative all together (at least in the traditional way that it has been understood) into other ways of “telling stories,” or of creating meaningful poetic theatre experiences. In many avant-garde productions and in our literature, ways of conveying meaning beyond the beginning-middle-end format with recognizable characters were giving way to many other ways of creating a poignant theatre experience or an imaginative reading experience. As we moved into not only a new decade but a new millennium, questions regarding what comprises a musical and what role does dance play in that reassessment were very much on the minds of producers, artists, and audiences. Even thoughtful and established dance critics, like Anna Kisselgoff, could be found waffling about dance’s role in musical theatre. On the one hand, she writes regarding this season “… the foray of dance shows into Broadway does suggest that new musicals are still floundering about for something to say.”22 This begs the question – does “something to say” require a narrative or a “book” for a musical. There is no doubt, for example, that many audience members appreciate seeing their annual production of The Nutcracker each holiday season. Depending on which version one sees, Act One has a clearly defined narrative while Act Two is often given over to dance spectacle. In Act One, the audience is introduced to little Clara and her brother, Fritz; it is Christmas Eve and the magician-uncle, Drosselmeyer, appears to conjure the battle of the mice and the rescue by the Nutcracker and his band of soldiers and of course, there is a transformation scene in which the Nutcracker becomes a handsome prince and leads Clara into a forest filled with moonlit and snowflakes. For many productions, Act Two suspends with a lot of narrative and we are entertained by one exquisite dance after another. The audience may need the narration in Act One to set them up for the simple but elegant display of dance in Act Two. Here, virtuosity takes center stage and the ballet ends with everyone on stage, dancing, and creating an overall sense of Christmas joy.23 Applause. Could The Nutcracker be regarded

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as a musical? Are we moving musical theatre productions that stress dance more and more toward The Nutcracker, or at the very least to Noverre’s ballet d’action? These are questions that musical theatre in the twenty-first century will no doubt continue to grapple with when considering the role of dance in musical theatre productions. Susan Stroman has had a long and wide-ranging career as a director and as a choreographer on stage, in film, and in television. She receives countless awards for the quality of her work. She continues to push the boundaries of tradition; as yet another example consider how she re-invents Agnes de Mille’s choreography for Oklahoma! with a harsher and more realistic approach to that iconic musical.24 After the over-the-top success of the uproarious musical, The Producers (2001) winning 12 Tony Awards, she ventured into dangerous territory when she directed and choreographed the thoughtful and poignant musical, The Scottsboro Boys (2010), which unfortunately closed after only 49 performances all the while garnering 12 Tony nominations but no wins. 25 Stroman continues to bounce back and forth between the commercially safe and those that challenge convention.26

Challenges Mean Opportunities Dance on the musical theatre stage in the twenty-first century has a wide palette of colors from which it can draw. While there are certainly musicals that offer audiences safe, conventional dances performed by some of the best dancers, there are others who push boundaries, explore new vocabularies of movement, and tease out the relationships between theatre-making and dance-making. Theatre and dance scholar Nadine George-Graves walks into the controversy over Contact and points out that this musical has characters, plots, rising and falling action, conflict, costumes, lights, sets, and, with the exception of live music and singing actors, all of the elements we normally come to expect from a musical production. She succinctly observes that “the substitution of orality with corporeality was the signal difference.”27 Too much Dance for Theatre. The book that she edited, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, interrogates some current and past explorations where theatre and dance intersect and create something different. Some call this different and not easily defined species – Dance Theatre, some Performance Art, some Music Theatre, some … just don’t care to name it because we would bring our preconceptions and past experience to the performance. We expect this kind of cross-fertilization when we go to see avant-garde theatre or experimental dance but now this exploration is making its way onto the Broadway stage. As we leave the construction of musicals that comprise what many call “the Golden Age of the American Musical” and make our way through the now familial “concept” musical, we are discovering that there are different “stories” or “images” or “sketches” that we can tell ourselves because we are opening ourselves up to different ways in which they are presented.

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As one example, we can look at Julie Taymor’s vision for The Lion King (1997), which comes out of her theatre and dance experience in mixed and varied cultures –both East and West, from Bali to Broadway – and how she was able to create a musical theatre that had not been seen before on the Broadway stage. Her collaboration with modern dancer/choreographer, Garth Fagan, and her designs for the costumes blended in ways that created a unique kind of staging that continues to appeal to an audience of the young and the old alike. The Lion King is a fantasy but it is also a very human story as well.

Bill T. Jones and Andy Blankenbuehler On the other end of the spectrum is the contribution that modern dancer/ choreographer, Bill T. Jones, brought to the musical theatre dance vocabulary. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company has employed postmodern movement alongside more conventional modern and balletic movement to create dance pieces that incorporate language and speech as a part of its creative makeup. He also includes many different ages and body types in his modern dance choreographies. Jones was asked to choreograph Spring Awakening (2009), a musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same name. It is a coming-of-age play but one that is honest and raw in how it approaches the angst of teenagers struggling with their sexual identities and sexual orientations. It is a musical that includes sexual situations, pregnancy, abortion, and suicide. This does not sound like material that would make a good subject for a Broadway musical. Adding to the music, text, and performance, Jones brings in his improvisational methods when working with the actors in order to discover movement that exemplifies their characters, the situations in which they find themselves and the hot and cool emotions that can spring up quickly and recede just as quickly. Director Michael Mayer had seen some of the work that Jones created on “nondancers” for his dance company and felt that Jones would be an excellent collaborator in finding the right movement for his very young cast. For “It’s a Bitch of Living” number, he asked the young boys to channel their most outrageous rock star idols with their bodies to which he added an angstdriven climbing up, then jumping down, then manipulating their school chairs, all the while stomping, stomping, stomping throughout the number. Musical theatre scholar, Mary Jo Lodge, points out that in some musicals, the characters know they are dancing; in others, they do not. In Spring Awakening, the characters are clearly not aware that they are dancing because the movement is designed to comment “upon the turmoil of the inner lives of the tormented teens …”28 What Jones contributed to this show was “a kind of non-verbal, more elemental expression of physicality on stage, a youthful energy …”29 One of the characteristics of Jones’ choreography in the concert hall or on the Broadway stage is his fierce exploration of movement – any kind of movement – that will convey something directly to his audience. He discovers the vocabulary for each dance or musical on its own terms. He also knows when to stop the movement. Stillness

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is an important part of his work as a choreographer. For Spring Awakening, he received a Tony for Best Choreography. Not all experiments in musical theatre dance must derive from the ballet or modern dance concert stage. Andy Blankenbuehler is an example. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and, like many performing on Broadway, he found his calling while participating in the high school drama club. In this case, it was at St. Xavier High School. He performed and choreographed. After graduating, he went on to Southern Methodist University, but only lasted for a year, and then he was on to Disneyland in Tokyo to perform – also for a year. From there, it was on to New York City and within two years, he was performing in a revival of Guys and Dolls (1992) choreographed by Christopher Chadman.30 Soon, he was performing in Fosse (1999), where he was able to work with the choreographer, Ann Reinking, and learn from the best about Fosse’s dance technique and choreographic approach to musical theatre dance. Eventually, his interests moved from performing toward choreography and, following his work on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Into the Heights (2008), he continued to build a consistent record of directing and choreographing on and off-Broadway but, it was his work, and his collaboration with Miranda, director Thomas Kail, and orchestrations and co-arranger, Alex Lacamoire, on the Pulitzer Prize winning musical, Hamilton: An American Musical (2015) where he was able to introduce a uniquely creative way of thinking about choreography for a musical theatre production. “Because Hamilton was completely sung-through, it was almost completely danced-through”31as well. This is a musical that incorporates so many different movement vocabularies from jazz, tap, and waltz to hip-hop and other forms of urban dancing like krumping and popping. The staging of Hamilton does not easily, if at all, distinguish between the director’s hand and that of the choreographer. Each song has its own unique purpose and reason for being and the movement had to match that in a kinesthetic way that did not mimic the lyrics but extended them in such a way that the audience could engage with the nuance of what is being conveyed at any one moment on the stage. The goal was to make sure that “the dance styles, body language, and nonverbal communication of the ensemble [would]come to both support and tell the story.”32 Miranda describes Blankenbuehler’s unique approach to the choreography for his musical as “stylized heightened gesture.”33 From beginning to the end, Blankenbuehler was looking for very specific movements and gestures that would convey character, situation, and emotion without necessarily drawing attention to itself outside of the overall style of the show. Dance scholar, Phoebe Rumsey, describes how Blankenbuehler used the staging in the four-minute Prologue in order to introduce the audience to how they might look at the styling for the show. He quickly introduces the audience to the range of movement he will come back to throughout the show. He uses the “stylized heightened gesture” that Miranda refers to in order to create “the formation of poses and shapes that allude to the narrative through a miming quality.”34

