Kevin Winkler - Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

THE BROADWAY LEGACIES SERIES

Geoffrey Block, Series Editor

Series Board

Tim Carter

Kara Gardner

Kim Kowalke

Dominic McHugh

Jeffrey Magee

Carol J. Oja

Steve Swayne

Stephen Banfield, Emeritus

Larry Starr, Emeritus

South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten

Jim Lovensheimer

Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical

Charlotte Greenspan

To Broadway, to Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick

Philip Lambert

Irving Berlins American Musical Theater

Jeffrey Magee

Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

Dominic McHugh

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical

Todd Decker

Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War

Carol J. Oja

Well Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart

Dominic Symonds

Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance

Kara Gardner

The Shuberts and their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfelds Rivals

Jonas Westover

Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical

Kevin Winkler

Pal Joey: The History of a Heel

Julianne Lindberg

Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical, Revised Edition

Tim Carter

Sweet Mystery: The Musical Works of Rida Johnson Young

Ellen M. Peck

The Big Parade: Meredith Willsons Musicals from The Music Man to 1491

Dominic McHugh

Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Winkler, Kevin, author.

Title: Everything is choreography : the musical theater of

Tommy Tune / Kevin Winkler.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |

Series: Broadway legacies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021027797 (print) | LCCN 2021027798 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190090739 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190090753 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Tune, TommyCriticism and interpretation. |

Musical theater producers and directorsUnited States. |

ChoreographersUnited States. | MusicalsNew York (State)New YorkHistory and criticism. | MusicalsUnited StatesHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML429.T86 W55 2021 (print) | LCC ML429.T86 (ebook) |

DDC 782.1/4092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027797

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027798

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190090739.001.0001

As always, for Richard

In real life, as opposed to a stage name in a theater playbill, Tommy Tune, the subject of this fine book by Kevin Winkler, Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune, was indeed assigned the musical name Tommy Tune upon his birth in 1939 in Wichita Falls, Texas. By the time he was twenty-six, Tune was taller than six feet six and a seasoned performer on Broadway, and by the age of thirty-five he had received the first of his ten Tony Awards for his dancing performance as a Featured Actor in Seesaw (1973). A few years later, in 1978, Tune co-directed and choreographed his first Broadway show, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, for which he received a Drama Desk Award. From then until the early 1990s, Tune was consistently the most successful director-choreographer on Broadway.

While Whorehouse did not receive a Tony, each of Tunes five succeeding showsA Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine (1980), Nine (1982), My One and Only (1983), Grand Hotel (1989), and

In the Introduction to his pioneering study of the highly successful but lesser-known Tune, Winkler, himself an award-winning author for Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (2018), published earlier in the ever-growing series Oxfords Broadway Legacies, writes that in the 1980s, after the British had firmly established a bulkhead on Broadway and dominated the musical landscape with mechanized spectacles, Tune almost singlehandedly reminded audiences of the pleasures of imaginatively staged song and dance performed by larger than life personalities. And although Robbins, Fosse, Champion, and Bennett, were fine dancers who performed professionally earlier in their careers, only Tune managed to keep his dancing shoes throughout an extraordinary decades-long performing career. Both as a performer and a choreographer, Tune openly expressed a special fondness for tap, but his personal and choreographic styles demonstrate an eclectic range of dance styles from ballroom to vaudeville.

Winkler provides an invaluable service in his role as a dance scholar who knows all the steps and stagings and possesses the ability to convey this knowledge in a remarkable combination of meaningful description and insightful analysis. This skill is especially valuable because director-choreographers inhabit a territory that is invariably threatened with, if not extinction, historical amnesia. Sadly, this common fate is perhaps more true with Tunes work than the choreographic conceptions of Robbins, Champion, Fosse, and Bennett, all of whom created work that remains in our collective stage memory and in film adaptations such as Robbinss West Side Story and Fosses Cabaret.

Unfortunately, the two major film versions based on Tunes directorial and choreographic stage vision illustrate the problem. As Winker explains, the choreography of the 1982 film adaptation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas bore little resemblance to the show, and the 2009 adaptation Nine, which eliminated nearly half the score (directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall), similarly bore virtually no resemblance to Tunes original production. When Everything Is Choreography in a Tune musical, the absence of Tunes indispensable choreography and staging is deeply felt. Fortunately, some stagings of Nine continue to follow Tunes theatrical vision.