Rob Marshall: something to dance about.

In the short space of three years, Rob Marshall has become one of Broadway's leading choreographers.

Late in the first act of Victor/Victoria, Blake Edwards's Broadway musical version of his popular 1982 film, there is a thrilling moment when the show really takes off. Julie Andrews, debonair and tuxedoed as Victoria in her Victor guise, dances a witty, sensual tango with Rachel York, who plays Norma Cassidy, the hilariously ditzy gangster's moll. As this lavish, expansive, populous show momentarily concentrates on these two, their deftly timed gestures and shifts of position sum up the multilayered gender confusion that propels it. Victoria preens and glides, hoping to convince others of the masculine identity she has adopted but going through just enough hesitations and inappropriate moves to convey her inner conflict. Norma, meanwhile, in a nearly backless gleaming gown, luxuriates in the dance and in her certainty that her partner is a man.

This showstopping tango represents the ingenuity at which Rob Marshall, choreographer of Victor/Victoria as well as of five other recent Broadway musicals, excels (and was one reason why Marshall's failure to be even nominated for an Antoinette Perry Award made last season's Tony nominations so controversial). The memorable moments in his shows are dance numbers with dramatic impact, organically connected to the particular tale being told. "I love telling a story through character and through plot when I choreograph," he notes. "When Blake came up with the idea of a tango between the two women--well, it's all there for you. Right away, you have something to dance about. You have a story to tell, behavior to explore or expose, and that's my favorite way to choreograph."

Marshall, thirty-five, recently completed an impressive hat trick during the 1995-96 Broadway season by providing the choreography for Jerry Zaks's invigorating, joyous revival of Stephen Sondheim and Larry Gelbart's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That show opened in April, following on the heels of last fall's revival of Sondheim's Company, which preceded Victor/Victoria by a few weeks. "I feel like I live in this room," Marshall jokes, seated in the spacious rehearsal studio in which Victor/Victoria had been assembled and where he is midway through preparing Forum.

He's certainly not complaining about being so much in demand. Over the past three years, the amiable, unpretentious Marshall has moved to the forefront of Broadway choreographers, working steadily and with considerable success at a time when the number of musicals making it to the Great White Way has plummeted severely. After sharing the choreography credit on 1993's Tony Award-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman, he served notice of his flair for comedy and eye for detail with his next production, the charming, highly acclaimed revival of She Loves Me, directed by Scott Ellis (with whom Marshall was reunited for Company). Each of its two acts featured an intricate ensemble number full of clever nuance and deft characterization. In "A Romantic Atmosphere," as a haughty maitre d' attempted to instruct a haplessly inept busboy amid an array of trysting couples, all illusion of suave sophistication dissolved into frantic chaos. Marshall's wittily timed staging of the culminating "Twelve Days to Christmas," a wry look at holiday shopping foibles, escalated zestily from leisurely perusal to no-holds-barred aggression.

Marshall received Tony Award nominations for both shows, as well as for his next venture, Jack O'Brien's fresh look at the 1955 hit Damn Yankees. It was primarily through his vibrant, original choreography for the show's charmingly inept Washington Senators that the audience immediately got to know the members of the team. The hilarious "Blooper Ballet" (a number created for this revival) was a nonstop compendium of everything that can go wrong on the baseball field.

"Jack O'Brien and I were looking for a way to introduce the team," recalls Marshall, who grew up amid a family of devoted Pittsburgh Pirate fans. "We wanted to present each of the players as an individual character. In the `Blooper Ballet,' we showed how bad they were, so that you could see how far they had to go. I rented a bunch of those baseball blooper videos. It was a blast to work on; it rolled off me very easily."

In addition to devising comic athletic moves for the male ensemble, Marshall's assignment for Damn Yankees included reconceiving the dance-oriented star role of Lola, the seductive devil's emissary made famous by Gwen Verdon, played in the revival first by Bebe Neuwirth and later by Charlotte d' Amboise. In her portions of the show Marshall was particularly aware that "Damn Yankees was a huge challenge for me, because I had Bob Fosse--this genius choreographer whom I idolized--on my shoulder. I wanted to pay tribute to some of his brilliant work, but our production also took its own course. I didn't want to make changes unless there was a reason to. Lola's striptease, `Whatever Lola Wants,' is a classic; I wasn't going to change the concept, but I was able to find my own approach. In the original, Joe Hardy sat there and watched her do the whole number. My Joe Hardy was more physical...more involved in the dance."