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Rumsey provides an excellent example with her description of “The Battle of Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down).” …The ensemble enters with a series of lunges where the dancers pulse or flex their feet before stepping deeper into the battle. A wave of canon of strong poses passes among the group, akin to stop animation. At times, bodies move through battle gestures (holding guns, swinging fists, and shifting head positions with sharp focus changes, to enhance a sense of bravery and cockiness needed to pull off the victory. Overall, through a combined effort to work in unison, find specific marks, hit movement accents, and display sharp changes in energy dynamics, the ensemble achieves a sense of group strength and solidarity.35 Sometimes, his approach is so subtle that it may not register with many in the audience. An example Miranda provides is the staging practice of having the character of Burr moving in straight lines, while Hamilton moves in curvilinear patterns, suggesting that Burn sees limitations and obstacles while Hamilton sees options and possibilities.36 Rumsey also writes that there is a strong sense of gender equity in the ensemble. She points to the fact that the ensemble, both men and women, are dressed in eighteenth-century soldier costumes. The choreography throughout the show does not distinguish between men and women – all get to fight, all get to assert themselves, all get to dance without distinguishing between stereotypical male and female movement.37 Scholar Anne Searcy does a thorough analysis of the dance in Hamilton. Among the points that she makes is that the dance in this show carries the same weight as does the music and the lyrics. (Personally, I would add that the lighting contributes in that regard as well.)” But, it is not a “clean” integration. The dance is often used as a way in which to contextualize sections of the narrative, aspects of character and the political or historical time frames in which the scenes are located. Blankenbuehler’s contribution is not to integrate the choreography with the narrative as much as it is to explore what is not being said in the lyrics and thereby provide us with more commentary and/or additional context. The dance and movement are layered through and through the music and the lyrics. She offers an example of how this was realized. In Hamilton, Blankenbuehler makes much greater use of this semirealistic mode, employing the dance to comment on the action of the narrative. In the number “My Shot,” for example, Hamilton moves between talking to his friends and speaking in an interior monologue. When Hamilton enters this description of his inner state, the ensemble around him pops and locks. In this style of hip hop dance, the performer moves in jerky bursts of speed; the overall effect makes it look like a piece of film that is being sped up,

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slowed down, and reversed. In the musical, this creates an impression that Hamilton has moved outside the time experienced by the other characters. Even when the musical moves back into real time, the dance continues to walk a fine line between realistic motion, showing the action of the narrative, and semirealistic motion, depicting interior space. As Hamilton speaks to the crowd in “My Shot,” they slowly lunge forward, as though drawn in by his words (Figure 1); they then begin to shift around him in agitated groups. This subtle shifting in time and locale is portrayed as Blankenbuehler’s moves between realistic and nonrealistic movements. Blankenbuehler is not the first to find a vocabulary that was unique to a musical theatre show. Many will immediately reach back and point out that Jerome Robbins accomplished much of the same with West Side Story; but, what is unique here is the way that Blankenbuehler provides layer upon layer to the movement choices that he makes that complement that same quality that Miranda does with his lyrics and his music.38 There is so much to see; so much to take in. Some musicals are designed to be consumed in one gulp. I see it. I understand it. Thank you. Some musicals, however, ask the audience to not only drill down a little deeper but also to pay attention not only to the primary characters but also to the wider context in which they move. That context created by the ensemble members along the back of the stage, or those downstage right or left, or those on the scaffold above can provide the audience with a richer and more nuanced experience.39

A New Golden Age? It is difficult to look into the future to determine where dance and choreography on the musical theatre stage might go after the pandemic. Musical theatre dance has a rich, complex, and interesting history. It adapts to what is needed or expected with each succeeding generation and sometimes, it jumps ahead to show possibilities that others may not have considered. One example is the most recent revival of West Side Story (2020) with direction by Ivo Van Hove, a Belgian theatre director, and choreography by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, a Belgian modern dance choreographer. They bring an outsider’s perspective to this iconic “American” musical. Their interpretation is vastly different from what the original and subsequent revivals have been. While Hove introduces an empty space with projections and go-cameras and an array of multimedia, Keersmaeker concentrates on challenging the ballet base of Jerome Robbins with a modern dance sensibility that not only looks at movement as fundamentally vertical but one that can explore the horizontal as well. Dancers do not have to remain on their feet; dancers can use the stage floor in a myriad of interesting ways.40 Their interpretation reminds one of the modern dance choreographer, Alwin Nikolais from the 1950s–1980s, known for his use of computer-generated sound and lighting and special effects and what that might have looked like if he had chosen

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to direct and choreograph West Side Story. Some critics were enthusiastic – glad to finally see West Side Story move into the twenty-first century – while others viewed this as a desecration of what makes West Side Story so West Side Story and that is, the choreography of Jerome Robbins. What some of the critics who take issue with this version have forgotten is the way in which Jerome Robbins challenged the conventional use of the ballet vocabulary of his day and dressed three male dancers (one of whom was Robbins himself ) in sailor outfits (a not uncommon costume for male dancers on the musical theatre stage beginning with John Durang in the eighteenth century) and sent them “on the town” exploring New York City and looking for women. He brought that same brashness to giving gangs in New York ballet and jazz and tap and social dance and, even some suggestion of break dancing, as a way in which to express what it was like to be a teenager in a large metropolitan area in the mid-1950s. He missed “not a beat.” Through his imagination, he helped us to re-­ imagine what dance could look like on the musical theatre stage. And, we are still grateful for it. But, he would be the first to say – get off your behind, refer to the past but don’t lock your vision in that direction. Find something new, something meaningful, or as ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev would say: “Astonish Me!”

Notes 1 See her interview at: https://youtu.be/zOOU_HX1z4o 2 Ben Brantley, “Theatre Review: Enter Singing: Young, Hopeful and Taking On the Big Time.” New York Times, April 30, 1996, p. C13. 3 See her web page at: https://www.marliesyearby.com/about 4 Constance Valis-Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 309. 5 Savion Glover, Savion: My Life in Tap (New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, 2000), p. 14. 6 Kerry Lee Graves, The Emerging Prominence of Women Choreographers in the American Musical Theatre: A History and Analysis. PhD dissertation. Texas Tech University, December, 2001, p. 133. 7 This is the official website for Susan Stroman. In addition to video clips from her shows, interviews and more, there is an excellent chronology of Stroman’s life and career with bylines and photographs a brief video clips beginning when she was a child and concluding in 2022 at: https://www.susanstroman.com/timeline 8 Jennifer Dunning, “Crazy for Dance, a Broadway Gypsy Creates Her Own: Susan Stroman ….” New York Times, February 16, 1992, p. H5. 9 Dunning, p. H5. 10 Harold Prince, Sense of Occasion (Guildford, CT: Applause Books, 2017), p. 267. 11 Graves, p. 139. 12 David Richards, “Theater Review: Show Boat; Classic Musical with a Change in Focus.” New York Times, October 3, 1994, p. C11. 13 Mel Brooks and Tom Meehan, The Producers: The Book, Lyrics, and Story behind the Biggest hit in Broadway History! – How We Did It (New York, NY; A Roundtable Press Book, 2001), p. 40. 14 Graves, p. 143. 15 Pamyla Alayne Stiehl, The Dansical: American Musical Theatre Reconfigured as a Choreographer’s Expression and Domain. PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2002, p. 372.

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16 Joanna Dee Das, “What Makes a Musical?: Contact (2000) and Debates about Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.” The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical. Edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L Wollman (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), p. 239. 17 Das, p. 239 and Stiehl, p. 372. 18 Das, p. 370–371 and Stiehl, p. 239. 19 See: https://jeromemoross.com/bboriginalproduction/ 20 Stiehl, p. iii. 21 This ballet as used as the opening to the movie, White Nights (1985), performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Florence Faure. 22 Anna Kisselgoff, “Critic’s Notebook: Broadway’s Dance Card is Full a new challenge to ….” New York Times, January 7, 2000, p. E1. 23 Jennifer Fisher’s Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in a New World is an excellent history documenting the transition of the Russian ballet to its Americanization by George Balanchine and others. 24 You can compare the difference between Agnes de Mille’s choreography by going to https://youtu.be/2D1loAVwiMc with that of Susan Stroman’s at: https://youtu.be/ gzSK-YmDROc 25 A brief clip from the show can be seen at: https://youtu.be/GAS1SCEkSBo 26 Susan Stroman maintains and excellent website regarding her work in dance and in theatre. See: https://www.susanstroman.com/ 27 Nadine George-Graves, “Magnetic Fields: Too Dance for Theater, Too Theater for Dance.” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Edited by Nadine George-Graves (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 2. 28 Mary Jo Lodge, “Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theatre,” Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance. Edited by Dominic Symonds and Millie Taylor (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 84 29 See: https://playbill.com/article/dance-man-bill-t-jones-had-his-own-awakening-onnew-musical-com-141054 30 See: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/2018/05/04/hamilton-musicalchoreographer-andy-blankenbuehlers-cincy-roots/568718002/ 31 Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), p. 133. 32 Phoebe Rumsey, “The Convergence of Dance Styles in Hamilton: an American Musical.” In The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), p. 256. 33 Miranda and McCarter, p. 134. 34 Rumsey, p. 257. 35 Rumsey, p. 258. 36 Miranda and McCarter, p. 134. 37 Rumsey also points out that while women take on male mannerisms, the men do not take on female mannerisms. 38 This is a short video in which Blankenbuehler demonstrates how he comes up with movement to go along with the lyrics, the music and the situation they characters are in at that time. See: https://youtu.be/VmYTsOrnWP0 39 In this interview, Blankenbuehler addresses many questions regarding the choreography in Hamilton. See: https://www.playbill.com/article/andy-blankenbuehleron-making-history-with-hamilton 40 See: https://www.playbill.com/article/what-does-west-side-story-look-like-with-newchoreography

EPILOGUE

If the present is prologue, what can we safely forecast about the future of dance on the musical theatre stage? One might be that musical theatre dance will continue to reflect what is going on in the wider culture and put it on the stage. In the 1910s and 1920s, social dances easily floated from the dancehall to the stage and back again. In the 1960s and 1970s, the social dances associated with rock and roll found expression in musicals from Bye, Bye, Birdie to Hair. The success that director-choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, had with American in Paris (2015) and MJ: The Musical (2022) illustrates that the relationship between film and video dance with live theatre performance continues to draw audiences and to challenge choreographers to remain true to the style of its original artists, like Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson, while updating the choreography for a contemporary audience. This back and forth between the stage and film works in the other direction as well as witnessed with the 2021 remake of West Side Story with Justin Peck quoting from the iconic choreography of the musical’s original choreographer, Jerome Robbins, all the while making it his own. More recently, there seems to be a kind of pushiness or in-your-face performance style in the musical theatre dance that conjoins with the increase in a hard rock sound of the modern musical score. Current examples of this might include choreographer Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s Six: the Musical (2020) and choreographer Sonya Tayeh’s Moulin Rouge: The Musical (2019). At the same time, choreographers are not afraid to break dance down to its basic movement elements and then reintegrate them seamlessly, and delicately, with the overall movement, staging, and direction of a musical as seen in choreographer, David Neumann’s Hadestown (2019) or the collaboration between choreographer, Kelly Devine, with director, Christopher Ashley, in which they configured and reconfigured simple wooden back chairs to create objects (like an airplane), locations (like the elementary school) and internal spaces for a character’s monologue,

