THE PRACTICAL ART OF STAGE DANCING
Yankee Doodle Dandy danced the buck and wing. His father was a minstrel clogger who shed blackface for Irish-themed variety, a song-and-dance man who recruited his wife, daughter, and son into a family vaudeville act. They were the Four Cohans, and the son—George M.—was born on the Third of July. He was twelve in 1890, when buck-and-wing was red-hot, and he set out to master every step he could. Brassy, self-assured, he introduced his Lively Bootblack act as “his own conception” of buck dancing, stressing difficult steps of his own invention. But vaudeville audiences weren’t so interested. So instead of clogging in place, Cohan snapped his head back and ran up a wall. Or he started out lazy and let the music send him into a frenzy. His secret was his enthusiasm, energy unbound. That and a few trick steps, he soon realized, triggered a larger ovation than any carefully rehearsed routine. One term for this kind of act was “endurance dancer.” (“I danced and danced for applause until I got a hand.”) As Cohan would explain to the readers of The Saturday Evening Post, in an article titled “The Practical Side of Dancing,” “The only way to make a hit with the public was to do something eccentric, something outside of the true art of dancing.”
In billing and salary, he understood, masters of the true art rarely got very far. Cohan’s own father, to pick the most searing example, wrote plays but was forever pigeonholed as a “song-and-dance man.” The variety axiom “Once a dancer, always a dancer” had two sides. When George wrote his first nonmusical play and audiences literally cried out “Give us a dance,” it was as much a compliment to the appeal of his footwork as it was a criticism of his fledgling skills as a playwright. All the same, it was an enforcement of status boundaries. “The mere learning to dance on the stage is no detriment,” Cohan wrote. “It’s the making of a reputation as a dancer that retards a man’s progress.” He was determined to break free.
That he did, escaping into—and helping to create—American musical comedy. Cohan showed ’em, becoming a song-and-dance man who owned a theater on Broadway named after himself. The populist, flag-waving plots of his shows were fables of underdog triumph in the American vernacular. A few of his songs would prove immortal—“Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—but Cohan knocked out his compositions in bulk. Many were coon songs, their rhyming patter bouncing along on the ragtime rhythm of dance steps. Though he had made his reputation as more than a dancer, his cocksure walk and the way he wore his hat over one eye were as central to his persona as the slang he delivered through one side of his mouth. His was an Irish style, an urban American one, part George Primrose, part George Walker. His shows had drive, and they were driven by dance. Even when, as a director, he adapted someone else’s work, the ingredient he invariably added was more dancing. The phrase one critic applied to Cohan’s 1922 production of Little Nelly Kelly might stand for all his productions: “a general dancing rough-house.”
It was partly due to Cohan that American musical comedy danced. But his was also a dance-mad age, as the animal dances of vice districts stampeded across the country and up and down the social scale. There was a craze for the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear. Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a ballyhoo in black slang, was the hit of 1911. The title of another song Berlin wrote that year was self-fulfilling prophecy: “Everybody’s Doing It Now.” “Syncopation is the soul of every American,” he told Theatre Magazine. This was a creed that, as a Jewish immigrant whose family had fled Russian pogroms, he had learned from a Negro ragtime pianist in New York’s Chinatown at a dive called Nigger Mike’s. (Mike was also a Russian Jew.) The syncopations of James Reese Europe’s black dance band propelled the foxtrot of Vernon and Irene Castle, a clean-cut white couple who made ragtime dancing respectable. (For Dancing Times, Irene explained how she and her husband took “nigger dances” and toned them down for the drawing room.) Their casual chic gave the middle classes access to upper-class taste and permission to enjoy American music from below. The main channels through which dance songs were introduced to the general public were vaudeville and Broadway shows—for example, the Castles performing Berlin’s “The Syncopated Walk” in the 1914 revue Watch Your Step. A new dance that audience members might try was practically a requirement for a successful production.
