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Tony Waag [biography]
Dates: 1957-
Birth Date: Sep 8, 1957
Place of Birth: Fort Collins, Colorado
Tony Waag, the elegant funny man of tap dance and classic song and dance man, was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. As a kid, he watched reruns of Hollywood musicals and admired Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Eleanor Powell, but he adored the television comedy-variety shows of Red Skeleton, Danny Kaye, Lucille Ball, and Carol Burnette. In 1977, as a nineteen-year-old art major at Colorado State University, he joined a group of sweating young dancers going through the paces in a tap class conducted Leslie "Bubba" Gaines and Charles "Cookie" Cook of the Copasetics who, along with Brenda Bufalino, were at the college for a weekend workshop and performance. During the workshop, the casual humor of Gaines and Cook was hugely appealing. "They were laughing and joking, and they loved what they were doing," Waag recalled. "They spread this kind of joy, that everything's okay as long as you have friends and are pursuing your dream. It wasn't so much about tap dance as it was about fraternity and community -- that was the Copasetic philosophy I wanted to pursue. I decided I wanted to dance." In his second year of college, Waag transferred to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to study modern dance; he switched to theatre in his third year, and then moved to San Francisco where he worked in regional theater.
He arrived in New York City in 1982 with two suitcases, $500 in his pocket, and showbiz on his mind, still wanting to find the Copasetics. After arriving, just walking down the street, he ran into Brenda Bufalino, then performing with her first company, Bufalino & Company, at Riverside Church. She invited him to attend her tap classes at Fazil's [formerly Jerry's Dance Studio), and when he arrived for class there, in an adjourning studio, were the Copasetics. "They were rehearsing, or pretending to rehearse, but really joking around. I found home!" said Waag. He developed as a sophisticated and superb rhythmic technician with Bufalino and become a founding member of her American Tap Dance Orchestra, (ATDO), performing its premiere on July 4, 1986, at Battery Park in New York City. In 1986, Waag founded the American Tap Dance Orchestra with Brenda Bufalino and Charles "Honi" Coles, and toured with ATDO nationally and internationally. From 1989 to 1995, he operated, with Brenda Buflino, Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center in downtown New York City. A studio that studio boasted the best tap dance floor in the city.
Waag's specialty mix of rhythm tap and eccentric was first realized in ATDO's American Landscape (1991), when he sang, sand-danced, and soft-shoed to Hoagy Carmichael's classic song, "Old Buttermilk Sky." In 199, he was asked by Al Heywood and the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day to perform a tribute to Donald O'Connor, who was to be honored with the Flo-Bert Award at that year's Tap Extravaganza. Waag decided on doing his own rendition of O'Connor's gravity-defying "Make ‘Em Laugh," from the 1952 MGM musical film classic Singin' in the Rain, considered one of the funniest dance scenes on film. Standing backstage right before his performance, tap master Jimmy Slyde turned to Waag and delivered one of his terse one-liners that held volumes of meaning: "Just remember, Tony, you have all the time in the world." Waag took a deep breath and strode onto the stage, singing and dancing, tripping and falling, rolling across the stage, panting, and doing his signature camel impression. When he finished, Donald O'Connor, who sat dead center in the theatre, stood up and shouted "Wonderful!"
The eccentric style of tap dancing draws from a diverse and highly inventive range of grotesque body movements-- from twisting and entwining the legs in legomania and snaking the hips to the shimmy and itching. It is a venerated style of vernacular dance that draws the most laughter from audiences of all ages; and Waag, who considers himself a proponent of that style, takes great pleasure in making people laugh. At the same time, he enjoys flipping to the romantic, sentimental, and bittersweet side of the emotional coin. After performing "By Myself," a poignant song-and-dance (interspersing soft-whispering shuffles and slides into the lyrics of the song made famous by Tony Bennett) at the 2007 New York City Tap Festival in 2007, which he founded in 2001, the fifty-year-old Waag recalled, "I've come full circle. I can pull off a beautiful soft shoe or a pratfall, if I decide that's where I am going, but I'm not out here to dance my can off. It's not becoming, and I don't have the hunger. I'm not competitive in any way, shape, or form, I just want to enjoy myself. If there's a cutting session going on, I'd rather go watch the sunset."
For Waag, directing the American Tap Dance Foundation, the premier tap organization in New York, and producing tap dance festivals and shows has become richer and more fulfilling than performing. "When I do perform, I am ready to enjoy those morsels of opportunity," he reflected. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he answered, "As Tony Waag, tap dancer, singer, eccentric soft-shoe-song-and-dance man . . . and Fool."
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]