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and much more to tell the story of Americans stranded in the small Canadian town of Gander, Newfoundland, when their plane was diverted due to the attack on the twin towers in NYC in the musical, Come From Away (2017). It is a fool’s errand to think that in the epilogue that I or anyone can project the direction that the dance on the musical theatre stage will take when the theatres reopen after the restrictions of the pandemic are lifted. Certainly, we can rely gently on the notion that “the past is prologue to the present,” but we have to also acknowledge that the only thing that can truly be expected is the unexpected. Having said that, let me make a few observations. As we have seen, dance on the musical theatre stage has moved from being the ugly but entertaining step-sister to the heart of what makes the musical happen. We have also seen that the training or education of the dancer has produced a very eclectic triple threat – one that can adapt to the heights of comedy as well as lean into the depths of dramatic storytelling. In some cases, choreographers have become directors and in many others, they sit alongside the director to collaborate on a shared vision for what they see as the ideal performance of the musical production they are working on. These, I think, will continue to feed the musical in the immediate future. I think we can better determine what the future holds if we ask what will the needs be now, and into the future. The Black Lives Matter movement has kicked us in the head in order to make us look at what has been around us the whole time but which many have not seen or wanted to see. There are many peoples that makeup America and it is incumbent upon us to break through the fences of our narrowly defined vision so that their stories can indeed be told and their styles of movement inform our choreographies. That has implications for our composers, librettists, designers, directors, performers of all kinds, and, of course, our choreographers and dancers. I don’t know how that will change the musical theatre of the future. All I do know is that it will. It must. When we think about our shared present and immediate future not only with our fellow Americans but with people from all over the world, we cannot stick our heads in the sand regarding the many challenges we face to preserve our earth’s environment and the many living creatures that we share on this most precious planet. There are now singers and dancers and visual artists and musicians who are addressing these pressing concerns in their work. It is only a matter of time when some of these will collaborate and create a musical theatre experience that does the same. I can only hope that it happens sooner rather than later. There is a Chinese saying that says – how a people or nation treats its children, and poets, and dancers can tell us much about that nation’s character. From my perspective, dancers are children in the sense that they perform with arms wide open, risk adverse, and committed to living out their shared imaginative possibilities. Choreographers are indeed poets. They create and structure movement into kinetic bulbs of vibrancy. If we ask questions “that matter,” our musical theatre history indicates that our dancers and choreographers will “step up” and deliver what we need, what could not have been imagined.

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INDEX

Note: Page references with “n” denote endnotes. 3 for Tonight 196 5 A.M. 133 18th Amendment 119n1 42nd Street 221, 237 110 in the Shade 166 1984 (Orwell) 236 Abbott, George 171, 172, 174, 194–195, 205, 224, 225, 233, 239 Abolitionist movement 64 Academie Royale de Danse 6 Acocella, Joan 227 ACT UP 236 Adams, John 11 Adams, John Quincy 24 The Adding Machine 93 Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Wagner) 20n5 aesthetic dance 65 African-Americans 17, 162–163, 185, 191n91, 192; artists 67, 144; dancers and choreographers 211, 242; dances 1, 16–18, 114–115, 206; experience 253, 255; folk dance 44; history 251; lived experience of 213; music/musicals 70, 114–115; performers 1; schoolchildren 192; stereotypes 68; tap dancer 242; vernacular dance 18 African dances 16–18 Africanist jazz dance 206 African musical instruments 17

African slave trade 16 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power 236 Ailey, Alvin 211 Albee, Edward 193 Albertieri, Luigi 203 Albertina Rasch Dancers 127 Albright, Ann Cooper 81 Allan, Maud 76–79, 102, 126; female solo artist movement 83; peers 81; Salome dance 79–80 Allegro 166–167 allemande 8, 12, 25, 31–32, 58 Allen, Debbie 246 Allen, Robert C. 62 All That Jazz 226 Alton, Robert 133, 161, 162, 185, 195, 196 Americana 142 American Association of Masters of Dancing 21n22 American audiences 2, 16, 20, 26, 32, 34, 36, 39, 81–82 American ballet 38, 50, 126, 130, 132, 146n3, 171 American Ballet theatre 161, 170, 198 American Bandstand 203 “The American Company” 16 American Company of Comedians 14; see also London Company of Comedians; Old American Company American Country Dance Society 164

Index 281

American culture 4, 90n92, 99, 206, 225 American Dance Machine 239 American Dances: A Personal Chronicle in Words and Pictures (de Mille) 166 “the American dream” 4 American Indian dance 29 American in Paris 260, 269 American National Theatre and Academy 180 American Revolution 14, 25, 50 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) 117 American Society of Professors of Dancing 21n22 American Theatre Company 16 Anders, William 193 Anderson, Hans Christian 247 Anderson, Jack 65 Anderson, John Murray 70, 111, 116, 133 Andreyanov, Samuel Constantinovitch 131 And the World Goes ‘Round 256 animal dances 69 Annie, Get Your Gun 114, 183, 185, 261 Anthony, Susan B. 64 Anthony Street Theatre 34 anti-theatre laws 24–25; repeal of 26 Anything Goes 246 Apache dance 69–70, 92 Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Homans) 21n9 Appia, Adolphe 123 Applause 210 “Applied Aesthetics” 65 Arbeau, Thoinot 7–8, 11 The Archers 26–27 The Archers (Dunlap) 26 Arenal, Julie 195–202, 253 Arlen, Harold 167 Aronson, Boris 145 An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing, drawn out of the quiver of the Scriptures, By the Ministers of Christ at Boston in New-England (Mather) 10, 20n5 Arten, Mary 27 The Art of Stage Dancing 107, 109 Asante, Kariamu Welsh 17 Ashley, Christopher 243, 269 Ashton, Frederick 163 Asian-American performers 2 Assassins 237 Astaire, Adele 1, 78, 107, 112, 123, 128 Astaire, Fred 1, 78, 107, 112, 123, 128, 154, 186, 196, 256 As Thousands Cheer 143, 183

Astor Place Opera House 34, 42 Atkins, Cholly 249n20 Atkinson, Brooks 136, 175, 224 Avian, Bob 227, 228, 230 Babes in Arms 133, 135 Babes in Toyland 104 Bacchae 179 Bacharach, Bert 229 Bajour 228 Baker, Josephine 133, 152 Baker Street 239 Bakst, Léon 75 Balanchine, George 37, 38, 48n61, 110, 123, 126, 130–138, 144, 161, 162, 166, 170, 173, 187, 245, 249n1, 268n23; background 130–131; immigration to United States 130; introduction to Broadway musical theatre 133 Baldwin, James 213 ballet(s) 28, 32, 35–36, 50, 125–126; for Americans 38–39; French 26, 29, 36–37; Romantic 35, 51–55, 82; studying 33; teaching 57; as theatrical art 36; see also dance/dancing Ballet Ballads 180, 260 Ballet Chinois 6 ballet’d’action 6–7 ballet d’cour 6 Ballet Russe 75 Ballet Theatre 186 Bal Negre 145 The Band Wagon 128 Barabau 131 Baranova, Vera 133 Barbach, Otto 112 Barker, Barbara 53 Barnes, Clive 199, 222 Barnes, Howard 182 Barnum, P. T. 38 Barras, Charles M. 51 Baskt, Leon 126 Battle, Hinton 214, 246 Baum, L. Frank 246 Baum, Vicki 243 Beardsley, Aubrey 80 Beatty, Tailey 246 Beauchamp, Pierre 6, 8 Beauty and the Beast 237 The Beaux Stratagem 16 Beck, Julian 200 The Beggar’s Opera 14, 15, 22n40, 22n43 The Beggar’s Opera (Gay) 14 Belasco, David 84 Belcher, Ernest 196

282  Index

Belcher, Marge 196 Bemis, Minnie Renwood 90n106 Bendedix, Julius Roderich 58 Bennett, David 118 Bennett, Michael 85, 111, 189n31, 218, 219, 222, 227–232, 237, 238–240, 243, 255–256 Bentley, Muriel 171 Bentley, Toni 80 Berkeley, Busby 105, 124, 241, 258 Berkson, Robert 20n4 Berlin, Irving 70–71, 92, 94, 137, 143 Berlin Stories 209 Bernhardt, Sarah 79, 139 Bernstein, Leonard 123, 169, 170, 175 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas 240 Bettis, Valerie 185 Bible 10 Bierce, Ambrose 259 Big Deal 246 Billion Dollar Baby 160, 172 “Billy the Kid” 161, 186 Birch, Patricia 220–223, 246 Bird, Dorothy 129 The Bird Catcher 31 The Birth of Harlequin, or, The Witches Frolic 27, 31 Bishop, Andre 258 Black and Blue 246 The Black Crook 1, 41, 50, 55–56, 59, 61–62, 149, 163; dancers’ costumes 53; dancers in 54; and nineteenth-century romantic ballet 51–55 blackface minstrel troupe 43 Black Lives Matter movement 270 Black Panthers 193 Blake, Eubie 114, 246 Blank Dance From 1619 to Today (Emery) 23n53 Blankenbuehler, Andy 263–266, 268n38, 268n39 Blasis, Carlo 52–53 blonde burlesque 61 Bloomer Girl 167 Bloomer Polka 41 Blossom Got Kissed 258 Blue Holiday 145 “The Blushing Ballet” 110 Boccacci 199 Bogart, Anne 238 The Bohemian Girl 41 Bolger, Ray 123, 134 Bolton, Guy 123, 193 Bonfanti, Marie 50, 52, 84 Bonnard, Jacques 198

