"I always did each show for about two years. So if you play the music, it just comes back to me"

Gwen Verdon distills the rhythm of a Broadway life: sustained, relentless devotion that turns performance into second nature. Two years on a single show, eight performances a week, rehearsals, put-ins, replacements, etch the score and steps into the nervous system. What remains isn’t just memory in the cerebral sense, but a physical archive. Play the first bars of a number, and the body unlocks: weight shifts, breath patterns, angles of the wrist, the timing between a cymbal hit and a head snap. Music becomes a key that opens an entire world.

She is describing the alchemy of repetition, how craft matures into intuition. The casual ease of “it just comes back” masks thousands of tiny calibrations, finding the pocket in the tempo, learning how lights change depth perception, gauging an audience’s energy, even adjusting a heel strike to accommodate a different stage rake. Over time, the choreography is not remembered; it is inhabited. The score is not accompaniment; it is a map of cues, emotions, and kinetic pathways.

There is also a poignant tension between ephemerality and permanence. Theatre vanishes the moment it happens, yet long runs embed indelible traces. Hear the opening vamp and back flood the scents of dressing rooms, the snap of a costume’s hook, the chill of the wings, the camaraderie of quick-change whispers. Music resurrects not only steps but a whole ecology of performance, the orchestra’s surge, a partner’s grip, the hush before a blackout. Memory here is communal: a band hit can summon an entire company’s muscle memory, prop tables, fly cues, and breath.

Verdon’s reflection honors the dignity of discipline. The enduring artistry of a role is not secured in archives but in bodies that have lived inside it night after night. Sound becomes time travel; professionalism becomes poetry. Through devotion, the fleeting becomes durable, and a life in the theatre remains ready to be danced again the moment the music starts.