Magical Mr. Minahan: A Life in the Lights

Even during his college days, it was clear that Gregory A. Minahan ’76 was headed for a life on the stage.

The Crimson’s 1976 Commencement issue predicted that “Broadway sits as the pot of gold at the end of Greg Minahan’s rainbow—he’s caught a glimpse in the distance and he can’t stop following the colorful road there.”

With the help of a little song and dance, Minahan made the trip.

His resume now includes three years with the American Dance Machine, his “graduate school of dance,” and an eight-year stint with Cats on Broadway.

In the past few years, Minahan has made his home off-Broadway—as a music appreciation teacher at his daughter’s old elementary school. But the allure of the great white way is calling him back and he expects his return to the bright lights of Broadway is inevitable.

College roommate Thomas E. Harter ’76 says the path Minahan took doesn’t surprise him.

“Greg had stars in his eyes,” Harter says. “He was never driven by money or power or that sort of thing, he just loved to sing and dance.”

Although he is the son of a dance instructor, Minahan actually focused on singing during his early years. He graduated from high school musicals to Hasty Pudding Theatricals and Agassiz Theatre productions during college.

His fondest memory of Harvard, he says, is when he directed and played the lead in the musical George M. during his senior year.

“I went to college not knowing what I wanted to do, but by the time I was graduating I was doing as much [theater] as I could,” he says.

The unofficial theater concentrator moved to New York after graduation, intending to pursue his passion for singing. His work with the Pudding’s 1976 production, Tots in Tinseltown, led to his first job out of college when the Tots director hired him.

But his real break and the starting point of his dancing career came a year and a half later, when he landed a spot in the bus-and-truck tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar. Minahan says the Harlem-inspired musical, which was one of the first shows to feature a primarily black cast, inspired him to prioritize dancing for the first time in his life.

“That was the first time I was ever around dancers, and I figured I should take it seriously,” he says.

His successful audition for the American Dance Machine, a company Dance Magazine’s John Gruen has proclaimed as being “dance-historic, far reaching, and visionary,” marked the beginning of his dance career.

Founded by director Lee Theodore, a career Broadway dancer who played the original Anybodys in West Side Story, Dance Machine reconstructed and performed classics of Broadway choreography.

“I really just faked my way through the dancing part of auditions,” Minahan says. “[Theodore] needed someone who could sing, had an all-American look and could learn fast and those I could do. So she sat me down and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you.’”

During his three years of intense training with Dance Machine, Minahan toured Japan, met and married his former wife (who he has since divorced) and became a father. His jump onto the Broadway company of Cats soon after its 1982 opening allowed his daughter Sheena Mari to have “something close to a normal childhood,” he says, because it offered steady employment.

After a year of dancing as an understudy, Minahan was promoted to the position of dance captain, in charge of training new dancers.

By the time Minahan left Cats, he had performed 10 of the 12 male roles on stage and trained more than 75 dancers.

While Minahan says his experience with Broadway’s longest-running show was valuable because it taught him the art of directing, he says his decision to teach was spurred by his creative frustration.

“I was pretty much babysitting someone else’s work all the time,” Minahan says. “Even on the modest elementary school level, being creative on a regular basis is pretty gratifying.”

“Working with these children in elementary school is ever so much more free—in spite of the obvious limitations. For every resource you don’t have, there are half-a-dozen expectations and pressures you also don’t have,” he adds.

While Minahan says he misses most the physical aspect of his time with Cats, he says teaching is rewarding in itself.

“I miss the sweat—when you’re dancing on Broadway you’re working out everyday—but now I’m getting into my 40’s and not getting automatic exercise, and I miss that a lot,” he says.

“But on the other hand teaching the young kids is both a drain and a sustenance at the same time.”

As music appreciation teacher at the Caedmon Elementary School in New York, Minahan puts on two children’s productions a year.

“I’ve been at this school for 30 years and rarely have I come across someone so creative,” Principal Carol Devine says, noting Minahan’s ability to work wonders within a limited budget. “He made it snow on stage when the kids were singing. It was the most magical thing you ever saw.”

While Minahan says teaching rewards him creatively, he emphasizes that it was never his ultimate goal. In fact, Minahan says he may return to his first love after his daughter is independent.

“Every time I see a Broadway show, I wouldn’t mind doing it again,” he says. “I’d like to take another stab at directing or performing on stage.”

For years, Minahan thought his post-graduate career had been in spite of Harvard rather than because of it. But looking back, he now gives his college experience more credit.

“There was so much good theater going on all around campus, but it was all part of this extra-curricular, rebel underground; an academically self-destructive sub-culture,” he remembers. “The truth is, I really had no idea that I wanted to go to New York after graduation. But it turned out to be the natural course of action, given the rebellious frame of mind I was in after four years of straddling the fence between academics and theater.”

Minhan likes to quote a favorite line of Theodore’s: “Limitations are your greatest source of creativity.”

“It was true at Harvard,” he recalls. “And it’s true at Caedmon as well.”

—Staff writer Juliet J. Chung can be reached at jchung@fas.harvard.edu.