Bordman, Gerald 55, 220, 228 Bostonian Puritan 8, 11 Botticelli, Sandro 140 Box O’Tricks 109 The Boyfriend 221, 240 Boyle, John 142 The Boys From Syracuse 133, 136 Brahms Waltz 102 Brakhage, Stan 206 Brandenburg Concertos 175 Brando, Marlon 172 branles 8 Brantley, Ben 252, 258 Braque, Georges 75, 126 breakdown 17 Brice, Fanny 115, 118, 133 Brigadoon 166, 185 Bring in da Noise; Bring in da Funk 245, 246, 251, 252–255 “Bring on the Girls” 193 Broadway 260 Broadway shows/musicals 124, 125–126 Broderick, Matthew 257 Bromwell, George 11 Brooks, Lynn Matluck 30 Brooks, Walter 114 Brown, John Mason 138 Brown, Lew 98 Brown vs. Board of Education 192 Brubeck, Dave 206 buck and wing 45 buckle down 28 Burg, Gregg 214 burlesques 42, 46n10, 57, 64 burlettas 42 Burnside, R. H. 86, 127 Burris, Jim 71 But Not for Me 258 Butt, Alfred 78 Buy It Dear, T’is Made of Cashmere 38 Buzzard Lope 72 Bye, Bye, Birdie 195, 196, 201, 221, 269 Byrne, James 29, 32 By the Sad Sea Waves 106 Cabaret 20n2, 167, 203, 206, 208, 226 Cabin in the Sky 123, 137, 144–145, 162 cachucha 40 Cadmus, Paul 170 Cagney, James 100 cakewalk dance 1, 45, 67–69 Calhoun, Jeff 261 Call Me Mister 224 Camelot 5, 185 Camino Real 185

Index 283

cancan 60–61 Can-Can 186 Cantor, Eddie 46, 100 Caribbean Carnival 143 Carib Song 145 Carnival! 198, 204 Carnival in Flanders 185 Carousel 160, 193 Carr, Benjamin 26 Carter, Jimmy 236 Castle, Irene 1, 72–73, 74, 92 Castle, Vernon 1, 72–73, 92 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) 192 The Catherine Wheel 248, 260 Cato conspiracy (South Carolina) 17 Cats 237 Cavallazzi, Malvina 50 Caviar 203 Cecchetti, Enrico 53, 127 Celeste Mogador 35, 61 Cerrito, Fanny 36 A Certain Party 69 Chadman, Christopher 264 Chagall, Marc 207 Champion, Gower 161, 185, 195–202, 239 Chaplin, Charles 75 Chapman, John 187 Charleston 96–99 Charleston Theatre 31 Charles Weidman Dance Group 203 Chase, Lucia 170 Cherry Blossoms 143 Chestnut Street Theatre 24, 25, 30, 36–38 Chicago 227, 233, 245, 255 Chicken Scratch 72 The Chocolate Dandies 97 choreographers 2–3, 6–8, 111–113, 138–139; American 82, 94, 161; British 32; Broadway 53, 128, 185, 224–225, 240, 260; contributions of 185–188; French 29, 33; Italian 50–51; rise of 192–214; and their contributions 185–188; women as 81; see also specific choreographers Choreographing the Stage Musical (Sunderland and Pickering) 20n4 choreography 251–267 A Chorus Line 189n31, 218, 219, 230, 231, 233, 245, 254, 258 Christy, E. P. 43 Chronicle of a Death Foretold 247 Civil Rights Act of 1964 2, 193 Civil Rights Bill 1964 213 civil rights marches 192

Civil War 64 “Civil War Ballet” 167–168 Clarke, Martha 245, 247 classical ballet 28, 75 clog dance 30, 44–45 Clorindy, the Origins of the Cakewalk 68 The Club 240 The Cobras 84 Cochran’s Revues 132 Coco 229–230 The Cocoanuts 112 The Code of Terpsichore (Blasis) 53 Cohan, George M. 13, 46, 94, 107, 113–114, 198 Cohen-Stratyner, Barbara 97 Cold War 192, 237 Cole, Jack 101, 184, 203–206 Coleman, Ornette 206 Coles, Honi 242, 249n20 Collier, Jeremy 21n24 Colonial America 10, 15, 22n24; theatre dance in 12–14 Coltrane, John 206 columbine 31 Comden, Betty 171 Come, Fly With Me 138 Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 136 Come Fly Away 260 Come From Away 243, 270 Come Summer 166 commedia dell’arte troupes 7 commedie-ballet 6 Company 219, 229–230, 231, 233 concerts 12, 25 Confucius 20 Congress of German Dancers, Essen, Germany 177 Connolly, Bobby 99, 118, 176 Conservatoire National de Musique et d’Art Dramatique 65 Contact 248, 258–259, 261, 262 Continental Congress 12, 16 The Contrast 26 Cooke, George Frederick 34 Cooper, James Fennimore 17 Cornejo, Francisco 102 Costa, David 50, 51, 53 cotillion 8, 12, 25, 58 The Country Wake, or the Frolicsome Crew 29 courante 7, 9, 15 Courtin’ Time 137 COVID pandemic 1, 251–252 Craig, Edward Gordon 93, 123 Crazy for You 246, 256

284  Index

The Creole Show 67 Cronkite, Walter 193 Cunningham, Merce 161 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime 226 Curran, Seán 261 Cushman, Charlotte 41 Daily News 187 Dale, Grover 240 Dalí, Salvador 126 Daly, Ann 77 Damn Yankees 207, 208, 225, 239 The Dance 75 dance craze 68–69, 74 dance/dancing: as accepted social activity 10; African-American 16–18; forms 25, 42; manuals 7–9; masters 10–12; and minstrel tradition 42–46; modern 138–145; and pantomime 55–57; role in social and theatrical life 24; as social engagement 9; and socialization 24; technical virtuosity in 33; theatre 12–16; and vaudeville 100–103; see also ballet(s); specific types dance directors 103–111; 1920s 111–113; Julian Mitchell 103–106; Ned Wayburn 106–111 Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Musical 147n40, 224 Dances at a Gathering 175 Dance to the Piper (de Mille) 166 Dancin’ 233, 237, 245, 260 Dancing and Fencing Academy 11 “the dancing body” 2 Dancing-Master (Playford) 12 The Dancing Master (Rameau) 8 Dangerous Games 247 Daniele, Graciela 246–247, 261 Daniels, Danny 186 Dark of the Moon 160, 196 The Darktown Follies 71 Dash, Irene 174 The Dashing White Sergeant 35 Das Totenmal 179 Dauberval, Jean 32, 52 Davis, Miles 206 Davis, Toots 72 A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine 241 Dean, Dora 67–68, 70 Dear Evan Hansen 226, 252 Deas, Lawrence 114–115 Death of a Salesman 198 The Death of Captain Cook and Dermot and Kathleen 32

Debussy, Claude 126 The Decameron 200 Declaration of Sentiments 64 De Lancey House, New York City 15 de Lavallade, Carmen 211 Delsarte, François 65–66, 76, 139 Delsarte System 139 de Lully, Jean-Baptiste 6 de Mille, Agnes 161, 163–169, 188n15, 221, 239, 261–262 de Mille, Cecil B. 163 de Mille, Henry Churchill 163 de Mille, Matilda Beatrice 163 de Mille, William C. 163 Democracy in America (De Tocqueville) 4, 59 Demoiselles d’Avignon 75 Denby, Edwin 131–132, 171 Denishawn Company 101 Dennhardt, Gregory 105 Denoir, M. 13, 15 Depression of 1930s 122–145 Dere, Danny 124 Descutner, Janet 23n60 Desert Song 97 Desjardines, Pauline 41 Des Moulina 26 Destry Rides Again 194 DeSylva, B. G. 98 De Tocqueville, Alexis 4, 59 Devine, Kelly 243, 269 Diaghilev, Serge 75, 93, 131 Diaghilev Ballet Russe 76, 125 Diamond, John 2, 42, 68–69 Die Fledermaus (or The Bat) 58–60 Dietz, Howard 124 Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Gottschild) 146n3 Dillingham, Charles 70, 93 DiMuci, Dion 259 DiPrima, Diane 206 director-choreographers 192–214; Gower Champion 195–202; Jack Cole 203–206; jazz dance 203–206; Julie Arenal 195–202; Katherine Dunham 203–206; prologue 192–195; shows that shaped the period 206–214; time to mourn/time to dance 236–239; Tommy Tune 239–245; traditions challenged 245–249; traditions continue 245–249; traditions evolve 245–249 The Disappointment 13 Dixon, George Washington 42

