Jazzed: Jack Cole and Twentieth-Century American Dance

Renowned dancer and choreographer Jack Cole (1911-1974), whose birth name was John Ewing Richter, was a one-of-a-kind artist who initiated a gripping style of theatrical jazz dance that forever vanquished the vaudeville kickline. Cole's distinctive four-decade career choreographing for stage, screen, and his iconic nightclub act began during the Great Depression. He transformed early modern dance by injecting angularity, syncopation, and body isolations derived from Indian, Latin American, African, and Caribbean dance forms.

At the forefront of Broadway innovation, Cole worked on shows like Ziegfeld Follies of 1943, Kismet (1953), and Man of La Mancha (1965). But his greater renown came as a film choreographer, with quintessential contributions to Gilda (1946), There's No Business LikeShow Business (1954), Les Girls (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Let's Make Love (1960). In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Cole shepherded Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, who were considered nondancing movie stars, through an array of eye-catching production numbers. His work on Monroe's exceptional performance in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" helped catapult Monroe to superstardom. Cole also collaborated with Gwen Verdon, Mitzi Gaynor, Rita Hayworth, and Chita Rivera. He influenced Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Michael Bennett. Yet Cole's impact on American dance has long been overlooked.

With lucid prose and unmatched research pulled from film and art archives, public events, memoirs, and interviews, Jazzed takes readers on a journey through Cole's professional and personal transitions. Author Debra Levine not only focuses on Cole's choreography career at MGM, Columbia Pictures, and Twentieth Century-Fox but also uncovers details of his obsessive training, his struggles with depression and alcoholism, his proclivity for violence, and his encounters with homophobia. Levine winnows fact from fiction to deliver an insightful, entertaining biography of the dance renegade whose unique brand of theatrical jazz dance still resonates in nightclubs, music videos, and musicals today.

Debra Levine is a Hollywood-fascinated dance critic whose discovery of Jack Cole turned her aesthetic world on its head. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, HuffingtonPost, and more. She is the founder of artsmeme, a fine arts blog.