Donald OConnor

I don’t know if this will spark any response or not. These are just two facts I recently ready .

i have always marveled at the smooth way OCONNOR took the baton at the end of Singin in the Rain and had such command of the orchestra. His beat looked like the real thing and I had always taken it for his agility and physical cleverness. Turns out Donald was a serious composer who performed his first Symphony with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and had more of his work recorded by the Brussels Philharmonic. So his chops as a conductor are not just an actor’s trick. I could not discover whether he actually could play the piano but he handled those scenes very naturally. 

the second thing I read explained his complicated relationship with Gene Kelly during Singing in the Rain. OCONNOR has generally spoken well of Kelly and thanked him for the chance to perform Make Them Laugh. Some thought Kelly was just being his demanding self, some thought he might have been jealous of his younger costar. In this Wikipedia article, O Connor broke it down with startling honesty. With all his years in vaudeville, he learned routines. He had two routines and he danced them all the time. He had never been to school and he had never had dance training. He said “ I was a hoofer , dancing from the waist down. For Singing in the Rain I had to learn to dance from the waist up. I did not have the body and muscles of a dancer and I could not learn steps easily.Kelly was very patient with me. “ 

I suddenly understood what stressed Kelly so much He is handling this huge project. His costars , Debbie Reynolds and Donald OCONNOR, are essentially  lithe, agile non dancers . Without the years of dance training, and the formation of the muscleclature, his body just did not pick things up. No wonder poor Debbie was found crying under the piano. Fred Astaire supposedly offered her encouragement, but he never said a word about Kelly. Most people thought that was because Fred would not undertake to criticize another performer. Actually though Fred had had the same experience with Ginger Rogers and other partners. He has said that she was not much of a dancer when they started, but she worked hard. Now I see that wasn’t some kind of snobbery, she had been dancing on Broadway but did not have dance training.  Like OCONNOR, she did not really use her whole body. 

There has been an interesting case of this on Broadway . Karen Olivo  played Anita in the 2009 revival of West Side Story and won a Tony. Nevertheless she has complained about the choreography being unnecessarily complex and taxing. Some of her colleagues responded that she found it taxing because she was not a trained dancer. Her body was not prepared to absorb the stress of performing those moves. It sounds like snobbery, but it is a physical fact that dancers in training spend years teaching their muscles and nerves to perform certain moves from a certain position . This training means they know how to start and complet a step from a controlled position. They can do it over and over without hurting themselves. Sadly, Olivo had ongoing physical problems that ended with a broken foot and torn ligaments . She had to add fish to her vegan diet to have the protein needed for her body to heal. Most of these problems can be traced back to lack of dance formation. 

poor Gene Kelly went from Singing in the rain, where he had to direct choreography and train the co stars, to American in Paris, where his costar, Leslie Caron, was a legitimate dancer, but had suffered serious malnutrition during the war and could not work the long days that dancers do in film. It made me feel different about Kelly. He was undoubtedly competitive, selfish, demanding and harsh,  but it wasn’t for nothing. He had a lot to contend with in his efforts to make the best film.

I don’t know if this is of interest to anyone else. I found it fascinating because it it explained why Singing in the Rain was so debilitating for OCONNOR and Reynolds.