Index 285

Doctor Jazz 214 Doctorow, E. L. 226 “Doin’ the Chamberlain” 195 Dolan, Phil 133 Donehue, Vincent J. 194 Donen, Stanley 196 Don Giovanni 255 Donnybrook! 204 Don Quixote 38 Douglass, David 15 Drake, Alfred 182 Dreamgirls 232, 238 Dubarry 84 Ducy-Barre, Louise 41 Duke, Vernon 144 Dumas, Alexandre 37 Duncan, Isadora 20n8, 76, 80–81, 83, 102, 139, 140–141 Dunham, Katherine 123, 137–138, 145, 162, 203–206 Dunlap, William 26 Dunning, Jennifer 244, 256 Durang, Caroline 27, 50 Durang, Charles 28, 30, 33 Durang, Ferdinand 30 Durang, Jacob 27 Durang, John 21n20, 26–30, 170; career of 27; “Dwarf Dance” 27–28; and French ballet masters 29; interest in dance 28; marriage of 30; retirement 40 Durang’s Friday 42 “Durang’s Hornpipe” 28 Duse, Eleonora 93 “Dwarf Dance” 27–28 Dylan, Bob 193, 226 Eagle Rock 69, 72 Earl Carroll Vanities 116, 126 Easton, Carol 163 East Side Story 169 “The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett” 180 Eckert, Marie 178 Eckert, Valentin 178 Ecki, Shirley 171 Eder, Richard 241 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 160, 192 Elementary Treatise upon the Theory and Practice of the Art of Dancing (Blasis) 53 elite arts 25 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland 8 Ellington, George 56 Elliot, Liza 129

Elssler, Fanny 32, 36–41 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 39 Emery, Lynne Fauley 17, 23n53 “energizing” techniques 65 Engel, Lehman 220 The English Dancing Mastere: or, Plain and Easie Rules of The Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to Each Dance (Playford) 8 entrechats 28 Erdman, Jean 222 Esmeralda 41, 42, 49n84 Espinosa, Leon 42 An Essay towards an History of Dancing (Weaver) 21n11 Essence of Old Virginia 45 Ethiopian Operas 43 Ethiopian Serenaders 43 Europe, James Reese 74 Europe, Jim 72 European-Americans 17–18 European antecedents 6–7 Evita 237, 246 exhibition ballroom dance 69 exhibition ballroom dancers 70 Expressionism 177 extravaganza 57 Faison, George 246 Falsettos 237 Fancy Free 161, 170–171, 186 Fannyelsslermaniaphobio 40 Farquhar, George 13 16 Farrell, Bob 42 Father Knows Best 193 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Gregory) 24 Federal Dance Theatre 191n93 Federal Theatre 123 Fela! 138 Felix, Seymour 124 Ferdinand, Franz 91 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 206 Fetchit, Stepin 67 Fiddler on the Roof 175, 206, 208, 238 Field, Ron 206, 209, 210, 228 fin de siècle period 66–74 Finian’s Rainbow 185, 186, 187 Fiorello 195 The Firefly 112 Fisher, Jennifer 268n23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 92 Five Mile Out of Town Dance 42 The Fleet’s in 170 Flora, or Hob in the Well 13, 15

286  Index

Flora, the Red Menace 255 Flower Drum Song 194 Floyd, George 252 Flying Colors 163 Fokine, Michel 75, 126, 139 folk art forms 25 folk dancing 5 Follies 167, 219, 231, 233 Follies of 1907 80 Fordyce, James 24 Forrest, Edwin 34 The Fortune Teller 104 The Forty Thieves: or, Striking Oil in Family Jars 63 Fosse, Bob 85, 161, 185, 196, 207, 218, 223–227, 239, 245, 260 “Fosse and Niles” 224 Foster, Allan K. 94 Fowlkes Tavern 13 Fox, George Lafayette 55–56 Fox, Harry 72 Fox Trot 72, 73 fragmentation 218–220 Francis, William 32 Francisquy, Jean Baptiste see M. Francisquy Franck, Mlle. Celestine 42 Frankenstein, Alfred 164 Franklin, Benjamin 11, 24 Freeman, Max 86 French ballet 26, 29, 36–37 French comedie-ballets 6 French dancing masters 24–25, 26; in United States 33–42 French Revolution 24, 30, 32, 33 Freud, Sigmund 74 Friml, Rudolf 112 Fuller, Larry 246 Fuller, Loie 65, 76, 81–83, 90n106, 102, 139 Fuller, Margaret 39 Funny Face 241 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 205, 208 Gadd, May 164 Galahoff, Basil 134 galliards 7, 8 Garcia Márquez, Gabriel 247 Gardel, Pierre 52 The Garden or Earthly Delights 247 Gardie, Anna 32–33 Gardner 189n22 Garrick, David 6, 245 Gates, Bill 237

gavotte 8, 12, 25, 58 Gay, John 14, 15, 22n40 Geddes, Norman Bel 93 Genée, Adeline 163 Gener, Randy 248 Gennaro, Liza 165, 205 Gennaro, Peter 202, 224, 228 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 166, 209 George-Graves, Nadine 71, 262 George Washington, Jr 114 George White Scandals 116, 127 George White Scandals of 1926 98, 99 Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 93 Gerdt, Elizaveta 131 German modern dance 176–177, 179–180 Gershwin, George 94, 118, 125 Gershwin, Ira 118, 125, 129 Geva, Tamara 131, 134 gigue 8 Gilbert, W. S. 66 Gilvey, John Anthony 195, 198 Gintautiene, Kristina 54 Girl Crazy 256 The Girl From Utah 72, 117 The Girl in Pink Tights 166 Giselle 38 Give a Girl a Break 196, 224 Glass, Bonnie 70 The Glass Menagerie 198 Glass Pieces 175 glissade 28 Glover, Savion 251, 253–255 Godfrey, Thomas 16 Godkin, Paul 260 Godspell 219 Golden, Eve 72, 104 Golden Boy 207, 211, 212 Goldilocks 221 Goleizovsky, Kasyan 131 The Gondoliers 66 The Goodbye Girl 247 Goodman, Benny 259 “Good Morning Starshine” 202 Good News 99 Gottfried, Martin 219, 226 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon 43, 146n3 The Governor’s Son 113 Grable, Betty 196 Graham, Martha 20n8, 93, 102, 111, 132, 142, 160, 161, 165, 166, 179, 190n55, 219, 221, 222 Grahn, Lucile 36 The Grand Duke 74 Grand Hotel 243–245 Grand Hotel (Baum) 243

Index 287

“Grand Tragic Dance” 15 Graves, Kerry Lee 256, 258 Gray, Joel 209 Grease 221–222 “The Great American Goof ” 161 “Great White Way” 2 The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (Hoffman) 3n1 Green, Adolph 171 Green Grow the Lilacs 164 “The Green Violinist” 207 Greenwich Village Follies 111, 116 Gregory, John 24 Greif, Michael 252 Gresham, Herbert 86 Griffith, D.W. 75 Grisi, Carlotta 36 grizzly bear 69, 71 grotesque dancer 66 Grotowski, Jerzy 200 Group Theatre 123 Grunn, Homer 102 Guest, Ann Hutchinson 220 Gussow, Mel 240, 248 Guys and Dolls 186, 187, 225, 264 Gypsy 175, 194 Hadestown 269 Hair 195, 199, 219, 253, 269 Hale, Chester 107 Hale, George 125 Halevy, Ludovic 58 Hall, George 124 Hallam, Lewis 14, 15, 26, 27 Hallam Company 15 Hamilton: An American Musical 189n31, 244, 264–265 Hamlet 160 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 160 Hamlisch, Marvin 231 Hammerstein, Oscar 193, 232 Hammerstein, Oscar II 112, 118, 164 Haney, Carol 194, 221, 224 Hansberry, Lorraine 193, 214 The Happy Time 197, 198–199 Harburg, Yip 167 Hardy, Camille 81 Hari, Mati 102 Harland, Ada 61 Harleqiun in Philadelphia 27 Harleqiun Woodcutter 27 Harlequinades 47n22 Harlequin Protected by Cupid, or, The Enchanted Nosegay 31 Harper, Herbie 134

Hart, Lorenz 123, 164 Hart, Moss 129, 143 The Harvest Home, or Rustic Merriment 29 Haskill, Jack 124 Hawkins, Erick 20n8, 161 Hazard, P. H. 33, 36, 37 Hello, Broadway 114 Hello, Dolly! 197–198, 240 Henderson, Ray 98 Henry, John 26 Henry, Sweet Henry 228 Hepburn, Katherine 229 Herbert, Edith 241 Herbert, Victor 118 Here’s Love 228 Hering, Doris 201 Hesitation Waltz 73 High Button Shoes 172 high culture 19 Highland Fling 30 Highwater, Jamake 6 Hill, Constance Valis 98, 100, 144 Hines, Gregory 214, 254 Hispanic-American performers 1 History of the American Theatre (Dunlap) 26 Hitchy-Koo of 1918 116 Hitchy-Koo of 1920 109 H.M.S. Pinafore 66 Hoffman, Gertrude 51, 80, 94, 102, 105, 140 Hoffman, Warren 3n1, 188n13 Hoffmaster 28 Holder, Geoffrey 211, 246 Holm, Hanya 139, 141, 161, 175–185, 190n61, 197, 221, 223, 260 Holman, Libby 124 Holt, Henry 13, 15 Homans, Jennifer 21n9, 53 Hoochie-Coochie 72 Hook, Line, and Sinker 223 Hornblow, Arthur 13 hornpipe 9, 12, 15, 25, 28, 31–32, 43; performed by Durang 27 House of Flowers 211 Howells, William Dean 63 How Long Brethren? 191n91 How Now, Dow Jones 239 Hoyt, Charles 104 Huffman, J. C. 118 Hughes, Langston 185 Hugo, Victor 41 The Humours of Bartholomew Fair 29 Humphrey, Doris 19, 101, 132, 142, 161, 166, 179, 219 Humpty Dumpty 55–56, 109

