When They Do Let Them Sustain On

At 14 I Discovered Girls. At That Time Dancing Was The Only Way You Could Put Your Arm Around The Girl. Dancing Was Courtship. Only Later Did I Discover That You Dance Joy. You Dance Love. You Dance Dreams.

The Way I Look At A Musical, You Are Commenting On The Human Condition No Matter What You Do. A Musical May Be Light And Frivolous, But By Its Very Nature, It Makes Some Kind Of Social Comment.

I Wanted To Invent Some Kind Of American Dance That Was Danced To The Music That I Grew Up On: Cole Porter And Rodgers And Hart And Irving Berlin. So I Evolved A Style That Certainly Didn't Catch On Right Away - But I Had Some Good Mentors In New York Who Encouraged Me.

It Fit Into My Scheme Of Things For Many Reasons. At The Time It Was True That Male Dancers Were Looked Down Upon, And It Was True That A Lot Of The Male Dancers Were Effeminate. But What I Was Really Trying To Do Was Develop Something That Would Be American.

My Mother Had Gotten A Job As A Receptionist At A Dancing School And Had The Idea That We Should Open Our Own Dancing School; We Did, And It Prospered.