Broadway Gypsy Takes Inevitable ‘Next Step’

“I want to dance forever,” declares Nick Mendez, a Broadway gypsy in his mid-30s struggling to postpone the inevitable in Christian Faber’s new film, “The Next Step.”

Handsome and spectacularly fit, Mendez can’t accept the documented facts of professional dancing: that the physical demands are so punishing that the average career ends at age 29, not including those terminated earlier by injury. Mendez’s agent, colleagues, girlfriends and his own aching back all tell him it’s over, but his need and fear drive him to increasingly desperate attempts to hang on to an illusion of youthful prowess.

“He’s in deep denial,” explains Rick Negron, who plays Mendez in the film and is also currently in the “Ragtime” chorus at the Shubert Theatre. “At thirtysomething, your body cannot do what it did at twentysomething. The younger kids can perform four or five turns and jump much higher than you. You can’t keep up.”

Negron’s Broadway credits include “Legs Diamond,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “Leader of the Pack,” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and the original version of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” directed by Hal Prince. At 35, however, he doesn’t depend on dancing jobs anymore. He was hired for “Ragtime” as a singer and also plays small roles in the show--the most prominent being the train conductor who buys a flip-book and thus propels one of the major characters toward success.

Indeed, ever since he began studying dance as a teenager in his native Puerto Rico, Negron also developed his skills as actor and singer. Ultimately, he says, those non-dance skills sustained him and helped him avoid the cycle of denial and disaster that Nick Mendez suffers in “The Next Step”: professional humiliation, unemployment, compulsive promiscuity and even prostitution.

Although he confesses that once, very early in his dancing career, he indulged in backstage sex just as Nick Mendez does near the beginning of the film, Negron insists that the character’s womanizing makes his own past indiscretions look pale.

“He is like my shadow, my libido gone wild with no regard to consequences,” he comments. “He acts on things that I only think about. It’s a way of making him feel younger, of escaping the reality of not getting jobs anymore.”

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The character is based on four or five different dancers in U.S. and foreign tours of “West Side Story,” says Aaron Reed, who wrote and co-produced the film. Himself a former dancer who started out at UC Santa Cruz, Reed now works in the computer department of the William Morris Agency. Like Nick Mendez, he once applied to perform in a strip show when musical theater employment bottomed out, was turned down and ended up supporting himself by various odd jobs such as delivering beer to celebrities.

“There is an intersection of peak performance and artistry that can only occur for a limited number of years,” Reed points out. “Choreographers want no restrictions on what they can imagine visually and physically on stage.” Dancers no longer up to that challenge aren’t hired and need to seek other career options.

But where? “I think what’s missing from the film is a role model, someone who was able to make a [career] transition,” Negron says. “There are plenty of dancers out there who have gone into other areas, and I think it might complete the picture to show them.”

Ann Barry would agree. As president of Career Transition for Dancers, she presides over a bicoastal, 12-year-old, not-for-profit organization that offers free counseling, scholarships and other services to dancers in exactly Mendez’s predicament.

“Some people do come to us in crisis,” she says, “but more and more dancers are preparing for their futures earlier than later. Career counseling, a very strong part of our program, teaches them that what they have as dancers are translatable skills and that they can find other careers as equally rewarding.”

As outlined in the organization’s 12-point manifesto, those translatable skills sound highly impressive: “ability to work independently and as part of a team . . . dedicated and persistent . . . flexibility and adaptability to change . . . energetic, with physical stamina. . . .” But can any other career be equally rewarding? Not for Nick Mendez and dancers like him.

“I dreamt about dancing for five years after I stopped,” says Kathleen Haigney, formerly of New York City Ballet and now the Los Angeles administrator of Career Transition for Dancers. “Most of the dancers who come through this [Southland] program would die to have a job connected to the profession. But they are completely forced out of dance and have to dig very deeply inside themselves to find a way of continuing to express their creative sides.”

“Dance is a drug,” Negron insists. “Unless you’ve been a dancer, you don’t realize how unbelievably freeing and joyous it is.” Even with accumulated knee and ankle injuries, he continues to take jazz-dance classes to release those feelings. But he’s also remarkably clear-minded about the downside of the profession:

“Dancers fall in love with this business and want to get to the point where they can go from one show to another without auditioning,” he says. “To be called for jobs--that’s really making it as a Broadway dancer. But for the rest, there comes a point where they realize how ruthless this business is, and how much they have to sacrifice. I have siblings who are younger than me who have kids and a house and two cars and a dog. I don’t have any of those things yet--I’ve had to put them off for show business. And, for some of us, that’s an awfully big price to pay.”