In the second of this three-part series, Tony Award-nominated performer Robyn Hurder, actor Clyde Alves, Tony-winning choreographer Casey Nicholaw and more weigh in on how the style of Broadway dance has changed.
Examining the 2022-2023 Broadway season from a choreography perspective, the crop of productions featured a vastness of style. Across 15 musicals, audiences took in pop- and hip-hop-inspired movement (“& Juliet), contemporary vocabulary (“A Beautiful Noise”), tap (“Some Like It Hot”), modern rhythm (“Sweeney Todd”), Golden Age technique (“New York, New York”), comedic musical staging (“Shucked”), music-video specificity (“KPOP”), classic musical-theater dance (“Bad Cinderella”) and an ode to Bob Fosse (“Dancin’”).
The five nominees for the 2023 Best Choreography Tony Award emphasized this range. And a look at the past five seasons of Tony nominees in this category similarly reveals a broad spectrum represented in each year. For example, the 2022 category included Bill T. Jones’ fusion of modern dance and Irish step in “Paradise Square,” Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s pop-concert approach to “SIX,” Warren Carlyle’s classic choreography in “The Music Man,” Camille A. Brown’s take on the choreopoem “for colored girls” and Christopher Wheeldon’s reimagining of Michael Jackson’s signature moves in “MJ.”
Within the context of recent Broadway seasons, 2022-2023 was on par with the trend of variety, but widen the lens, and it might have been the height of an overall transition in choreographic style.
Judging by the Best Choreography nominees from 1988-1993, today there is more diversity of style. From 1988-1993, shows like “Grand Hotel,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Crazy for You,” “Guys & Dolls” and “Jelly’s Last Jam” were in contention for the Tony. Certainly, there are differences between the movement in these shows, but broadly speaking they are more similar to one another than, say, “KPOP” and “Some Like It Hot.”
Robyn Hurder, current star of “A Beautiful Noise” and a Tony nominee for her dance-heavy performance in “Moulin Rouge!,” has clocked the stylistic shift over her two-decade career. “When I started out, everything was very traditional,” she said, referencing the vocabularies of the Golden Age and what is known as “theater dance.”
Her husband, actor Clyde Alves (who played a prominent dance role in “New York, New York”), agreed. “It really was a lot more traditional, and now we’re kind of all over the place in a beautiful way,” Alves said.
“Now it’s becoming very contemporary,” Hurder specified.
Both of Jen Weber’s Tony-nominated shows (“& Juliet” and “KPOP”) relied heavily on inspiration from music videos and current cultural touchpoints. This summer’s “Once Upon a One More Time” featured hard-hitting choreography by Keone and Mari Madrid, who have choreographed music videos for Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish as well as dance for television on “World of Dance” and “So You Think You Can Dance” in addition to their company’s concert-dance-meets-theater-dance pieces. The Madrids’ style combines lyrical, hip-hop and competition dance in a vocabulary all their own. In spring 2024, Rick and Jeff Kuperman — known to theater audiences as the duo behind Off-Broadway’s “Alice by Heart” — will bring their kinetic, high-intensity choreography to Broadway in “The Outsiders.”
Of course, this was propelled by predecessors like Tony winners Twyla Tharp, Andy Blankenbuehler and Sergio Trujillo (to name a few) who incorporated high-impact movement, a blend of pedestrian and theater movement and social dance, respectively, into their choreography. All of this has pushed towards today’s contemporary style.
Even musicals created in a classic style weave in contemporary features, as with Casey Nicholaw’s Tony-winning choreography in “Some Like It Hot.” “This is the kind of dancing I grew up with,” Nicholaw said. “This [show] was able to honor that and then hopefully make it also feel fresh and have it feel like a classic, but modern.”
“Art and dance are ever-evolving but they are always influenced by what came before — as we all are,” said “Bad Cinderella” choreographer (and former Broadway performer) JoAnn M. Hunter. “There is room ‘stylistically’ for all types of dance and movement and it is up to the creators and their point of view to be able to tell stories through movement. The goal is to service the piece as a whole.”
Some observers believe that today’s choreography also features greater athleticism. But actors Alves and Hurder agree that choreography has always been athletic. Hurder specifically pointed to the “Backstage Romance” number in “Moulin Rouge!” and what’s known as the “heat wave” section in “Music and the Mirror” from “A Chorus Line” as being “killer” on the body.
The athletic demand may actually have stayed relatively steady, “but the style of it has completely changed,” said Alves. “It’s a lot more jarring. It is less fluid in some ways. You have to be totally adaptable as a dancer to be able to handle that.”
“I come from a strict ballet training; I’m a classic happy-tap showgirl,” Hurder said. “Even with ‘Moulin Rouge!’ and Sonya [Tayeh]’s choreography, I was terrified, because I was like, ‘This is not my wheelhouse.’ It really is transforming, and I love watching it, but for me, it’s a little bit of work to get on board.”
“You can always do more than you think you can do,” Alves said. “Watching Robyn, I saw that with ‘Moulin Rouge!’ and a complete switch of style. It’s scary, but it’s fun.”
Andy Blankenbuehler noted that a gamut of styles can help attract, and please, a wider net of audiences. “We are in a time of flux,” he said. “I’m not sure who’s going to the theater right now, and so I think it’s important to have lots of different kinds of dance.”
“It’s van Gogh. It’s paint against the wall [in a] who-cares-about-style kind of way because everything works,” Blankenbuehler described. “Chris Wheeldon can go do ‘An American in Paris’ and that works. Then you can do something like [Sonya Tayeh’s work in] ‘Kung Fu’ and it’s going to work. It just has to be story-appropriate. People right now are demanding truth.”