(bouncy music)
Hey! My name's Jerry Mitchell
and I am the director and choreographer of Half Time.
Welcome to our world famous review
starring the one and only "Zaza"
and featuring the notorious and dangerous "Les Cagelles."
Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to remain in your seats,
when they perform.
The management cannot be held responsible for your safety.
And I beg you, open your eyes, you have arrived --
Robert Goulet is making the introduction,
Ahh, one of my favorite costumes.
♪ Les Cages aux Folles ♪
(laughs loudly)
Gary.
Okay so, this is 16 boys
dressed as girls doing a can-can
16, 12, it was 12 of the greatest dancers
I've ever worked with.
They were all my Newsies.
(chuckles loudly)
So this is fabulous.
This is the can-can that we did on the Tony Awards
but it's a cut-down version of it.
So it's hard for me to watch it
because I like the long version.
And this, where they're tossing the girls into the splits,
they were actually going over the orchestra pit and landing
on the paserelle, which was kind of funny at the time.
Still funny, makes me laugh.
All the things I made those boys do.
This had three parts to it.
This number, this was the La Cage number
and it had started with Andy Pelic in that cage
as a white bird while all the other girls
were dressed in red
and T was at the top and it became his dress
and then they came out as the can-can girls
and the can-can curl.
And Andy Pelic, I mean what a genius acrobat he was.
We used him throughout all of this.
And a little comic relief huh?
16 splits in a row and one who just goes yeah!
And that's Andy doing
what are those things called?
Spotters. You stay in one place and just keep walking over.
He was in, so talented.
It was so hard for the boys to keep their leg
in second position during the fouettes
because the skirts were so heavy.
In order to have the skirts do that movement,
they needed to have weight to them.
So we had to change it to a little coupe turn.
That number was a lot of fun.
They discovered that sometimes the best way to fit in
is to stand out!
Let's hear it for "Kinky Boots!"
(loud cheering)
Well this is a very --
I haven't watched this.
I really haven't watched, I've seen it too many times
in the theater.
But obviously this is the original company and such a
amazing night to have won
for choreography but to have also won for best musical,
for Cyndi to have won for the first time as a composer,
you know, and this is a song that she wrote for me,
specifically, because I said I want them all to say
yeah! I made the boot. Yeah! I did this! Yeah, I did that!
And she comes back and writes me a song called
"Everybody Say Yeah."
Which every producer and everybody said
I was gonna have to cut
because the lyrics weren't good enough.
And I said no but you're missing the point.
It's a celebration of making these boots.
And everybody's gonna be on those treadmills
dancing and jumping around and it's gonna be just fine.
It's not really about the lyrics right now.
It's about celebrating what we just did
which was we made the first kinky boot.
That's all we gotta say
and then we just gotta get excited about that.
And you know, I did about four and a half months
building one treadmill with David Rockwell
and experimenting with one treadmill
four feet off the ground or three feet off the ground.
And then there were no rails
and I fell off that thing 10 times at least
in the preproduction.
Research and development of one treadmill
and after we finally worked on it and got one
that was working,
Paul Cannon was with me, one of the original angels,
all of the original angels were part of the preproduction.
Once we got one treadmill working,
and we sent it back to the shop several times,
got the speeds fixed and I added bars for safety
because I knew the union would never let me
put a dancer on it
because they'd be falling and hurting themselves.
The next thing to figure out was how to make them work
and not stop every night
because when we were working on them, they would jerk
and stop and you'd get thrown.
And Bill Menchie and his shop and David Rockwell designed
this thing that now has gone to 13 companies
and all over the world
and it's just brought audiences so much joy, this number.
It's really a very simple number, you know,
it's not a very complicated number.
It really does -- people love it.
Because it's about what they're doing,
not the treadmills but what they're doing on them.
How they're celebrating the making of the boot
which is always -- when it's connected to story,
I think is when it works best.
Kinky Boots was up against that fabulous show "Matilda"
and I mean that with my whole heart,
that fabulous show "Matilda."
When I saw Matilda in London, I thought --
I called Paul. I called Hal Luftig, my producer,
and Daryl Roth, and I said you know what,
just take us out of the season,
we should not compete with that show, it's too good.
And look what happened.
I think our show ultimately was a message of joy.
And that message of joy was something
that people walked out of theater with
and got very excited about.
And I think it's why we're still turning audiences on today.
And Annaleigh, my Annaleigh, Margot.
I mean, this was Annaleigh's second job with me
and then she went on to win a Tony Award herself
right after this.
She's brilliant.
This was a brilliant cast.
Brilliant people.
Thank you for watching.
Come see Half Time at Paper Mill Playhouse.
You might see some Tony Award winners up there on stage.
(playful music)