Always Gonna Dance: An Interview with Noah Racey

"I love it, I love it, I love it!" Racey says of his vocation, confirming the impression. "It's so easy to criticize musical theater as the bastard of the fine arts," he says. "But moving a dramatic story through music is no small feat, and to do it right and really honor each moment and try to feed it into music and into the dance, it's so hard. That's why I love it."

Some may be surprised that Racey's still operating at maximal enthusiasm after the potentially deflating experience he had eight months ago in his first starring role on Broadway. Never Gonna Dance, in which Racey took on Fred Astaire's role from the movie Swing Time, was one of last season's shortest-lived musicals. Labeled "spiceless" by the New York Times and reviewed just as coldly by many other publications, Dance sputtered out after two months.

But Racey spoke about it without bitterness during our recent pre-matinee interview at Goodspeed. "What I'm dealing with is the fact that it happened at all, not that it closed," he says. "Look what I did: I starred in a Broadway show. It was extraordinary, staggering."

And proving the old adage—okay, the modified adage—that dancing well is the best revenge, Racey has won over audiences and critics in the title role of Where's Charley?, running through Sept. 25 at Goodspeed in East Haddam, Conn. Portraying an 1890s Oxford student who poses as his aunt to chaperone his own dates, Racey spends half the play dressed as a woman and in some scenes continually runs off stage to change in or out of drag. He also tumbles, pratfalls, climbs up to the balcony and does assorted other physical stunts—plus tap dances on top of a piano and soft-shoes his way into everybody's hearts with "Once in Love With Amy."

All in a day's work, Racey says. "Ballet, jazz, flamenco, all types of dance, physical comedy: To me it all becomes the same kind of energy," he says. "It feels so neat to express a certain kind of emotion through your body. It's such an amazing playground."

With the lead in Where's Charley?, Racey is once again filling the shoes of a beloved hoofer of yesteryear: Ray Bolger, who originated the role in 1948 and was forever thereafter associated with "Once in Love With Amy." By inheriting roles from Bolger and Astaire, as well as from contemporaries like Jim Walton and James Brennan—whom Racey calls "my heroes" and who had both been Bobby Child in Crazy for You before Racey played the role last summer at the Muny in St. Louis—Racey is carrying on a tradition he loves. "I like the word hoofer," Racey says. "It's been kind of taken aside by this idea that there are different kinds of tap dance. To me, hoofer is a dancer. Hoofer is somebody who uses their hoofs. And that's how I like to use the word. I'm a hoofer. I tap dance, I do classical ballet, I do partnering, I do theater dance."

Racey's admiration for his predecessors is one reason he's proud of Never Gonna Dance despite its commercial failure. "People would say, 'So do you feel the weight of trying to live up to Fred Astaire?'" he reflects. "Turning my love for what Fred Astaire did and my appreciation of what Fred Astaire was and what I learned from him and how much I adored what he did—turning that into a weight, into an expectation. It's like speaking two different languages. It doesn't make any sense. It's not a weight."

Prior to Never Gonna Dance, Racey's last Broadway appearance was in the original ensemble of Thoroughly Modern Millie. On tour and in regional theater, he's done many of the great dance shows—West Side Story (he was Riff), Oklahoma (Will), On the Town, 42nd Street—and though his resume is filled with revivals and reworkings of older material (like Never Gonna Dance and Millie), Racey insists tap dancing is very much of the moment. "It is such a phenomenal field right now," he says. "We have had the can opener that is Savion Glover blow the lid off of what we knew about tap dancing and how we thought it could be used."

Racey believes the theater can learn from popular music in creating new material for song-and-dance men like himself. "Videos do it well. People like Usher, Justin Timberlake—these are song-and-dance men. They're amazing dancers, the physicality they use. And that's where I think we can go. It doesn't have to be just Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern or our dear Frank Loesser [who wrote Where's Charley?]. They set the stage with a respect for lyric to music to dance with a format that you don't have to bypass when you get into contemporary music."