288  Index

Hunchback of Notre Dame 41 Hutin, Mme. Francisque 34–36 Ibsen, Henrik 93 I’d Rather Be Right 143 I Married an Angel 133, 136 I’m Solomon 214 The Incense 84 The Independence of America, or the Ever Memorable Fourth July 1798 32 Indians 199 Ingrouille, Carrie-Anne 269 Inside USA 185 Institute of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze 178 integration: Agnes de Mille 163–169; choreographers and their contributions 185–188; dance narrates 160–188; Hanya Holm 175–185; Jerome Robbins 169–175; pent-up restlessness and opportunity 160–162 The International Cup 127 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 74 interpretative dance 65 interregnum: for musical theatre 232–234; for musical theatre dance 232–234 Into the Woods 237, 246 Invitation to the Dance 260 Iolanthe 66 Irene 221 Irish Jig see jig dance Irma La Douce 239 Isaacs, Edith J. R. 135 Isherwood, Christopher 209 Italian ballet 50 Itō, Michio 93, 111, 143 It’s All Fair Weather 186 Ixion 59 Ixion, or, The Man at the Wheel 61 Jackpot 143 Jackson, Andrew 24 Jackson, Michael 237, 269 Jacobsen, C. H. 106 James Joyce’s The Dead 261 Jamison, Judith 214 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 76, 139 Jarrett, Henry C. 51 jazz dance 69, 76, 85, 96, 98, 99, 115, 123, 143–144, 205–206, 218, 255; Jack Cole 203–206; Katherine Dunham 203–206 jazz music 16–17, 42, 114, 115, 126, 130, 170 Jefferson, Thomas 11, 24 Jerome Robbins’ Broadway 208, 237

jig dance 25, 42–45 jigs 7, 12, 15, 17 Jim Crow dance 43 John D’Auban, Frederick 66, 81 Johnson, Charles 67–68, 70 Johnson, James P. 97 Johnson, Lyndon 193 John Street Theatre 15, 22n46, 24, 26, 31 Jolson, Al 46, 118 Jones, Bill T. 138, 263–266 Jones, Edmond 123 Jones, Inigo 7 Jones, LeRoi 206 Jones, Robert Edmond 93 Jonson, Ben 7 Joplin, Scott 92 Jowitt, Deborah 170, 172 A Joyful Noise 218, 228, 239 Juba, Master 2, 42–43, 68–69 Jubilee 129 The Judgement of Paris 21n11 Judson Dance Theater 200 Kantor, Michael 220 Karsavina, Tamara 75, 125, 131 Katz, Ruth 58 Kaufman, George S. 124 Kean, Edmund 34 Kean, Thomas 15 Keep ‘Em Laughing 143 Keep of the Grass 137, 170 Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa De 138 Kelly, Gene 162, 185–186, 194, 260, 269 Kemble, Fanny 35 Kendall, Elizabeth 80–81, 139–140 Kennedy, John F. 5, 192–193, 213 Kennedy, Robert 193 Kern, Jerome 34, 94, 112, 117–118, 123 Kerouac, Jack 206 Kerr, Walter 210, 212 “Keystone Kops Ballet” 172 Kidd, Michael 161, 185, 186–187, 194, 227–228, 239 King, Martin Luther 192, 193, 209, 213; “I Have a Dream” speech 213 The King and I 173 Kirkwood, James 230 Kirstein, Lincoln 130, 161 Kislan, Richard 4 Kisselgoff, Anna 248, 261 Kiss Me, Kate 181–183, 184, 224, 261 Kiss Them for Me 160 Kleban, Ed 231 Knowles, Mark 60, 69

Index 289

Knuntze, Reinhold Martin 178 Kopit, Arthur 199 Korean War 192 Korean War Armistice agreement 192 Kramer, Larry 236 Kreutzberg, Harald 129, 139 Kriza, John 171 Kruger, Miles 196 Krupska, Dania 161, 221 Laban, Rudolph von 139, 177, 253 La Bayadere 36, 37–38 La Berege Ciquette 34–35 La Biche au Bois 51 La Boheme 252 Lacamoire, Alex 264 La’ Capenna di Tom 37 La Cracavienne 39 Lady, Be Good! 112 Lady Butterfly 109 The Lady Comes Across 195 Lady in the Dark 129, 162, 209 The Lady of the Camellias 37 La Fille mal Gardee 32 La Foret Noire 29, 32 L’Amour trouve les Moyens, or The Fruitless Precaution 32 Lancashire Clog 44–45 Landau, Tina 238 Ländler 58 The Land of Belles 126 The Land of Joy 92 Lane, Nathan 257 Lane, William Henry 42 Lang, Harold 171, 182 Langer, Suzanne 5 L’Apres-midi d’un Faune 126 Larson, Jonathan 251, 252 La Sylphide 35 La Tarantul 39 Latouche, John 180 La Tragedie de Salome 81 Laurents, Arthur 169, 175, 190n46, 193 Lauterer, Arch 123, 180 la volta 8 lazzi 7 Le Balet Comique de la Royne 7 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 6 lectures 25 Lederer, George 116 Lee, Baayork 228 Lee, C. Y. 194 Lee, Mary Ann 18, 36, 37–38, 40–41 Lee, Sammy 99, 112, 113, 118, 127

Le Grande Duchesse de Ge’rolstein 63 Lehar, Franz 73 Le Jeune Homme et la Mort 260 Lemon Squeeze 72 Lend an Ear 185 Le Nègre 110 Lenny 226 Le Sacre du Printemps 76 Les Ballets 132 Les Danseuses Vienoises 41 Les Misérables 237, 260 Le Spectre de la Rose 134 Letters on Dancing and Ballets (Noverre) 7, 86n1 Levingston, William 13 Levinson, Andre’ 176–177 L’Histoire du Soldat 179 The Liar 185 Lieberstraum 102 Lifar, Serge 75 Life Begins at 8:40 143 Life magazine 160 Lil’ Abner 186 Limón, José 161, 170 Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre 14 Lind, Jenny 35 Lindbergh, Charles 92 The Lion King 138, 263 Littlefield, Catherine 221 Little Johnny Jones 114 The Little Mermaid 247 A Little Night Music 222–223 The Little Show 124 Litz, Katherine 221, 260 Liza: Stepping Out at Radio City Music Hall 255 Liza with a Z 218 Locke, John 11, 24 Loesser, Frank 225 Logan, Olive 62 “The London Company” 16 London Company of Comedians 14; see also American Company of Comedians; Old American Company Long, Robert Emmet 241 Look Ma, I’m Dancing 173 Loring, Eugene 161, 186 Lorraine, Lillian 70 Losch, Tilly 221 Louche, John 260 Louisiana Purchase 137 Louis XIV 6, 7, 8 Louvre 12 Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly 7

290  Index

The Loves of Mars and Venus 21n11 Lowe, Jim 42 Lugne, Aurelien-Marie 79 Lyles, Aubrey 114 Lynne, Gillian 238, 239 Lyon, Genevieve 70 MacKaye, Steele 65 Macready, William Charles 34 Madonna 237 The Maid of Cashmere 37, 38 Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals (Laurent) 190n46 Malcolm X 213 Malia, Judith 200 Mallarmé, Stéphane 83 Malone, Jacqui 18 Maltby, Richard, Jr. 261 Man of La Mancha 5 The Man of La Mancha 203, 205 Marbury, Elizabeth 74, 117 The Marge and Gower Champion Show 196 Markert, Russell 2 Markham, Pauline 61 Markova, Alicia 125 Marshall, Kathleen 261 Marston, Richard 51 Martha Graham Dance Company 221 Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (de Mille) 166, 169 Martin, Edward 13 Martin, John 5, 31, 124, 125, 129, 141, 142–143, 145, 162, 171, 180–181, 182, 186 Martins, Peter 249n1 Maslon, Laurence 220 The Masque of Blackness 7 Massine, Leonine 75, 126 Mates, Julian 12 Mather, Increase 10–11, 20n5 Matisse, Henri 75, 126 Maxixe 73 Mayer, Michael 263 Maywood, Augusta 33, 36, 37 Maywood, R. C. 37 McCarren, Felicia 82 McCracken, Joan 165, 172, 224 McCulloch, Lynsey 21n12 McEwen, Mary 30 McFarland Minstrels 45 McKayle, Donald 206, 246 McKechnie, Donna 229 Meisner, Sanford 172 Melhac, Henri 58 Mendez, Sam 20n2

The Me Nobody Knows 219, 221 Mentges, Francis 30 The Merry Widow 73 Messrs 31 Metropolitan Opera Company 132 Metropolitan Opera House 164 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 209 M. Francisquy 26–27, 29, 32 Middle Passage 16, 23n51, 253 Mielziner, Jo 167 The Mikado 66, 143 Milhaud, Darius 126 Mille, Cecil B de 75 Miller, Arthur 164, 193, 198 Miller, Buzz 224 Miller, Flournoy 114 Miller, Marilyn 116 Miller, Scott 222 Mills, Florence 115 Minnelli, Liza 247, 255 Minstrel Misses 109 minstrel tradition: and dance 42–46; stock minstrel characters 43; walkaround 44–45 minuet 12, 25 Miracle on 34th Street 228 Miranda, Carmen 195 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 189n31, 190n46, 264 Miró, Joan 75 miscegenation 99 Miss Saigon 237 Mitchell, James 172 Mitchell, Julian 103–106, 109 Mitchell, Ruth 238 Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater 259 MJ: The Musical 269 Mlle. Augusta 36 Mme. Gardie 26, 29 modern dance 65, 138–145 Modern Dancing 73 Modern Precision Dance 93 Mogador, Celeste 61 Moliere 6 Monplaisir, Adele 41 Monplaisir, Hippolyte 41 Montez, Lola 41 Moore, Carrie Augusta 56 Moore, Lillian 31, 47n37 Moore, Tom 222 “moral dialogues” 16 Mordden, Ethan 122, 162, 166, 167, 184 Morehouse, Ward 181–182 Morlacchi, Giuseppina 50 Mormons 19

