As an Ivy League-bound champion athlete, James Brown III was the type of student who's voted most likely to succeed. His high school classmates would have pegged his success to sports or medicine, since they knew him as a track star and wannabe neurosurgeon. Though he's given up both those pursuits, he has attained the success he seemed destined for in the field he chose instead: dance.
At age 25, James has already performed in three of the biggest blockbusters of the past decade—Wicked, The Producers and The Lion King—and is now in one of this season's musical hits, The Color Purple. He's made his movie debut, appeared on one of television's most buzzed-about programs (Chappelle's Show) and worked with such A-listers as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Usher, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Sondheim and Nathan Lane. Since coming to New York five years ago (to do psychology research!), he's been employed nonstop as a dancer. Should we believe him when he says "There are tons of shows I haven't gotten"?
When James arrived in New York in June 2001, he was a psychology major with med-school aspirations who had just completed his junior year at Brown University. He had earned a research grant to study the so-called Adonis complex, an obsession with having the "perfect body" that drives men to diet and work out excessively. A Brown professor, Katharine Phillips, had co-written a book about the disorder, and James wanted to study it specifically among male dancers. To get to know potential subjects, he attended dance classes and auditions. One of the first auditions he went to was for the all-star concerts marking Michael Jackson's 30 years as a solo artist. He was hired—and thus, for his first professional gig, he danced to "Beat It" alongside Jackson himself; behind Whitney Houston, Usher and Mya in an opening number; and with chart-topping divas Destiny's Child and Missy Elliott on their hits "Bootylicious" and "Get Ur Freak On," respectively.
The producer and choreographer of the Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration—held at Madison Square Garden in late summer 2001 and televised that November on CBS—also hired James to dance in Usher's and Mya's concerts at the Garden and for R&B singer Deborah Cox's nationwide tour. Some fellow dancers in the Jackson show told him about auditions for the first national tour of The Lion King, and by spring 2002 he was its dance captain and understudy for a role he had long desired, Simba. His future as a doctor had been vanquished.
"Lion King was, like, my favorite musical ever," says James. "I loved the movie, and I saw the show when it first opened and I was: 'Oh, God, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my whole life!' I always wanted to be Simba."
He got to play his dream role in The Lion King during his two years with the tour, but he'd have an even greater emotional attachment to a show in the future—now the present. "I think all of us in The Color Purple to a certain extent have a very close relationship with the story, only because it's a large part of our history, where we've come from, and there's a positive outcome," James says. "And it's a recognized movie and book, not just recognized by African-Americans but cross-culturally.
