Cars filled every inch of the parking lots at Paper Mill Playhouse on Thursday, spilling out into a gravel clearing down the street, thanks to the excitement surrounding its latest show.
But the party officially started when nine senior citizens in stretch pants and tracksuits got loose to some hip-hop beats. They didn't have rap songs when they were young, but they would shake it, shake it anyway -- just as long as they didn't break it, break it.
In the musical, "Half Time," the latest Paper Mill show expected to make the leap to Broadway, veterans of the Great White Way play members of an all-senior hip-hop dance team from New Jersey. The story is inspired by a real group of Nets dancers that first came together in East Rutherford more than a decade ago.
Opening Tuesday for a limited engagement after a week of previews, the show is slated to run through July 1. Even when members of the audience aren't hip to the hop, they're drawn in by the show's energy and pure charm.
The Nifty Shades of Gray, aka the Nu Hip Crew, a team of seniors who dance to hip-hop music for the New Jersey Cougars. (Jerry Dalia)
"I don't like hip-hop, but I enjoyed that," said one woman, leaving the theater, stocked with seniors like herself -- OGs, if you will -- but also young students.
"Half Time" is based on "Gotta Dance," Dori Berinstein's 2008 documentary about the NETSational dancers, the NBA's first senior hip-hop dance team. The team formed in 2006 in East Rutherford after the New Jersey Nets, then still playing in New Jersey, hosted an open call for dancers 60 and up. Making the cut were 12 women and one man. They initially had no idea they would be asked to dance to hip-hop.
The film chronicles management's concern that the dancers, whose strengths included swing and tap dancing (though none danced professionally), will not be able to pick up the dance style in time for a performance at center court. But after three weeks of intensive training, the silver-haired retirees are dripping in swagger and brushing their shoulders off like pros. Trading shiny raincoats and a "Singin' in the Rain" routine for the chance to "make it rain" to a Fat Joe and Lil Wayne song, they send the crowd into hysterics.
"Half Time" loosely follows the journey of the real team, fictionalizing many details. In the story, the Nets become the New Jersey Cougars. But specific characters do take cues from actual seniors on the team, which includes seniors from New Jersey and New York (they've since performed for the Brooklyn Nets). The musical is the latest iteration of a production that opened in Chicago in 2015 as "Gotta Dance."
The soft-voiced Emmy and Tony nominee Georgia Engel ("Drowsy Chaperone," "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"), 69, headlines the show as Dorothy, a woman whose expressive alter ego, Dottie, has an unmistakable passion for hip-hop. (She played the same role in the Chicago production.) By the end, she's rapping like a veteran MC. Dottie is based on a kindergarten teacher named Betsy Walkup, whose zest for rap is immediately clear in the documentary, as expressed through her own alter ego, Betty. To her, hip-hop is a dance for the masses, perfect for baby boomers accustomed to doing "The Twist."
"I really let loose," Betsy says in the film, her flaxen hair framing her face in neat waves. "I really kind of did a pole dance, honestly."
As "Half Time" progresses, Dottie, a kind of exaggeration of Betty, is appointed the leader of the squad and proceeds to school her teammates on the distinctions between the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. By the end of the show, she's invoking Public Enemy's "Fight the Power."
Tony nominee and Emmy winner Andre De Shields ("The Wiz," "Full Monty"), 72, plays the widower Ron, the only male dancer on the team, which is initially called Nifty Shades of Gray.
"It sounds like a bunch of seniors dressed in leather, spanking each other," Ron says, rejecting the name. (By the end, they transition to the "Nu Hip Crew.") His character, who prefers swing dancing, is a nod to Joe Bianco, the only man on the NETSational team.
Buzzwords of 2018 -- diversity, inclusion, equity -- they’re all covered in the show, says De Shields, who has been with the production since Chicago. He says he appreciates the show giving veteran actors a path to sustainability and longevity, and encouraging the same for anyone watching in the audience.
"It's the kind of thing that keeps us alive, reinvigorated, vivified," he says.
The NETsational senior hip-hop dance team makes its center court debut in Dori Berinstein's 2008 documentary 'Gotta Dance,' the story that inspired the musical. (New Jersey Nets)
"Half Time" produces instant laughs as the seniors' creaky, earnest shimmying -- along with their complaints about the room temperature and music -- is held up against the slick moves of the regular dance team, the Cougarettes.
One song is actually titled "Who Wants To See That?"
Berinstein, the producer of the Paper Mill show alongside Bill Damaschke, has won four Tonys in her career, including back-to-back honors in for best revival of a play with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 2001 and for best musical with "Thoroughly Modern Millie" in 2002. She's been guiding the project since she first had the idea to make an age-defying film. Beyond Broadway, she sees the story being adapted into a movie musical or TV series.
