Introduction

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190631093.003.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-8

Author(s):

Liza Gennaro

Keyword(s):

Musical Theater ◽

Award Winning ◽

Bob Fosse ◽

Katherine Dunham

I come to my interest in musical theater dance genetically. My father, Peter Gennaro, was a Tony Award winning choreographer and star dancer/choreographer on Broadway and television variety shows. My mother was a ballerina-turned-Broadway-dancer who danced for Bronislava Nijinska, Agnes de Mille, and Michael Kidd. My father, before becoming a choreographer in his own right, danced for Katherine Dunham, Hanya Holm, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. My parents were voracious dance and theater goers and I spent my childhood and teenage years seeing great dance and theater that included Judith Jamison in the premiere of Alvin Ailey’s “Cry,” Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first performances with The American Ballet Theatre, the premiere performance of Jerome Robbins’ ...

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Making Broadway Dance

10.1093/oso/9780190631093.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Liza Gennaro

Keyword(s):

Musical Theater ◽

Character Analysis ◽

Dance Studies ◽

George Balanchine ◽

Script Analysis ◽

Depth Analysis ◽

Art Design ◽

Bob Fosse ◽

Katherine Dunham

Musical theater dance is an ever-changing and evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists requiring dramaturgical understanding; character analysis; knowledge of history, art, design; and, most importantly, an extensive knowledge of dance, both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis—derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theater and dance—belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music, and lyric. The standard adage, “when you can’t speak anymore sing, when you can’t sing anymore dance,” expresses its importance in musical theater as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral, and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research, and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway’s most influential dance-makers, including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Donald McKayle, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett, and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theater and dance scholars, students, practitioners, and Broadway fans.

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Everything is Choreography

10.1093/oso/9780190090739.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin Winkler

Keyword(s):

Musical Theater ◽

Full Scale ◽

Scale Analysis ◽

High Stakes ◽

Broadway Musicals ◽

Bob Fosse ◽

Funding Environment

Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full-scale analysis of the work of Tommy Tune, and his place in a lineage of Broadway’s great director-choreographers. The decade of the 1980s was considered a low point for the American musical. Tune’s predecessors in the art of complete musical staging like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett were either dead or withdrawn from the Broadway arena. Yet it was the period of Tune’s greatest success. The book examines how he adapted to an increasingly corporatized, high-stakes producing and funding environment. It considers how Tune kept the American musical a thriving, creative enterprise at a time when Broadway was dominated by British imports. It investigates Tune’s work since the mid-1990s, when he shifted his attentions to touring and regional productions, far from the glare of Broadway. Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career, and the book details the deft balancing act that kept him working as a popular singer-dancer-actor while he was directing a series of striking and influential Broadway musicals.

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Taking the Reins

10.1093/oso/9780190631093.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 106-144

Author(s):

Liza Gennaro

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Musical Theater ◽

Peter Pan ◽

West Side ◽

West Side Story ◽

Close Analysis ◽

Artistic Vision ◽

Male Dominated ◽

Bob Fosse

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

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