We visit a rehearsal for the CW show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and meet choreographer Kat Burns, the woman behind the comedic dance routines on the show; Two correspondents for Vice News talk about what it's like to cover such dangerous and emotional stories; A Middle East scholar reflects on changes "Homeland" has made to respond to criticism of the show's depiction of Muslims.
Meet 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' choreographer Kat Burns, the comedy world's go-to dance guru
The cast and crew of the CW series, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," is holed up in an old hotel-turned-studio space in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
On this day, actors Rachel Bloom and Scott Michael Foster are mastering the choreography for a ballroom dance number called, ahem, “Let’s Have Intercourse.”
The show stars Rachel Bloom as Rebecca Bunch, a high-powered New York attorney who follows her adolescent crush to the L.A. suburb of West Covina in search of a new life. It’s a genre all its own: a romantic musical comedy-drama, punctuated by elaborate and fully choreographed musical numbers.
The woman behind these often hilarious dance numbers is choreographer Kat Burns.
"OK ready, Rach, think very sensual on this opening," Burns instructs Bloom during a rehearsal. "Your core’s engaged, your lines are long. And you’re sexy, yet pathetic."
"I love working with comedians," Burns says. "It's a blessing with actors who are comedic, they're going to make it way more funny and interesting than you could have ever dreamed. Just like you bounce jokes off each other, it's the same with movement ... Comedy and dance, people are somehow shocked with the niche I've created, but to me it's very obvious, because the variety show, burlesque even, is a comedic take on sexy dancing."
Burns has made a name for herself as the go-to choreographer for comedians, especially those who come out of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv scene. She’s worked on everything from "Key & Peele" to the "Wet Hot American Summer" reboot.
"There's like a bunch of musical theater nerds in the comedy community that find each other because some people hate musicals and some love them," Burns says. "The ones that love them flock to each other."
While Burns has loved dance since she was a child, first falling in love with Shirley Temple movies as a kid, she didn’t grow up thinking it was something she could do for a living:
"I went to college to be a nurse and then nobody in my family was like, You're terrible at science, ya dumb dumb. So I took anatomy and I'm like, I’m not grossed out by the cadaver, but I don't really want to know why it's dead or help it not be dead."
After graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in communications, she eventually moved to L.A. and worked a series of odd jobs in post production, among other gigs:
"I had so many side jobs — I dog walked, I house sat, I baby sat, I waitressed at a steakhouse. A bunch of waitressing jobs — Katsuya, The Bazaar. A bunch of random dance jobs, too ... I remember one Christmas they hired 20 girls to be dressed as Nutcrackers and to stand in the stairs as guests entered Tori Spelling's house ... So for two hours I stood there as a toy soliders."
Plenty of weird side jobs and years of doing comedy shows at UCB later, Burns found herself in the right place at the right time for the chance of a lifetime. A friend she worked with on "Key & Peele" talked her up to "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" creators Aline Brosh-Mckenna and Rachel Bloom.
Here’s Rachel Bloom:
I’ve been working with Kat for a couple years because she and I were on a group together at UCB called Quick and Funny Musicals. And I just know that she’s going to be serving the joke. We wanted someone who had a specialty in comedy for the series, and she’s the only specifically comedy choreographer I know of.
Burns recalls: "When I had the interview I was like, Holy smoke! It would be so amazing to be a proper department head of a show that I could work on every week for months? That never happens! And it's televised? And I get to do a bunch of styles of dance, from tap to anything goes."
She’s not kidding — anything goes when it comes to "Crazy Ex"’s musical numbers. On this day she was working on two distinctly different sequences: inside, a ballroom dance duet; outside, the crew is setting up a dance number for the song, "Santa Ana Winds," complete with gigantic wind machines and a street full of parked cars to mimic L.A. traffic.
"This song that we're doing today, 'Let's Have Intercourse,' has a very Ed Sheeren vibe to it," Burns says. "Typically, there's references, so like this one it's the Ed Sheeren music video ... Honestly, until that happens, I put it out of my head, so even this, we're rehearsing this Ed Sheeren thing then outside is a 'Jersey Boys'-ish, Frankie Valli moment, and so I have to run back and forth and I'm prepping for the next one. So I'm focused on whatever the task is directly ahead. If I go too far ahead then too many balls to juggle."
Perhaps it’s this constant motion and variety that makes Burns the go-to choreographer for comedians — and what snagged her an Emmy for choreography last year, an honor that usually goes to a reality competition show like "Dancing with the Stars" or "So You Think You Can Dance."
