To me, dancing is an opportunity to exist in an alternate reality. With my imagination moving galaxies per minute, there’s no telling what I will do, when or how—and that’s my escape from this world. It’s common for my mind to drift off and borrow ideas from a character in a Disney movie while performing […]

The closing months of the 2016–17 season brought a glut of extraordinary music and dance to Broadway’s stages, and the superabundance has left 2017–18 looking a bit anemic. Partly it’s real estate—there are only so many Broadway theaters; in June, nearly three dozen were occupied. The only musical scheduled to open this summer was Prince […]

Apart from having won the Tony Award for best choreography, the dances in Damn Yankees, West Side Story and the 1994 revival of Show Boat have little in common. Not the choreographers—Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and Susan Stroman—or the composers—Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern. Not the dancers, either—the standouts were […]

I have always felt a need to communicate and, even more importantly, to be understood. But as a child, I always hit an emotional wall when trying to speak. Although my great-aunt Rose had no connection to dance, she intuitively saw that I needed an outlet, and recommended that I take a movement class. It […]

It doesn’t look like your great-grandfather’s jitterbug. Yes, the year is 1945, and yes, the setting is a jazz club. But these swing dancers are in the new musical Bandstand, directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler. The number, “Nobody,” is a paean to determination—”You know who tells me, ‘Stop’? Nobody.” The choreography begins as metaphor […]

As more and more stars from movies and television get their kicks doing Broadway musicals, more and more choreographers have to find steps for them to dance. Sometimes it’s not hard: Denis Jones discovered that Tony Danza had trained in tap when they worked on Honeymoon in Vegas; Spencer Liff had spent years choreographing for […]