She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.” One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”Īt 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.īallet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style. and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”Ī few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth Prince Charming is M.I.A. “A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color. That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth. LONDON - Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms.
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