ABSTRACT
Musical theater choreographers tell stories in movement and gesture, in response to text and plot and in collaboration with music. Working closely with a theater director, or in some cases serving as director and choreographer, a dance maker’s job is to translate the ideas of the libretto into movement. In the case of original shows, there is no burden of reckoning with past productions. For the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof, director Bartlett Sher chose the internationally acclaimed contemporary choreographer Hofesh Shechter to reinvent Jerome Robbins’ original dances used in the 1964 Broadway production. The Tony Award-winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli collaborated with director Bartlett Sher on the 2015 revival of The King and I, and created several sequences of original movement and staging. In the case of Robbins’ ballet “Small House of Uncle Thomas,” Sher chose to retain Robbins’ choreography, but told Gattelli that he wanted “to do the ballet but on steroids.”.
