Jet setter

GANG BANG Green stands out in West Side Story

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Cody Green, who plays Riff in the Arthur Laurents revival of West Side Story, is no stranger to watchers of reality television. As the winner of Bravo's Step It Up and Dance—another pitiful example of bad choreography entering the homes of thousands of Americans—Green was a godsend. He even made the anemic dance set to Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" bearable (well, slightly). The dancer, 28, grew up outside of Vancouver, where he studied dance with his mother. He attended Juilliard for two years before joining the casts of Mamma Mia!, Movin' Out and Grease. As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Green's athletic dancing is tempered by soul; he's one of the truest parts of the musical, originally choreographed and directed by Jerome Robbins. Over drinks in Hell's Kitchen, he spoke about his career.

Time Out New York: Your mother, Susie Green, was your first dance teacher. Did you start when you were five?
Cody Green: I was three, actually.

Do you remember much?
A little bit. A lot of what my mom does is to teach music to Carl Orff teachers, meaning master-level teachers at universities. She does a lot of Laban work as well. So when you're a kid, she really has you exploring different movements; it's not just running around the room, but focusing at a young age. But it's not so structured that you can't be free. Laban has eight efforts, like punching and twisting and pulling, and she had me doing those different movements when I was a little kid. I think it helps a lot with choreography as you get older because it gets you working creatively to think of how to move in different ways. So that was cool, and I remember that growing up. My sister danced as well. My brother did for a little while too.

Are they younger or older?
Both of them are older. I was the baby, and my mom had a dance company and her studio was actually in our house. I would go downstairs, sit on the stairs and watch my sister and all the other dancers perform. By the time I was nine or ten, I went on tour with my mom's company to Moscow and Finland, as Canadian Youth Ambassadors. A lot the pieces that she did weren't just dance—they were also theater and issue-oriented pieces. Growing up, she studied at the National Ballet of Canada, but when she was invited to join the company, she decided to leave and moved to London to study modern dance. She did a lot of Graham and Wigman and trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance. Then she went to L.A. and studied breakdancing with Otis, who was Michael Jackson's teacher. When I started dancing, she wanted me to try everything.

You're so coordinated. I wonder if your training is part of the reason?
I grew up dancing and playing basketball, baseball, volleyball and soccer. Dance was just kind of fun. As I got older, I started to realize, I can do this physically and I can compete both with peers and with myself and I can also express myself. As much as I loved the competitive feeling of sports, I really liked dance. And as a kid, I was performing in front of thousands of people with my mom's company. At that point, I wasn't really in the company; I would come on with one of the older guys and do some hip-hop. My mom set up a group of her younger kids—I was 10 or 11—and we did an episode of 21 Jump Street with Johnny Depp. Do you remember that show?

Of course! I so loved that show.
There was an episode when Johnny Depp's character is having a flashback about going to a dance. We were all the dancers around the main characters and I ended up being the stand-in for the little kid who was Johnny Depp. When you see his body moving or dancing, it's me! But with the company, we did a piece to a song for Earth Day. We did pieces about the war, about women's rights because we went to Beijing in 1995, and all of those experiences were incredible. When you're even 15 years old, you sort of don't realize, Wow I'm in a Communist country. I was in Russia before the Iron Curtain fell and then went back in 1992. To see the difference was pretty cool.

Did you go from that environment to Juilliard?
It was a busy last couple of years for me in high school. My dad's partner passed away and my girlfriend at the time passed away and then our house burned down. I went to New York because I had won a scholarship with New York City Dance Alliance, which is a convention that my mom had suggested I go to. Joe Lanteri, who runs it, is still a jazz teacher at Juilliard. I wanted to talk to him about going to the school. One of my mom's students was in her final year at Juilliard and I stayed with her. At that time, the dollar, Canadian to U.S., was not so great. With the house burning down, I was stuck. She set up an audition for me with the director of the school.

Benjamin Harkarvy?
Yes. I auditioned four or five days before the program started. He brought me in his office and said, "Great job—I would love for you to come to school." This was sort of out of nowhere because I hadn't applied. I couldn't afford it. He said, "Unfortunately there's no scholarship at this time because it's right before the year starts and it's all been given away, but if you come back and audition again we'll see what we can do." So I ended up taking that year to work at Tokyo Disney. I did that for four months and got a call that Juilliard was able to give me a full scholarship. Luckily, the people at Tokyo Disney are really respectful of education; when I told them I'd gotten this scholarship they said, "You can leave." That was kind of amazing.

You left Juilliard after two years. What happened?
It's a different experience for everybody. Some people have a wonderful experience, some people don't. I got sick my first year, so it was tough. I had to come from behind and catch up, which I did, but at the time the money thing was pretty tight. I'd used all the money I'd made at Tokyo Disney to pay for my room and board at the school. The next year, the scholarship was all of my tuition but not room and board, which was something like $12,000. Which isn't terrible, but if you're not working? It was almost $20,000 Canadian and it was not that plausible. My parents got me through my second year and I ended up getting a job with Mamma Mia! [Pauses] I just wanted to do it. It felt like the right time. A lot of my training happened on the job with Momma Mia! I must have been 19.

How did Movin' Out happen?
I was doing Mamma Mia! when I had heard about an audition. The minute that I saw John Selya's part [of Eddie], that's what I wanted to do. I ended up getting cast in the tour, and we got to work with Twyla Tharp. Even though it was the same choreography, she reset it a little differently so it was original for all of us, which was very cool. I got moved into the lead role of Eddie for a short time as a replacement and then ended up doing it on the tour and on Broadway. I covered both Tony and Eddie in New York for the last part of the production.

Talk about working with Tharp.
Oh, she was wonderful with me. She's so honest; she tells you straight what isn't working. She knows what to say to get out of you what she knows that you need. She's tough, but in a really good way. For me, it always made sense: "It can't be acting and then dancing. It has to be acting and then the acting has to be in the dancing. You can't just all of a sudden stop and do a dance." It had to go all the way through. That's tough if you're not used to doing it.

CONTINUED >>