Everything Is Choreography

<em>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. </em>For two decades Tommy Tune was the maestro presiding over a string of glittering Broadway musicals that took the tradition of complete musical staging<br>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 <br>and Casey Nicholaw. <p/>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 <em>Seesaw</em><br>and <em>My One and Only</em>--a distinction no one else can claim. <p/>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<br>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. <p/><em>Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune</em> 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.<br>