Michael Kidd (born Milton Greenwald; August 12, 1915 – December 23, 2007) was an American film and stage choreographer, dancer and actor, whose career spanned five decades, and who staged some of the leading Broadway and film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Kidd, strongly influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Léonide Massine, was an innovator in what came to be known as the "integrated musical", in which dance movements are integral to the plot.
He was probably best known for his athletic dance numbers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a 1954 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek called the barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides "one of the most rousing dance numbers ever put on screen". He was the first choreographer to win five Tony Awards, and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1996 for advancing dance in film.
Early life, education, and dance career
Kidd was born in New York City on the Lower East Side, the son of Abraham Greenwald, a barber, and his wife Lillian, who were Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia. He moved to Brooklyn with his family and attended New Utrecht High School. He became interested in dance after attending a modern dance performance, and went on to study under Blanche Evan, a dancer and choreographer.
He studied chemical engineering at the City College of New York in 1936 and 1937, but left after being granted a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. He toured the country as a member of the corps de ballet of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, and performed in roles that included the lead in Billy the Kid, choreographed by Eugene Loring, which featured an orchestral composition by Aaron Copland.
In 1942, while performing with Ballet Caravan, Milton and his fellow dancers were encouraged to adopt an "American" name. His choice of the stage name 'Kidd' as his older brother was a booking agent for the Concord Hotel in the Catskill Mountains, and Milton was always known as "the kid."
In 1941, Kidd became a soloist and assistant to Loring in his Dance Players. He became a soloist for Ballet Theater, later known as the American Ballet Theatre. His performances there included Fancy Free (1944) choreographed by Jerome Robbins and with music by Leonard Bernstein, in which he played one of the three sailors. While at the ABT, he created his own ballet, On Stage! (1945). Although the play and his performance were well received, and the New York Times observed that Kidd was "hailed as one of the great hopes of postwar American ballet," he left Loring's company for Broadway in 1947 and never again worked in ballet.
Kidd's first choreography on Broadway was for E.Y. Harburg's Finian's Rainbow, a lyrical musical that explored racial prejudice. Kidd won his first Tony Award for that play. However, his next Broadway musicals were not successful. They were Hold It, a college musical, and the Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical Love Life, directed by Elia Kazan, which both had short runs in 1948. Next came Arms and the Girl (1950), directed by Rouben Mamoulian, with Pearl Bailey and Nanette Fabray, also a flop.
Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950), his next play, cemented his reputation as a Broadway choreographer. It was based on Damon Runyon short stories, with book by Abe Burrows, and earned Kidd his second Tony Award. The play attracted the attention of movie producers, and he was lured to Hollywood.
His first film was a 1952 film adaptation of Frank Loesser's 1948 Broadway musical Where's Charley?, starring Ray Bolger repeating his Broadway performance in the lead role. His first big film success came the following year with The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.
The Band Wagon, which featured the music and lyrics of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, included an extensive dance sequence at the end, the "Girl Hunt Ballet" featuring Astaire and Charisse, which was a spoof of hard-boiled Mickey Spillane novels. Kidd was hired to stage the film's dances at Astaire's request because he was nervous about the ballet. Kidd said that he made Astaire comfortable by pretending that he was just making up the steps spontaneously. The film also featured "Shine on Your Shoes", set in a 42nd Street penny arcade and featuring Astaire and LeRoy Daniels, a real-life shoe-shiner, and "Dancing in the Dark" with Charisse, set in Central Park.
Kidd's work for the 1954 film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers brought him acclaim. The film was directed by Stanley Donen, with music by Saul Chaplin and Gene de Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. It was written directly for the screen and based on the short story "The Sobbin' Women", by Stephen Vincent Benét, which was based in turn on the ancient Roman legend of The Rape of the Sabine Women. He initially turned down the assignment, recalling in 1997: "Here are these slobs living off in the woods. They have no schooling, they are uncouth, there's manure on the floor, the cows come in and out—and they're gonna get up and dance? We'd be laughed out of the house."
The entire cast, even extras, consisted of a melange of dancers, acrobats and stuntmen, including the ballet dancers Jacques D'Amboise of the New York City Ballet and Marc Platt, formerly of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Except for Howard Keel and Jane Powell, the roles of the brothers and their brides were all played by professional dancers at Kidd's insistence. Mercer said that the musical numbers were written at Kidd's behest, as an example "of how a songwriter sometimes has to take his cue from his collaborators". For example, Kidd explained to Mercer and dePaul his conception of the "Lonesome Polecat" number, the lament of the brothers for the women, and the two worked out the music and lyrics.
By the mid-1950s, Hollywood's output of movie musicals had begun to wane, and he worked on only two more during the rest of the decade. He made his movie acting debut in It's Always Fair Weather (1955), directed by Gene Kelly and Donen, in which Kelly, Kidd and Dan Dailey played three ex-GIs meeting 10 years after the war, only to discover they had little in common. The film featured an exuberant number in which the three dance with garbage can lids fastened to their feet. The downbeat film was a critical success but was not heavily promoted by the studio, and failed at the box office. The film was originally designed to be a sequel to the 1949 film On the Town, but Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin were unavailable, and the film lacked chemistry among the three actors. The production was marked by constant strife between Donen and Kelly, with much of it stemming from Donen's striving unsuccessfully to include "Jack and the Space Giants", a 10-minute dance solo by Kidd. Kelly rejected this, which Kidd took as a personal insult, and Donen went further, ending his collaboration with Kelly for the rest of their lives. The "Jack" number appears as a bonus feature on a DVD of the film, and one commentator suggests that Kelly's judgment was not wrong as the number was listless and did not advance the plot.
Kidd was both director and choreographer for the musical comedy film Merry Andrew (1958), starring Danny Kaye. By then, the era of movie musicals was pretty much over, and Kidd turned his attention to Broadway, where he had continued to work while choreographing movies. At the same time that he was choreographing The Band Wagon, he was staging dances for Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Can-Can. In this show, he created dance numbers for Gwen Verdon that helped make her a Broadway sensation.
His other Broadway shows during the 1950s included Li'l Abner in 1956, which he directed as well as choreographed. He won another Tony Award for his choreography, which was adapted for the film version in 1959. After Merry Andrew, however, he made no other films until Star!, with Julie Andrews, in 1968. Neither film was successful.
On Broadway, he directed and choreographed Destry Rides Again (1959), with Andy Griffith, Wildcat (1960), which starred Lucille Ball, Subways Are for Sleeping (1961), a musical comedy about homelessness, and Ben Franklin in Paris (1964), starring Robert Preston. He also choreographed the famous Broadway flop Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966), a musical version of the Truman Capote novella with Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain that never officially opened.