The eyes have it: Rohan Browne is ready for a new role.
CHRISTOPHER PARKER
The best scene in the movie adaptation of enduring Broadway smash A Chorus Line would have to be early on, when the director Zach, played by a harried Michael Douglas, lines up the wannabe performers – already culled from hundreds to 17 – and he literally puts the spotlight on each person, one by one.
It’s an interesting juncture in the movie, despite the high camp. The emotional arc swings from exhilaration to despair as each dancer steps into, or out, of the light and reveals their motivations, their secrets and their past. “Every dancer has seen A Chorus Line,” Rohan Browne, 32, says. “Aside from being one of the greatest musicals of all time, it’s just us. It is the show that tells the story of our day-to-day lives.”
The Melbourne-based musical theatre performer describes himself as a dancer first, then a singer and lastly an actor. Today we are meeting at Passioné Italian restaurant in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. He is in town performing with Mel Schneider and Sam Ludeman in musical Doris, about the life of Doris Day. Browne is dressed for Brisbane but looking Sydney, in a blue-denim shirt, halfway unbuttoned to reveal a tanned chest and a necklace of wooden beads. Shorts and Havaianas round out the summery attire.
“It shows the process we go through for every single gig. Auditions bring out fears, insecurities and massive highs as well, and then there’s either rejection or acceptance at the end. Sometimes things that you’ve gone through in your past come up on the floor too.”
In the movie, Zach asks them why they dance. Pretty standard really. But then, in an attempt to shake up their obviously rehearsed responses he goes deeper. Tell me about your mother? A flamboyant male dancer is quizzed, how did your parents react when you told them you were gay? And then just one word: Sex?
I ask Browne, who will play Greg Gardner in the upcoming Australian production of A Chorus Line if he’s prepared to recreate the scene. He says sure. I’ll be reading as Zach, I say, but there’s a proviso; he must answer not as his character, a proudly gay dancer who is “not a queen, he’s a king”, but as Rohan Browne. He agrees a second time, this time warily, unsure of the game here. In the hammiest American accent Browne has likely ever heard, I get my Michael Douglas on – boy oh boy this is fun – and sit back a metre from the table to change the physical dynamic. We begin. Why do you dance?
“I couldn’t imagine my life without dancing. I even got to a point at the end of West Side Story (Browne played one of the leading men, Riff) and I thought, this could be it for me,” he admits. “I was 31 and it looked like it should be the time for me to start looking at other avenues. But there was something in me that resisted.
“When I dance it makes me feel alive and fresh and in touch with myself. It centres me,” Browne says, speaking with a completely un-self-conscious candour. His underlying mantra as a performer is: “The strongest are those not afraid to show vulnerability”. And it’s a strong straight man who continues dancing through years of teasing as a boy, a topic we discuss later in brave detail.
So far so good. As a journalist I am enjoying Browne’s dramatic turn of phrase. As Zach, a fictional director assessing a future charge, I am impressed by his passion and his self-awareness. But let’s go deeper. If he had three minutes to express who he was as a person and a performer – right down to his very deepest – what would that dance look like?
“There would be a lot of lyrical stuff,” he says. “By that I mean fluid movement, a cross between jazz and contemporary, where it’s more felt and emotional than a hip-hop funk kind of number where it’s all down and cool and it’s forced.
“You’re kind of conducting the music with your body. At the end of the three minutes I would love for people to wonder whether the music was composed for the movement, or if the movement was choreographed for the music. It would work as one and it would be constantly interchanging. And that would represent me, and my life as a performer. I have to adapt to different situations; you have to say at every audition, ‘OK, so you’ve seen me as this, now you’re going to see me as something else’.”
Browne’s stellar career has seen various reinventions from randy alley cat to rebel gang leader, and psychopath king to nightclubbing cad. It’s all part of achieving music theatre’s “Grand Slam”: he played Fred Casely in Chicago, Rum Tum Tugger in Cats, Riff in West Side Story and Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar as well as acting turns in The Drowsy Chaperone alongside Geoffrey Rush, for which he was nominated for a Green Room Award.
In between a still-hectic music theatre schedule, Browne is studying acting one-on-one with coach Nicholas Coghlan – whose star pupils include Joel Edgerton – and preparing to transition into a new phase in his career. “I want to be a ‘triple threat’, who can dance, sing and act equally well. I don’t want to be known as just a dancer who’s stepping up,” he says.
Despite having “good instincts” for how a character he’s playing thinks and feels, Browne acknowledges that he has a long way to go before he can “have the technique to portray the nuances as well as the broadstrokes”.
Browne is attracted to the “much bigger window of performance” offered by acting. “The longevity for actors compared to dancers is worth working towards, but it’s going to take longer than I thought. You don’t just walk into acting.”