"They're all still dancing and as a group," she says of the NETsationals, who will be in the house for opening night. "They take their hip-hop really seriously. It's sparked in them just a great passion for life. They inspire me constantly."
The show boasts music from Westfield native Matthew Sklar and the late Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Nell Benjamin and a book by Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin.
As part of the evolution of the current production, actress and singer-songwriter Ester Dean ("Pitch Perfect"), who has worked with chart-topping artists from Beyonce to Lil Wayne, lent her talents to the project's finale.
"This material was very challenging because it was very true; we couldn't lie about it," says Jerry Mitchell ("Kinky Boots," "La Cage aux Folles"), the musical's Tony-winning director and choreographer. He anticipates the show will make it to Broadway within the year.
"I don't think there will be any problems getting an audience for this show," he says.
There is plenty of levity to be found in watching seniors try on the swagger required of hip-hop, but the show also relays deeply felt messages about aging, ageism and respect. Despite the gripes of an executive who doubts the mature dancers can pull off the routine, their coach refuses to play them for laughs.
Another dancer, Joanne, played by Tony winner Donna McKechnie ("A Chorus Line"), clings to her youth after her proctologist husband leaves her for a younger woman.
"It's a curse," Joanne says, sounding hopeless. "Nobody wants you, nobody even wants to look at you anymore."
McKechnie, 75, says her character is loosely based on the glamorous dancer Peggy Byrne from the documentary, a former Miss Subways in New York. She says the story holds the potential for the actors "to inspire people not to abandon themselves, not to give up."
"Getting older myself, I'm learning how to cope," she says. "You don't have the same defense mechanisms you did when you were young." The style of dance was new to McKechnie, too. The former Fosse dancer trained for three weeks in a hip-hop bootcamp, a more intense version of the original team's practice period.
From left: Garrett Turner, Georgia Engel (Dorothy/Dottie), Alexander Aguilar and Lori Tan Chinn (Mae) in 'Half Time.' Engel's character, inspired by a dancer in the documentary 'Gotta Dance,' has an alter ego named Dottie who raps and leads the senior dance team. (Jerry Dalia)
Camilla, another dancer (Nancy Ticotin, 60, from "Orange is the New Black"), flawlessly delivers red-hot salsa moves to the anti-ageist anthem "Como No?"
"Half Time" goes behind the routines to reveal the inner workings of each character and their family life -- one dancer, named Bea, played by Tony and Emmy winner Lillias White ("The Life," "Sesame Street" and "The Get Down"), 66, says the only way she can get some time with her text-happy granddaughter, Cougars dancer Kendra (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe), is to hitch a ride with her to practice (in the film, more than one senior had a granddaughter on the regular dance team).
Ron, meanwhile, strikes a deal with his family that if he emerges from their basement, makes the dance team and performs, he can take a trip with his grandchild to SeaWorld. Another character, Mae (Lori Tan Chinn, "Orange is the New Black"), inspired in part by Filipina grandmother Fanny Militar from the original team, delivers a number of the show's punchlines, but also has to cope with her husband forgetting who she is.
The interplay between generations -- including the 20-something coaches and the seniors -- gets to the beating heart of the show, echoing an emotional moment in the documentary when the NETSationals perform a kind of call-and-response routine with the Nets Kids Dance Team.
"It's very much a multigenerational story," Berinstein says. The seniors battle stereotypes, but their dance coach Tara (Haven Burton), at just 27, has also aged out of being a dancer.
Kimberlee Garris, 39, says that character and her boss, a Cougars executive, each take cues from her real-life role. A co-producer of "Half Time," Garris was a Knicks dancer who became entertainment director for the Nets and coached the NETSationals. While she didn't age out of dancing, she did face pressure from her bosses to deliver -- if the seniors didn't perform, they'd be cut.
"We were pushing them hard," she says. "There was never any talk about them being a joke. We were just so inspired by how determined they were." Now the joke, she says, is that their 15 minutes have lasted 12 years.
Original NETSational dancer Edie Ollwerther, 75, of Hasbrouck Heights, recently saw the show. She's grateful for the way the story can open people's minds. "It grows on you," she says of hip-hop.
Ollwerther has been a dance teacher for 43 years, for the last 22 at Edie's Dance Factory, her studio in Wood-Ridge. In 2006, she showed up to the Nets audition with her friend, Janice Mallett, figuring she didn't have anything to lose. They had been in the same tap-dancing troupe, Rutherford's Happy Hoofers. Both made the cut.
"I don't think any of us, including them, had any idea of where this was going to wind up," she says. "... I don't think they expected us to be as good as we were for that time."
The group danced at a Paper Mill gala and again last week after a preview performance.
"We still are all ready to go," Ollwerther says. "When we see each other it's like a family reunion."
"Half Time" runs through July 1 at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn; papermill.org/show/half-time
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.