Everything is Choreography

Abstract Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full-scale analysis of the work of Tommy Tune, and his place in a lineage of Broadway’s great director-choreographers. The decade of the 1980s was considered a low point for the American musical. Tune’s predecessors in the art of complete musical staging like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett were either dead or withdrawn from the Broadway arena. Yet it was the period of Tune’s greatest success. The book examines how he adapted to an increasingly corporatized, high-stakes producing and funding environment. It considers how Tune kept the American musical a thriving, creative enterprise at a time when Broadway was dominated by British imports. It investigates Tune’s work since the mid-1990s, when he shifted his attentions to touring and regional productions, far from the glare of Broadway. Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career, and the book details the deft balancing act that kept him working as a popular singer-dancer-actor while he was directing a series of striking and influential Broadway musicals.