GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Cody Green of 'Grease'

Doesn’t this young man look like Jason Gould, sometime-actor son of Barbra Streisand? Someone in Streisand’s circle thought so, which may be why she hired him to perform alongside her on not one but two occasions.

Cody Green, the young man pictured, recalls either the director or producer of Streisand’s “Timeless” concerts noting the resemblance when he was offered the dancer role in her September 2000 concerts in New York and Los Angeles. But Green, a Canadian, was in the States on a student visa, about to begin his second year at Juilliard, and the school refused to let him take time off. Though he briefly considered dropping out, he ultimately just turned down the job. (It was a slot that had been filled by Savion Glover when Streisand had done the concerts months earlier in Las Vegas for the millennium.)

Well, at least Green got to share the stage with Streisand once: That summer, he’d sung in her backup choir at the Democratic National Convention in L.A. And he has since worked with some other big-name celebs, like Billy Joel (in Movin’ Out) and Cate Blanchett (a scene from her upcoming movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

The headliners on Green’s current gig are famous, too, even though they’d never before performed on Broadway. He’s in the new revival of Grease, whose leads, Laura Osnes and Max Crumm, were cast from a TV reality show. Green plays one of their classmates at Rydell High and understudies Kenickie, Sonny and class nerd Eugene.

Grease is Green’s second Broadway show; his first was Movin’ Out, which he also did in London and on tour. And Movin’ Out was only his second professional theatrical credit. He was cast in the Mamma Mia! tour while still in Juilliard—that time, he did quit school to take the job. While studying dance at Juilliard, “I never did really think about the Broadway thing,” says Green. Then his friend Nicholas Dromard got into the Mamma Mia! tour. “We were a similar type…and I said, ‘Hey, I want to do that.’”

After he’d been part of the Mamma Mia! ensemble for about a year and a half, he auditioned for Twyla Tharp, who needed replacements for the Broadway principals in her Billy Joel-scored opus Movin’ Out. He didn’t get that part, but he was cast in the Movin’ Out national tour. Later, he joined the New York company during the final months of the show’s Broadway run, performing lead role Eddie when John Selya didn’t go on.

Because Movin’ Out is a danced-through musical and Tharp’s Tony-winning choreography extremely demanding, no principal does eight shows a week. On the tour, Green was the “main” Eddie, performing the role four or five times a week. On Broadway, he spelled Selya two or three times a week. “The role of Eddie is unbelievably exhausting,” says Green, who also covered Keith Roberts as Tony in the Broadway cast. “It feels kind of like a marathon every night, and you feel so excited that you got through it. You feel like you accomplished so much.”

He says his favorite number in Movin’ Out was probably “Goodnight Saigon,” Eddie’s intense and devastating Vietnam flashback. “That’s probably the hardest point of the show, the point at which you’re most exhausted, because you’ve been on stage since the beginning of the second act, straight through,” Green says. “Once it’s done, you feel like you’ve gotten through the show.”

He also liked the numbers that Billy Joel himself performed. Joel attended opening night in several cities on the tour, taking over at piano for the curtain call, “New York State of Mind,” in some of them. “We were just so excited and so pumped to be there on stage with Billy Joel, listening to him,” Green remembers.

As a Movin’ Out cast member, he worked with another legend in director/choreographer Tharp. “I had an amazing experience in rehearsal with Twyla,” Green reports. “You feel this energy with her when you’re working and it just kind of brings the best out of you. She expects a lot, and you push to that. I really feel like I grew through that.”

Following Movin’ Out’s Broadway closing in December 2005, Green starred in the show in London during the spring of 2006. He then returned to the U.S. and rejoined the tour for a few months. Late last year, he auditioned successfully for the Grease revival. But before rehearsals could begin, the parts of Sandy and Danny had to be awarded in the NBC reality competition Grease: You’re the One That I Want. While the TV series was being filmed last winter, Green happened to be staying in L.A. with Lorin Latarro, his friend and former Movin’ Out castmate. And Latarro happened to be assisting Grease director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall throughout the competition. The show was taped at a studio around the corner from Latarro’s home, so Green went over and watched the goings-on.

Grease, he says, has been “a really cool experience. Walking into the room for the first rehearsal, the energy was so great...this really positive energy. Everybody was so excited just to get started, and right off the bat I was like: This is going to be a lot of fun. The rehearsal period feel just flew by.”

Another of Green’s projects also had its premiere recently. He dances in the ensemble of a few numbers in the new Beatles jukebox musical movie Across the Universe, directed by Julie Taymor. He’s an officer in the Army induction scene set to the song “I Want You” and one of the suit-and-briefcase squares in “Come Together.” 

