The great dance way.

Dance has always given its regards--and its talents--to Broadway, playing a key, if varying, role in the past, present, and so far as one can tell, future of that somewhat amorphous theatrical form, the Broadway musical. After all it was 130 years ago next month that The Black Crook opened in New York City at Niblo's Gardens, making history not only as, just conceivably, the first Broadway musical, but also introducing a new and wide public to the glories (more or less) of ballet and toedancing! Still some notable dancers such as Maria Bonfanti and Rita Sangalli appeared in it, and when, years later in 1929, it had a deliberately somewhat campy revival on the other side of Broadway's Hudson, in Hoboken, New Jersey, it even provided the formidable Agnes de Mille with her first chance at big-time choreography.

After The Black Crook and such questionably suspicious dance interludes on Broadway and its environs as Billy Watson's line of Rubenesque British beauties brought here in the 1870s (and known, perhaps a little unkindly, as "the Beef Trust"), showbiz and Broadway have enjoyed various and varying relationships with Terpsichore, her handmaidens, and her hand-boys. In the early years the dances on Broadway were provided by "dance strangers," and the first person--so far as I know--to use that brave new word choreograph in connection with a Broadway show was George Balanchine.

The show was the 1936 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Winter Garden Theatre. The date was January 30, and Balanchine had been brought in by his old friend Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) who had composed the music. Interestingly, Balanchine was only responsible for the "ballets." "Modern dances" were provided by Robert Alton, a sometime pupil of Mikhail Mordkin and member of the Mordkin Ballet, who was two years Balanchine's senior and had a major career on Broadway and in Hollywood, perhaps culminating with his choreography for Pal Joey. But we get ahead of ourselves.

Balanchine himself broke new ground for dance on Broadway later that same year, 1936, with his next show, the Rodgers and Hart musical comedy On Your Toes, starring Ray Bolger and Tamara Geva, where dance was for the first time in America incorporated into the plot. Balanchine continued to work on Broadway with Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938), Great Lady (1938--for contractual reasons credited to William Dollar), Keep Off the Grass (1940), Louisiana Purchase (1940), Cabin in the Sky (1940--a rather unlikely collaboration with Katherine Dunham), The Lady Comes Across (1942), What's Up (1943), Dream With Music (1944), Song of Norway (1944), Mr. Strauss Goes to Boston (1945), Where's Charley? (1948), and, finally, Courtin' Time (1951).

I have listed all of Balanchine's work on Broadway simply because it was far, far more intensive than most people nowadays imagine. And all this in addition to considerable work on movie musicals in Hollywood. However, major credit for the balletization (or danceization, perhaps) still goes, and perhaps properly, to two other dancers from, more or less, the classic field--Agnes de Mille, with her breakthrough work on Oklahoma! in 1943, and Jerome Robbins, like Balanchine one of the great choreographers of the century, who over the course of two decades and eighteen shows transformed show-biz dancing from On the Town (1944) to Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

In those early days, post-Balanchine days of the dance in the Broadway musical, the choreographers, following the same courses as de Mille and Robbins, mostly came from--what can one call it?--theatrical art dance, be it classic ballet (Michael Kidd, Donald Saddler) or modern dance (Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris). Yet soon both a new breed of Broadway dancer (they call them gypsies) and a new breed of Broadway choreographer developed. By 1949 one of the original of this new species, Gower Champion (who danced for Balanchine in The Lady Comes Across and later made up a dance team with Marge Champion, then his wife) had won his first Tony Award for choreography.

Soon the gypsies were dominating the market, with Joe Layton, Ron Field, Michael Bennett (who had terrific successes with A Chorus Line and Dream Girls), and Tommy Tune. But the major gypsy figure was Bob Fosse who, following Robbins, developed a specific style of Broadway dance and Broadway dancer. And interestingly all of these choreographers also took the path of Robbins by eventually directing their shows. The director-choreographer became the major figure in what was known as the "concept musical," with virtually only Harold Prince standing outside the charmed dance circle as a major director.

But what now? All these Broadway director-choreographers, apart from Tune and their father figure, Robbins, are now dead, and the major directors have become the past, present, and future Prince, men from British classic theater, such as Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner, and Michael Blakemore, and some bright new Americans, including Jerry Zaks, George C. Wolfe, Des McAnuff, James Lapine, and Scott Ellis--none of whom graduated from our dancing classes.

Dancing on Broadway is, of course, far from over. Indeed, this year we have had our first true "dancical" since Fosse's Dancin' in 1978 with Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, directed and devised by Wolfe with choreography by Savion Glover. But the choreographers themselves seem to be in muted tones. Graciela Daniele (who, in the older Robbins tradition, does also direct), Lar Lubovitch (the only one with a "classic" dance background), Wayne Cilento, Rob Marshall, and Susan Stroman are all show choreographers of marked talent but rather less prominence than their predecessors. Why, the luckless Marshall was not even nominated for a Tony this year. Nor is the level of dancing quite what it was. This may sound strange with that galaxy of tap dance kids in Bring in 'da Noise, or the glossy expertise of Scott Wise in State Fair, yet surely the tremendous dance energy that characterized Broadway from Oklahoma! through West Side Story and Chicago to A Chorus Line is missing.

Will it return? Over the past two decades of the musical, only composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has demanded more than the minimum of a choreographer (in his case, Gillian Lynne). Perhaps show dance is going to take a seat somewhat farther back than in the past. But who knows? It has always been difficult to suppress for long The Black Crook, the Beef Trust and their successors.