Index 291

Moross, Jerome 180, 260 The Most Happy Fella 225 Moulin Rouge 105 Moulin Rouge: The Musical 269 Moulton, Robert D. 184 Mouvet, Maurice 70 Movin’Out 260 Murray, Walter 15 The Murray–Kean Company 15 Musical Chairs 255 musical comedy 42 Musical Theater Choreography (Berkson) 20n4 musical theatre 26; professionalization of 117; role of dance in 57–64 musical theatre dance 1–3, 4–6, 18, 20n4, 86; changing landscape of 66–74; defined 50; in perspective 74–76; professionalism 54 Music Hath Charms 126 The Music Man 228 Muybridge, Eadweard J. 111 My Fair Lady 185 My One and Only 241, 256 The Mystery of Edwin Drood 247 Nagrin, Daniel 185 The Naiad Queen 41 The Naid Queen 37 Napoleonic Wars 59 Nassau Street Theatre (New York City) 15 Nathalie, ou la Laittiere Suisse 36 National Woman Suffrage Association 64 Native Americans 2, 10, 16, 17, 20n7; dances 5, 19; dance traditions 20n8 Negro Compton Hornpipe 42 Negro dance 16, 42 “The Negro Dance” (Dunham) 206 Negro Spirituals 191n91 Neumann, David 269 New Chestnut Street Theatre 32 New Faces of 1943 143 New Girl in Town 225 Newman Theatre 231 New Moon 143 new stagecraft 123 New York City Ballet 161, 173, 258 New York City Opera 255 New York Herald Tribune 181 New York Journal American 181 New York Performing Arts Library 175 New York Public Library 161 New York Sun 181 New York Times 80, 129, 180, 228 Next to Normal 252

Nicholas Brothers 136 Nichols, George 42 Nichols Brothers 133 Nifties of 1923 94 Nijinska, Bronislava 125 Nijinsky, Vaslav 75, 76, 93, 110, 126, 139 Nikolais, Alwin 82 Niles, Mary Ann 224 Nine 241 No, No, Nanette 112, 221 Nobody Home 117 Norton, Harold 70 Noverre, Jean George 6–7, 32–33, 86n1 Noverre, Jean-George 245, 262 Nowhere to Go but Up 209, 228 The Nutcracker 38, 173, 261–262 Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in a New World (Fisher) 268n23 Nye, Russell 25 Nymph Errant 163 “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Bierce) 259 O’Denishawn, Florence 107 Offenbach, Jacque 61 Of Thee I Sing 125 Oh, Calcutta! 219 Oh, Kay! 112 O’Horgan, Tom 200 O’Keefe, Georgia 75 Oklahoma! 2, 161–162, 164, 165, 169, 193, 220, 224, 262 Old American Company 14, 26, 29; see also American Company of Comedians; London Company of Comedians The Old Schoolmaster Grown Young 31 The Old Soldier 31 Old Southwark Theatre 27 Ole Virginny Breakdown 42 Olsen, Tillie 2 Once on this Island 237 Once Upon a Mattress 239 Ondine 42 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Márquez) 247 Oneida community 19 O’Neil, Zelma 99 O’Neill, Eugene 164 One Touch of Venus 166 “On Stage!” 186 On the Town 172, 260 On Your Toes 123, 133, 136, 237, 246, 249n1, 260

292  Index

opera 42, 144, 207; ballad 13–14; comic 16; opera bouffe 55, 63 operetta 42, 57, 61; Die Fledermaus (or The Bat) 58–60 Orchesographie (Arbeau) 7 Orpheus in the Underworld 61 Othello 116 “Our Polly Is a Sad Slut” 14 Out of this World 185 Over Here 221 Overlie, Mary 238 Over the River 70 The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre 262 The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance 21n12 Pacific Overtures 246 The Pajama Game 173, 185, 194, 207, 218, 224 Pal Joey 162, 185 Palmer, Harry 51 Palmer, Leland 228 Palmer, Robert 259 pantomime 55–57 pantomime ballet 6 Papirofsky, Joe 223 Papp, Joseph 200, 231 The Parisian Model 105 Paris Opera Ballet 31 Park Theatre 22n46, 26 passepieds 8 The Passing Show of 1913, The Century Girl 109, 116 Pastor, Tony 54 Patience 66 Patinkin, Sheldon 220 pavannes 7, 8 Pavlova, Anna 32, 38, 75, 93, 125, 163 Payne-Carter, David 195, 198 The Pearl and the Pumpkin 109 Pearson, Scott 228 “Peasant’s Dance” 27 Pennington, Ann 99 Pennsylvania Militia 30 Perón, Eva 246 Perpener, John 211 Perrot, Jules 41 Peter Pan 173 Peters, Johnny 71 Peters, Michael 232 Peterson, Marjori 111 Petipa, Marius 38, 75, 131 Petit, Roland 260 Phantom of the Opera 237–238, 260

Philadelphia 25–26 Picasso, Pablo 75, 126 Pickering, Ken 20n4 pierrot 13–14, 31 pigeon wing 29 Pike, Thomas 11–12 “Pillar of Fire” 186 Pinkster Day 17 Pins and Needles 119 Pippin 218, 219, 226, 233 The Pirates of Penzance 66, 247 Placide, Alexandre 29, 31–32 Plain and Fancy 185 Playford, John 8, 12 Pleasures and Palaces 225 Plessis, Alphonsine 61 Pompon, Rose 61 Poor Little Ritz Girl 109 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste see Moliere Porgy and Bess 144, 246 Porter, Cole 94, 182, 184, 185 “Possum Up a Gum Tree” 24 precision dance 93–96 Presley, Elvis 193 Primrose, George 45 Primus, Pearl 143, 185, 211, 221 Prince, Hal 238, 239, 246, 255–256 The Prince of Parthia 16 The Prince of Parthia (Godfrey) 16 Prinz, Le Roy 124 Prodigal Son 132 The Producers 257 professionalization, of musical theatre 117 Promises, Promises 229 Public Enemy 236 Public Theater 200 Puritan authorities 10 Puritan New England 10 Puritans 4, 5, 10 Quack, M.D. 81 quadrille 12, 25 quadrille réaliste 70 Queen, Dahomey 185 Quesnet 32 Quirey, Belinda 9 racism 2, 64, 99 Radha 84–85 Radio City Music Hall 195 A Rag Baby 104 Ragtime 248 ragtime dance 69–70, 72–73 ragtime music 70 Raimund, Carl 127

Index 293

Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulders 211 Raisin 214 Raisin in the Sun 214 raked stage 46n1 Rambert, Marie 163 Rameau, Pierre 8 “Rappers Delight” 236 Rasch, Albertina 51, 94, 118, 124, 126, 127–130, 132, 161, 162, 166 Ravel, Maurice 126 “Reading, Writing and a Little Bit of Rhythm” 195 Reagan, Ronald 236 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Shields) 226 The Recruiting Officer 13 The Recruiting Officer (Farquhar) 13 Rector, Eddie 72 Redhead 225 Redige, John 31 Red Roses for Me 185 Reed, Janet 171 reels 12, 25, 42–43 Regal, Betty 52 Reinagle, Alexander 32 Reinhardt, Max 178 Reinking, Ann 261, 264 Rent 245, 251, 252–255 The Restoration of Harlequin 31 The Return of the Labourers 31 Revolutionary War 12, 24–25, 33 revue 115–117, 122, 124 The Revue of Revues 127 Rice, Thomas D. 42–43 Rice, Tim 246 Rich, Frank 208, 232, 238, 242, 244, 245 Rich, John 47n22 Richard, David 257 Ricketts’ Circus 29–30 Riff Brothers 223 rigadoon 8, 12, 25 Rigg, Lynn 164 Rinehardt, Max 85 ring shout 44 The Rink 247 Rio Rita 112 Rita Gauthier 37 Rivera, Chita 228, 247 Robbins, Jerome 160, 161, 169–175, 186, 194, 199, 204, 206, 220–221, 224, 227, 239, 245, 247, 258, 260, 266–267 Robinson, Bill 31, 46, 100–101, 123, 242 Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday 26, 29–30, 94 “Rodeo” 164

Rodgers, Ginger 196 Rodgers, Richard 123, 160, 164, 194, 232 Rodney King riots of 1992 256 Romantic ballerinas 36–37 Romantic ballet 35, 51–55, 82 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 169 rope dancing 15, 29 Rose-Marie 112 Rosenthal, Jean 198–199 Ross, Herbert 211 Roussel, Louis 13 Royal Academy of Dance 8 “The Royal Captive” 15 Royce, Edward 118, 119 Rubenstein, Ida 125 Rumsey, Phoebe 264–265, 268n37 “Runaround Sue” 259 Runaways 219, 233 Runnin’Wild 97 Rush, Benjamin 24 Sadler, Donald 185, 249n1 Sadler’s Wells Theatre 31 Sagolla, Lisa Jo 202, 212–213 Salinger, J. D. 192 Sally 118 Salome (Wilde) 79 Salome dance 79–80; eroticism 82 Sandor, Gluck 126, 170 Sangalli, Rita 50, 52, 55–56 Sappington, Margo 219 sarabande 8, 12, 25 Satie, Erik 126 Schechner, Richard 200 Scheherazade 134 Schonberg, Bessie 170 The School for Husbands 203 Schubert Brothers 116, 127, 170 Schumach, Murray 173 Schwartz, Arthur 124 The Scottsboro Boys 262 Searcy, Anne 265 Seesaw 218, 240 self-expression, and dance 76 Sellars, Peter 241 serious pantomime 32, 48n45 Sermons to the Rich and Studious on Temperance and Exercise (Rush) 24 Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce) 24 Serpentine Dance 81–82 sexism 2 Shahn, Ben 82 Shakers 4, 18–19, 23n60 The Shakers 19

