‘Just in Time’ choreographer Shannon Lewis is ‘deconstructing the proscenium’ with ‘potent’ movement for Jonathan Groff
“It was pulling me, it was undeniable,” recalls Shannon Lewis of her desire to be a choreographer. "It was pulling me away from performing, and I was shocked to find out that I was OK with that.” After a robust dance career with 10 Broadway credits under her belt, the artist felt her dreams shifting, and now she’s making her Broadway debut as choreographer with the Bobby Darin musical Just in Time. Lewis chatted with Gold Derby about creating dance moves for Jonathan Groff, working with unique stage restrictions, and creating sequences for Saturday Night Live in record time.
Lewis created a successful career for herself as a performer, dancing her way through demanding tracks in shows like Fosse, Contact, and Sweet Charity. But she slowly developed a “larger vision” that began echoing loudly in her head. “As a dancer, I became extremely good at being another person's muse,” she explains, “I was really giving myself over to their creative vision. And I did that at a very high level for a long time and it was very satisfying. But there was always a little voice inside my head that said: I have an idea, or I'd love to have that conversation.” She longed to be part of the big-picture conversations that creative teams would have while the actors took their break.
She pursued choreographer gigs to the point that they eventually overtook her performance work. But her time on stage proved vital. “I'm so glad I had the performing experience,” says Lewis. "It gives me a real insight into how to speak to actors, how to speak to dancers, how to get inside their mind so that I can articulate what I want. So I wouldn't trade any of that time. I never thought of it as a new chapter. I just felt like it was a continuation and evolution of myself.”
Figuring out the mind of an actor was paramount in delivering the central conceit of Just in Time. The musical begins in 2025 with Groff playing himself, but he is soon seduced by the rhythms and movement of the past as he becomes Bobby Darin. “The movement definitely is much more modern, it's much more edgy. It's Jonathan, so he's having fun up there,” explains Lewis. “He's throwing in some twists and things that maybe Bobby Darin wouldn't do. And as we then start to go back in time to tell the story … that's when we add the little physical tweaks and things that Bobby Darin did.”
The show covers the majority of the crooner’s life, and notably features an extravagant production number for the hit that put Darin on the map: “Splish Splash.” And yes, Groff dances in a bathtub. “It’s when he really became a household name. So looking at it from a storytelling perspective, I knew it had to hit really hard in terms of emotionally. You had to really see that he was evolving,” describes Lewis. Groff’s Darin begins singing while writing the song, and it continues as he works up the ranks, finds increased popularity through radio play, and ultimately culminates in a huge production number on a late night show.
Lewis’ choreography for the number echoes this build in intensity, culminating in an explosion of energy with the televised performance. “I really went back to the Hullabaloo times, which was so fun,” she notes of her inspiration for the crowd-pleasing sequence. “There was a group of dancers and these big stars would come on and they sang and danced … so I went back to that era of choreography, and I ended up creating a dance break in the middle of ‘Splish Splash’ that was never there.”
Since Just in Time performs at the Circle in the Square Theatre, dance breaks are complex to stage. There are two main playing spaces, both of which are fairly intimate, and the audience’s eyes are constantly darting around the immersive environment. “It was a wonderful challenge,” confirms Lewis. "We knew we weren't doing a proscenium, so my thinking was already deconstructing the proscenium.” Much of her choreography is applied to the three-character ensemble of women, known as The Sirens. “They really inform the audience,” explains the choreographer, “if the Sirens are on stage and Bobby Darin is on the other side of the theater, if they look across the theater with their eyeballs, the audience is going to look there too. So we really spent a huge amount of time deconstructing that and going, where's the focus?” Since both available stages in the theater are on the small side, Lewis can “focus the movement down and make it really potent.”
In addition to her stage work, Lewis has created dances for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Saturday Night Live, including the hysterical “Gladiator Twosical” sketch. “There's no job like that in the entire world,” says Lewis of SNL and its brutally fast pace. “I usually get the script maybe 20 hours before, and sometimes I don't get the script at all! Sometimes I know it's going to be a song and I'll get the lyrics. I don't get the actual music. Sometimes I hire dancers that I know and trust, and I don't know what they're doing until I show up on set at 6 a.m. on Friday and we start shooting at eight.” Her experience on Broadway is always put to use here, as Lewis must make “strong choices conceptually” at the drop of a hat in order to come up with a finished product. “You want that improv feel,” she adds, “you never want to feel like it's been worked out too much because the nature of the show is that it's always constantly bouncing from thing to thing.”
For the Gladiator II parody, Lewis created two different versions of a sword-heavy dance sequence based on two different types of prop swords. One was drastically heavier than the other and she had no idea how Paul Mescal would handle the different weights in each shot. But taking the spirit of improv into account, she streamlined the dance from a three shot-setup to a single shot, trusting that her star would be able to handle the swordplay upon his arrival. “We got on set and Paul Mescal picked it all up and we ended up being able to shoot it all as one piece, which really made it a choreography dream,” she gushes. “It turned out to be this really cool thing that we never expected.”
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions