HAPPY FEAT
Decades ago, man hoofed it from Oregon to Broadway. Now, at 83, he’s a teacher in tip-tap shape in Colorado.
His story could be made into a Broadway musical.
The year is 1958, and 24-year-old Gene GeBauer hitchhikes to New York City from Oregon in hopes of becoming a dancer and ends up ... a star.
Well, it didn’t happen quite that way. While GeBauer didn’t meet with the failure that legions of starry-eyed hopefuls experience, his name wasn’t on marquees. Yet for nearly two decades, GeBauer acted and danced in the choruses of some of the biggest Broadway musicals.
Eventually, he made his way to Colorado, where he became a master tap-dance teacher and an expert in the classic steps and dances of the 1930s and 1940s. Today, at age 83, GeBauer is still tapping and still teaching.
“When I was starting out, a ballet dancer told me tap was passé. And it was true. After the ’40s, you didn’t see it much,” GeBauer said, adding with a chuckle, “but tap is alive, and so am I.”
GeBauer is one of six people being honored Sunday as “Legends of Dance in Colorado” by the University of Denver Carson Brierly Giffin Dance Library.
“He’s made his life by dancing,” said Mary Wohl Haan, a former student and the coordinator of Dance Bridge, a project of the city of Boulder’s Office of Arts + Culture. “He knows so much. He is one of our community’s treasures.”
The other honorees are arts philan-
thropist Celeste Grynberg; former Colorado Ballet ballerina Maria Mosina; Deborah Reshotko, artistic director of a communityoriented company, Speaking of Dance; Aspen Dance Connection executive director Fran Page; and Damian Woetzel, director of the Vail Dance Festival and a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.
While all are certainly distinguished, none has hoofed it with Carol Burnett, Carol Channing and Julie Andrews. GeBauer was in the casts of “Once Upon a Mattress,” “Hello, Dolly” and “Camelot” on Broadway.
While still living in Medford, Ore., where he had studied tap and ballet, GeBauer auditioned for a director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, who told him to come to New York. When he arrived, he found himself outmatched. “Those New York dancers,” he said.
While taking classes trying to catch up, he saw an ad in a trade paper seeking strong male ballet dancers, above-average height. The 6-foot-tall GeBauer applied. The job: partnering with the dancers in the Jewel Box Revue, a well-established touring company of female impersonators.
“I didn’t know what a drag show was,” GeBauer said. He took the job. “It was an education. Back in Medford, there was maybe one black family, and if you were gay, well, back then, you kept that secret,” he said. “But my first friends in New York were a couple of black dancers in the revue.”
Soon, GeBauer was succeeding in the cattle-call auditions for Broadway shows. He even made it into the cast of the nuditylaced avant-garde Broadway revue “Oh! Calcutta!”
“It wasn’t really that good a show, but people came because of the nudity,” GeBauer said. “Everyone was prancing around on stage naked and getting paid for it.”
GeBauer’s final show on Broadway, in 1973, was “Sugar,” a musical based on the movie “Some Like It Hot,” in which he got to dance with Steve Condos, one of tap dancing’s greats. “By then, I was a very seasoned, overripe Broadway dancer,” he said.
GeBauer turned to acting and did the things actors in New York do — driving a cab or working in a printing plant, when not doing summer stock or dinner theater. “I really wasn’t very good, though I wasn’t serious about it,” GeBauer said. “I did get a Rheingold beer commercial and one for Cadbury chocolate.”
GeBauer married Judy Hink, an actor and playwright, in 1976. When their daughter, Amber, was born, they returned to Oregon to run a theater and dance workshop. Later, they moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where Judy pursued a master’s degree in playwriting at the University of Iowa and GeBauer, at age 57, got his bachelor’s degree.
GeBauer and family came to Colorado in 1991 so he could study the Alexander Technique, a method to reduce inefficient movement and body tension, which had helped with a back injury he had had since “Hello, Dolly.”
He also started to teach tap and — perhaps more importantly — collect and document techniques and dances, going to workshops and master classes with tap virtuosos. He has now put much of this knowledge — 150 dances — on 10 DVDs, sharing it and teaching it to his associate, Michelle Farrell, “so she can carry on when I can’t,” GeBauer said.
“It is daunting; there are so many dances,” Farrell said.
GeBauer is still teaching at Destination Dance in Wheat Ridge every Friday. On a recent afternoon, he was putting his advanced class of eight — most of whom have been taking lessons from him for 20 years or more — through their paces.
GeBauer has the ability to teach even the most complicated steps, said Peg Emery, a longtime student who teaches a senior citizen tap class at the Arvada Center. “He was on Broadway and took that experience and brought it to us who will never get to Broadway.”
After suffering a severe back injury shoveling snow in January, GeBauer now may use a cane and tries to take it easy, but he is still dancing.
“I’m not much of a disciplinarian now,” he said. “I like to dance, my dancers like to dance, so we dance.”
After leading the group through a complex series of counts, GeBauer raised his arms. “I did it,” he said. “Leadership! That’s what it’s about.”