Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Broadway Legacies

Based in part on the author's interviews and conversations with Tommy Tune about his life and career
Features findings from access to a wide range of Tune collaborators and co-workers
First book to consider Tune's career in full

Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Description

Grand Hotel. My One and Only. Nine. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. The Will Rogers Follies. For two decades, Tommy Tune was the maestro presiding over a string of glittering Broadway musicals that took the tradition of complete musical staging by a director-choreographer into a new era defined by spectacle and technology. He was last in a grand lineage led by Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett, but also provided a link to a new generation of choreographers-turned-directors like Susan Stroman, Jerry Mitchell, and Casey Nicholaw.

Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career. His nine Tony Awards (plus a tenth, for Lifetime Achievement) were earned across four categories, not only for choreography and direction, but also as both featured and lead actor in a musical, for Seesaw and My One and Only--a distinction no one else can claim.

Tune took the musical forward by looking backward, bringing satiric energy and contemporary style to a trove of show business antecedents--from clog dancing to showgirl formations, from precision kick lines to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style ballroom glides. He did the same with his concert and cabaret performances, drawing on classics from the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter and performing them not as nostalgia but as vital, immediate statements of personal philosophy.

Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full scale book about the career of this prodigious artist. It celebrates and examines with a critical eye his major projects, and summons for readers a glorious period of dance, performance, and theatrical imagination.

Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Broadway Legacies

Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Broadway Legacies

Author Information

Kevin Winkler, Freelance Writer

Kevin Winkler enjoyed a career of more than twenty years as a curator, archivist, and library administrator at the New York Public Library, prior to which he was a professional dancer. His book, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (OUP, 2018), won the Theatre Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Award, Special Jury Prize, was a finalist for the Marfield Prize, and was cited as an ALA/ACRL CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. He is an on-screen commentator in the acclaimed documentary, Merely Marvelous: The Dancing Genius of Gwen Verdon.

Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Broadway Legacies

Reviews and Awards

"We really sense the energy, rhythms, moods, and sounds of the movements, and are able to feel the theatricality of the choreography, and, hence, understand how Tune's staging worked to drive the drama in his productions." -- Lisa Jo Sagolla, American Theatre Magazine

"Winkler's book is the definition of a page turner. I literally could not put it down, except when I was rushing to YouTube to watch some of the dance numbers he so vividly described ... My appreciation and knowledge of Tune's career grew after reading this book, and I'm sure yours will too. If you love -- and care about -- the Broadway musical, this book is absolutely essential reading." -- David Meyers, The Algemeiner

"Winkler has written a lively, incisive look at Tommy Tune, Broadway's leading director/choreographer/performer in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. Free of pretense, Tune served both his shows and audiences with his wit and unique style and Winkler captures it all." -- Ken Bloom, author of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes

"Winkler explains what went right and what went wrong with each production as part of the larger story of Tune's superstar sensibility, triumphing in a period when it felt as if British musicals owned New York. The spectacular research outlines the history of the Broadway musical over a half century. Among studies of how entertainment can be made entertaining, it's a model of reporting." -- Mindy Aloff, editor, Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology (Library of America)

Everything is Choreography

The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune

Kevin Winkler

Broadway Legacies

From Our Blog

The musical genius of Tommy Tune: 'old plus old equals new'

From the beginning, Tommy Tune was pulled as if by centrifugal force toward dance and the Broadway musical. He was taking dancing lessons by the age of five, but his early ambition to be a ballet dancer was abandoned when he shot up in height during his teenage years. He later joked about his extreme height, saying, 'Sometimes, instead of thinking of myself as six-foot-six, I tell myself I'm only five-foot-eighteen.'

Posted on November 16, 2021

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