Michael Kidd, Choreographer, Dies
By PATRICIA ELIOT TOBIAS
Published: December 24, 2007
Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer of exuberant dance numbers for Broadway shows like “Finian’s Rainbow,” “Guys and Dolls”‘ and “Can-Can” and Hollywood musicals like “The Band Wagon” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles.
The cause was cancer, said his nephew, Robert Greenwald. Biographical sources generally give Mr. Kidd’s age as 88, but Mr. Greenwald said his uncle was actually 92.
On Broadway, Mr. Kidd won five Tony Awards: for “Finian’s Rainbow” in 1947, “Guys and Dolls” in 1951, “Can-Can” in 1954, “Li’l Abner” in 1957 and “Destry Rides Again” in 1960.
In 1996 he received a special Academy Award “in recognition of his services to the art of dance in the art of the screen.”
Perhaps his best-known film work was in 1954 in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” a musical of the American frontier whose dances were created by Mr. Kidd for ballet dancers who were not supposed to appear balletic. Instead, he had them perform what he called “work movements,” like wielding axes.
Mr. Kidd defined his choreography as ”human behavior and people’s manners, stylized into musical rhythmic forms.”
He added, ”I always use real-life gestures, and most of my dancing is based on real life.”
Anna Kisselgoff, the former chief dance critic of The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Kidd’s signature was ”characterization through energy, epitomized by a lovesick male clan going courting with an acrobatic challenge dance” in “Seven Brides.”
Michael Kidd was born Michael Greenwald in Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant barber, Abraham Greenwald, and his wife Lillian. While still at New Utrecht High School, he attended a modern dance performance, was hooked and began to study with Blanche Evan.
In 1936 and 1937, he attended City College of New York, intending to be a chemical engineer, but in mid-1937 he received a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. Soon he became a member of the corps de ballet for Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, touring the country and dancing many roles, including the lead in “Billy the Kid.” By 1941, he had become a soloist and assistant director for Eugene Loring’s Dance Players, and from 1942 to 1947, he was a soloist for Ballet Theater, which is now called American Ballet Theater. While there, he was given the opportunity to create his own ballet, “On Stage!” in 1945.
Ms. Kisselgoff described it as a “wistful fantasy, about a janitor who protectively helps a timid young dancer at an audition.” She called Mr. Kidd’s performance as the janitor “Chaplinesque.”
Edward Denby of The New York Herald Tribune predicted that “On Stage!” would take Mr. Kidd to Broadway, saying his gifts leaned more toward entertainment than poetic expression. In 1947, Mr. Kidd abandoned ballet for the Broadway musical.
Mr. Kidd was hailed as one of the great hopes of postwar American ballet, especially by those who believed ballet should be drawn from American life. Yet unlike Jerome Robbins, whose first ballet, ”Fancy Free” in 1944, also launched a Broadway career, Mr. Kidd never returned to a dance company.
Mr. Kidd’s initial effort as a Broadway choreographer was for “Finian’s Rainbow,” the Burton Lane-E.Y. Harburg fantasy that mixed social significance with an oversized leprechaun. It brought Mr. Kidd the first of his five Tony Awards.
“If notes of music could leap across the stage, they would be no lighter or lovelier than this joyous ballet of young and carefree people,” the critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times.
Mr. Kidd’s next few musicals did not fare as well. Productions of “Hold It,” about college life, and Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner ’s “Love Life,” directed by Elia Kazan, had short runs in 1948. “Arms and the Girl,” directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Pearl Bailey and Nanette Fabray, had a similar fate early in 1950.
But Mr. Kidd hit the jackpot later in 1950 when Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls” opened on Broadway. Mr. Kidd earned a second Tony Award for his choreography in what would become one of theater’s greatest musicals, with numbers like Adelaide and the Hot Box Girls performing “Bushel and a Peck” and “Take Back Your Mink” and Sky Masterson’s “Luck Be a Lady” crap game in a sewer. Mr. Kidd was lured to Hollywood. His first film as choreographer was the 1952 adaptation of the Frank Loesser hit Broadway musical “Where’s Charley?,” starring Ray Bolger, repeating his Broadway role. Mr. Kidd’s first big success in films came with the Fred Astaire musical “The Band Wagon” in 1953. The film, which used the music and lyrics of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, included the now-famous “Girl Hunt Ballet” with Astaire and Cyd Charisse, a spoof on the hard-boiled private eye stories of Mickey Spillane.
