How Stratford Festival dancer Devon Michael Brown leaps and pirouettes through Guys and Dolls and Something Rotten!
iPhoto caption: Devon Michael Brown as Rusty Charlie with members of the 'Guys and Dolls' company.
You wouldn’t think a musical about Shakespeare’s London would have much in common with one set in the seedy backrooms of 1950s New York.
But the Stratford Festival’s concurrently running productions of Something Rotten! and Guys and Dolls share a memorable acrobatic sequence: A gambler soars across the Festival Theatre stage in a tumbling combination capped with a sky-high backward flip. In Something Rotten!, the moment arrives during “It’s a Musical,” a number packed with choreographic references to classic musicals, including several recently staged at Stratford.
Devon Michael Brown is the dancer who performs this combination, called a roundoff back layout. Sometimes, he does so twice in a day.
“It’s fun for me to see the reaction in the audience,” he shared during a video call. “Say we’re doing Something Rotten! in the evening, and we’ve done Guys and Dolls in the afternoon, and some people have come to both shows. You can feel the reaction of ‘Oh, I just saw that this afternoon!’”
Brown performed in director-choreographer Donna Feore’s original stagings of Guys and Dolls and Something Rotten!, in 2017 and 2024 respectively. For this bedrock member of Stratford’s formidable company of dancers, performing both remounts in the same year is equal parts intense and gratifying.
During his childhood in Milton, Ontario, Brown trained as a competitive dancer while taking acting and singing lessons on the side. In 2013, he danced in the background of the first season of The Next Step, a long-running Family Channel series about a teen dance troupe. Brown worked his way up to the speaking role of Max over the series’ following two seasons — before packing his jazz shoes for Stratford at the age of 19.
“This was a fantastic place to be so young, be a sponge, and try to learn from as many people as possible,” he said of dancing in Guys and Dolls and H.M.S. Pinafore during that first season.
The next year, he appeared in Feore’s production of The Music Man as Tommy Djilas. The featured dancing and speaking role includes a romantic subplot with fellow side character Zaneeta Shinn — played at Stratford by Heather Kosik, Brown’s future wife. “At the time, we were dating, and so it was a really special show in that sense,” he recalled. “I’ll always very much appreciate that opportunity to share that with her.”
Another formative Stratford show for Brown was Morris Panych’s movement-based Frankenstein Revived, a dialogue-free 2023 adaptation of Shelley’s novel. He embodied Henry Clerval, Frankenstein’s best friend, whom the Creature (played by Marcus Nance) murdered in a second-act climax. “It changed me as a performer,” he said. “I still get people coming to me and saying that was one of their favourite shows that they’ve seen… It was such a big swing.”
Throughout Guys and Dolls, Brown plays Rusty Charlie, part of the male ensemble of gamblers. In Something Rotten!, however, he tackles a common dancer task: playing a handful of small roles. These include a townsperson, who populates London’s streets and a courtroom; a member of the Bard Boys, who performs enthusiastic backup vocals for the rock-star character of Shakespeare (played by Jeff Lillico); and an uptight Puritan, who materializes briefly during a surreal musical sequence.
Whether a character appears for 20 seconds or several minutes, Brown crafts a specific worldview for each. For example, he thinks of his character in the show’s amateur acting troupe as “someone who’s a little slow on the uptake,” but eventually “becomes more bold in his feelings toward what’s going on.”
When each ensemble member dedicates themselves to making specific choices, there’s a cumulative effect. “If we’re all 100 per cent committed to the story, and we’re all living it as honestly as we can, we’re giving the audience the most real world possible,” Brown said. “It’s a fantastical environment, there’s [dancing] eggs and omelets, and we’re talking about seeing into the future and things — but you ground it in the sense that these are real people that would exist in this given circumstance, and I think that that helps the audience enjoy it to their fullest.”
Fewer costume changes power Guys and Dolls, but playing a single character carries its own challenges. Even as Brown is leaping, pirouetting, sliding, and tumbling — in addition to the roundoff back layout, he performs an in-place backflip called a standing back tuck — he links each movement to Rusty Charlie’s personality. “Whether it’s dialogue on stage or it’s a dance number, it’s the same scene work, in a way,” he said. “I think of justifications for why my character would do a big flashy jump or a big turning sequence: ‘He’s a showboat-y guy. He’s the kind of guy that would take it far.’ Or if he’s winning, he’s showing off, and so, ‘How does he show off?’”
Across both shows, characterization faces the obstacle of physical exhaustion. In Guys and Dolls, for instance, the four-minute “Crapshooters’ Ballet” contains Brown’s most intense explosion of dance — and when it’s over, he doesn’t get to rest. Instead, he and the other gamblers jump into another scene and then the song “Luck Be a Lady.”
“I think it is a 20-minute sequence of us all on stage,” he said. “You exit the stage, and you’re dripping in sweat. You’re exhaling, and you’re emptying your pockets of all the money that you’ve collected throughout the show, and then you turn around, you come right back on stage.
“It’s so exhausting, but it’s really rewarding when you get to dance so full-out. You get to use your technique and your training to the fullest extent, and that’s really rewarding: to be able to do exactly what you’ve trained for.”
Guys and Dolls and Something Rotten! run at Stratford’s Festival Theatre until November 14 and 15, respectively. More information is available here.
The Stratford Festival is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.
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