While a tap step or two might enter the repertoire of average folk, tap—at least in white culture—was more theatrical than social. It could, however, be done in a group. When a vaudevillian like Frank Young—who informed the newspapers that he had learned his first buck steps from the Negroes of Evansville, Indiana, and that he had thereafter acquired finesse from a European dancing master—needed some extra cash, he could get a job in one of the many schools that taught chorines, en masse.
CHORUS LINE
There were chorus girls in musical comedies and chorus girls in vaudeville, but nowhere were they more essential than in the revue. The revue began as a review, a collection of topical songs and sketches lightly parodying the preceding theatrical season. The French spelling came courtesy of the impresario and publicity mastermind Florenz Ziegfeld, who modeled his revues after the Folies Bergères of Paris. From 1907 through the 1930s, Ziegfeld’s Follies set the standard for spare-no-expense in costumes and scenic effects. Money, properly applied, could also buy the most talented star performers (including the top black star, Bert Williams). But “Glorifying the American Girl” was Ziegfeld’s aim before it became his motto, and beautiful young women, dangled as a not-quite-attainable ideal, were the Follies’ main attraction. Ziegfeld chose the girls himself, and only after an aspirant’s beauty was established did she present her singing and dancing talents for inspection. These were usually limited, and the dancing in the first editions, staged by the partially deaf Julian Mitchell, was more fashion show than choreography: fifty girls personifying taxicabs in headlamp brassieres.
The staging of musical comedies wasn’t all that different. In an article of 1913, Ned Wayburn—that Inventor of Ragtime and creator of the Minstrel Misses—characterized musical comedy staging as a search for “effects”: turning chorus girls into table lamps, raising the curtain just enough to reveal pretty ankles and dancing feet. Wayburn spoke from authority. He regularly arranged five or six shows at a time. He amassed an ever-expanding directory of thousands of chorus girls, complete with names, addresses, and measurements, divided into the going categories of statuesque showgirls, in-betweens, delicate types, and dancers. He wrote articles about how the ample chorus girls of yore had been replaced by thinner girls, more lithe and livelier—in the lingo of the era, they had to have “ginger.” Son of a Pittsburgh machinery manufacturer, Wayburn carried himself like a Captain of Industry, portly, self-serious, never without his pince-nez. He directed with a dog whistle and a megaphone. Through the thirties, he ran the biggest chorus-girl factory in America.
In 1915, Wayburn took over the staging of the Follies and introduced the swivel-and-pause Ziegfeld Walk so that the showgirls could negotiate steep staircases in style. When the critic Edmund Wilson, writing about the Follies in 1923, lamented a resemblance to military drills and goose-stepping, he was talking about the Walk, but also about “precision dancing,” a tradition that stemmed from England and the turn-of-the-century efforts of the Manchester textile manufacturer John Tiller. Finding chorus dancing too untidy, Tiller applied industrial discipline to the training of his own Tiller Girls. (Rescuing the girls from poverty and its temptations, he argued, was a noble side benefit.) Their routines were, in fact, drills. The girls practiced them endlessly to achieve a perfect unison. Linking their arms around one another’s waists, they formed a unit, a line that kicked and kicked and revolved and kicked some more. During the twenties, multiple squads of Tiller Girls and their many imitators overran Europe, an invasion of Girls between the wars. European intellectuals analyzed them as symbols of mass production in the Machine Age, the body broken down into component parts, the individual subsumed into the collective. To Siegfried Kracauer, their speedy step dancing made the sound “business, business.” In his eyes, the Girls were an American product, but the Follies and other American shows first imported them from England.