It was Fred Astaire who asked that Mr. Kidd be hired to choreograph the film and stage the dances, reportedly because Astaire was nervous about the ballet. Mr. Kidd later said that to make Astaire comfortable, he came to rehearsals and pretended that he was just making up the steps spontaneously.
For the same film, Mr. Kidd choreographed “Shine on Your Shoes,” in which Astaire lights up a penny arcade with a brilliant partner, LeRoy Daniels, a real shoe-shine man, and the lyrical “Dancing in the Dark,” in which Astaire courts Ms. Charisse in Central Park.
In a 1998 interview, Ms. Charisse said of Mr. Kidd: “Everything he did was special for that movement. He’s like a little gust of wind.”
At the same time, Mr. Kidd was working on “Bandwagon” as well as Cole Porter’s Broadway musical “Can- Can.”
“It is Michael Kidd, the choreographer, who every now and then picks ‘Can-Can’ out of the old operetta routines and turns it into a modern show,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times. “ With Gwen Verdon leading the ballets with impudence, recklessness and humor, the dancing is spectacular.”
By 1954, Mr. Kidd was ready for another Hollywood musical, this time “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” directed by Stanley Donen and based on a Stephen Vincent Benet short story about seven backwoods brothers, the eldest played by Howard Keel, who go in search of brides and kidnap some from a nearby town. Frightened at first, the women warm to their captors and happily wed them.
“While those with overly delicate feminist sensibilities may find the sexual politics of ‘Seven Brides’ too horrifying to contemplate,” Stephanie Zacharek wrote in The Times in 2004 on the occasion of a 50th-anniversary DVD release of the film, “the rest of us will want to play the barn-raising sequence — choreographed by Michael Kidd, it is one of the most rousing dance numbers ever put on screen — over and over again.”
For the film, Mr. Kidd recruited ballet-trained dancers like Jacques D’Amboise, Marc Platt, Tommy Rall and Matt Mattox to join the musical actor Russ Tamblyn; his female dancers included a young Julie Newmar (billed as Julie Newmeyer) and Ruta Lee (then Ruta Kilmonis).The following year, Mr. Kidd worked on the Frank Sinatra-Marlon Brando film version of “Guys and Dolls.”
Mr. Kidd, who had acted in plays in the 1930s and ’40s, made his movie acting debut in the 1955 musical “It’s Always Fair Weather,” which was directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. In the film, he joined Dan Dailey and Kelly as a trio of old Army buddies who drunkenly dance with ashcan lids on their feet before holding a reunion a decade later. Around this time, he also turned to directing both Broadway musicals, like “L’il Abner” in 1956, which brought him another Tony for choreography, and films like “Merry Andrew,” with Danny Kaye in 1958.
By the late 1950s the musical film was an endangered species, however, and after adapting his choreography for the film version of “L’il Abner” in 1959, Mr. Kidd did not make another film until he choreographed “Star!” with Julie Andrews in 1968 and “Hello Dolly!” with Barbra Streisand in 1969. Neither was a success. But he kept busy on Broadway working either as choreographer or director or sometimes both on musicals like “Destry Rides Again,” with Dolores Gray and Andy Griffith, in 1959; “Wildcat,” starring Lucille Ball in 1960; “Subways Are for Sleeping,” in 1961; “Ben Franklin in Paris,” with Robert Preston in 1964; “Skyscraper,” starring Julie Harris in 1965; and the ill-fated “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, a show that shut down the night of its last preview in 1966 and never officially opened.
In 1972, Mr. Kidd directed and choreographed “The Rothschilds,” with Hal Linden, and he staged the Broadway musical “The Goodbye Girl,” with Bernadette Peters in 1993.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Kidd choreographed and directed some television specials, including several with Julie Andrews. In 1982, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his contribution to the television special “Baryshnikov in Hollywood.”
He also acted in a few films during those decades, most memorably as a faded jack-of-all trades director-choreographer trying to rescue a beauty pageant in the 1975 cult film “Smile.” He directed episodes of “Laverne and Shirley” as well as scenes for Janet Jackson in two music videos, “When I Think of You” and “Alright.”
Mr. Kidd is survived by his second wife, the former dancer Shelah Hackett; his daughters Kristine Kidd and Susan Kidd, both from his first marriage, to another dancer, Mary Heater; and two children from his second marriage, Amy Kidd and Matthew Kidd.
Mr. Kidd’s primary focus for any dance number was on the characters and the story. As he said to Ms. Kisselgoff in 1994, “I always write a scenario first, even if it is a scenario for an emotion.”
