Michael Kidd, 1915 - 2007.

Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer of exuberant dance numbers for Broadway shows like Finian's Rainbow and Guys and Dolls and Hollywood musicals including The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles.... "I always use real-life gestures, and most of my dancing is based on real life," Mr Kidd said in an interview. He defined his choreography as "human behavior and people's manners, stylized into musical rhythmic forms."

Patricia Eliot Tobias, New York Times.

In addition to directing for stage and television, Kidd worked sporadically as an actor - most memorably, in Michael Ritchie's 1975 cult-fave Smile, masterfully playing Tommy French, a sly, sardonic beauty pageant choreographer ("No, dear, if you kick and bend at the same time, you're going to knock yourself out!") whose inspirational speeches to comely teen-age contestants are somehow all the more effectively uplifting for being transparently (to the audience, at least) bogus.

Joe Leydon.

In his half-century career as a dancer, choreographer and director, Michael Kidd won friends and awards with equal alacrity. And he lived long enough to see some of his best films acknowledged as classics. He even aged gracefully, never settling into a role as the grand old man of Broadway and Hollywood dance but rather staying energetic, perceptive, witty. His stories about working with pop diva Lena Horne on a revival of the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey could curl your hair, and his death from cancer on Sunday at age 92 deprived the dance world of one of its most sunny raconteurs.

Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 27, 2007 9:32 AM