Tommy Tune

Come hear 10 time Tony Award Winner Tommy Tune
tell tantalizing tales from his remarkable career!

Included will be talk about his friends, co-stars and collaborators that include Twiggy, Barbra Streisand, Michael Bennett, Ann Reinking, Mike Nichols, Gene Kelly, Carol Channing and more.  It’s been a long and award-winning career on stage and film. Tommy Tune Talks is a program in which Tune, in conversation with Ted Chapin, will dive into the specifics of his entire career.  Film clips will augment the conversation, showing how innovative and entertaining he has been as both performer and director/choreographer.

Born in Texas, Tommy Tune came to New York and started dancing in the chorus on Broadway in Baker Street, A Joyful Noise and How Now Dow Jones that had him working with Harold Prince and Michael Bennett. In Seesaw he choreographed a number for himself to perform – “It’s Not Where You Start” – and won his first Tony Award as Best Featured Actor. Then he made a visit to Hollywood where he appeared in Hello, Dolly!, dancing alongside Barbra Streisand, and The Boy Friend where he met Twiggy. His award-winning career as director and choreographer began with two bold Off Broadway shows, Cloud 9 and The Club and then The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. That was followed by Nine, A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, Grand Hotel and The Will Rogers Follies and My One and Only in which he starred opposite Twiggy.

Tune has won many honors and awards, from the National Medal of Arts, the George Abbott Award from the Society of Directors and Choreographers to 8 Drama Desk Awards.  He has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his streak of Tony Awards – ten, including one for Lifetime Achievement – includes the unprecedented winning of both director and choreographer awards two years in a row!  No one has ever done that before or since.

Ted Chapin is the author of the much loved Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical ‘Follies’ and was, for more than thirty years, the President of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.  He hosts the PBS program The American Songbook at NJPAC.