Broadway's brightest since George M. Cohan

Susan Stroman, AS '76, whose name has graced more Broadway marquees simultaneously than anyone since George M. Cohan, still comes home to Delaware several times a month to visit her family.

Unless she's wearing her signature black baseball cap, no one pegs her as the five-time Tony-Award-winning director-choreographer famed for The Producers.

The only thing fancy about Stroman is her footwork. Her clothes are classic, and her shiny blond hair is straight as a soccer mom's. Interviewers describe her as "kind," "cheery," "admirable" and just plain "nice."

When she came to the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, Del., to collect a $50,000 Commonwealth Award for dramatic arts last April, she was photographed next to novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Oates wore stylized makeup, dramatic jewelry and a shimmering dress. Stroman wore a simple white silk blouse and long black cardigan. Her most noticeable feature was her high-wattage smile.

She looked more like a former UD commuter student than the hottest choreographer on Broadway. She's both.

Stroman grew up in Meadowood, Del., in the early '60s, watching musicals with her late father, Harry, a World War II veteran of the Philippines. Harry sold appliances for a living and played piano professionally at area restaurants. He'd play Broadway standards on the family piano. She'd dance.

"My father was an amazing piano player, so I grew up in a home filled with music," she says. "I understood music, and, when my father played, I would imagine people moving through the song. . . . I have always said that choreography chose me, instead of my choosing it. Music and dance were always inextricably linked for me, and choreography was the natural extension."

After commuting to UD to study English and theatre, Stroman got her start in New York as a chorus girl.

"When I arrived in New York, my intention was always to choreograph," she says. "I danced to make a living, and, with each job, I would meet others who wanted to direct or write. Eventually, we all had to make the choice to stop performing and really concentrate on what we wanted. You can't have a split focus in this business. You really must direct all your energies into your true love."

She started choreographing off-Broadway, and, eventually, the late director Mike Ockrent hired her to choreograph her first Broadway show, Crazy for You.

The show won the Tony for best musical in 1992, and Stroman took home her own Tony for choreography. It was the first in her library--followed by one for Show Boat in 1995 and another in 2000 for Contact.

Ockrent and Stroman were married in 1995 and often worked together until he died of leukemia in 1999 at 53. Stroman and his family and friends created the Mike Ockrent Charitable Trust to support alternative and mainstream leukemia research and to give children suffering from cancer the chance to attend Broadway plays and visit backstage.

Stroman stepped in for Ockrent as director of the Broadway adaption of The Producers. The final touches were added at their kitchen table, over bagels with Mel Brooks, arranger Glen Kelly and Tom Meehan, who co-wrote the book.

The unlikely hit was a remake of Brook's 1968 cult film spoof about a has-been Broadway producer and his accountant who hatch a plot to produce a sure-fire flop and pocket their investors' money. Everything goes wrong when Springtime for Hitler is a runaway hit.

Life imitates art when the Broadway production became what The New York Post critic dubbed a "cast-iron hit." Neighboring theatres opened their box offices to help sell the $100 tickets to lines of fans stretched down the street. The show won an unprecedented 12 Tonys, and Stroman took two of them home to her library--one for direction and another for choreography.

Critics invariably credit Stroman's chancy style, with dancers kicking high and props as varied as loaves of bread and bentwood chairs. Stroman's dancers don't break out for a song; they dance in character and move the plot forward.

She spends months researching each play. It paid off when she restaged a standard like Agnes De Mille's Oklahoma! but making it edgier, grittier, more representative of pioneer America.

"I tend to immerse myself in research when I begin work on a show. Whether it be pioneer life, like in Oklahoma! or the life on the levee in Showboat, history informs my work," she says. "I've probably touched on every decade since the mid 1800s in my career, so I've gathered this working knowledge of how current events have influenced art and dance through the years.

"When I create a dance, my goal is always to move the story forward. The song and the movement should come out of the story, and the transition should be logical and natural. In Crazy for You, it means showgirls in the Old West dancing with mining pans out and pick axes, and in Contact it means a restaurant full of diners and their dinners coming to life.''

Stroman says she works from the time she awakens around 8 a.m. until she goes to sleep around midnight. "Most Broadway shows end around 10:30 p.m., so the days can get rather long," she says.

Stroman says the tenor of Broadway has changed since Sept. 11. "People are looking more toward upbeat and happy musicals. Dark, tragic shows aren't faring as well. People turn to theatre and art during times of struggle. It's comforting, and laughing for three hours can be very cathartic," she says. "On the creative
side, I find producers are less willing to take a chance on new or unconventional pieces they feel are unproven. With the ever-increasing cost of putting up a show and the tourism slump in New York, taking risks seems to be taking a back seat."

Stroman's full-length piece for the New York City Ballet, Double Feature, with the music of Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson, premiered in January. This spring, she starts work on The Frogs, a new musical at The Lincoln Center, with music by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Nathan Lane.