294  Index

Shakespeare, William 7, 21n12, 136, 160, 169 Shaking Quakers 18 Shakur, Tupac 236 Shaw, Brandon 21n12 Shawn, Ted 20n8, 101 Shelton, Suzanne 84 Sheridan, Robert Brinsley 29–30 Sherin, Edwin 240 Shields, David 226 Shimmy 96–99 Shore Leave 170 Short, Hassard 129 A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (Collier) 21n24 Showboat 99, 112, 117, 164, 173, 185, 193, 196, 237, 246, 256, 257 show dancing 26–30 shuffle 29, 45 Shuffle Along 114–115, 246 Silences (Olsen) 2 Simon, Neil 229 Simonet, Francois 31 Simonson, Lee 93 “Simply Irresistible” 259 Simpson-Serven, Ida 106 “Sing, Sing, Sing” 259 Singing in the Rain 237, 260 Sissle, Noble 114, 246 sissone 28 The Sisters 38 Six: the Musical 269 Slave laws 17 slavery 64 The Sleeping Beauty 38 Smiles 109 Smith, Cecil 128, 220 Smith, Chris 71 Smith, George Washington 33, 37, 38, 41–42, 69; career 40–41 Smith, John C. 70 Smith, John N. 42 Smith, Joseph C. 69 Smith, Oliver 171 Smoke House Dance 42 “Smokin’ Reefers” 163 Smuin, Michael 246 Snoop Dogg 236 social dancing 5 Sodi, Pietro 13 soft shoe 45 Sokolow, Anna 161, 185, 199, 224 solo dance artists 76–85

“Some Other Time” 172 Some Thought Concerning Education (Locke) 11 Somner, Sally 82 Sondheim, Stephen 169, 175, 205, 222–223, 229, 246 Song and Dance 237 Sons O’Guns 124 Sophia of Brabant 32 Sophisticated Ladies 214, 237, 246 The Sorcerer 66 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 27 Soul Train 203 Southwark Theatre 15, 24 Spanish fandango 30 Spessivtseva, Olga 125 Spewack, Sam 225 sponsored balls 25 Spring Awakening 263–264 Stagg, Charles 13 Stagg, Mary 13, 22n36 stair dance 45 Stanislavski, Konstantin 7, 75, 209, 239 Stanton, Elizabeth Candy 64 St. Denis, Ruth 65, 76, 83–85, 100, 139, 153 “Steam Heat” 224 Stearns, Jean 16, 45, 97, 136 Stearns, Marshall 16, 45, 97, 136, 249n20 Stebbins, Genevieve 65 Stepney, Francis 10, 21n24 Stieglitz, Alfred 75 Stonewall Riots of 1969 233 Stormy Weather 101 Stothart, Herbert 112 Strauss, Johann, II 58 Stravinsky, Igor 76, 126, 179 Straw Hat Revue 170 Street Scene 185 The Street Singer 124 Streets of Paris 195 Strike Up the Band 125 Stroman, Susan 220, 246, 248, 255–262, 267n7, 268n26 The Student Prince 97 Subways are for Sleeping 211, 218, 228 Sugarhill Gang 236 Sullivan, Arthur 66 Sunday in the Park with George 237 Sunderland, Margot 20n4 Sunrise at Campobello 194 The Sunshine Girl 72 Sweeney, J. W. 42 Sweeney Todd 237

Index 295

Sweet Charity 202, 203, 207, 227, 246 Swenson, Swen 228 Swing 261 Sylvain, James 33 Taglioni, Amelie 35, 39 Taglioni, Marie 35, 36 Taglioni, Paul 33, 35, 36 Tamaris, Helen 141–142 Tamborine 15 Tamiris, Helen 161, 183, 185, 191n91, 191n93 Tammany; or, The Indian Chief 29–30 Tango 73 Tango Apasionado 247, 248 Tango Argentino 261 tap dance 86 The Tap Dance Kid 246 Taubman, Howard 228 Tayeh, Sonya 269 Taylor, Joseph, Jr. 167 Taylor, Raynor 26, 99 Taylor-Corbett, Lynne 261 Taymor, Julie 263 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 76 Ted Shawn Male Dance Troupe 203 Tell, William 26 The Tempest 160 The Temple of Minerva 26 Ten Days That Shook the World 209 Terry, Walter 181 Texas Tommy 69, 71, 239 Tharp, Twyla 138, 248, 260 Theatre, Bowery 34 theatre dance 15–16; in Colonial America 12–14 Theatre de Nicolet 31 theatrical divertissements 9 Theodore, Lee Becker 239 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 160 Thompson, Lydia 61 Thompson, Robert Ferris 18 The Three Musketeers 94, 128 The Three Penny Opera 210 Three Virgins and the Devil 161, 164, 170 Tiller, Jennie 94 Tiller, John 93–94 A Time for Singing 214 The Time Machine (Wells) 74 Tintypes 221 “Tis Woman That Seduces All Mankind” 14 Todd, Arthur 23n48 “Too Darn Hot” 184

tordions 8 Tostée, Lucille 63 total theatre 123 Touch and Go 185 The touchstone, or Harlequin Traveler 27 Tough Situation 223 traditions 218–220; challenged 245–249; continue 245–249; evolution of 245–249 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet 174 transitions 19–20 Trash Can dance 186 Trend 179–180 Trial by Jury 66 A Trip to Chinatown 81 Tronto, Rudy 255 Tropical Revue 145 Tudor, Antony 163, 186 Tumble In 96 Tune, Tommy 85, 220, 228, 239–245, 255, 256 Turkey Trot 69–70 Turnbull, Julia 37, 40 Twain, Mark 2, 52, 63, 164 Two Gentlemen of Verona 222 The Two Philosophers, or, The Merry Girl 31 Tyler, Jeanne 195 Tyler, Royall 26 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 37, 55, 59 Undine, ou La Naiade 36 United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming 18; see also Shakers United States: Anna Gardie’s success in 32–33; anti-theatre laws 24–25; dance, importance of 24; Elssler tour in 38–39; French dancing masters in 33–42 United States Congress 24 The Unsinkable Molly Brown 202 Up in Central Park 183, 185 Vaillande, Suzanne 31 Valis-Hill, Constance 205 Van Buren, Martin 39 vaudeville 100–103, 115–117 Verdon, Gwen 196, 225 Very Warm for May 129 Vestris, Charles 36 Vestris, Ronzi 36 Victoria Alexandrina 59 Vienna Lusthaus 245, 247 Viertel, Jack 230, 233 Vietnam War 200, 233 Vigano, Salvatore 52

296  Index

“Virgins are Like the Fair Flow’r in Its Luster” 14 The Vision of Salome 78, 126 Vivian Beaumont Theater 259 voltas 7 Wabe, Ashea 80 Wagner, Ann 20n5 walkaround dance 44–45 Walken, Christopher 239 Walker, George 68, 70, 116 Walkowitz, Judith 79 Walsh, Thommie 240, 241 waltz 12, 25, 58–60, 73 War of 1812 30 Washington, George 9, 11, 24 Watch Your Step 92 Watt, Doug 222 Wayburn, Ned 2, 97, 103–111 Weaver, John 7, 21n11, 58 Webb, Clifton 70, 124 Webb, Margot 70 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 246 Weber, Lisa 61 Wedekind, Frank 263 Weevil Wiggle 72 Weidman, Charles 101, 102, 142, 161, 170, 179, 183, 224 Weidman, John 258 Weill, Kurt 129, 185 Weiss, Mme. Josephine 41 Wells, H. G. 74 West, William H. 45 West Side Story 2, 138, 161, 169, 173–174, 187, 189n31, 193, 212, 221, 224, 227, 231, 238, 266–267, 269 What’s in a Name 143 Wheatley, William 51, 53 Wheeldon, Christopher 269 Where’s Charley? 225 The Whims of Galatea and Mirza and Lindor 32 White, George 116 The White Fawn 53–55 white performers 1, 42, 43 Whoopee! 255 Wigman, Mary 129, 132, 139, 176, 177, 179, 190n55 Wilde, Oscar 79–80 The Wild Rose 111

Williams, Bert 46, 68, 110, 115, 118 Williams, Ethel 71 Williams, Tennessee 164, 185, 193, 198 Wilson, Meredith 228 Wiman, Dwight Deere 224 Winkler, Kevin 224, 226, 242, 244 The Wiz 246 The Wizard of Oz 104 Wodehouse, P. G. 123, 193 Wolfe, George C. 253 Wolfe, Thomas 64 Wollman, Elizabeth L. 219 Wonderful Town 173, 185 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum) 246 Woodward, Joanne 172 Woof, Woof 126 Woolman, Elizabeth L. 201 Words Without Music: A Surrealistic Ballet 133 Working 219 World War I 91 World War II 2 Wound Knee Massacre 64 Wright, Frank Lloyd 75 Xochitl 102 Yakovleff, Alex 126 “Yankee Doodle” 13 Yearby, Marlies 252–253 Ye Bare and Ye Cubb 13 The Yeoman of Guard 66 Your Arms Too Short to Box with God 246 You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown 221 Ziegfeld, Florenz 70, 80, 93, 109–110, 112, 118, 128 Zieg feld Follies 2, 104–105, 116, 118, 126, 128 Zieg feld Follies 183, 187 Zieg feld Follies of 1913 72 Zieg feld Follies of 1916 110 Zieg feld Follies of 1922 96 Zieg feld Follies of 1923 97 Zieg feld Follies of 1924 94 Zieg feld Follies of 1936 133 Ziegfeld Walk 110–111 Zimmerman Telegram 91 Zorba 210 Zorina, Vera 136