The Band Wagon (1953)

The dance sequences in The Band Wagon

13 sequences, 1 with a timestamp — what is danced, by whom, and where to find it.

1. 00:06:17

   By Myself

   Broadway Tap

   Danced by Fred Astaire · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Astaire continuing down the nearly emptied station platform after the press deserts him for Ava Gardner.

   When Ava Gardner's arrival pulls the reporters away, Tony Hunter walks the Grand Central platform alone, and the station's receding columns measure how completely his expected homecoming has evaporated. The two-shot sequence keeps Astaire moving forward as he sings that he will face the unknown, turning an abandoned publicity welcome into a deliberately solitary exit.

   Stream or rental only — the timestamp is for when you have it playing. MC² places the number at 00:06:17–00:07:39 in its 112-minute reference; the named 1080p Blu-ray release and current rental listings identify the comparable commercial edition.

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2. A New Sun in the Sky

   Golden Age Broadway Jazz

   Danced by Cyd Charisse; male dance ensemble · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Charisse appearing through the giant yellow sunburst and commanding the male chorus in matching flashes of color.

   Charisse bursts through a flat yellow sunburst in a sparkling yellow costume, and the male ensemble's angular responses turn her solo declaration into the revue's first clean visual hit. Two shots are enough: the frontal design holds the radiating lines around her while her kicks and turns claim the stage after Gaby has left both Paul and Cordova's prestige project. The yellow-and-red palette makes the lyric's new beginning literal without returning to Faust's cumbersome machinery.

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3. A Shine on Your Shoes

   Rhythm Tap (Hoofing)

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Leroy Daniels · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Astaire balancing in the shoe-shine chair while Daniels polishes both shoes, followed by their tap duet through the penny arcade.

   Tony trips over Leroy Daniels's outstretched legs in the penny arcade and converts the shoe-shine chair into dance apparatus, bracing on its arms so both freshly polished shoes kick toward the ceiling. Daniels answers with his brushes and feet before the pair tap past the Photomatic booth, rigged baseball cans and an electric mystery box that erupts in flags, steam and horns. Their return duet makes Daniels's working rhythm—not Tony's star entrance—the number's engine.

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4. Dancing in the Dark

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Cyd Charisse · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Astaire and Charisse gliding across the moonlit Central Park terrace before returning to the waiting carriage.

   Tony and Gaby step out of a hansom cab into an empty Central Park court and begin with a side-by-side walk, allowing their disputed height and incompatible training to resolve through shared timing rather than argument. Only three shots carry them from the fountain terrace into long foxtrot glides and a quiet turn up the steps, with Charisse's white dress and Astaire's gray suit separating their bodies from the blue night. They finish by walking back to the carriage as naturally as they arrived, making the partnership feel discovered rather than announced.

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5. Girl Hunt Ballet

   Dream Ballet

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Cyd Charisse; dance ensemble · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Charisse's double identity—the ethereal blonde and the red-sequined brunette—opposite Astaire's trench-coated private eye.

   A machine-gun burst tears open the pulp-book curtain, sending Astaire's fedora-wearing detective through dress-shop mirrors that multiply Charisse's blonde and into the Dem Bones café, where switchblades, a trumpet and a bottle marked nitroglycerin become choreographic clues. Charisse divides the mystery between a pale-blue blonde who melts into Astaire's arms and a red-sequined brunette who strikes through sharp hips and heels, giving the same dancer two incompatible alibis. Across fifty-seven shots and nearly twelve minutes, Kidd makes every pursuit, fight and seduction advance the detective syntax rather than pausing it for a dance break.

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6. I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan

   Soft Shoe

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Jack Buchanan · Choreography Fred Astaire (staged duet); Michael Kidd (film choreography)

   Astaire and Buchanan mirroring one another in top hats and canes inside a single spotlight.

   Astaire and Buchanan enter in identical tuxedos, top hats and canes against horizontal bands derived from a Paul Klee design, then share one spotlight for a deliberately understated soft-shoe. Tiny delayed echoes in their hat tilts and cane placements make two different performers look like the same disappointed idea arriving twice. The symmetry sharpens the joke in the title: every romantic plan may have changed, but neither man will surrender his immaculate show-business finish.

