This season, performer and choreographer Tilly Evans-Krueger is pulling double duty on Broadway. Most nights, while she performs the role of Ace in The Outsiders, her choreography is being performed down the street by the likes of Tony-nominated actress Sadie Sink in John Proctor is the Villain.
A native of Madison, Wisconsin, Evans-Krueger started with dancing at her local studio. As her interest in serious training grew, her grandmother enrolled her in classes all over the city. She later received her BFA in dance from Wright State University, in Ohio, which allowed her to begin her career with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company prior to graduation.
Her transition to theater began when she moved to New York City and was cast in Sonya Tayeh’s you’ll still call me by name at New York Live Arts. “Concert dance is my first love and always will be, but then Sonya started choreographing musicals and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s the hype in New York,’ ” Evans-Krueger says. At her first musical theater audition, she sang “Happy Birthday,” and got the part.
After several off-Broadway gigs, she booked Moulin Rouge!, choreographed by Tayeh, as a vacation swing. She didn’t make it onstage before the COVID-19 pandemic closed down all performances. With the rush of her growing career on pause, Evans-Krueger began to feel a pull towards creating her own work. “I had an awakening of sorts, because there was no other outlet to express,” she says. She returned to Moulin Rouge! as a full-time swing in 2021 with that in the back of her mind, and later joined the workshop of The Outsiders as the original Ace, dance captain, and Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s associate choreographer.
That’s where she reunited with director Danya Taymor, with whom she had worked on two off-Broadway plays. “Danya and the Kupermans definitely saw something in me,” Evans-Krueger says. “They encouraged me and instilled confidence that the way that my body wants to move, the way that I contribute to a creative process, is something that they want in their circle.”
Taymor recruited Evans-Krueger as the movement director for John Proctor is the Villain while they simultaneously rehearsed and opened The Outsiders. The play follows a high school English class as they read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and draw comparisons between the play and the #MeToo allegations circling their small town. Dance is a through line of the show, starting with a class discussion on the characters in The Crucible secretly dancing in the forest and culminating in the show’s climax.
Evans-Krueger sought to create movement that felt human. “What gets me super-excited about choreographing for plays and musicals is how we blend reality with something that’s just turned up a notch, a little bit more expressive.”
The characters in the play aren’t themselves trained dancers, so the choreography isn’t very technical, but it is at times very physical. Evans-Krueger led the cast through the same warm-up she would use for any dance rehearsal. Then she brought in Gaga-inspired improvisation to help actors Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo find movement that begins with some teenage awkwardness before building into total abandon. “The movement felt like it was already there,” Evans-Krueger says. “I think it’s inside of all of us, the way we moved when we were 16.”
The process brought Evans-Krueger back to her own high school experience and memories of making up dances in her kitchen for her friends. “We had a workshop for this section of the play and I worked with a bunch of humans who are super-close with me, so it was like we were back in the kitchen, me telling my friends what I think would be cool here and what would be kind of funny there.”
The career that began in her kitchen has led to Evans-Krueger being sought after as a performer and choreographer, though juggling both hasn’t been easy. Leading up to the opening of John Proctor, they would rehearse from 10 am to 6 pm, but Evans-Krueger would leave to arrive at fight call for The Outsiders by 5:45 pm. That night, she’d perform and be back at rehearsals by 10 am the next day. Evans-Krueger admits she hasn’t always been the best at prioritizing things like sleep and time with friends. Still, at least for now, she considers the hustle worth it. And like the girls in John Proctor is the Villain, she’s grown to trust her own voice. “When the moment comes to speak up, for yourself or for what’s right, it comes from such a depth that it’s out of body,” she says.
