Many recognize the names of director-choreographers like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, and Susan Stroman – each of whom have made significant contributions to musical theatre dance and have been recognized as such by the Tony awards they have accrued; however, the director-choreographer who has received the most Tony awards has been Tommy Tune. One of the reasons is that, in addition to his work as a director and choreographer, he has consistently been recognized for his talent as a performer as well.
Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is a thoroughly researched and well written study of the life and work of this often underrated director-choreographer. The reason for his lack of recognition recently is because his last successful musical on Broadway was The Will Rodgers Follies in 1991 and, although it won the Tony award for Best Musical and Best Director and Best Choreographer for Tune, he has not been represented on the Broadway stage as a director-choreographer since then. He has concentrated most of his efforts since the early 90s on touring as a performer. In addition, while Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse have consistently had revivals of many of their musicals brought back to Broadway, that has not been the case for the musicals which Tune directed and/or choreographed. Out of sight; out of mind.
What Winkler has done is to bring forward the unique contributions that Tune has made to the American musical theatre beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the early 1990s. Much like his well-received biography Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical, Winkler brings his twenty plus years as a curator and archivist at the New York Public Library as well as his previous experience as a professional dancer to bear on the research for this most recent book. While others who write about Broadway musical theatre director-choreographers emphasize biographical detail over a critical review and analysis of the dances themselves, Winkler follows in the tradition of writers like Deborah Jowitt, whose Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance, threads biographical detail into her discussion and analysis of the plays and dances of her subject.Footnote 1 With Winkler, the reader goes right to the work that distinguishes Tune from that of many in his profession – his ability to direct and choreograph with a high level of professionalism, a keen attention to detail and an ability to articulate a unique vision for each production that his collaborators are eager to help him realize.
Like Bennett and Stroman, Tune danced from the time he was a child; and, like them, he was choreographing his peers in neighborhood productions put on in the family garage as well as for school performances. He continued his studies in the BFA program at the exceptional theatre program at the University of Texas in Austin and later completed a MFA in Directing from the University of Houston. On the day he arrived in New York City in 1963, following his first audition, he received his first professional job offer performing for a summer stock tour of Irma La Douce.
Two years later, he made his Broadway musical theatre debut in the Hal Prince directed Baker Street, which was choreographed by Lee Becker Theodore, who played the role of Anybodys in the 1957 production of West Side Story and who was the founder of the American Dance Machine, a living archive of the best of musical theatre choreographies. The following year, while in an elevator at the Variety Arts rehearsal studio, he met Michael Bennett, who offered him a role in the chorus of his first Broadway choreographed musical, A Joyful Noise. With that, Tune had found a friend, mentor and collaborator who would be instrumental to his development as a performer and as a choreographer.
Tune’s career as a director had an unexpected yet propitious beginning. In 1976, he was offered the opportunity to direct Eve Merriam’s ground breaking play, The Club. Set in 1903 at an all-male club, the eight characters are all played by women. Merriam wrote a highly satiric play that challenged popularly conceived notions of gender roles.
Tune was the only male associated with the production. In his role as director and choreographer, he was able to help each actress clearly delineate the gender characteristics particular to their own character. As Winker writes: “The masculine and the feminine co-mingled, creating a provocative androgyny.”Footnote 2 Tune brought this notion that any actor could play anything to this production and he continued to carry that idea into subsequent productions he would direct.
Chapters 2 through 7 focus on each of the productions going forward including his breakout Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), which included the infamous “Angelette March,” in which six female chorus dancers were attached to two inflatable sex dolls – all dressed like drill team marchers, and which took a not so subtle swipe at the overt sexuality of televised cheerleaders and “The Aggie Song,” in which the University of Texas A&M football team act out in clog dance and buck-and-wing what they expected to do when they finally arrived at the Chicken Ranch whorehouse. In this musical, Tune purposefully took a nonjudgmental approach to prostitution and used that to comment on political corruption and hypocritical sexual attitudes of his day. These chapters include analysis and commentary on other well-known Tune musicals like A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980) Nine (1982), My One and Only (1983), Grand Hotel (1990) concluding with the pinnacle success of his career, The Will Rodgers Follies in 1991.Footnote 3
Winkler takes a thorough and close look at each production in terms of its history, conceptional development and the specific choreographic ways in which Tune creates character, mood and stylization appropriate to that particular show. As one example of how he does this, let’s focus on the origin of Tune’s unique and highly successful production of Grand Hotel based on the 1932 film of the same name, which was itself based on the popular novel by Vicki Baum.
Set in Berlin of 1928, it tells the story of several characters whose lives intersect for brief periods of time throughout their stay at this lavish hotel in a disquieting time just before the Depression and the devastating tragedies that would soon engulf the world. This unsettling musical begins and ends with the character of the Doctor repeating: “Grand Hotel Berlin. Always the same. People come. People go.”Footnote 4
Tune soon established the convention of the revolving door as its central metaphor. Rather than an elaborate set, he relied on four mirrored columns in the center of the ballroom adding to that the constantly changing and rearrangement of ballroom chairs to establish various locales that could isolate intimate conversations or surround an action with onlookers and commentators on a central action occurring center stage.
As Winkler makes clear, steps were secondary to Tune’s overall insistence that movement should dominant when thinking about staging. He took his inspiration from many different sources – Kabuki theatre, silent films, and from ballet, particularly the story ballets of Antony Tudor, which he admired for their intricacy in allowing the simplest of gesture to convey so much to the audience. With most of his productions, including this one, he would begin each rehearsal with a warm up that would entail simple yoga exercises, various breathing techniques and he would always conclude with a circle to bring the cast together in a focused way.
Winkler documents that for each production, Tune would employ the expertise of other dancers and choreographers to help him discover the specific movement vocabulary most appropriate to the show. In that way, he was not precious about his contribution to that aspect of the production. In the case of Grand Hotel, for example, he brought in the founders and co-artistic directors of the American Ballroom Theater company, Yvonne Marceau and Pierre Dulaie. With their consummate expertise as ballroom dancers playing the roles of the Countess and the Gigolo, he was able to convey the recurring metaphor of the tension between life and death throughout the show. Their “What She Needs” was a number that could be relied upon to receive one of the biggest ovations each evening.
The last chapter of the book gives itself over to discussing Tune’s performance in musicals and his touring with the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and other theatrical endeavors. Afterall, he was at heart a song-and-dance man and that love for performing on the stage gave him a special empathy when working with performers when he was directing and choreographing.
Winkler’s experience as a dancer is evident in his descriptions of the choreography of selected dances. Sometimes, he brackets dance terms with simple descriptors so that readers unfamiliar with dance terminology might see in their mind’s eye what a specific movement might look like. Some might read this book and wish that there was more biographical detail about Tune’s personal life; but, Winkler made the choice to focus on Tune as a director-choreographer and as a performer, and I think that he was correct to do so. Sometimes, biographies of musical theatre celebrities become much more voyeuristic about their private lives and less about what made that person’s contribution to the field of musical theatre so important. For those readers who are interested in learning more about the broader context of Tune’s contribution on the American musical theatre stage, I would direct them to the extensive commentary Winkler provides in the Notes section of the book.
As a part of the Broadway Legacies Series of the Oxford University Press, Winkler’s book on the work of Tommy Tune has made a significant contribution to our deeper appreciation for musical theatre, and for musical theatre dance in particular.
