“One view. One mission: Director and Choreographer,” reflects Susan Stroman about her recent work. “To me, it’s one vision all the way through.” Over the course of her career, Susan Stroman has found a way to live in the roles of both choreographer and director. After winning two Tony Awards for Best Choreography for Crazy for You and the 1994 revival of Showboat, Stroman had her first directorial experience with the 2000 revival of The Music Man. That same year she co-created, directed, and choreographed her genre-bending dance-musical, Contact. The production, which told three stories through dance alone, won the Tony for Best Musical and earned Stroman her third Tony for Best Choreography. Since then, she has both directed and choreographed shows including Bullets Over Broadway, Big Fish, The Scottsboro Boys, and, most recently, Little Dancer. In 2001, she became the first woman to win Tony Awards for Best Direction and Best Choreography in the same night for The Producers.
Stroman considers herself a storyteller, a role she learned as a child. Her father, a salesman, was himself a great storyteller who would also play show tunes on the piano after dinner. In her young mind, that music became movement, characters, and stories. Inspired by the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Stroman found dance as a means of expressing the inner world of her imagination. When she became a professional Broadway choreographer, Stroman helped bring focus back to narrative choreography, presenting the dancers as characters, and depicting their emotional development through their interactions with space and objects.
Stroman’s involvement with An Apocalyptic Vaudeville began when Mandy Patinkin called her to describe a project he had in mind: a collaboration with the performer Taylor Mac consisting of a collection of songs they both felt passionate about. Stroman remembers her first meeting with the two artists in a rehearsal room in New York City: “When they started singing the songs, I was taken aback by the sound. There is something extraordinary about the sound of their voices coming together. And soon we decided that it shouldn’t just be a concert, that it needed to hang on an idea and to live in another world.” Stroman began to imagine, while Patinkin and Mac sang, moved, and improvised.
The Last Two People On Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville tells the story of two vaudevillians who have washed ashore after a cataclysmic storm, and who communicate only through song and dance. The vaudeville aspect of the piece resonated with Stroman, who immediately thought of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s famous road movies, which also feature two vaudevillians coming together. “Vaudeville is a part of my life,” reflects Stroman, who also used the style in her production of Kander and Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys. “To know all about vaudeville, to know all of those wonderful vaudeville poses and vaudeville dance steps—it’s pretty much part of me.”
Inspired by the artists’ concern over global warming, An Apocalyptic Vaudeville is set after a great flood. During rehearsals, Stroman listened to soundscapes of rain and thunder as if they were music. Together with music director Paul Ford, Stroman, Patinkin, and Mac have been developing the production over years, meeting whenever their busy schedules would allow. During one of their workshops, Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, flooding lower Manhattan and giving new weight to the project.
At the end of the world, Susan Stroman offers music and dance as a means of salvation. Throughout her career, she has told stories of hope, joy, and human connection. Despite storms and differences in personality, the characters in An Apocalyptic Vaudeville survive and find comfort in each other. As Stroman explains, “through song and dance, they find a middle ground to communicate. They find a middle ground where they can exist together.”
Aida Rocci Ruiz is a first-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./ Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