Since so many of the musicals that do make it to Broadway these days are revivals, Marshall has had plenty of opportunity to evaluate the particular challenges and burdens this places on a choreographer. "It's important for me, with a revival, not to do what was done before," he explains. "But you also have to be careful that you don't cut off your nose to spite your face; you don't do something different just to be different--something that may not serve the material. Luckily, with Forum, I hadn't seen the original. So `Comedy Tonight' and `The House of Marcus Lycus,' the two big dance numbers, are completely new and fresh. David Chase created new dance arrangements for this revival, and we've taken a whole new look at `Comedy Tonight,' even though Tony Walton's set is very similar to his original. For `The House of Marcus Lycus' "--in which the local procurer presents his array of courtesans to Pseudolus, the bustling comic whirlwind of a central character portrayed by Nathan Lane--"each lady gets a real showcase. We tried to give each of them her own personality, her own territory that nobody else touches."

Marshall's early interest in theater was in acting rather than dance, but by the time he enrolled in Carnegie-Mellon's musical theater program, he had started taking dance classes. "I started with jazz dance, but then a teacher told me, `You're never going to be a dancer unless you take ballet, too.' So I also started taking ballet seriously. During the year before I began at Carnegie-Mellon, I was taking daily classes," he recalls.

His fondness for musicals was launched early: "While all my friends were listening to Elton John, I was listening to Gypsy and Mame. The Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera's productions were a big influence for me, and I was in productions of The King and I and The Sound of Music as a child. I used to sneak into the dance rehearsals and watch. That whole world--how they did what they did--always interested me."

Marshall took a year off from Carnegie-Mellon to appear in the touring company of A Chorus Line. "Michael Bennett rehearsed me, and it was amazing to work with him," Marshall says. "It was 1980, and he was still very involved with the Chorus Line companies. I was very lucky. I learned a lot about dancing during that year, from the dancers around me and through taking classes in the different cities. When I returned to school, I was a better dancer."

Soon after graduation, Marshall appeared in the Broadway musicals Zorba (1983) and The Rink (1984), both by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and Rupert Holmes's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985). All three featured choreography by Graciela Daniele, who became a mentor for Marshall. He was the dance captain for The Rink and her assistant for Drood.

"Graciela taught me the process, completely," Marshall observes. "She had assisted Fosse and had been Michael Bennett's dance captain on Follies, and she passed that heritage down to me. She was, and has been to this day, so generous to me."

Cats turned out to be Marshall's final Broadway show as a performer; he suffered a back injury, and during his rehabilitation period found himself getting offers to choreograph for regional theaters. "It started snowballing for me," he notes, and at twenty-seven he put performing behind him. "I wasn't enjoying it anymore, and I was ready to move on," he says. "I'm glad I stopped early. I knew I had more to give, and I realized that choreography was the direction in which I was going."

Marshall's first Broadway choreography credit, Kiss of the Spider Woman, gave him the experience of working on an original musical as it was evolving (one that, like so many of late, was based on a nonmusical film). It also reunited him with colleagues from The Rink--composer Kander and lyricist Ebb, book writer Terrence McNally and leading lady Chita Rivera--and presented an opportunity to work with legendary director Hal Prince. Marshall joined the production in Toronto, where it was taking shape prior to its acclaimed runs in London and then in New York City.

"They were having trouble solving the problem of Aurora's [Rivera's role] involvement in the show and how it connected to the central story of the two prisoners," Marshall explains. "They asked me to come up and look at the show, and to rework all the material for Chita. I knew her well, so I was able to create the material that would work best for her. I focused on the character of Aurora and how she'd behave." For the number "Where You Are," a show-stopper for Rivera, in a classy white tuxedo, and the male ensemble, Marshall drew inspiration from Marlene Dietrich: "I was looking for a way to define Aurora. I wanted her to be somebody with style and strength, passion and power. Chita also has that style and strength, and she was bold enough to be masculine in her moves." The climax of the number was a brilliant coup de theatre that captures this dark, moody show's contrasts between fantasy and reality: Aurora and the men reach for the bars of the prison cell and are suddenly holding canes, which they brandish as they bring the number to a rousing showbiz finish.

