GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Kelly Sheehan of 'White Christmas'

The show 42nd Street has twice nearly intruded on a milestone in the life of Kelly Sheehan. First, there was her birth. Sheehan’s mother, a dancer named Julie O’Connell, discovered she was pregnant with Kelly right around the time she was cast in the Los Angeles production of 42nd Street in the early ’80s. She would have had to pass on the role, except the production ended up being delayed, so the new mom was able to join the chorus line after all. A couple of decades later, Sheehan had to rush her high school graduation so she could move to New York to appear in the Broadway revival of 42nd Street. After she’d been cast, Sheehan wrapped up her high school studies half a year early in order to be in New York for the start of 42nd Street rehearsals at the beginning of 2001.

Now, as 2008 draws to a close, Sheehan is back on Broadway in Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, the screen-to-stage adaptation (with extra Berlin songs incorporated) that arrived at the Marquis Theatre after years of regional productions. Sheehan was in four of those productions: in 2005 in Los Angeles; 2006 in St. Paul, Minn.; last year, Boston; and even a one-week engagement during the hot summer of 2006 at St. Louis’ Muny. While most of the Broadway cast has previous White Christmas experience, Sheehan has the longest tenure with the show other than star Jeffry Denman (who’s been in it since it originated in San Francisco in 2004).

“This is definitely the most exciting year that we’ve had,” says Sheehan, “because of the parade, the big Broadway opening... And having a theater right in Times Square is so exciting. Pretty much everyone has family coming to New York and seeing the show. Sometimes when you’re out of town, they don’t necessarily want to travel to St. Paul or Detroit to come and see the show, but people always want to come to New York.”

Last Thursday, Sheehan and her castmates performed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; she’d also performed at the parade when she was in 42nd Street. Both 42nd Street and White Christmas—along with last spring’s No, No, Nanette at City Center Encores!, which Sheehan was also in—were choreographed by Randy Skinner, a master of old-timey tap shows.

“I absolutely adore him,” Sheehan says of Skinner. “He really researches the time period and stays true to it. He recognizes the different steps and the different style and the different energy that people had. People were into dancing for themselves—they weren’t doing it for fame, or TV or the camera. He really focuses on how they did it back then, and he’s always been considerate to the dancers on helping us look and sound our best.”

Tap is Sheehan’s favorite type of dance, and her forté, but it’s also an almost invisible art in contemporary musicals. White Christmas: set (and created) in 1954; 42nd Street: based on a 1933 film; No, No, Nanette: from the Roaring ’20s. “It’s really challenging,” Sheehan acknowledges, “to find a good old-fashioned American musical with tap dancing and very period pieces—big tap numbers, from the times where there were 30 to 40 dancers on stage. We really don’t have that anymore, and it’s very expensive to do.”

Sheehan is a third-generation tapper. Her grandmother, Betty O’Connell, started dancing after she won lessons as a teenager, and as an adult opened three dance studios in the Toledo, Ohio, area. Betty’s three daughters, Julie, Joanie and Jeanne, all danced. Julie, Sheehan’s mother, performed in film and TV, including the 1984 film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and the Soul Train Music Awards (she was the “token white girl,” says Sheehan), and choreographed Miss Universe pageants. Jeanne O’Connell followed her sister Julie into the 42nd Street tour.

Sheehan’s father, Bill, also was a tap dancer. Her parents—both from Ohio originally—met in L.A. at a dance studio. He later moved behind the scenes and became a cameraman for such TV series as Baywatch and Highway to Heaven. Today he lives in New York and is employed by Columbia University (he’s divorced from Sheehan’s mother).

When they were living in Los Angeles, Julie O’Connell taught dance, and some of her students were Hollywood child stars, including Drew Barrymore and Christina Applegate. “She taught a lot of famous kids and saw what the business was doing to their lives,” says Sheehan, who was born in L.A. “So we moved back to Ohio.” Sheehan, an only child, was 10 at the time. In L.A., she’d done commercials (for Barbie) and TV (a guest spot around age 6 in thirtysomething), twice competed on Star Search, and got to personally know such legendary hoofers as Donald O’Connor and Fayard Nicholas. In Toledo, she attended an all-girls Catholic school. “It kind of turned my life upside down a bit,” she says of the move to the Midwest. “It was very academic, and in Ohio sports are very big, so it’s really not about the arts. It was quite a change, but I learned how to ride a bike and kind of be a normal kid.”

Her mother continued to teach dance, and her Ohio students included future starlets Katie Holmes and Alyson Stoner (of the Disney Channel). Sheehan trained under her mother. “She still comes to the show and says, ‘Oh, you missed that step,’ ‘Oh, you should do that better,’” says Sheehan. “Always a teacher.”

