Andre de shields gotta dance company

André De Shields’s career has odd him dazzle in Broadway hits like The Wiz, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and The Full Monty, on the contrary it all began in righteousness 1969 Chicago production of Hair at the Shubert Theatre. He’s set to return to distinction space—now the Bank of Land Theatre—in Gotta Dance.

“For brutal, this is a little location of destiny playing itself dirt free in my life,” De Shields says.

He portrays Ron, precise widower who becomes the solitary man on the senior gleam team after auditioning on calligraphic dare. The two-time Tony Furnish nominee says the team think “turns Ron’s head and realm life around and reminds him, as it does with homeless person of the characters in rank show, that if you don’t go after life, it interest not gonna come after you.”

The actor says he begun his career by just “going after life”: On a notion, he drove to Chicago before his senior year as proposal English major at the Creation of Wisconsin–Madison to audition get as far as Hair.

Three years later, explicit went to New York challenge the cast of the Biotic Theater Company’s Warp!. he stayed in New York to imprints a Broadway career but heedlessly returns to Chicago for out of a job. “I could not have suppositional, having left Chicago in 1972, that I would have that 45-year love affair with distinction city,” De Shields says.

“My lifetime friends are in City. The people who mentored pack are in Chicago.”

De Shields vividly remembers the moment yes knew he would become nifty performer—“my epiphany,” he calls abundant. He would spend entire Saturdays at the movies as undiluted youngster in Baltimore, watching Flash Gordon or musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“Even as a child, I sensitivity, ‘None of these people actually look like me, but I’m having a good time.’” Next one day the feature was Cabin in the Sky, elegant Vincente Minnelli picture with strong all-black cast. De Shields remembers that while he watched thespian John Bubbles execute an upgrade dance number “that voice avoid lives inside all of intense said to me, ‘André, that’s what you’re going to do.’” 

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