The State of Musical Theatre Choreography: Casey Nicholaw’s "Some Like it Hot"
I saw "Some Like it Hot" after the production posted its closing date.
Casey Nicholaw’s production of Some Like it Hot played its last performance on December 30th after a year on Broadway. Upon this announcement, I stopped into the Shubert Theatre on October 22nd to see what the Tony-winning choreography was all about.
It’s a show about jazz-age dancers and musicians, among other things, but the dancing of Some Like it Hot isn’t really of then, or of now. It’s of Casey Nicholaw, a man whose body of work since 2005 makes him an institution in Broadway dance.
Adapted from the 1959 film of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe, the musical is set in 1933 and follows a jazz-tap duo act that happens to witness a triple hit by a mob boss and his goons. The friends disguise themselves as women in order to escape Chicago unrecognized, and skip town with an all-female traveling jazz band.
The opening number is “What are you Thirsty For?” meant to show that the party goes on despite prohibition. “Let loose,” sings charismatic bandleader Sweet Sue.
When you're drowning in a sea of debt
That's the time you're gonna wanna get your whistle wet
The ensemble strikes shapes on the orchestra’s punchy accents, cymbal splashes and woodblock ticks, but nobody is letting loose. The crowd of allegedly tipsy speakeasy patrons delivers sharp, controlled lines, with movement that stops (almost cleanly) in poses. The partnering is family-friendly, and I notice that the dancers don’t look at one another—they appear to be counting the music. The ensemble smiles and emotes, but it’s not entirely convincing that they’re having all the fun they say they are.
Fun is Casey Nicholaw’s credo. He recounts his professional experiences in measures of fun, ranging from “so much” to “a lot of.” He describes himself as “eighty percent light, and twenty percent dark.”
There’s just a bit of life missing from the dancing in this show, and that can be attributed only partially to the toll of a year straight at eight performances per week. (The cast I saw was all original except for ensemble replacement Ericka Hunter Yang, and Dan Horn, a swing since April of this year.) The other part speaks to a larger problem in musical theatre dance: it has gotten tired again.
The choreography finds hints of specificity in the form of lindy hop which pops up occasionally in phrases throughout the musical. It’s discordant at times when the music is straight, but it lands nicely in the first-act finale when the band does swing, and the outward direction of performance (as opposed to a partner-directed energy more authentic to lindy) makes sense in the context of the show-within-a-show scene. Nicholaw’s stance on historical dance must have evolved since 2013 when he amusingly stated,
“I research like crazy, but the funny thing is: accurate research doesn’t mean theatrically worthy research. For example, 1920s dance research is a bit boring and there isn’t a great deal of it, so I end up using an idea from the research and simply doing my own creative thing. It’s a great way to start, but then let it go. [...] Just go with your gut.”
Not only does the lindy work well to situate the musical in its period, the embedded high-energy fun of the partner swing dance advances the production’s celebratory tone that is so thoroughly Casey Nicholaw.
He will likely be remembered as standing out from his contemporaries for his use of dance as comedy. A tap dance chase scene in the second act shows off his willingness to deliver a punchline via dance. Gangsters accent their time steps with their shotguns, and problems get solved with a knee to the nuts and a flap-ball-change away. It’s possible that Casey Nicholaw knows the musical parody form as well as anyone, having directed and choreographed successful original parodies including Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone, Something Rotten, and Book of Mormon. There’s nothing in the choreography for Some Like it Hot that isn’t tried and true.
Like many Broadway choreographers, Nicholaw began his career as a chorus boy. He felt a creative impulse while performing in the musical Seussical. He tells professor Lyn Cramer,
“I told myself I didn’t want to be that person sitting backstage silently declaring how different I would do things if given the chance. I decided to man up and do something about it.”
Man up he did. In 2001 he self-produced an independent showcase of his own choreography which was well attended by industry folks whom he had connected with over the course of his performing career. Two years later he was selected to present work in the second ever DanceBreak showcase, a competitive program which places six new (without a Broadway credit) choreographers in front of producers and other potential opportunities. DanceBreak’s notable alumni are too numerous to list. (The organization has been on hiatus since 2020.) After two choreography contracts with New York City Center Encores!, he received a pivotal phone call from the director of the then upcoming Broadway musical, Spamalot. He tells the story in a video interview for Playbill:
“I got the job so easily, which was so weird. I just got a call out of the blue saying Mike Nichols would like to meet you in his apartment about choreographing a Broadway show. I was told that Jerry Mitchell had recommended me for the job because he was too busy. [...] I talked to [Nichols] for like an hour, never got my reel out, never got my resume out, and he just said after an hour of talking, ‘Well, you want the job?’”
Nicholaw had landed his jump from Broadway dancer to choreographer, and almost twenty years later his name brings to mind the kind of enthusiastic, upbeat, and precise dancing that has had a stronghold on the musical theatre dance scene throughout the 21st century. Others in the same stylistic camp are Jerry Mitchell and Susan Stroman (both of whom influenced him as mentors), and Warren Carlyle. These four director-choreographers represent the state of musical theatre dance as once again standardized.
Musical theatre dance waits around too patiently for innovators to come about and bring something fresh to musical stages. Even when they do come, the others rarely listen and learn. Innovation moves slowly as a result, and the dancing in musical theatre lags far behind new developments in dance at large, if it considers them at all. Bob Fosse was an innovator whose style caught on and became incorporated into the establishment vocabulary of theatre dance. Savion Glover and Andy Blankenbuehler are two recent innovators who have invested in musical theatre and whose choreographies have expanded on the theatrical applications of dance within the commercial space. They’ve been handed Tony awards, but little further creative control or support for experimentation. Musicals are expensive, and scarcity of investment resources discourages risk. Nicholaw, Carlyle, Stroman, and Mitchell keep getting hired, and the establishment vocabulary reigns on. Musical theatre and its dancing remain too much a genre rather than a medium, at their own peril.
Photo by Matthew Murphy