A Dude from a Different Planet

By Gerald Clarke

Broadway's high-stepping Tommy Tune wins a Tony for "Nine'

Tommy Tune has one big advantage over other dancers, choreographers and directors of musicals. It is not that he is 6 ft. 6 in., although that helps. Nor is it that he has the most musical name on Broadway. No. Tune's advantage is that he had the luck to grow up in Texas around real hoofers, the most graceful performers on legs. "My father used to train Tennessee walking horses," he says, "and that gave me an early sense of gaits. When the ring emptied out, I'd go in and imitate them."

But it was on two legs that Tune--that is his real name--walked out onto the stage of New York City's Imperial Theater two weeks ago to accept a Tony Award for his direction of "Nine," which also won the award for best musical. Or did he dance onto the stage? It was hard to tell for sure. Despite the fact that he had made the trip twice before--as best featured actor in a musical for Seesaw (1973) and as co-choreographer of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine (1980)--he could not quite believe it when No. 3 was announced. "I just sat there," he says. Yet somehow he managed to reach the proper place and do the proper thing: he tripped a little dance and said a few words.

Actually, as Tune would probably be the first to acknowledge, it was a close race between him and his good friend and mentor Michael Bennett, who directed Dreamgirls. In a bad, in fact rotten, year for musicals, both demonstrated what an energetic and imaginative director can do with mediocre material. Dreamgirls, which opened last December, was an early hit, and "Nine," which came in at the last minute (five hours before the nomination cutoff), was a late one. But the most recent entry is the one the voters remember best. "Tommy was faced with the decision of whether to have the comfort of another week or two of previews or to open in time to qualify for the Tony," says Producer Zev Bufman, whose own show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, also lost to "Nine." "He went for drama--the awards or nothing--and he won."

Indeed, it can be said that without Tune "Nine"almost certainly would have been "Zero." Based on Federico Fellini's 1968 movie 8 1/2, it is the story of an Italian film director who has sought refuge at a Venetian spa, where he is desperately trying to put together a film and at the same time make sense out of his disorderly life. Arthur Kopit's book is confusing, Maury Yeston's music is forgettable, and his lyrics are banal. Yet Tune's direction is so lively one tends to forget all that. Most directors would be glad just to avoid traffic jams with such a large cast: four boys, one man and 21 women. Tune, by contrast, rejoices in movement, and all 26 seem to flow together, as if they were made of air and not the coarse stuff of earth.

But then some people are not at all sure that Tune is made of ordinary clay. "Tommy is extra-special--half of this world and half of another," says Bufrnan, who worked with him on a 1975 production of Mack & Mabel. Writer Larry King, who worked, and occasionally collided, with Tune during rehearsals of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, is not even sure about the first half. "Man, I don't know!" he writes in his book The Whorehouse Papers. "I think that dude grew up on a different planet." Tune, 43, does not smoke or drink, and his West Side Manhattan apartment is even sparer than he is. Almost all the interior walls have been knocked down, and the only furniture is a bed. When guests drop by, they may sit on nine big pillows. Tune meditates in the morning and evening and spends half an hour more doing yoga exercises. Before each rehearsal of "Nine, "he led the company in a session of yoga breathing. "When we ended," he says, "we were all as one."

If anybody was born to dance, it was Tune. His father serviced oil rigs, his mother was part Shawnee, and they met at a dance. Of course. Tommy was only five when he started dance classes. "I absolutely loooved ballet," he says, generously giving the verb four or five more syllables than the dictionary. "I was actually quite good at it."

Still, Tune was forced to admit that with his body he would never make it as a ballet dancer, and he began looking in the direction of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly rather than Nijinsky. When he saw a local production of The King and I, he narrowed his sights still further--to Broadway. He studied drama at the University of Texas at Austin and after graduating in 1961 turned north toward Times Square. He missed out on several parts because of his height, but finally got into the chorus of Irma La Douce. Some of the other shows he was in, Baker Street and A Joyful Noise, were less successful, but Tune remembers those days in the chorus line as the happiest of his life. "I love being part of a team," he says. "There is an incredible feeling when 16 of you are stopping a show together."

His Tony for Seesaw almost ended his career as a performer, and he was not offered new parts, probably because producers thought he would be too expensive. He tried a nightclub act and was roundly panned, which left what he calls a "huge scar." He was praised, however, for his direction of a feminist revue, The Club, in 1976 and for the current off-Broadway hit Cloud 9. It is as director and choreographer that he is now generally known. "Performers get applause," he says ruefully. "Directors get gray hairs."

Well, maybe not -- at least not yet anyway. On July 5 he will begin rehearsals for Funny Face, a stage version of the 1956 movie musical. He will co-choreograph and play the Fred Astaire part; Twiggy will take Audrey Hepburn's old role, and with luck the show will reach Broadway in the fall. Till then, tourists should not be alarmed if they hear whinnies in Times Square. It may just be Tommy Tune practicing some of those stylish steps he learned in the paddock back in Texas. -- By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka

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