OCR Text |
Show Ann Reinking dances for the TV cameras Ann Reinking has a half-dozen half-dozen Broadway shows under her belt, two movies and she : turned down parts in both - "Charlie's Angels" and "Three's Company." And she doesn't even have a press agent. In fact, she always had the fear she might not make it a fear that should be quelled by now. Miss Reinking does a Bob Fosse number in the Emmy award-winning "Julie Andrews' Invitation to the Dance with Rudolf Nureyev," to be rebroadcast Sunday, Oct. 25 on "The CBS Festival of Lively Arts for Young People" series. The dancing that Miss Reinking does, both on stage and in front of the camera, is grueling. "Anyone who does star dancing or solo work," she says, "gets pulled muscles and so forth. You're really out there eight performances a week, trying to make it work and be the best. You have to give them more than step-step, step-step, kick-kick. It's like being a star football player. You get a few more injuries than the guy sitting on the bench." Miss Reinking has spent very little time on the bench. She arrived in New York from her native Seattle, Wash., at 18, exactly seven years after she announced to her parents over dinner that she wanted t be a dancer. ("They all but choked," she recalls.) Her first job was in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. "It was a good place to learn the ropes, to learn professionalism" something some-thing she needed. "I'd go on stage with a squirt gun or blacken my teeth," she says. "On Broadway, I would have been fired. You don't have girls walking around with squirt guns." Her first job after Radio City was in the chorus of a touring "Fiddler on the Roof," and she now says, "I'll never go on the road again." She didn't have to. Bob Fosse cast her in "Pippin," in which he used dancers individually, indivi-dually, rather than as anonymous anony-mous chorus members. Then it was on to the starring role of Joan of Arc in the flop musical "Goodbye, Charley. "But who wouldn't want to play a saint?" she asks. Then came "Coco," the Katharine Hepburn musical. Miss Reinking had a small part. "Katharine Hepburn said to me, 'You can act.' Wasn't that nice?" After that she went through what she calls her replacement replace-ment period, taking over for Donna McKechnie in "A Chorus Cho-rus Line" and Gwen Verdon in "Chicago." Says Miss Reinking, Reink-ing, "Someone said I was the replacement queen of Broadway." Miss Reinking's last show was "Dancin'," and then the film "All That Jazz." The next stop is playing Grace Farrell, Daddy Warbuck's secretary, in the movie version of "Annie." Miss Reinking hopes to find her ultimate security in acting. "Acting is something I can do," she says. "And I'd like to be able to make a living for myself past the age of 45 or 50. I don't want to kill myself every night if I don't have to. You try doing this at 50. It'll hurt. It hurts now." Ann Reinking |