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7. I Love Louisa

   Musical Theatre Character Dance

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Cyd Charisse; Nanette Fabray; Oscar Levant; company ensemble · Choreography Michael Kidd

   The failed show's company reviving itself with beer, clapping and comic folk steps around the crowded hotel room.

   After the Faust opening collapses, Tony, Gaby, Lily and Lester turn the company's hotel-room wake—beer, food and all—into a mock-Mittel-European drinking dance. Their accented claps, heel stamps and linked folk steps pull the surrounding performers out of postmortem gloom, while the cramped party furniture forces the celebration to remain collective. The number lands because this invented Louisa is less an escape than the first practical rehearsal for the lighter show they should have made.

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8. Louisiana Hayride

   Musical Theatre Character Dance

   Danced by Nanette Fabray; dance ensemble · Choreography Michael Kidd

   Fabray springing onto the barrel beside the enormous hay wagon—a take that injured her leg.

   Nanette Fabray leads the country chorus from an oversized hay wagon and barrels, punctuating the lyric with crisp jazz-inflected folk steps instead of treating the rural props as static scenery. Her leap onto an unreinfoced barrel—the accident that injured her leg during filming—adds a startling vertical accent before the ensemble closes ranks around the wagon. Five shots keep the scale of the set readable while Fabray's attack prevents the novelty setting from swallowing the dancer.

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9. Shine on Your Shoes

   Rhythm Tap (Hoofing)

   Danced by Fred Astaire; Leroy Daniels · Choreography Michael Kidd

   The arcade duet with real-life shoeshiner Leroy Daniels trading rhythms with Astaire.

   The camera favors sustained, full-body framing, preserving the phrasing and the relationship between the dancers and the floor. The movement is allowed to build through complete musical ideas, so the payoff comes from performance rather than editorial camouflage.

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10. That's Entertainment!

    Musical Theatre Character Dance

    Danced by Fred Astaire; Jack Buchanan; Nanette Fabray; Oscar Levant · Choreography Michael Kidd

    The four creators scrambling over backstage ladders and flats while introducing “That's Entertainment!”

    Jeffrey Cordova begins his theatrical sermon on a backstage platform, tumbles from it and keeps singing, making his own grandiosity part of the joke. Tony, Lily and Lester join him among ladders, ropes and discarded flats, using mock tragedy and tap accents to demonstrate that Oedipus, Hamlet and a song-and-dance show all depend on the same urge to perform. Five sustained shots let the quartet's climb through the scenery become the physical proof of the lyric.

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11. The Beggars Waltz

    Romantic Ballet

    Danced by Cyd Charisse; James Mitchell; corps de ballet · Choreography Michael Kidd

    Charisse's classical waltz emerging from the gloomy beggar pageant in the ill-fated Faust production.

    Cordova's Faust rehearsal dresses Cyd Charisse and James Mitchell as suffering street figures, then gives them pointe work, supported turns and a corps arranged around them to Adolphe Adam's music from Giselle. The polished Romantic-ballet vocabulary collides with the deliberately grim beggar tableau, so the expensive solemnity of Cordova's concept becomes visible before anyone calls it a failure.

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12. Triplets

    Musical Theatre Character Dance

    Danced by Fred Astaire; Jack Buchanan; Nanette Fabray · Choreography Michael Kidd

    The three stars dancing on their knees as quarrelsome babies in high chairs, complete with tiny shoes at knee level.

    Astaire, Buchanan and Fabray sit in three high chairs with adult heads above padded baby bodies, then perform the number on their knees so shoes attached at knee level become the triplets' feet. Black velvet on their lower legs and across the floor erases the supporting anatomy while fifteen quick shots turn nursery jealousy into a sequence of shoves, kicks and synchronized complaints. The technical discomfort is inseparable from the gag: three elegant adults must bounce like furious toddlers without revealing how the illusion works.

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13. You and the Night and the Music

    Danced by Fred Astaire; Cyd Charisse · Choreography Michael Kidd

    The brief Astaire–Charisse duet struggling amid the Faust set's flames and mechanical spectacle.

    The New Haven rehearsal traps Tony and Gaby's duet inside Cordova's Faust machinery, with flames, platforms and damnation imagery crowding the single continuous shot. Their sweeping theatrical partnering never gets the open air that made “Dancing in the Dark” breathe; when the overwrought effects overwhelm the rehearsal, the production's artistic mismatch fails in bodily, visible terms.

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