Even Edmund Wilson considered the choral maneuvers of the Tiller Girls to be characteristically American—“what the American male really regards as beautiful: the efficiency of mechanical movement.” But characteristic American chorus dancing was actually a bit different. Ned Wayburn gave his account in a mid-twenties instruction manual titled The Art of Stage Dancing. Essentially a book-length ad for his school, the manual explained “the kind of dancing that one can commercialize.” On top of a foundation of limbering stretches, Wayburn taught Musical Comedy, Acrobatic, Exhibition Ballroom, and Modern Americanized Ballet. (The last promised to collapse tedious years of training into a few months.) The fifth category was Tap and Step, which included buck dance, soft shoe, waltz clog, and “straight (or English) clog.” The term tap dancing, sporadic through the teens, was catching on. Tap and Step, Wayburn wrote, was in the tradition of George Primrose. It was dancing that “expresses American syncopated rhythms.” His book explains how to build a time step and a break, the basic time step that would rule Broadway from then on. (Eddie Russell’s 1924 manual The Art of Buck and Wing Dance Simplified outlines the same version, suggesting that a dancer hum eight bars of “Turkey in the Straw.”) Surprisingly, Wayburn also stressed the distinct sound produced by each way of striking the floor, an attention to tone that was likely to be lost in the thunder of massed chorines.
For shoes, Wayburn recommended ankle-strap Mary Janes or laced Oxfords. Only very advanced pupils needed to consider clogs or split soles. Most professionals, Wayburn added, preferred the “Haney metal plates,” which appear to have been a recent development. Dancers in search of a louder, brighter sound had been hammering nails into their soles since way back, but the mid-twenties was when the concept spawned a mass-marketed product. One story puts the plates on the shoes used in No, No, Nanette in 1925, but if so, the metal passed beneath the notice of reviewers. The earliest patent seems to be the one issued to William John Haney of Indiana in 1927, quickly followed by James Selva and Salvatore Capezio, men whose main business had been making ballet shoes. (Later ads for Selva taps pointed back to 1925 as the beginning of the line.)
Wayburn described tap numbers as “bread and butter dances, something you can sell most easily in the present show market.” Yet the core of his teaching was Musical Comedy dancing, the most eclectic category of all, “a cross between the ballet and the Ned Wayburn type of tap and step.” This mix might include handstands, cartwheels, splits, or high kicks, but Wayburn drew a firm distinction between straight acrobatics and acrobatic dancing. Doing one trick after another was for the circus; dancing spiced with tricks was the more lucrative stuff of musical comedies and revues. Largely interchangeable, the routines Wayburn taught were constructed to fit any thirty-two-bar song, the standard template on Tin Pan Alley. One step brought the dancers onstage, another took them off, and those in between were built to goad applause.
To a writer in The New York Times in 1925, a chorus with some ballet training was the mark of the new. Technical standards were rising, and chorus girls were working harder than ever. As the decade progressed, dance directors piled on references to modernity in crankshaft dances and skyscraper routines. They arranged people like pistons and made metal strike metal. Fad dances came and went. Tap persisted.
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Simply executing the routines wasn’t quite enough. “You must throw your personality into it,” Wayburn advised. More important than the step was the manner in which the step was sold. It could be a smile, an attitude, or something more intangible such as “atmosphere.” Personality, idiosyncrasy heightened into style—this made the difference between a dancer in the line and a soloist, between a chorus girl and a star. (Wayburn’s instruction was directed almost exclusively toward young women; the book’s references to “boys” are few and perfunctory; his school offered males only private lessons.) Wayburn and Ziegfeld always said that they were on the lookout for a girl who, often unconsciously, phrased or accentuated in some slightly different and pleasing fashion. As much as the story of the chorus girl who becomes the leading lady was a fantasy, it did actually happen. The dancing stars of the Follies had that extra something. Ann Pennington made the most of her four-foot-ten-inch frame and dimpled knees. Her every move was devil-may-care: tossing her curls, shaking her hips. In Wayburn’s book, he brags about his former student as one of the “leading exponents of ‘Tap and Step Dancing,’” but the tap Pennington does in films of the late twenties is minimal and messy, a side effect of her pep.