"When you work with Hal Prince, you learn how to move a musical along, how to keep the new images coming at you," Marshall notes of the director with whom he again collaborated in late 1994 on The Petrified Prince. (This original musical had a limited off-Broadway run at the Public Theater.) "He's very visual, with a great sense of structure."

In contrast, Blake Edwards, despite his impressive credits directing films, was a newcomer to directing for the stage. "He was completely open and wonderful, and allowed me into the process completely," says Marshall. "He invited me to help him make that transition." Victor/Victoria had runs in Minneapolis and Chicago prior to New York City and became one of those shows about which rumors were circulated in the press. Marshall acknowledges that it underwent significant changes along the way, noting that "the hardest thing about that collaboration was that our composer, Henry Mancini, had passed away."

Michael-Demby Cain, a dancer in the show's busy ensemble, emphasizes Marshall's positive outlook and commitment during a tryout that included its share of difficulties. "This was the best experience I've had," says the veteran of five previous Broadway musicals. "You feel you're in such good hands with Rob, because he has such a strong sense of the overall quality of the show. He's always looking out for the show as a whole."

Marshall recalls, "The challenge of Victor/Victoria for me was having to create all of the nightclub numbers; that's one reason I took the show. That was scary at first, because doing numbers that aren't directly connected to the story tends to be harder for me. But the projects that scare me a little are the ones that are interesting to do. There are two distinctive clubs in the show, so it was important to make sure that each had its own sensibilities. The gay club, Chez Lui, has a bohemian atmosphere, so I looked for dance styles like the apache dance in the second act. That type of dancing came from the streets of Paris and started in the Left Bank bohemian clubs. [Costume designer] Willa Kim and I studied books of Brassai's photographs of 1930s Paris underlife, and those really inspired me. The bigger club in the show, Cassell's, is more opulent, not unlike the Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergere. For those numbers, like `Le Jazz Hot,' it was great to have such a large ensemble to work with, to choreograph on that scale."

Compared with the grueling process of cutting and rewriting to shape a new musical, the challenge of working on Forum was to be true to, yet take an invigorating new look at, a proven, beloved classic. This 1962 blend of Roman farce and burlesque sensibility was right up Marshall's alley. As a bonus, the project gave him the chance to work with a master director of comedy, Jerry Zaks (responsible for the recent revivals of Guys and Dolls and Anything Goes, as well as numerous others). "Rob is a great collaborator," says Zaks. "He's tremendously imaginative and full of good ideas. He's not afraid to cut and to change and improve. Working with him was a wonderful experience."

Marshall returns the compliment: "Working with Jerry Zaks is a major treat! He has a very strong vision of what he wants, but he also gives me complete freedom and trust, which is very rare. Getting to work with him and with Nathan Lane was a big reason I took on the show.

"Comedy seems to be the world I feel most comfortable in. The style of this show is in my blood. Forum is very physical; you'll see a lot of movement. It's a small company; there are eighteen in the cast, and that's the number of dancers alone in Victor/Victoria. Forum is not that kind of big extravaganza. There are three male dancers--the Proteans--and six women. We have a younger company than the original. Nathan is really moving a lot in this show, and he's in almost every number. It's hard to get through a rehearsal with him because he's just so funny. You end up screaming with laughter! He's also so smart and dedicated--a real theater person."

Marshall's impressive and diverse work on Broadway has made an impact by reflecting the dramatic specifics and distinctive tone of each musical. "I like to serve the piece, whatever it may be," he affirms. "I like the fact that these shows are all so different. I think some choreographers are more interested in putting their own personal stamp on a show. My style is more about making the movement look completely organic, as if the performers were making it up."

On the horizon for Marshall may be opportunities to direct, which he has done quite often outside of New York. "It seems to be where I'm naturally heading, and it's something that's important to explore," he says.

Ideally, he would like to find a project that allows him to both choreograph and direct. If so, he would be following an illustrious tradition established by such titans as Robbins, Fosse, Bennett, and Gower Champion. (Mean-while, his sister, Kathleen, who was his assistant on several shows, is keeping up the family tradition by hanging up her shingle as a choreographer, most recently for Swinging on a Star.)

It has taken only a few whirlwind years for Marshall to demonstrate his versatility and talent and become one of Broadway's most sought-after choreographers. He will certainly continue to make an important contribution to musical theater in the coming years, and it should be exciting to see what new directions his career takes.