Search Results

This chapter explores the foundation of Bob Fosse’s dance style through his years as a young performer in the waning days of vaudeville, his teenage appearances in Chicago area nightclubs and burlesque houses, and the dance act he formed with his first wife, Mary Ann Niles. Fosse appeared in three films at MGM, the last of which, Kiss Me, Kate, featured a short sequence of his choreography that displayed aggressive jazz stylings, burlesque traces, and witty comic touches. It also showed the influence of Jack Cole, the American dancer and choreographer who had created his own dance idiom incorporating movement from Middle Eastern, Indian, Afro-Cuban, and other ethnic dance traditions into an athletic, sexually charged jazz dance style that was highly influential.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green realized that after On the Town their newfound success as writers required that they attempt devising a second musical. In short order they penned Billion Dollar Baby, with a score by Morton Gould, which opened on Broadway almost one year to the day after their first tuner debuted. The show, though well received, didn’t have the lasting impact of Town, but it did help them secure a gig at MGM, where they were hired to write a screenplay for a new movie version of the Broadway musical Good News. It was the beginning of a bi-coastal existence for them that would last 15 years.

This chapter discusses de Mille’s collaboration with Rodgers and Hammerstein on Oklahoma!, her first Broadway hit. It describes the integral role dance played in the show; the nature of de Mille’s working relationship with Rodgers and Hammerstein; the contributions de Mille’s dances made to the meaning of the musical as a whole; and de Mille’s desire to be seen as a partial author of the work. Quotations from notes, letters, and interviews with cast members help reconstruct the genesis of the dances and serve as resources to interpret their meaning. De Mille’s unique contributions are highlighted as distinct from those of her collaborators. The dream ballet at the end of Act I is given special attention, as is the character of the “Girl Who Fell Down,” performed by Joan McCracken in the original production.

Catherine tries to make ballet more appealing to Americans by recruiting and training “manly” men with no prior dance experience. She hires Alexis Dolinoff as her partner, répétiteur, and men’s teacher. The Littlefield Ballet gives its first performance on October 25, 1935. The Littlefield School moves into unassuming quarters at 1815 Ludlow Street. By the end of 1935, Catherine has changed the company’s name to the Philadelphia Ballet and premiered The Snow Queen at the Academy of Music. Karen Conrad and Joan McCracken emerge as leading soloists. Catherine choreographs new ballets of her own in 1936 and presents modernist works by Russian-Jewish choreographer Lasar Galpern. Jimmie Littlefield elopes with a Philadelphia widow and moves with her and her young son to a farm she owns called Zacata on the Potomac River in northern Virginia. Catherine eventually buys a bungalow nearby in Montross and the Littlefields use the area as a family retreat.

Joan McCracken leaves the Littlefields to perform at Radio City Music Hall and eventually on Broadway. Catherine stages dances for the large-scale “American Jubilee” pageant at the World’s Fair in New York in 1940. Her innovative bicycle ballet in the pageant is a tremendous hit. Al Jolson hires her for his comeback show on Broadway, Hold On to Your Hats. She is then enlisted to choreograph ice-skating routines for New York’s Center Theatre, which has been converted into an ice theater by Chicago entrepreneur Arthur Wirtz and his business partner, Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie. Wirtz soon installs Catherine as choreographer for Henie’s touring Hollywood Ice Revues as well. She takes her Littlefield Ballet on an eight-week national tour. She and Philip officially separate, although they remain friends and business associates. She and her Littlefield Ballet return to Chicago for the 1941 opera season. The company disbands after Pearl Harbor is bombed and many of Catherine’s male dancers, including Carl, enlist in the military.

Bloomer Girl (lyricist Yip Harburg, composer Harold Arlen) provides another case study of the way de Mille incorporated dance into the fabric of her Broadway musicals. The show premiered in 1944, when de Mille’s husband, Walter Prude, had just been sent to England to fight in World War II. De Mille’s letters reveal a profound need to produce meaningful work with a tragic component. She felt conflicted at being assigned the creation of humorous dances for a lighthearted depiction of star-crossed romance between a rebellious suffrage activist and a soldier in the Confederate army. She found a way to insert a previously composed ballet about a widow who loses her husband in the Civil War, a choice that elevated the show as a whole and moved audiences.

Examination of Agnes de Mille as a radical dance maker in her choreographic trifecta—Oklahoma! (1943), One Touch of Venus (1943), and Bloomer Girl (1944)—reveals an ideological shift in the production of dance on Broadway and the development of a paradigm for making dances in the musical theater. This chapter further explores de Mille’s ability to employ dance as a medium for presenting social commentary, developing character, and creating a space for female spectatorship. Her artistic project required dancers who were not merely technicians but rather actor-dancers capable of embodying character and expressing legible story through dance. Displacing the stable of Broadway chorus men and women, de Mille introduced the actor-dancer to the commercial stage, thereby developing some of the greatest dance talents of the twentieth century, including Joan McCracken, Bambi Linn, Sono Osato, and James Mitchell. Selected dances from One Touch of Venus (1943), Bloomer Girl (1944), and Carousel (1945) are analyzed.