Choreography on Broadway

This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message )

Chroniclers of the

For the most part, dance movement itself was either the last to be mentioned by critics or ignored altogether, resulting in dance numbers in musicals going unrecorded. The only way to preserve dance movements from generation to generation was by demonstration, imitation, practice, and personal supervision.

Not until 1960, with the musical

The major step of integrating dance into a unified effect onstage were vital and ingenuous for commercial dancing. One of the earliest successful examples of this concept was in Pal Joey. The dancing in the show enhanced the environment and projected character without any reduction in the flashy entertainment values then prized in musical shows.

When it was realized the importance of dancing as a tool for character development and plot advancement, famous director-choreographers began to emerge: Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, and Gower Champion.

Robbins believed whoever controlled the movement controlled the show. This was definitely evident in

Fosse had a talent for manipulating, tampering with, or otherwise reconstructing the contribution from writers in order to make the material serviceable to his staging and choreography. Fosse's style of self-contained acts of vaudeville and burlesque led him to a career of show-stopping numbers for audience approval.

Champion wasn’t as personal as Fosse, or as material-oriented as Robbins, but nonetheless, his craft and work sustained the old-fashioned

• Kislan, Robert (1987). Hoofing on Broadway. Prentice Hall Press.
  ISBN 0-13-809484-5
  .

• Dramatic structure
• Tony Award for Best Choreography
• Musical theatre
• Broadway theatre