If Christopher Gattelli’s choreography looks familiar, that’s probably the point. A veteran of more than 20 Broadway shows and a devotee of movie musicals, he has an encyclopedic dance brain, a catalog of musical theater references he deploys throughout his work onstage and onscreen. Homage is his calling card.
And that makes him a very clever satirist. His two current projects — the stage adaptation of the television show “Schmigadoon!,” at the Kennedy Center in Washington through Sunday; and Broadway’s “Death Becomes Her,” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater — both feature wickedly detailed sendups of “musical theater dance.”
For Gattelli, 52, those scare quotes might as well be hugs. Barbed as his dance humor can be, it’s underpinned by his affection for the genre, in spite and because of its excesses and quirks.
“It’s easy to get snarky when you’re spoofing something you’re so familiar with,” he said in an interview. “It’s easy to get all the digs in. But I’m truly writing love letters to all of my dance heroes.”
The choreography for the stage version (based on that first season), which Gattelli also directs, is even giddier and broader. Now, when the performers sing out “S-C-H-M-I-G-A-D-O-O-N” in the opening number, à la “Oklahoma!,” they also spell the letters with their bodies, à la “Y.M.C.A.”
In “Death Becomes Her,” which Gattelli choreographed and directed, the references are slightly less pointed, but the dance jokes are just as sharp. Based on the 1992 film — a dark comedy in which two women drink a potion that promises eternal youth, emphasis on eternal — the musical adds a chorus of body-suited dancers as “Immortals.” They delight in their own sinister sinuosity, like the self-aware dance ensemble of Fosse’s “Pippin.”
And Gattelli ensures that the showstopping “Death Becomes Her” number “For the Gaze” lives up to its own double entendre title: There are parades of feathered Ziegfeld Follies showgirls, and enough shoulder shimmies and hip thrusts to power a disco-era variety show. (A dancer in a black bob wig even cartwheels in for a cameo as Liza Minnelli, jazz hands flying.)
The dancer and actress Ariana DeBose, who appeared in the television version of “Schmigadoon!,” said in a phone interview that she appreciates Gattelli’s multilayered dance humor. “He understands how to build these big, glorious spectacles, and that energy is going to translate to any audience,” she said.
But for DeBose, a fellow musical theater enthusiast who started as a dancer on Broadway, “a lot of the magic happened when we were chatting about the great film stars and theater stars who excelled in dance and how we could emulate their particular qualities,” she said. “We were referencing Vera-Ellen in ‘White Christmas,’ Donna McKechnie in ‘A Chorus Line’ — they meant something to us.”
On a recent Zoom call between “Schmigadoon!” rehearsals in Washington, Gattelli discussed his approach to dance-based satire. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When did you start using dance to make people laugh?
Some of my earliest choreography jobs were for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS events. That’s the kind of audience that will get 90 percent of the theater jokes you make, even the deep cuts. So we would create these opening numbers that would spoof everything. Hearing my peers, my community, laughing — the bug really bit me then.
How do you convey archness — the raised eyebrow — in dance? The dancing body is usually such a vulnerable, earnest thing.
Even archness has to come from an earnest place. That happens most naturally when the dancers are addressing the audience directly. It helps in “Death Becomes Her” that we begin with Viola Van Horn, Michelle Williams’s character, addressing the audience. When the Immortals come out for that first number and flirt with the audience, it doesn’t feel like a cheap wink — it feels like they’re helping her tell the story.
The television version of “Schmigadoon!” created stage-style musical numbers for the screen. Are they funnier now, onstage?
What I think is funny is that I’m now doing the opposite of what was happening in most of those Golden Age movies: Those choreographers were usually taking gorgeous stage dances and trying to make them fit on film.
The stage is honestly a much more comfortable arena for me — this is the place and the history I know best. And so I felt like I could take the vision even further, like I was directing and choreographing the numbers the way they had always been intended. Especially because I have more bodies to play with, or at least more bodies that people can see all the time, which automatically amps everything up.
Specificity seems like a big part of the humor in “Schmigadoon!,” too.
Oh, definitely. When I was first choreographing these numbers, I would sit in the room and show the dancers YouTube videos of the old musicals, and then follow up with emails full of links. Like, “Watch what they’re doing at four minutes into ‘June Is Busting Out All Over.’ Look at this moment from ‘Dance at the Gym.’” I really got in there. [laughs]
Most audience members can quote a few lines from Broadway songs. But not many can quote Broadway choreography. How do you make sure that kind of dance joke lands?
I think the key to that is to add details that, even if the average audience member doesn’t know where they’re from, they’ll go, “Oh, I’ve seen that before.” Like in “With All of Your Heart,” Ariana’s big number from the first season of “Schmigadoon!,” we put in this toe-tapping moment that’s from “Step in Time” in “Mary Poppins,” when Mary is dancing with the chimney sweeps. It’s not exactly famous, but it is iconic. Even if people can’t name that moment, it will be familiar in a way that makes them, I hope, feel like they’re in good hands. And if they can name it, then it’s a great little Easter egg.
Musical satire can be nihilistic — like “The Book of Mormon” — but your work seems fundamentally optimistic. Is it?
Well, I like to lead with kindness. I feel like I tend to choose shows that I can do that with, or those shows tend to choose me. Even a show like “Death Becomes Her,” which we call a cautionary tale, the idea is still to lift up, not to push down. I’ve been a part of hits, and I’ve been a part of misses, but the thing I’m always going for is joy. And big belly laughs.
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