‘Tap in Time’ salutes dance legends

The Four Step Brothers are among the dance legends honored in “Tap in Time.” The show is at 7 p.m. today, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the Nicholas J. Horn Theatre.

It’s more than tap routines. It’s tap roots.

And tonight, at the College of Southern Nevada, “Tap in Time” not only traces those roots but salutes two tap dance legends who call Las Vegas home.

Before “Tap in Time” hits the stage, CSN’s “Hands Across the Arts” benefit will honor Prince Spencer, whose career with the Four Step Brothers — billed as “The Eight Feet of Rhythm” — took him from New York to Hollywood, Las Vegas and around the world.

Along the way, Spencer and his Step Brothers broke numerous color barriers, becoming the first black act to play New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

On the big screen, the high-stepping Step Brothers appeared in movies starring the likes of Bob Hope in 1953’s “Here Come the Girls” and Jerry Lewis in 1964’s “The Patsy.” Spencer left the group after a 1965 Sands stint with Lewis, but he stayed in showbiz, serving as Redd Foxx’s business manager (and onstage tap partner) at the Sahara and appearing in Foxx’s “Sanford and Son” TV sitcom. He also co-starred with Eddie Murphy in 1989’s “Harlem Nights.”

Now 95, Spencer will attend tonight’s event — and greet attendees at a post-performance reception.

He’s won numerous awards, from an honorary doctorate to a Four Step Brothers star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but “this is right up there with most of them,” Spencer says.

CSN officials will present fellow honoree Bunny Briggs — who turns 91 Tuesday — with his award at the assisted living facility where he now resides, according to Gary Carton , director of CSN’s performing arts center.

Like Spencer, Briggs (whose movie credits include 1989’s “Tap,” starring Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr.) has received an avalanche of accolades, including an honorary doctorate, a Tony nomination for 1989’s “Black and Blue” and induction into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame.

Once described by Duke Ellington as “the most superleviathonic , rhythmaturgically-syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist ,” Bunny Briggs says he was born dancing: “When I finally faced the world my legs were kickin’. They let me loose, and I just started dancin’,” according to his American Tap Dance Foundation biography.

Their careers, and legacies, inform “Tap in Time,” which traces tap dancing’s African roots — and chronicles its growth as all-American entertainment.

Except that, for many African-American dancers, the joy of drumming out irresistible rhythms with their tapping feet “didn’t come from a happy place,” says Lindell Blake, “Tap in Time’s” writer, director and choreographer. “Their feet said one thing — and their soul said something else.”

The show (which encores Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) tries “to convey that dichotomy” of black dancers “being celebrated onstage” and treated “like third- or fourth-class citizens” offstage, Blake says.

But that’s the subtext. The show’s subject is tap.

At a recent rehearsal in CSN’s Nicholas J. Horn Theatre, Blake counts out a rhythm while dancers Elaine Alcorn and Victoria Jones run through a rapid-fire routine.

Ponytails flying, Alcorn and Jones pivot and whirl, trading steps as they accelerate from easygoing soft-shoe to buck-and-wing, shuffle and slide.

The dancers — two of eight featured in “Tap in Time” — are rehearsing a segment devoted to the one-time “blasphemy” of women dancing, “especially a dance coming from Africa,” Blake says. (Juanita Pitts, a 1930s and ’40s tapper who “dressed like a man and danced like a man” — inspired the section, he adds.)

“Tap in Time” begins during tap’s heyday — in the 1950s and 1960s. And “then we’re going to rewind the tape and go all the way back to the beginning,” Blake says.

That means going back to Africa — and a rhythmic style known as “gumboot,” used by gold miners as a form of communication, Blake says. With bottle caps affixed to the ankles of their rubber boots, miners warned each other of danger and determined their proximity to each other.

Similarly, slaves from Africa, toiling on plantations in pre-Civil War America, would set planks atop whiskey barrels and dance in bare feet, putting bottle caps between their toes to create percussive sounds, Carton says.

Irish cloggers — representing another oppressed 19th-century minority — added their steps to help create tap.

From city streets to vaudeville and nightclub stages, tap progressed — until, in the early 1930s, moviegoers around the world first glimpsed a dancing sprite named Fred Astaire and “Hollywood found its fascinating rhythm,” Blake says.

Once audiences experienced the “educated feet” of Astaire and other silver-screen tappers, “people found it intriguing,” he adds.

But while Astaire and other white dancers enjoyed above-the-title stardom, such black tap standouts as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers — and Spencer and his fellow Step Brothers — wound up in supporting or specialty roles. (Robinson danced with top moppet Shirley Temple in four 1930s movies; Astaire in turn saluted Robinson in 1936’s “Swing Time” in the number “Bojangles of Harlem.”)

Blake “really wanted to make note of” such issues in “Tap in Time,” he says. “Every time we see the happy face, there’s the burning soul — and the hurting soul.”

Narration and lobby displays will set the historical context for the show.

There will even be dancing in the theater lobby during tonight’s reception, Carton says, “so people can learn a step or two” themselves.

“I think it’s one of the best ways to expose” tap, Spencer says. “Have people participate in it. Go out and show the world and revive it somewhat.”

Because, in his view, there’s nothing that could possibly top tap.

“I just loved it,” Spencer says of his life as a dancing man. “I would rather dance than eat.”

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.