Andy Pellick, who grew up in a western Pennsylvania village of 260 people, 0 stop signs and 1 gas station with hand-cranked pumps, moved to New York City during the first week of September 2001. What happened there a few days later was enough to send even the slickest of city slickers retreating to some sleepy burg in the countryside, but Pellick the small-town transplant was undaunted.
"I couldn't imagine anywhere else I want to be," he says. "Oddly, I felt safer being here and in the middle of it. I felt like I was aware what was going on a lot better than anybody that I know outside of New York. Everybody was like, 'Can you just go to New Jersey for a week or two?' It was important to be here. I felt really connected to the city."
Five years and four Broadway shows later, Pellick's assimilation is complete. "I feel like a New York guy," says the 27-year-old. "I'm having a love affair with this city."
Pellick had eased into urban living by moving to Las Vegas after high school. "It was the perfect intermediate step, a great way to adjust to a bigger city." He didn't experience culture shock after arriving in New York but rather had felt it more back in his hometown of Grindstone, Pa. (about an hour southeast of Pittsburgh). "I think where I grew up was shocking to me," he admits. "I always felt like: What is this place that I'm living in? This isn't right. I always knew there was something bigger out there and there was a world that I was missing."
As a Broadway dancer, Pellick has been able to explore many worlds—from Emerald City to the African jungle to 19th-century Transylvania. His longest engagement to date has been Wicked, where his roles included flying monkey. He left the show about a year into its run to do La Cage Aux Folles, in which he memorably cavorted in a cage as a drag queen in a bird costume. In his Broadway debut, Dance of the Vampires, he portrayed one of the undead—as well as a clove of garlic (really). And now, in Tarzan, he's an ape and a moth.
Sense a pattern here? Pellick encapsulates his résumé: "I'm always a creature, and I'm always wearing a unitard. Every show." Every movie too. Pellick has made just one so far, but he didn't get to be a flesh-and-blood human in that either. In The Polar Express, Pellick's digitized likeness appears as a pastry chef in the "Hot Chocolate" number. Some of his dance steps were also used for a waiter in the scene. To perform these parts that would then get CG-animated, "we had to wear black unitards with motion-capture sensors on them," Pellick says. "Again with the unitard!"
Pellick's acrobatic flair has a lot to do with all the flying, swinging, flipping and contorting he's asked to do. And it's what got him into dance in the first place. "I loved just being, like, a kid, a little boy," Pellick recalls of his childhood. "We had a big pool, so I loved diving. And we had trampolines. I was a daredevil, so I would just be in the backyard playing around. I was the kid always dancing around and tumbling in backyards of everybody where I lived." Friends and neighbors knew his younger sister was going to dance class. "They were like, 'Put him in dance.' So I went with her one day and absolutely loved it." The studio he and his sister attended "was very good at acrobatics," Pellick explains, "so flexibility was key, and tumbling. That's kind of where it all came from."
Choreographers have tailored roles to his unique talents. Meryl Tankard came up with Tarzan's moth (pretty enough to be mistaken for a butterfly) at a workshop last summer where "they got an idea of who we were and what we could do," Pellick says. Jerry Mitchell had a cage brought to La Cage rehearsals and decided what exactly to do with it once Pellick was inside. He was hired for the Vegas show EFX when there was no spot open in the company, so a piece was created for him.
Like some others in the Tarzan company, Pellick previously performed in the aerial/aquatic revue De La Guarda, which was created by Pichón Baldinu, a designer for Tarzan. "He really taught me how to be comfortable and how to trust the apparatus, and everything that's going on. Once you establish that you trust what's happening, you can do anything," Pellick says. As a De La Guarda alum, he had no qualms about strapping on a harness for all the ape pendulation (as Tarzan's pal Terk calls it) in Tarzan. "It's so exciting because there's so much freedom," he gushes. "There's an entire other level that you get to experience because you're in the air—when does that happen [otherwise]?"
