Tony-winning choreographer and longtime Tampa resident Ann Reinking dies

This story has been updated from its original version to add comments from Debra McWaters of the Broadway Theatre Project.

Tony-winning dancer/choreographer Ann Reinking, who founded Tampa’s Broadway Theatre Project in 1991 and was the prestigious training academy’s artistic director until 2005, died Dec. 12 in Washington. She was 71.

The lithe, leggy Reinking was best known as a protégé and muse of groundbreaking choreographer Bob Fosse, who cast her in his semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz in 1979, playing a stylized version of herself. Reinking and Fosse were romantically involved for much of the ‘70s. She appeared on Broadway in A Chorus Line, Goodtime Charley and others, and replaced Fosse’s ex-wife Gwen Verdon in the original run of Chicago. Although she had received numerous accolades and awards by then, Reinking’s stunning, sensuous portrayal of murderess Roxie Hart put her on the map.

She played Grace Farrell in the 1982 film version of Annie, and returned to Broadway in 1986 in a successful revival of Fosse’s Sweet Charity.

Reinking married Clearwater businessman Jim Stuart, the Florida Aquarium’s first executive director, in 1989. With Debra McWaters, who taught dance at the University of South Florida, she started the Broadway Theatre Project, an intensive series of musical theater workshops and classes. “At that time, there were no musical theater projects in the summer, anywhere,” McWaters told the Catalyst. “I told her, I just wish we had something. And she said ‘Well, why don’t we’? She said ‘I can make it my Tampa project.’

“The thing that was great about Annie was that, if she said she was going to do something, she did it. She was not one who made empty promises. And she pulled out her address book and said ‘Let’s see who we can get.'”

“I had just come here and was looking for something meaningful to do,” Reinking told the Orlando Sentinel in 1991. “And the only thing I know how to do is this.”

The Broadway Theatre Project began at the Tampa Preparatory School, where McWaters was a dean, with 50 high school and college students. It soon moved to the Tampa Bay Center for the Performing Arts (later re-named the David A Straz Center for the Arts), where graduates performed – as did Reinking, frequently, with many of her famous friends. The highly competitive program continues today, with McWaters as president and co-artistic director.

Such song-and lance luminaries as Vernon, Ben Vereen, Tommy Tune, Gregory Hines, Bebe Neuwirth, Terrence Mann and even Reinking’s All That Jazz costar Roy Scheider came to Tampa to work with her students.

“They’re not only teaching them how to sing and dance and act, but they’re giving them major insights into life,” Reinking said. “‘Don’t be difficult, wait your turn, don’t read your press, work hard and have fun in the work.’ These kids are hungry for that.

“They’re just gorged with information, and they make major improvements. That happened to me as a teenager. You find that as you start to work it comes out without your even knowing it.”

The Seattle native was a multiple Tony Award winner, taking five awards for her choreography (and performance) in a 1996 revival of Chicago; she co-created, co-directed and co-choreographed the revue Fosse two years later, receiving another Tony nomination. McWaters worked on all the projects, including world tours, as assistant choreographer.

Reinking and her fourth husband, sportswriter Peter Talbert, divided their time between Tampa and New York; when she stepped down as artistic director of the Broadway Theatre Project, the couple relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona.

“At one point she had said ‘Do you think we could get to a point where I don’t have to be there (in Tampa) all the time?” McWaters recalled. “Because she had a son, Christopher, who was special needs. “She was still putting up Chicago shows, and Fosse shows. And my feeling was, no, because you’re needed here. This is a big thing, you coming here.

“But she started changing titles, and I thought ‘She’s about to edge off.’ And so she did. She edged off. And she had to – it was going to break her in two.”

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