When choral auditions began last December for the vibrant revival of “Funny Girl” on Broadway, many hopefuls struggled with the tap dance combination. Some, one choreographer recalled, stopped halfway, made prayer hands of gratitude, and left.
If they expected simple eight counts, they were faced with a much more complicated, rhythmic “Rubik’s Cube,” according to Jared Grimes, 38, the actor and professional tap dancer who plays Eddie Ryan, mentor to showgirl Fanny Brice, played by Beanie. Feldstein.
The “mad scientist” – the description of Mr. Grimes – behind the rigorous footwork was Ayodele Casel, a master tap dancer who will make her Broadway debut with a uniquely creative billing: tap choreographer. It’s a credit that rarely, if ever, appears in the mainstream theater world.
Ellenore Scott, known for her work on the Off Broadway production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” is the choreographer on the show, but “Funny Girl” director Michael Mayer knew she didn’t specialize in tapping. So he presented the producers with a “scary idea” to enlist Ms. Casel, 46, a mentee of Savion Glover and Gregory Hines, to modernize the musical’s tap numbers, such as Act II’s military-themed “Rat Tat Tat Tat.”
Ms Casel’s discerning brand of faucet is “like the best dagger in the whole world that just claws at the floor,” said Mr Grimes. Mr. Hines, who died in 2003, once praised her in an interview as a “freak of nature” – someone from whom he borrowed steps every now and then. The first time Mr. Mayer saw Ms. Casel onstage, while performing her autobiographical one-woman piece “While I Have the Floor” at New York’s City Center in 2016, he recalled how she appeared to float. .
“It was almost as if she let the word come to her,” said 61-year-old Mayer. “I’ve never seen a man who had such grace.” He was similarly struck by Ms. Casel’s sly sense of coolness, from her signature haircut – a hybrid high bun, low ponytail – to her metallic silver Oxford shoes with tapered legs, a departure from the expected feminine heels.
‘Funny Girl’, a musical linked to Barbra Streisand and show tunes, is now infused with a multicultural artistic perspective. Ms. Casel is the daughter of a black father and a Puerto Rican mother, raised in the Bronx and Rincón, Puerto Rico, and grew up on both Celia Cruz’s salsa and the Old Hollywood movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a couple who seemed ambitious and unattainable.
“I remember daydreaming that I was seen as a tap dancer,” said Ms. Casel, who took tap as an elective movement while attending the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. But she said to herself, ‘No one will ever see me like this. There is no way. I’m not blonde. I’m not white. I’m not a movie star.”
The Fanny Brice Connection
“‘Funny girl'” is about a woman who didn’t look like everyone else, didn’t sound like everyone else and said, ‘I’m going to make my life the way I want it to be, in hell or high water’” Mr. Mayer said. Mrs. Casel, he said, “has done the exact same thing.”
Historically, according to Ms. Casel, critics said that “women lacked the ability, the physicality, to take flashy strides.” While at NYU in 1996, she lingered at the Ambassador Theater on the Broadway run of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” playing the show “countless times on my $10 student ticket budget.” watched. She was related to the young Black Hoofers, but the cast was intentionally all male.
Tony Award-nominated tap dancer and choreographer Ted Louis Levy (“Jelly’s Last Jam”), who played Mr. Glover assisted with the choreography of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” remarked the ever-present Mrs. Casel.
“You knew why she was there,” said Mr. Levy, 61. “She wanted to know rhythm, and she wanted to know herself.”
Mr. Levy said he wanted to invite Ms. Casel to a training program that recruited new tap talent for production, but “they wouldn’t let me get a woman in.” Ms. Casel was undaunted: “I would just show up and show up to the point where I couldn’t be ignored any further.”
She attended tap jams around New York in Payless ankle boots, which she had taped on. Finally, it reached Mr. Glover’s ear that Mrs. Casel “knew the whole show,” she said. She became the only woman in Mr. Glover, Not Your Ordinary Tappers, who stopped at Radio City and the White House, among other places. Sometimes, she said, her presence in the all-male group was noted with underhanded compliments from onlookers: “They said, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t even know women tap dance’ or ‘you’re just like her'” — a reference to the men in the group.
Has she ever been intimidated?
Mrs. Casel shrugged and said, “I’m from the Bronx.”
