BROADWAY has always prized director-choreographers who could deliver hit musicals with an individual stamp on them -- masters such as Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune. Even when an individual project failed, they brought a special excitement to the Great White Way: that Broadway rhythm long celebrated on stage and screen.
Building on the achievements of their predecessors, these theater artists explored subjects that musicals had always avoided and found ways to make dance integral to a show's narrative thrust rather than just a diversion. Moreover, nearly all of them addressed show business itself as a metaphor for the superficial values and obsession with celebrity that plague American society.
Of this distinguished company, Tune is the last man standing, someone who won nine Tony Awards and pretty much owned Broadway in the 1980s. He remains active at age 67 but now thinks of himself, he says, "as an anachronism," dismayed by the conditions under which musicals must currently be created.
"You used to have one driving force behind you," he said between performances of "Doctor Dolittle," which plays two final times today at the Pantages Theatre before moving to the San Diego Civic Auditorium and then the Orange County Performing Arts Center.
"But there aren't any individual producers anymore -- they're all committees. Or corporations. When you sit down with them, sometimes you have as many as 12 people at the table and they each voice an opinion. And you watch your work dissolving into shreds, with so many people pecking at it."
Tune finds that the musicals surviving this kind of creative process don't really need the kind of star director-choreographer that used to dominate musicals. Instead, they require people adept at what he calls "that environmental theme-park-ride kind of thing."
"Do you notice that in those shows the audiences lean back in their seats while in the shows that I have always admired they sit on the edge of their seats and lean forward? Audiences don't have to listen now because it's cranked up. They don't have to imagine anything because the staging shows it all. It's a different time.
"I used to call what I did a theater of nuance, and that is like saying 'kindness.' People shrug and say, 'Huh?' "
