A few months ago, the actor Corbin Bleu was sifting through some old boxes, assembling materials to make a wedding gift for his fiancée (now his wife). Among the childhood photos, he found a school paper he had written in eighth grade about Fred Astaire. “Every generation to come will watch with open mouths at this amazing artist,” Mr. Bleu’s paper concluded. “To you, Mr. Fred Astaire, I tip my top hat.”
Fourteen years later, Mr. Bleu, 27, is making good on his promise to honor Astaire. In the new Broadway musical take on the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” he plays the song-and-dance man Ted Hanover, a role Astaire originated. For Mr. Bleu, finding that paper felt like kismet. “As I was gearing up for the role,” he said recently in his dressing room at Studio 54, where “Holiday Inn” is playing, “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s always really been there in my life.’”
Dancing, too, has been a constant for Mr. Bleu, practically since he could walk. He grew up in Brooklyn with parents who introduced him to the performing world early. “I got my first pair of tap shoes, and I was in love,” he said. When he was 7, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. “She threw everything at us,” he recalled. “That was really where I found my true heart for dance — everything from modern and jazz to African and cirque.”
At the academy, Mr. Bleu studied tap with the celebrated dancer Jason Samuels Smith, whose style rubbed off on him. “He has this very down, hunched, raw kind of vibe,” Mr. Bleu said, “and usually when I tap, I’m very much a hoofer — I like to be low.” Mr. Bleu realized that was antithetical to Astaire’s style. “You watch him extend, and it’s like he could extend all the way into the audience,” Mr. Bleu said. “I wanted to be sure I had that old-school jazzy, proper feel. A lot of me is still loosey-goosey, but I’m trying to keep that form.”
Mr. Bleu went on to attend the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts; then, at 16, in 2006, he became one of the breakout stars of Disney’s “High School Musical.” In the years after, he proved his Broadway bona fides as Usnavi, the lead of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” in 2010, and as Jesus in “Godspell” in 2012. Neither role required much of him as a mover, though Mr. Bleu would soon showcase those skills on national television: In 2013, he was the runner-up (with Karina Smirnoff) for Season 17 of “Dancing With the Stars,” in which the judges often praised his musicality and physicality.
Still, at the time of his “Holiday Inn” audition, Mr. Bleu hadn’t worn tap shoes for five years. But, as he put it, tapping already felt ingrained in his body and came back to him quickly. “It was like riding a bike,” he said. “It just felt so good to have everything released through my feet again.”
Denis Jones, the choreographer for “Holiday Inn,” was immediately impressed. “As soon as he put on his shoes, you could tell he had the goods,” he said. “I do like a good loud foot, and his taps have both clarity and musicality.”
“Holiday Inn” is beloved for its Irving Berlin score — less so, for a memorable blackface number called “Abraham.” Gordon Greenberg, the Broadway show’s director and co-writer, didn’t think twice about leaving it out. “It’s inappropriate and misjudged, and of its time, I suppose, but certainly not something I wanted to put out into the world,” Mr. Greenberg said.
Mr. Bleu, whose father is of Jamaican descent, said he doesn’t see his casting as a direct response to that scene (Astaire, in fact, isn’t part of it in the film) but acknowledges its significance. “You can’t deface an artist or a movie because of that one scene,” he said. “It’s important to recognize, ‘O.K., that was there, it’s not O.K., and we’re not going to do it.’ And hey, now we actually have a lead character who is black.”
Mr. Jones noted that in Astaire’s best-known sequence in the film, “Let’s Say It With Firecrackers,” Astaire benefited from more than a day of shooting and some effects enhanced in postproduction. Mr. Bleu must perform the dance live, with the firecrackers already built into the floor. “Every tap step has to move directly to the spot where you throw down a firecracker,” Mr. Bleu explained, “and building that was very difficult. When you first learn it, you’re just working on rhythms. Then you realize” — his eyes widened — “I have to go ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta just to make it over here!” Adding to the challenge, “we’re dealing with a floor that is not real wood,” he said, making for a slippery surface for tapping. “It’s like dancing on eggshells, but you can’t make it look like that.”
Onstage, Mr. Bleu never looks stressed out by the sound of his taps — or by anything else, for that matter: His smile is wide and warm, and there often appears to be an actual twinkle in his eye. Mr. Bleu said that this is something he learned from “High School Musical.”
“How to please your fans: You smile, you say a lot of ‘yeses,’” he said. “But is it something that’s necessarily me? I don’t think so.”
His director disagrees. “He understands what it is to give yourself to an audience,” Mr. Greenberg said. In his review of the show for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said Mr. Bleu “brings a lively, knockabout charm to the role of Ted.”
If that sounds like a certain famous singer and tapper of yore, Mr. Bleu acknowledges that his most obvious similarity to Astaire might be in spirit. “He’s tall, lanky,” Mr. Bleu said. “And, no, I am not a very tall person. I’ve got some butt! I’ve got some shoulders.”
Instead of trying to dance exactly as Astaire did, Mr. Bleu has adopted a kind of “What Would Fred Do?” attitude. “I think to myself, just keep smiling, keep breathing,” he said. “When you watch him in the movie, it’s like it’s nothin’.”
Continue reading the main story