Green has filmed a scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt that’s slated for a Christmastime 2008 release. Directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club), it’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who lives his life from old age to infancy. Green portrays a dancer at the Paris Opera, where Blanchett’s character performs. “She was so nice, so beautiful,” he says of the Oscar winner. “We’re sitting there and we had to watch one of her scenes, where she’s dancing en pointe. Her dance double did it, but she had to stand there and turn her head—she’s spotting the turns, because they’re putting her face on the body. And standing there [he imitates Blanchett tilting her head at different angles to match the dancer’s body positions], she just looked like royalty.”

Green’s scene in Benjamin Button wasn’t filmed on location in Paris but on a Hollywood set. He’s done plenty of traveling for dance, though. Did it, in fact, before he finished high school. Green—who grew up just outside Vancouver in the tiny British Columbia town of Crescent Beach (“No one’s heard of it; say ‘White Rock,’” which is the larger town nearby), about 15 minutes from the U.S. border—started taking classes at his mother’s dance school, Joy of Movement, around age 5. Not long after, he began performing with the school’s Visions Dance Company.

The semiprofessional youth troupe performed both locally and internationally, serving as cultural ambassadors for the Canadian government on some trips. “We did pieces that had a message, less focused on just entertainment,” Green explains. “They spoke to war or the earth or women’s rights.” When he was 10 and the Soviet Union still in existence, the company traveled to Novosibirsk, Siberia. As a teen, he performed with Visions at the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing. They also went to Prague for an exchange with a counterpart Czech troupe and performed in such other far-flung locales as Lapland, and even returned to Siberia after the Iron Curtain fell. In addition to providing a lot of dance experience, his travels with Visions were “eye-opening,” says Green. At the Beijing conference, for example, he saw that for many of the world’s women, their primary concern is not political and social equality, as in the West. “You had people from different parts of the world, lobbying for different things. Something as simple as water for their village,” he says.

Green’s childhood also was full of sports—soccer, baseball, basketball, volleyball. He gradually had to quit every team to free up more time for dancing, with soccer being the last to go. “At some point in high school, everything was going really well with dance. I felt like I got a lot from that, both physically and with regards to expression,” Green says. “I also liked the athletic part of dancing: all of the tricks and flips and break dancing and all of that stuff.”

Though he’d dedicated much time to dance throughout his youth, he wasn’t single-mindedly envisioning a performance career when he graduated from high school. “It’s just something that came naturally and I enjoyed doing it,” says Green. “I never really looked that far ahead with it; it was just what I did.” He had started dancing because his older sister (now a medical resident in L.A.) was doing it and his mother was teaching it—in the basement of their home: “It was easy, it was right there, I didn’t have to go anywhere.” Later on, “I found what I was doing with dance really challenging, and I wanted to pursue it for that reason. I liked where it was going, and it was tough. With dance, when you’re younger, you’re learning new things all the time. Which you don’t find when you learn a sport: It is what it is. But there are so many facets of performing that I enjoyed, and I got kind of caught up in it.”

Green danced for well-known Canadian modern choreographer Judith Marcuse, founder of DanceArts Vancouver, in a piece about teen suicide called ICE: beyond cool. He moved to New York after high school to explore his career options and ended up getting sent to Tokyo Disneyland to sing and dance as Aladdin and other characters. He returned to New York the following year and enrolled in Juilliard. His decision to leave school after two years was motivated not only by the Mamma Mia! job but also by a reduction in his scholarship. With the U.S.-Canada exchange rate at the time, continuing at Juilliard became financially untenable.

Since breaking into the biz, Green has lived for periods of time (when not on tour) in L.A.—he is originally a West Coast boy, after all. For now, obviously, he’s staying put in New York. “Working with Kathleen is a lot of fun,” he says of his boss Marshall. “She is just so prepared, she knows what she wants to do when she comes in, but then she gives you the freedom of expression within her choreography.” Green has a prominent role during the school dance scene at the top of Act 2 in Grease. Come October 20, he’ll have an even larger role throughout the show: He’s scheduled to go on as Kenickie at both performances that Saturday.

Photos of Cody, from top: outside the Brooks Atkinson Theatre; as Eddie in Movin’ Out; with Anna Aimee White (lifted) and ensemble in Grease. [Grease photo by Joan Marcus]

Updates on some previous Gypsies of the Month:
· Christopher DeAngelis is a swing on the Jersey Boys tour.
· Sarah Jane Everman just costarred in Unlock’d at the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF).
· Cara Cooper has joined the Legally Blonde ensemble on Broadway.
· Joanne Javien will play Eponine in Les Misérables at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass., this fall. She was Tuptim in The King and I, starring Lorenzo Lamas, at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse in August.