Bridging the dance GAP.

Alan Johnson shares some dish from more than 40 years of dancing and choreographing--not to mention overseeing those Gap ads

If you're among the Oscar watchers who secretly longed for the production numbers during this year's telecast, choreographer Alan Johnson did what he could to ease your pain. He is, after all, the man behind the all-singing, all-dancing, West Side Story--themed Gap TV spots that made their debut on Oscar night and have become almost as ubiquitous as Britney Spears's bare midriff.

"The feedback from those commercials has been incredible," marvels the 59-year-old Johnson, who is the last surviving person to be approved by the stage musical's original choreographer, the late Jerome Robbins, to re-create his work. "I recently went to a meeting for the Academy of Dance on Film Board, and this girl walked in in bright capri pants and high heels and said, `I came as your commercial!'" Though some Broadway stalwarts might see using beloved showstoppers like "Cool" and "America" to hawk jeans and khakis as sacrilege, Johnson has no trouble sleeping at night. "The authors' estates were behind it," he explains, "and everybody was really respectful of the material."

He's won three Emmys and devised moves for such legends as Shirley MacLaine, Ann-Margret, and Tommy Tune, but re-creating Robbins's West Side steps for productions all over the world has been Johnson's most consistent and gratifying gig. "When I first started, it was just a job," he admits. "It later became an obsession with me: Since I have the knowledge, I have to pass it on." While he admits to sometimes coming down with a touch of "West Side Narcolepsy" while watching rehearsals, the constant influx of young, exciting talent keeps the process fresh for him. And the musical's theme of true love in the face of extreme prejudice never fails to move him. "The ballet is my favorite moment in the show," he says fondly, "because Jerome shows the audience the possibility of a life without bigotry and hatred."

Johnson certainly got a taste of bigotry growing up in the small industrial town of Eddystone, Pa. "I started taking dance lessons when I was like, 6," says Johnson, "so I was the town sissy." In spite of the oppressive atmosphere, Johnson's steelworker father and waitress mother were supportive, driving their son to dance classes and abiding his obsession with movie musicals. "At age 71 knew from watching Hollywood films that that's what I wanted," he says. "Then in my teens I saw a Broadway tryout of some show in Philadelphia, and I went, `My God, they do it live!' So at 181 went to New York." He landed his first job as a dancer in the road company of Damn Yankees, and in 1958 he made his Broadway debut in West Side Story, starting in the ensemble and later playing A-Rab and serving as dance captain. It was around this time that Johnson came to terms with his sexuality.

"I couldn't have picked a more nurturing, encouraging, and permissive faction of society to grow up in than Broadway gypsies," he says wistfully. "About ten or 15 years ago I was reading in the newspaper about one of the gay-related military murders, and I said to my friend, `Fuck this! I'm coming out!' And she said, `Who the fuck doesn't know?' and I realized there was nobody that I knew that didn't realize I was gay."

Which is not to say that all of Johnson's love affairs were out in the open. When he was first doing West Side Story on Broadway, he had a clandestine fling with hunky actor Larry Kert, who starred as Tony and would later garner raves for his turn as Bobby in the musical Company. "I was so in love with him," confesses Johnson, who is currently single and shares a small house in the Hollywood hills with his Jack Russell terrier, Pussycat. "Larry was with someone else at the time, so it was on the sly. I remember I would change clothes after the prologue and come down and watch him sing `Something's Coming.' It was thrilling."

Though their romance didn't endure, their friendship did. "After the sex was no longer important, we would be on the phone every day," he says of Kert, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991. "He was incredible right up until the end. He made me laugh more than anybody."

Johnson knows a thing or two about generating laughter himself. One of his longest ongoing collaborations is with writer-director Mel Brooks. They met when Brooks was preparing to make his first film, The Producers. When his original choice to stage the classic number "Springtime for Hitler" was unavailable, Brooks called Johnson, who was just starting to choreograph. "I said, `Mel, this is your debut. Protect your ass. Don't do a friend a favor,'" recalls Johnson. But Brooks insisted he take the job and continued to hire him for his subsequent films, including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and High Anxiety.

In 1983 Johnson tried his hand at directing with the comedy To Be or Not to Be, which starred Brooks and Anne Bancroft and was the first studio movie to acknowledge that gays were victims of the Holocaust. When asked why he didn't continue to direct films, Johnson says, "Being the father figure of 500 people is not as good as being the father figure for 50 people. This is going to sound really cliche, but I love the joy of dancing, of throwing your body around to music. If I'm depressed, I only have to put on my favorite music and I'll wind up dancing around my living room, very happy."

The fact that he's brought the magic of dance into so many other living rooms via the Gap campaign also makes him happy, even if it doesn't make him rich. "Choreographers for TV and film get a flat fee," he laments. "It's the dancers who get rich. Every time a dancer calls me up and says, `I just got another check,' I say, `Then take me to fuckin' dinner.'"

Hensley is the author of Misadventures in the (213).