'Moulin Rouge' is a grand homecoming for this made-it-big SCPA grad

Darius Crenshaw has been a dancer his entire career.

He’s done it all. On Broadway (“The Color Purple,” “Motown: The Musical” and “The Phantom of the Opera”). With ballet companies (New York City Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet). TV, too (“Saturday Night Live” and “Rent: Live”),

Now he’s here in Cincinnati, dancing in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” through June 4 at the Aronoff Center as part of the Broadway in Cincinnati series.

For Crenshaw, who turned 46 on May 3, the Aronoff gig is a homecoming. Raised in Walnut Hills, he graduated from Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts in 1995.

When he entered SCPA as a fourth-grader, though, dance was nowhere in his mind. Instrumental music was what he wanted. Or theater, maybe. He was just 9, after all, so he didn’t really have a clear picture of what the future might hold for him.

But like all kids in the performing programs at SCPA, he had to take dance classes.

“I didn’t know anything about a ballet barre,” he said, speaking by phone from Durham, North Carolina, where “Moulin Rouge” was playing last week. “I didn’t know anything about a plie. I didn’t know anything.”

That’s when Missy Lay Zimmer entered his life. Today, we know Zimmer and her husband Andrew Hubbard as the founders and directors of Cincinnati’s Exhale Dance Tribe and the studio connected to it, Planet Dance Cincinnati. But back then, she was an upperclassman at SCPA and one of the school’s more advanced dance students.

So one day, when Crenshaw’s dance teacher was a no-show, Zimmer stepped in to teach class.

“I remember her so vividly,” said Crenshaw. “Her class was so different from anything I had experienced before that. The way she approached movement intrigued me. She is the one who made me interested in dance in a way I never had been before.”

As Crenshaw fed that growing interest in dance, there would be other SCPA dance instructors – Patricia Rozow, Mark Diamond and Sheila Cohen.

“Later, toward the end of my time at New York City Ballet, I was looking for something different,” said Crenshaw. “I just wasn’t sure whether it should be another ballet company or another form of dance altogether. Sheila was the one who suggested Broadway. But I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t fathom performing the same show every day.”

But dancers need to dance. And besides, there was still that longing to act that had driven him to SCPA in the first place. So when ballet work was slow, he auditioned for musicals, preferably musicals that offered some opportunities to exercise his acting chops.

“I auditioned for a production of ‘Damn Yankees’ that Jason Alexander was directing,” said Crenshaw. “Before I left the room, he pretty much told me that I had booked the show. He said ‘I love you and I love the fact that your mother and father had you. Don’t book anything else.’ The very next morning ‘The Color Purple’ called.”

Would he be available to join the show on Broadway? Immediately?

“Someone slap me,” he said, remembering the sudden onslaught of work. “I really wanted to work with Jason Alexander. But I couldn’t turn down a chance to be on Broadway. And ‘The Color Purple’ was a show with such a powerful message. I was extremely lucky for that to be my first show on Broadway.”

Since then, he’s been featured in a nearly steady stream of Broadway productions and tours. He was briefly sidelined by a knee injury in 2019. But when he was in the final stages of rehab in early 2020, he read that “Moulin Rouge” was holding auditions for its national tour.

“To be honest, it was a little too soon for me to audition,” said Crenshaw. “There’s a lot of knee choreography in our show, so I didn’t really expect to get it. But hey – an audition is the same as a free class.”

But he got called back to audition again and again. He got the show. But there was bad news, as well. Because of the pandemic, “Moulin Rouge” wouldn’t go into rehearsals until the fall of 2020.

That turned out to be wishful thinking. It would be 18 more months until rehearsals began. In some ways, the delay played in Crenshaw’s favor. It gave him more time to fully recover from his injury and from a serious case of COVID that saw his temperature top out at 103.9 degrees for nearly three weeks.

“I still think I was one of the lucky ones,” said Crenshaw. “So many actors and dancers went into the pandemic not having anything. The entire time, I knew I had a job coming out of the pandemic.”

And once again, he’s in for the long haul. Initially, he signed a standard one-year contract. And when that contract expired a month or so ago, he signed on for another year.

“I told you – I’m very lucky,” said Crenshaw. “I love being on the road. And I love this show. And I love that I’m getting to bring it to Cincinnati.”

Darius Crenshaw will teach a pop-up musical theater dance class at Planet Dance at 6 p.m. on May 22. For information, go to www.planetdancecincinnati.com. The studio is located at 2230 Gilbert Ave., Walnut Hills.

“Moulin Rouge! The Musical”

When: Now through June 4.

Where: Procter & Gamble Hall, Aronoff Center, 650 Walnut St., Downtown.

Tickets: $44.25-$140.

Information: 513-621-2787; www.cincinnatiarts.org.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: 'Moulin Rouge' a homecoming for SCPA grad with Broadway in Cincinnati