Marilyn Miller, another Wayburn pupil, was Ziegfeld’s biggest success. She was four when she joined her stepfather’s vaudeville act, and her performing never lost a childlike exuberance. Framed by blond ringlets, her darling smile and sunshiny eyes captured the hearts of a generation of theatergoers. In 1918, when she joined the Follies, she was twenty. Two years later, she shot to fame in the Ziegfeld-produced Jerome Kern musical Sally. It was a Cinderella story, the era’s favorite plot, tracking the rise of an orphan who makes it into—where else?—the Follies. By the time of Miller’s next show, Sunny, she was the highest-paid performer on Broadway, the ingenue queen of musical comedy in the twenties.
At the end of that decade, when sound films came in, Hollywood hired Miller to reproduce those landmark performances, and so, acknowledging the time lag and the change of medium, we can still catch a glimpse of what the fuss was about. Miller’s joy shines through, though not quite with movie-star projection. “Come on, let’s have some fun,” she says before her tap number in Sunny (1930). Flat-footed, in pants, she starts at an easy tempo, knocking out stop-and-start rhythms before building to turns and leg-crossing ballet jumps. In “All I Want to Do, Do, Do Is Dance,” a tap number added to the film of Sally (1929), Miller wears a skirt, but there’s still a disjuncture between the feminine styling of her upper body and the drags, swivels, and heavy breaks of her lower half. The fun she’s having is that of a girl playing at boys’ games with no intention of being mistaken for a man. Her technique may be beginner-intermediate and sometimes wobbly, yet her smile never dims. When Miller tied on her ballet shoes, critics of her own time found her “poetical,” but her sloppy, superficial ballet technique holds up less well on film. A musical theater star of the twenties could count on the trick of turning on her tiptoes to make an audience swoon. Sally’s debut with the Follies, the culmination of the Cinderella plot, came in the form of a Butterfly Ballet. It had to. Ballet signified aristocratic refinement and fairy-tale endings. Tap was for horsing around.
ECCENTRICS
Horsing around is what the era’s male musical comedy stars did. Leon Errol, a Follies regular and Marilyn Miller’s co-star in the stage version of Sally, was a physical comedian, but his drunk act was a dance. He specialized in “rubberlegs,” a term that explains itself, as does the similar label “legomania,” both in the general category of “eccentric.” The cartwheels, splits, and walkovers favored by women constituted a female parallel—Evelyn Law hopping across the stage with one foot nuzzling her ear. But “eccentric” was principally reserved for men, for funnymen. Most tapped.
A child of the prairie, Fred Stone grew up as a blackface breakdown dancer. With David Montgomery, he broke into musical comedy playing a buck-and-winging Moses and Aaron. In 1903, the pair found greater fame as the Tin Man and the Scarecrow in the original Wizard of Oz, where, in straw-stuffed clothing, Stone fashioned the archetypal eccentric dance character, ever on the verge of collapse. One critic noted the “perfect rhythm with which he does the anatomically impossible.” Montgomery died in 1917, but Stone lasted as a Broadway draw through the twenties. When he made it into movies, it was as a nondancing character actor. (He’s the bulb-nosed father of Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams.) It was Stone who said that ragtime changed stage dancing, and it was his eccentric type that he meant. Ragtime syncopations expressed through African-derived isolations: that could make white America laugh.
