Or, better yet, is there one???????????
Once upon a time , darlings, performers knew things. They knew to study acting with Uta or Lee. Or Austin (Pendelton) who is till going at it.
Back in the late Seventies, when "Runaways" moved up from The Public, to become a Broadway success, and Trini Alvarado was stopping the show, nightly, with "Lullaby From Baby To Baby," everyone then knew she studied and tap and jazz with Phil Black. I was just a fragile thing in my twenties, then, but I kept telling my parents I was going to run away to New York, and study tap and jazz with Phil Black. They knew I liked my creature comforts.
Three years earlier, during the "Chorus Line" frenzy, when everyone, including yours truly, worshiped at the feet of the celebrated Original Cast, we all knew that people like Donna, Kelly and Priscilla, studied with Luigi!!!!!!!!!!!! In fact, until just very recently--he passed away on April 7, at the age of 90--everyone of any note in dance was studying with Luigi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, with Luigi, actually gone, who is his equivalent today? I mean, in the post-"Chorus Line" post-millennial age that I knew we would eventually arrive at, and have, I had thought people would be studying with Kelly, or Donna, or Priscilla!!!!!!!!! Now, Donna does do a Musical Theater Audition class sometimes, down at HB Studios, which I have got to do, one of these days, but Kelly and Priscilla, while vociferous speakers of everything Dance, do not teach.
So, when one wants to learn and stretch, for physical as well as professional benefit, as I do, whom does one go to????????? If any of you out there dance, and can tell me whom you would consider the Luigi of today, well. like the song says in "Frank Mills," "I would gratefully appreciate it."
Remember what Martha Scott, standing in for Lucia Chase, in "The Turning Point," said--"Tradition is continuity, and continuity is tradition!"
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