Bob Avian will never forget the moment Michael Bennett told him he had AIDS. The two had been friends since 1959, when they met as dancers on a tour of “West Side Story.”
“We were like brothers, really,” Avian says. He assisted Bennett in directing Katharine Hepburn in “Coco,” choreographing Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” and “Follies” and creating the landmark “A Chorus Line.”
But over the Christmas holidays in 1985, Avian arrived at Bennett’s sprawling office at 890 Broadway to find him in hysterics. “I have it,” Bennett said, removing his sock to reveal a purple lesion on his foot. “I have it.” Avian was stunned. Robin Wagner, the set designer, ran into the men’s room and broke down.
That’s perhaps the saddest story in Avian’s candid and engaging new memoir, “Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey,” written with Tom Santopietro (“The Sound of Music Story”).
Bennett’s 1987 death was a tragedy, but it opened the door for Avian’s career as one of Broadway’s top choreographers. Had Bennett lived, says Avian, now 82, he would have been content to remain his No. 2.
“Not in a million years did I ever want to be like Michael,” he tells me. “He had enough ambition for a hundred people. I was very happy being a dancer. I was a stage manager. If a door opened, I walked through it.”
Cameron Mackintosh opened a door when he asked Avian to choreograph a revival of “Follies” in London in 1987. Avian wasn’t sure he was up to it. But Bennett, on his death bed, told him, “You should do this. You know what we did with the original, and you know the characters.”
Avian accepted the assignment. He went on to choreograph “Miss Saigon,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Martin Guerre” and a well-received 2006 revival of “A Chorus Line.”
While Bennett and other hard-driving director-choreographers often have big egos and little patience for their dancers’ mistakes, Avian is as modest as they come — and one of the nicest men in the business. The son of Armenian immigrants, he grew up in New York with a supportive family. Boys “didn’t dance back then,” he says, so he took piano lessons. A friend at Boston University saw Avian dance in some school productions and told him he had talent. He started taking lessons, and his parents were delighted.
Contrast that with Bennett, who had a fraught relationship with his family and dropped out of high school. His sexuality was knotty — he lived with women and slept with men — and he eased his anxiety and darker moods with alcohol and drugs.
“Michael was complicated,” says Avian. “I was generally happy. I was gay, so that came with problems sometimes, but I never wanted to kill myself.”
Avian danced for Jerome Robbins — “the scariest man I ever met in my life,” he says. Robbins broke dancers down until they were in tears. “It was a horror show,” writes Avian, who tried to dance behind someone else to avoid becoming a target. But the more he studied Robbins, he realized that underneath his ferocity was insecurity. “His fear came out of his mouth and hit the dancers,” Avian says. “When my fear comes out of my mouth, I yell at myself.”
Hepburn was insecure as well, mainly because, on the first day they rehearsed “Coco,” Bennett and Avian discovered she could neither sing nor dance. She hid her fear by doing the exact opposite of what they asked her to do. Finally, they figured out how to handle her: If they wanted her to go right, they told her to left.
“A Chorus Line” famously began as a series of late-night sessions with dancers speaking into a tape recorder about their troubled lives. Avian didn’t participate. “I wouldn’t be caught dead there, vomiting into a tape recorder,” he says. “Some of it was fascinating and enlightening. A lot of it was mundane. But in those stories Michael felt he had found his life.”
Avian is retired now, living much of the year in Florida with his husband. He survived showbiz with relatively few wounds. And in a business fueled by ego, only once did he ever give himself a pat on the back: “I was walking through Leicester Square and I had ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Miss Saigon’ and ‘Martin Guerre’ all running at the same time. They were Cameron and Andrew’s shows, but for me at that moment, they were Bob Avian shows.”
I’m enjoying Morgan James’ new record “Memphis Magnetic.” James appeared on Broadway in “Motown: The Musical,” “Godspell” and “The Addams Family,” but she’s really found her calling as a soul singer. She’s celebrating the release of “Memphis Magnetic” onstage Sunday night at 9:30 at Joe’s Pub. Not to be missed!
“Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning” airs weekdays on WOR Radio 710.