Lauded as Stone’s successor, Harland Dixon was a superior dancer. This was the same Harland Dixon who had tried to copy George Primrose’s style and it came out funny. In the beginning, he was a wing dancer, stringing together eight different wing steps in sixty-four bars of music. One day, he put in what he considered a “rest step,” slowly drawing in a leg. The step got a laugh and also a bigger hand than any of his exhausting wings. “From then on,” Dixon later said, “I never did wings except in hotel lobbies when other dancers were around.” Around 1912, Dixon gave up blackface, and he and his partner, Jimmy Doyle, moved from burlesque into vaudeville. They did challenge dances, imitation dances: Italian, Chinese, Russian, Negro. Dixon’s Irish jig was a display of confrontational temperament, a style he admitted to having stolen from Jimmy Monahan, who jigged with a glass of beer on his head at Coney Island. Dixon was less concerned with coining steps than with using them to convey character; when he played a man in a dentist’s office, he tapped out his trepidation all over the chair. This helped him and Doyle fit into musicals, and after the pair split in 1921, Dixon continued to move between vaudeville and Broadway. Critics adored him, but it wasn’t until well after Dixon retired that he appeared in a movie, Something to Sing About, a 1937 film starring and produced by his buddy James Cagney; in a sailor number, he shows his knack for turning an ordinary tap routine into farce.
James Barton may have been an even greater comedy dancer. Born into an Irish-American theatrical family in 1890, he performed from age four, but he didn’t make it onto Broadway until he was nearly thirty. In 1923, he carried Dew Drop Inn with some fourteen different routines, including burlesques of a dying swan and of a waltz danced earlier in the show. For the critic Alexander Woollcott, Barton could be compared only with Nijinsky and Chaplin. Heywood Broun hailed him as a genius, citing his ability to be “sublime and grotesque at the same time.” Reviewers described Barton, like Master Juba, as dancing with his toes, his legs, his ribs. His role in Dew Drop Inn had been created for Bert Williams just before Williams died, and the reviewer’s comment that Barton was “as negroid as Bert Williams used to be” was likely prompted not just by his blackface but by his pelvic freedom. Tap dancers—black and white—recognized Barton as a great in their field, and he called himself a drummer who danced best with a good jazz band. Nevertheless, as one tap master phrased it, Barton was “more fun to watch than to listen to.” In 1933, he began a five-year run as a sharecropper in the play Tobacco Road. He played Hickey in The Iceman Cometh and memorable cowboys. When cast in a musical, he would break out his soft shoe, but few thought of him as a dancer anymore. Only the 1929 short After Seben preserves his early style. There, his wit is evident—anarchic, self-mocking—but it’s hard now to see him as more than a white guy in blackface, shown up by the film’s black dancers.
Jack Donahue—the Boston lad who became a dancer, not a fighter—was in the Barton-Dixon line. He and Dixon were good friends, and their third musketeer was Johnny Boyle. Modestly, Donahue wrote of Boyle as the “best all-round tap dancer,” and Dixon agreed that Boyle was a great tap dancer—with zero personality. Boyle went into teaching. In a 1929 ad for the school he ran with Donahue, his photo looks like the mug shot of a man who could work for Capone. (He also appears in that 1937 Cagney film with Dixon, where he somehow manages to leave almost no impression while doing flips.) Donahue was different. Playing an orderly, he used a whisk broom to turn his sand dance into comedy. In Sunny and Rosalie, he played opposite Marilyn Miller, a pairing that indicated his rising professional stature. He was lauded for his “almost endless variety of steps” and for such tasty tapping that “the very orchestra stops to listen,” yet by the time of Rosalie, in 1927, he was, in the words of Brooks Atkinson, “more clown than hoofer.” He died in 1930 and made no films.
George White’s early life followed a similar trajectory, except that he started out on New York’s Lower East Side, as Isadore Weitz. After his bankrupt family decamped to Toronto, young Weitz discovered he could earn more by hoofing than by hawking newspapers. (He would recall “the sharp sting as the nickels and pennies hit your legs.”) He ran away to New York and worked for such underworld characters as Steve Brodie. His first dance partner was a black boy. With a white boy, Benny Ryan, he broke into musicals and traded steps with Dixon and Donahue on Forty-second Street at midnight. In the Follies, he paired up with Ann Pennington, of the dimpled knees. Instead of becoming a comedian, however, White became a producer, at age twenty-six. His “Scandals,” starting in 1918 and running annually through 1926, then more sporadically into the late thirties, gave the Follies its strongest competition in the revue business. White still danced—the Times called him “an adept stepper and a facile imitator of the steps of others;” he does a competent soft shoe in George White’s 1935 Scandals, one of two films he directed. But mostly he hired dancers: Pennington and Dixon and Tom Patricola, a knock-kneed zany who tapped heavily while strumming a ukulele. Almost no white eccentrics of the twenties made it into the thirties as dancers. It was one of their own who changed the mold.
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“He is one of those extraordinary persons whose sense of rhythm and humor have been all mixed up,” wrote Alexander Woollcott in 1919 about one more eccentric: Fred Astaire. This one performed with his older sister, Adele, the obviously gifted child in the family. Born in Omaha, of Austrian and Alsatian parentage, they began as a child act on the vaudeville circuits of the teens, stepping up and down a wedding cake as bride and groom in one number and dancing as a lobster and a glass of champagne in another. For his solo, the boy managed buck-and-wing on toe-tip. They studied at New York dancing schools, including Ned Wayburn’s factory, and Wayburn designed an act for them. (A 1907 profile of Wayburn mentions the Astaires as “wonderful little clog dancers from Omaha.”) Later, a vaudevillian named Aurelio Coccia taught them “smart” dances in the mode of Vernon and Irene Castle. They passed their awkward years touring small-time theaters in the opening slot, trudging their way up the billing and into the big time. Fred labored ceaselessly to improve, scrutinizing other acts and beginning to choreograph. Adele couldn’t be bothered. She got all the good notices.
Adele had a gamine charm, a refined outrageousness, ready-made for the twenties. After she and Fred appeared in their first Broadway revue, Over the Top, in 1917, she continued to receive most of the attention, from critics and college boys alike. But the critics also began to notice her gangly, big-eared, already balding brother, who was nimble and “ease-limbed.” The siblings became known for a jokey bit called the Runaround, during which, shoulder to shoulder, deadpan, they accelerated in a circle to an oompah beat. Their dancing was brightening, bubbly—all the more so since it looked, in the words of a Times reviewer, “apparently impromptu.” And they could handle the comedy part of musical comedy and take on speaking roles.
In London, critics greeted their dancing as a new American art. “Grotesque and eccentric dancing is familiar, but humor combined with vivacity and art and nimble daintiness is a novelty.” Royalty and the smart set invited the Astaires into their social circle, putting a permanent crease in Fred’s mid-Atlantic sense of style. Back in New York, the siblings were cast in Lady, Be Good!, with the first full score by Fred’s buddy from vaudeville, George Gershwin. The tricky pattern of “Fascinating Rhythm,” a song actually addressed to a maddeningly catchy cadence, required a rhythmically adept singer. Offstage, Astaire and Gershwin played stride piano together and traded tap steps. Woollcott was soon writing about the affinity between Gershwin’s rhythms and Fred’s feet. Others would soon note how Astaire’s dancing visualized music and how audiences held their applause in order to listen. A year into the run of Lady, Be Good!, Fred got bored with his solo and inserted tap. It stopped the show, so he added more. Virtuosic tap was something Adele did not do.
While Lady, Be Good! was knocking ’em dead in London, Astaire made an audio recording. The time is April 1926. The number is “‘Half of It Dearie’ Blues.” The composer is at the keys. When Astaire goes into his dance, his rhythms are clear and thumpy. There’s a little Shim Sham avant la lettre and sections that sound like a heavy-footed Bojangles, but Astaire is much less tidy than Robinson, much more apparently impromptu in sound. “How’s that, George?” he asks, and Gershwin answers: “That’s great, Freddie. Do it again.” Now Astaire goes to town. When he almost misses an offbeat, he screams like a motorist swerving to avoid a collision, and when he pulls out the quick stuff he chortles. Gershwin’s right. It’s pretty great. And in 1926, especially in Britain, it must have sounded new.