Mother and daughter traveled to NYC about once a month to see Broadway theater. “I fell in love with it,” says Sheehan. When the 42nd Street revival began auditions circa 2000, someone involved in them called her Aunt Jeanne. “She said, ‘I’m a little too old for this production. I don’t know if I want to do this again, but I’ll call my niece.’” So the 17-year-old Kelly drove with her mother to New York for an audition. “I think my mom wanted to show me how hard the business was,” she says. “[But] I got a callback and then the next day they called me and said, ‘We’d like to offer you a contract.’”

She was in 42nd Street for its entire four-year run, eventually taking over the part of Lorraine, one of the featured chorus girls in “Go Into Your Dance” and “We’re in the Money.” After the show closed in early January 2005, Sheehan went to southern California for an extended visit. While there, she auditioned for the L.A. production of White Christmas, and that show has largely occupied her professionally ever since.

This September, Sheehan performed in two dance pieces choreographed by Ray Hesselink as part of Freshly Tossed, a comedy/dance revue in the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Earlier this year, she assisted her friend Greg Graham (currently in Billy Elliot) in choreographing Tio Pepe, an entry in the Summer Play Festival.

She doesn’t yet have any plans for after White Christmas closes on January 4. “The best and worst part of being a gypsy is that you have no idea what’s next,” Sheehan says. “Going from show to show and never knowing what tomorrow holds. That’s fantastic and also kind of...sucks.”

Sheehan may be best suited for old-fashioned musicals not only because of her tapping talent but because of her wholesome, blond, all-American looks. “Going in and looking how I do—I just don’t fit in certain shows,” she says. “It’s not that I’m not as talented as other people, it’s just that I wouldn’t look right in certain productions.” Explaining her M.O. for looking for work, she states: “Some people go in for everything. That’s fine, but they put [physical descriptions in casting notices] for a reason, because they mean it. Instead of wasting their time, I’ll wait for something that is more appropriate.”

She adds: “Hopefully, there will be a big revival of some tap show again soon.” Sheehan takes a couple of tap and ballet classes a week, even when she’s in a show, as well as acting and improv classes. She has on occasion had to work outside the theater to make ends meet, usually as an in-store representative for Clinique cosmetics. Her boyfriend of five years, Clarke Thorell, is also a Broadway performer—currently back in the role he originated, Corny Collins in Hairspray. Thorell had a principal role in Lone Star Love, the Wild West musicalization of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor that was supposed to open on Broadway last season. He was involved in Lone Star Love through much of its development and its pre-Broadway tryout in Seattle, and brought Sheehan into a 2003 reading of it when an actress become unavailable at the last minute. That’s the only time they’ve worked together. “He likes to change it up, and he’ll go from show to show and is always busy doing readings and this and that,” says Sheehan, who met Thorell at a Christmas party when she was in 42nd Street. “I’ve been more steady—if I get a show, I’ll stay in it.”

After three years of being on the road during the holidays, Sheehan is enjoying her first White Christmas at home, even though the cast may be a little less tight-knit than in years past. “Doing it in New York is different,” she says, “because you go home at the end of the night, your family comes to see you, you have people in town. So it’s a little less of a ‘family’ because we get to go home to our real family. In other cities, because [the cast] have traveled together and spend Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s together, you really become this big family.”

There’s another difference between doing the show on Broadway and at the regional stages: Though the Marquis Theatre has a large seating capacity, it’s not particularly roomy in the wings. “In the other theaters, there was a lot more space backstage for anything to be set up and we could have full set pieces waiting to slide right on stage,” Sheehan says. “Here, they’re sawing set pieces in half to fold them, and a lot of stuff is hung.

“There’s a lot more ‘choreography’ backstage,” she continues. “The girls and guys in the ensemble don’t necessarily have time to go to our dressing room to change each time, so we have it downstairs by the musicians. We have very big skirts and petticoats and high heels, and 20 people in tap shoes have to go up and down this small spiral staircase.”

Regardless of where she’s tapping to the Irving Berlin tunes, her time in White Christmas has provided Sheehan with a holiday tradition. “There’s very little tradition, I think, in a performer’s life, because you might be in a different city each year,” she notes.

Photos of Kelly, from top: on Thanksgiving Eve, right before she did seven performances (including the Macy’s parade) in four days; with Drew Humphrey (left) and Matthew Kirk in White Christmas; as a cast member of 42nd Street, standing at far left; the littlest fan of 42nd Street, when her mother was in it; second from right, in a number from No, No, Nanette with (front row, from left) Rosie O’Donnell, Sandy Duncan and Jennifer Cody; dancing, on far right, to White Christmas’ “Blue Skies,” as sung by Stephen Bogardus (left). [White Christmas photos by Joan Marcus]