Director and musical stager Wayne Cilento talks about bringing Bob Fosse’s exuberant work to life onstage—and introducing him to a whole new generation.
Interview by Danielle Mages Amato
Wayne Cilento. Photo by Mike Hausberg.What’s your history with Dancin’?
I performed in the show 45 years ago. I almost didn’t do it because I was doing The Act with Liza Minelli, so I missed the auditions. But then choreographer Graciela Daniele set up a private audition for me. It was the easiest, most relaxed audition I ever had. Bob was such a smart, charismatic man. I think that’s why he was such a good director—because he relaxed the atmosphere, and you could let go, without it being so stressful. I later found out that he actually had private auditions for everybody. I thought it was just me!
What was the impact of Dancin’ when the show premiered? And what was the experience of performing in it?
It was the first time anything like that had ever happened, a dance concert for Broadway in that format. Yes, A Chorus Line was about dancers, but Bob took it a step forward. It was just 16 featured dancers, doing all styles of dance, which was very bold. As a dancer, he gave me everything I could possibly want to do in the show. And after all of that, getting a Tony nomination for it was beyond anything I could have hoped for. It was a great experience.
I had an opportunity to do one other show with Bob, several years later. I was heavily into choreographing myself at that point, but Bob called me up and said, “Wayne, I’m doing this new show on Broadway, Big Deal. Do you want to do it with me?” I said, “Absolutely,” and I dropped everything. It had been maybe eight years since Dancin’, and Bob had done film work during those years as a director/choreographer, and his style had changed. The combination of scene work, music, choreography—everything was integrated and blended, as if he were creating cross-fades and other film techniques. Dancin’ had an almost vaudevillian style, with a lot of beginnings and endings. A dance would end, one of us would come out and do an introduction to the next section, and we’d start that one. But with Big Deal, there was none of that. Dance numbers would blend into scenes, then into choreography, then into transitions to other scenes. It was brilliant to watch him do two different styles of work, and I just absorbed and learned so much from him.
What inspired your approach to this revival of Dancin’?
There’s no way that this show would work if I didn’t try to update it and try to bring it into the world of today’s generation. The biggest question for me was: if Bob were around today, what would he be doing? My goal was to change the approach of Dancin’ and use some of that style Bob grew into as a filmmaker, which I saw on Big Deal, and to make that style work for this new interpretation of Dancin’. Also, there were things in the original that wouldn’t work today. It was a different period, a different time. But it still needed to stay edgy, it still needed to keep his wit and sense of humor and his dedication to push the envelope.
What are some of the things that are guiding this production? Is the original choreography still in place?
Yes. Everything is true to what he did. But with numbers like “Crunchy Granola”—that was an old Neil Diamond song that was very popular in the 1970s, and I didn’t know if it would work today—I thought: I could pick another rock-and-roll song and set Bob’s choreography to it. But that wouldn’t be Dancin’. So what we’re doing is updating the orchestrations with different instrumentation, to give it the sound of today. That changes it, and even though Bob’s choreography stays consistent, it doesn’t feel dated. It has a new feel and a new energy.
Do the dancers of today, and the way they embody the choreography, make a difference in how it’s expressed?
I think this company we’ve put together is so young and eccentric and unique, kind of like our original company: we were all very different dancers at different points of our careers. These young dancers truly revitalize Bob’s work. As the director, I’m not being meticulous about every single thing. I think the mistake some people have made with Bob’s work in the past has been to make it too mechanical, in the sense that every move is completely isolated and stylized and specific. It becomes about exact shoulder angles and eye lines and finger movement. I’m teaching our company the steps, and I’m giving the dancers the freedom to interpret them in the way they dance. That’s what Bob did for us in the original company. If things look wrong to me, I will approach it, but otherwise, I’m letting the dancers dance. I think just that alone is lifting up Bob’s work.
Would you talk a little bit about Kirsten Childs and her role in updating the script?
The perfect thing about Kirsten is she was actually in Dancin’ as a performer—at the end of the run, so we weren’t in the show at the same time. And because both of us love Bob so completely and respect him so much, she was the perfect person for this. There was a lot of stuff that we needed to address in the dialogue, and numbers like “Bojangles” had some issues with clarity. We have stayed very true to the structure and almost everything Bob did, but there were things we needed to adjust, and we did. I think if I brought in another writer who didn’t really know Bob, or didn’t experience Bob the way we did, it would not have worked out as well as it did.
What should audiences expect coming into the show?
I think people who know Dancin’ the way it was will either be very excited about what they’re going to see, or they’ll hate it. We’ve recreated some pieces from other parts of his career: Sweet Charity, Pippin, The Little Prince, My Sister Eileen. It’s kind of like telling his journey as a choreographer. I think at the end of it, we get a better picture of who he was as an artist and a human being. And I hope new people discover his choreography in person for the first time.
