From Fame to Broadway: Debbie Allen Reflects on a Storied Career
Debbie Allen, the iconic dancer, choreographer, actor, and director, once found herself judging the Miss America pageant alongside a charismatic property developer named Donald Trump. He had just bought an 86-metre superyacht and rebranded it the Trump Princess. Eager to flaunt his prize, he invited Allen and her sister, Phylicia Rashad, aboard for a private tour. The opulence was astonishing: a bathroom carved from lapis lazuli, a fully equipped nightclub, and fine paintings. “It was incredible,” Allen recalls. “I remember him telling me: ‘Debbie, you can have a party on this.’ I said: ‘If I do it, honey, it’s going to be all Black people.’”
Four decades later, the Trump that Allen once knew as a “showman” is now the architect of a deeply polarised US. She struggles to reconcile the affable pageant judge with the authoritarian figure of the present. “He was a fun guy back then,” she muses. “I don’t know what happened.” Did she ever think of him as racist or sexist? “No!” Allen says. “I didn’t think it then and I wonder about it now. I wonder if that’s really him or is it people that are encouraging him to act like this. It’s hard to know, but we’re living in a time where it’s like we’re in an earthquake every day here in America.”
Allen, a 76-year-old grandmother married to former NBA player Norm Nixon, has exceptional grace. Sitting in an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, she wears a shiny silver jacket and a glittering cross. Warm and genial, she talks for an hour about the meaning of high art and popular entertainment in this time of Trumpian discord.
A Career of Firsts
Allen’s best-known roles include Anita in the 1980 Broadway revival of West Side Story and dance instructor Lydia Grant in the film and TV series Fame. She has choreographed the Oscars a record 10 times, founded the nonprofit Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, and was appointed a US cultural ambassador of dance by George W. Bush in 2001. She is also a prolific TV director, notably on Grey’s Anatomy, while her London production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won an Olivier award in 2010.
Now, she returns to directing on Broadway with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a haunting Chekhovian masterpiece by August Wilson set in an African American community in Pittsburgh in 1911. At a recent performance, a cheer erupted in the balcony at the Barrymore theatre. Audience members turned to look, muttering: “Is it the Obamas?” But it was Allen, making a splendid entrance and giving a regal wave.
Denzel Washington, who has made it his personal mission to memorialise Wilson’s series of 10 plays on film, selected Allen for the project. Washington suggested she direct the stage version first to “exercise those muscles and get those creative juices going”, an offer she enthusiastically accepted. Preparing for the production, Allen wrote a 40-page study guide for her team, diving deep into Wilson’s historical context and artistic inspirations. “It speaks to me because it is so intergenerational,” she says. “There are young people, young adults and older people. The play itself is so full; it is all of August Wilson. The greatest humour, the greatest dramatic journey for the characters, the real experience of spiritualism.”
Art in a Time of Turmoil
The play is set half a century after the emancipation of African Americans, but its protagonist, Herald Loomis, is a victim of peonage, a brutal system of forced labour that extended slavery into the 20th century. His trauma resonates anew in Trump’s US. “Herald Loomis’s search for his identity begs the question of America: who are we?” says Allen. “What is our identity? Because everything that’s happening right now is beyond explanation, beyond reason, beyond understanding.”
Born in Houston, Texas, to Vivian Ayers Allen, a poet and cultural activist, and Andrew Allen, an orthodontist, Allen fell in love with dance as a child. “I was always the entertainment for the family,” she says. The main ballet schools in segregated Houston refused to accept Black children, so her mother found a retired Mariinsky Ballet teacher to teach her privately. At 16, Allen flew alone to audition for the North Carolina School of the Arts. Despite a flawless performance, she was rejected. “My body wasn’t right for it,” she was told. Her voice tightens at the memory. “It was terrible.”
Allen studied at Howard University in Washington DC, where she found a culturally rich, empowering environment. “It was a better school for me, because it was right in the middle of ‘Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’,” she says. Her career began its ascent, leading to an audition for the 1980 Broadway revival of West Side Story. She found herself alone with composer Leonard Bernstein. “Would you like me to sing for you? Would you like me to dance for you? Or do you want a little of both?” she asked. Bernstein wanted to see everything.
The Fame Phenomenon
After a small part in the film Fame, came the TV adaptation. As the fierce dance teacher Lydia, Allen delivered the memorable lines: “You’ve got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.” She won a Golden Globe and two Emmys. When the cast visited the UK, the reception was staggering. “We didn’t realise how popular we were until we got off the plane and there were just hundreds of people out there screaming for us at the airport,” she says. They performed at the Royal Albert Hall and met Princess Diana.
Allen directed 10 episodes of Fame and has since directed several TV shows, including Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. She also directed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, playing recurring character Dr Catherine Fox. “I came on to the show doing the first penis transplant,” she laughs. Grey’s Anatomy, now in its 22nd season, is the longest-running primetime medical drama in US TV history. “The millions of people who are fans learn about their medical situation; they learn things that have saved lives,” Allen says with pride.
Resilience and Hope
Allen’s producing credits include Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, which tells the story of enslaved Mende people who rebelled and were freed by the US Supreme Court. “That was one of the most incredible legal cases,” she says. “I want the supreme court to look at the movie right now and remember that it can make a decision that may not be popular, but is just, right, fair.”
The court is far from the only institution under siege. Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center, had his name added to its walls, and announced a two-year closure. Allen had been an artist in residence there for over 15 years. “I went there when people said: ‘Debbie, you shouldn’t go.’ I said: ‘I am going to go, because that’s my house, too.’ But then everything changed and we can’t go back now. The pre-eminent performing arts centre in America; how does it get shut down? It’s one of our crown jewels, so hopefully it will come back.”
Allen refuses to succumb to despair. “We cannot raise a country to be powerful if we’re raised on fear,” she says. “It will not prevail.” Where some see insurmountable racial division, Allen sees a multiracial coalition fighting for the soul of the country. “You see predominantly white America standing up, saying: ‘This is not our country. We want to be free.’”
When asked what advice she would give to her younger self, she says: “Debbie Allen, keep that positive spirit of joy in what you do, and inquiry of what you want to know, and dedicate it to the craft. Stay there. Stay on that path.”
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is at the Barrymore theatre, New York, until 26 July.