The key difference between acting and dancing, Browne says, is the questions you must ask yourself: “Dancers ask, how can I do this physically? How does this make me feel? How does this resonate with me? And it’s all expressed through movement and usually in time with the music.
“As an actor you have to run the gamut of emotions. When have I been at my lowest point? When have I been at my highest point? How can I bring these things from my own life into this character? Finding the answers is about ‘looking under the lid’ and finding out what makes me me.”
A Chorus Line touches on the nexus between the skills required for acting and dancing because Zach pushes his performers into deeply personal territory to uncover their drive and their formative experiences. As I do Browne.
So what about sex? I ask open-endedly, trying to project enough of Michael Douglas’ directorial authority to excuse, or justify, an otherwise inappropriate question. Browne claps and says, “First sexual experience? Yeah of course ...” He pauses. “I don’t know if you want to put this in the magazine?” I explain that we’re just recreating the movie. We’re in character. In a snap Browne decides to let go of his apprehension. He commits to the exercise and he’s in actor mode.
“It was awkward as,” he says. Whether he means to or not, he tells the story of the song Surprise, Surprise from the movie version of A Chorus Line, which describes the character Richie’s heady, but hopeless first few attempts at sex. “I was 17, she was 16. I’d been away on holidays with my family and come back for the start of school, emotions were running high so we decided to wag one morning. We were on the carpet in the middle of this lounge room, and it was just on. The stakes were so high, the passion was intense, it was that whole ‘eternal love’, Shakespeare feeling like we were going to be together forever, no matter what anybody said.”
Any Romeo and Juliet-style resistance Browne experienced in the course of his first love paled in comparison to the stick he copped for choosing dance, first as a hobby and then a career. The middle child between two sisters who danced, Rohan watched them practise at home and at the tender age of four thought, ‘I can do that’. So he did.
“Speak to most guys in the industry and you’ll find out that their sisters started and, being competitive brothers, they wanted to dance too!” he says. “I was the only guy in my class and my teacher gave me so much attention and nurturing. She said I had a natural gift, she urged me to keep dancing.”
Browne studied at The Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School (VCASS) from year 8. He had support from his parents, encouragement from a mentor, Mrs Mahr at Seaford Ballet School, and more then enough natural ability to quickly excel. The deal was sealed when he arrived on the stage for an early performance and experienced an odd sense of familiarity: “It just felt like I’d come home, even though it was my first time on stage.” But none of this would help him avoid “the teasing, the bashing and the trouble”.
“The stigma when I started was that if you dance and you’re male, you’re gay. You had to fight against that to prove you weren’t,” he says, gritting his teeth at the memory.
If A Chorus Line is art imitating life, it’s reasonable to assume that Browne’s engagement to theatre star-on-the-rise Christie Whelan is life imitating art. You know the plot: A talented, photogenic couple of actors get together through their work, let’s make it a romantic musical, and act love out for real. The truth is nothing of the kind.
“I was in Asia doing Cats and she was in Sydney working with a really close friend of mine, I saw a photo of her and I thought, ‘Who is that? I have to know her’,” Browne says. “I spoke to my friend and I added her on Facebook. We started chatting and flirting. Two months later we had a first date and it was amazing, we just connected.
“Don’t tell her this (sorry Rohan, I am) but I fell in love with her pretty much straight away.”
Whelan too is flying high, with her role alongside Geoffrey Rush in Melbourne Theatre Company’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Rush is a close friend of the couple. They were guests at his 60th birthday: “Since I did The Drowsy Chaperone we’re kind of mates, he’ll give us a call if he’s in town. We’re like his cool young couple that he hangs out with,” Browne says.
Has it ever been tempting to ask Rush for a reference or a leg-up in Hollywood? “If I wanted his help he’d be there with bells on. He’d be telling people just get Rohan in a room and give him a go. He gives so much and he’s been so great for me and Christie. But I want to get there on my own merit.”
» A Chorus Line opens in Melbourne on Saturday, February 4. Tickets from Ticketek or www.achorusline.com.au
Browne’s 5 best dance clips \ His most-watched for dancing inspiration.
1. Michael Jackson at the1995 MTV Video Music Awards.
“The single most greatest (sic) live performance ever caught on film.”
2. Fred Astaire Puttin’ On The Ritz
“I tried to do this routine once. I thought it would take two hours to master it. It took two days.”
3. Gregory Hines in White Nights
“The movie Tap is another all-time favourite.”
4. Mikhail Baryshnikov Le Corsaire from Don Quixote
“The most perfect, most complete dancer. His legs!”
5. Eleanor Powell in Honolulu.
“Sexy AND talented …”