When she was 9, her mother, Aida Tirado, sent her to Ms. Casel’s maternal grandparents in rural Rincón, “to protect me from a very difficult domestic situation,” said Ms. Casel. The decision was painful, Ms Tirado recalled, but, she said, “as a mother you look after your child. You want the best for her, so you do what you have to do.” Celia Cruz and José Feliciano’s music was ubiquitous, and so was a sense of legacy, Ms Casel said, an “understanding that there are people who have gone before you and sacrificed a lot so that you could feel very comfortable.”
An insatiable student of history, Mrs. Casel has long emphasized Tap’s black roots.
“I know many people recognize the African and Irish influence. I’m going to be radical and say it’s a widespread, predominantly black experience,” Ms. Casel said. Lions like Astaire and Rogers had whitewashed taps, Ms Casel has argued. “A lot of people don’t know about John Bubbles,” she said, referring to Astaire’s teacher, one of “the ancestors” on tap. “He changed and increased the way we could move our feet by adding nuts and dropping heels.”
She is fierce about pronouncing the names of black female tap dancers forgotten by history, including in her one-woman show “Diary of a Tap Dancer.” Jeni LeGon was “the first black woman to be signed to a major Hollywood studio, but got dropped after Ellen Powell came in”; Louise Madison (“people said she would eat Gregory Hines alive”); and Juanita Pitts, a dancer in the 1940s who, like Mrs. Casel, was known for performing in suits and flats.
“They learned by watching the men, doing the steps backstage or in the alley, the same way I’d done on ‘Noise, Funk,'” Ms. Casel said. It was “heartbreaking to know that the same thing happened 50 years later.”
Modernize a classic
With the revival of “Funny Girl”† Opening April 24 at the August Wilson Theater, Mrs. Casel is reviving the legacy of tap in one of Broadway’s most sacred productions.
“We have the opportunity to inhale history and a rhythmic sensibility that may not have been present when the show was first seen,” she said. In Harvey Fierstein’s update of the 1964 book, the role of Eddie Ryan is expanded and cast for the first time on Broadway with a black actor (Mr. Grimes). The character is promoted to dance director of the Ziegfeld Follies, creating a natural vehicle for Mrs. Casel’s choreography.
“I look at Eddie Ryan and I think he’s the Baby Laurance and Sammy Davis Jr. conglomerate,” she said. Her dizzying combinations are meant to evoke what Mr. Ryan “is said to have choreographed with his experience, who was as rich as a black man” in the early 1900s. “The thing is, we didn’t see that. We saw a very curated version of tap dancing in Hollywood.”
One of the most transformed songs under Ms. Casel is “Eddie’s Tap,” a solo by Mr. Grimes. During rehearsals in February there was a thriving live piano and drum accompaniment, but Mrs. Casel’s syncopation, performed by Mr. Grimes in dusty blue wing-tip taping shoes, became the music instead. For Ms. Casel, the solo “sounds like freedom and it sounds like swing and it sounds like heaven.”
Mr. Mayer said, “That’s the magic of Ayo.”
Mr. Grimes, who calls Ms. Casel a mentor, said she is “a young legend”. When he was 14, Mr. Grimes’ mother used to drive him from High Point, NC, to New York to take Mrs. Casels’ taping lessons at Steps on Broadway.
“Come full circle,” he said of their “Funny Girl” collaboration.
for mr. Mayer meant modernizing “Funny Girl” inviting, overlooked influences. “All the performers in the venue are very committed to creating a show that responds to the moment we live in,” he said.
Ms. Casel and others make the show “inherently contemporary,” said Torya Beard, the production’s assistant director, who is also Ms. Casel’s wife. “Who tells the story, what we hold in our bodies when we sing, when we dance, when we laugh.”
The choreography in the show can create a rousing, mainstream tap dancing moment, with the dancing itself becoming a star alongside Ms. Feldstein.
“Beanie is fearless,” Ms. Casel wrote in an email. “When she dances, I see pure joy in her expression. I know that feeling.” (In a behind-the-scenes video posted to Instagram, Ms. Feldstein said her favorite part of rehearsals was watching Ms. Casel learn ‘Rat Tat Tat Tat’ live,” she said in the interview. video.)
Rather than a biography in the “Funny Girl” Playbill, Ms. Casel credits “the tap dancing women who paved the way for this moment,” including Ms. LeGon, Ms. Bright, and Ms. Pitts, with the memory of her foremothers.
“My name on that poster means they’re with me too,” she said.