"I'm very thankful that work's been coming and the comedy community and UCB has been so supportive and it's such a great group of creative people that are championing each other," Burns says. "I'm very thankful for them helping me to get to where I am, friends writing funny shows and asking me to be a part of it."
Check out some of Kat's other work!
A scholar of the Middle East asks: Is 'Homeland' still racist?
As the sixth season of “Homeland" comes to a close on April 9, one close observer dissects signs that the show is uncomfortable with its history of perpetuating Islamophobic stereotypes.
The series that stars Claire Danes as CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Mandy Patinkin as her mentor, Saul Berenson, has always found its drama in America’s war on terror. At the same time it's been called out by critics for racism. In 2014, The Washington Post dubbed it “the most bigoted show on television.”
Brian Edwards is professor of Middle East Studies and American Studies at Northwestern University and author of "After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East." He posits that in the era of Donald Trump, the producers of "Homeland" are no longer comfortable with the show's "status as a mirror on America’s doings abroad and as a mouthpiece for nativist anxieties about Muslims at home."
He wrote an essay for the L.A. Review of Books titled, "Moving Target: Is 'Homeland' Still Racist?" which he adapted with The Frame into an audio commentary (play below).
Brian T. Edwards is Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and professor of English, comparative literary studies, and American studies at Northwestern, where he is also the founding director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program. He is author of "Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express" (Duke, 2005), "After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East" (Columbia, 2016; paperback 2017), and essays and articles in a range of publications, including Salon, The Believer, Public Culture, McSweeney’s, American Literary History, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Follow him on Twitter
"Homeland" airs Sunday nights on Showtime.
Flipping the gender script at Vice Media
Isobel Yeung and Gianna Toboni are the most prolific correspondents on the news magazine show, “Vice,” on HBO.
They are young, razor-sharp journalists chasing big stories across the globe, often in chaotic and dangerous places few Western reporters will go. They’re brave, but not braggadocious, and it’s hard to look away from their compelling work.
Toboni and Yeung spoke with The Frame recently about the new season of their show. It’s produced by Vice Media and could be considered HBO’s version of "60 Minutes."
Interview highlights:
On what separates Vice Media from other news outlets:
TOBONI: One thing that's really exciting for both Isobel and I is that we get to go to the center of where these big news stories are unfolding. We're getting to walk through villages and meet people on the fly and, for us, we feel like that's the most genuine way to learn what's happening in different parts of the world. Isobel's been traveling quite a bit and I just got back from Somalia where we were in different parts of the country looking into the crisis there. There's a drought and they're on the brink of famine. That's one of the things we did. We walked into the villages and the camps and talked to people to learn what was happening there.
YEUNG: I think what our show brings to that spectrum of journalism at the moment is showing these stories in an immersive and long-form style where you're able to diversify the type of content, and to show people a situation that other people are in — both within the country and around the world — to try and understand that and to empathize with people. We do feel like we're on a mission to show this content in an entertaining and engaging way.
On being women correspondents on an outlet with a hyper-masculine reputation:
YEUNG: I think that Vice has — or had — a reputation, which was rather bro-y and male testosterone-y. I think that to our executive's credit, and to [founder Shane Smith's] credit, they've done a really great job at diversifying. Not just including women, but including people from all different walks of life.
On Isobel's interview with an Afghan lawmaker who threatened her:
YEUNG: That was a particularly rough experience because I didn't realize at the time actually that "to take your nose off," which is what he threatened to do, actually means to give you to a man to rape you.
I don't know if that particular politician, Nazir Ahmad Hanafi, would have granted an interview if I had been a man. Sometimes it helps because I think that in those sorts of situations, they underestimate you because you are a woman. They don't expect you to ask the tough questions. They don't expect you to hold them accountable.
On the benefits and hurdles of being a woman reporting around the globe:
TOBONI: It's often all-male crews that we're traveling with and so sometimes you walk into situations where you have to stop for a second and remember that you are not the same as your colleagues. You are the same as them in every other way, but some of the risks are different when you're a woman, just inherently. Like Isobel said, it can be beneficial to be a woman in those situations.
YEUNG: We talk about it quite a lot, as well in terms of going into those situations and feeling like your vulnerabilities can often be worn as credit to yourself and as a form of allowing someone to open up to you. And if you're in a dangerous position, getting beneath that bang bang and getting to a story that really tells of the humanity and the situation that real people are going through. I feel like sometimes opening yourself up to those vulnerabilities allows you additional access.
On the jokes made about Vice's dangerous reporting practices and hipster aesthetic:
TOBONI: Thank you so much for bringing this up. I want people to know that we crack up about this stuff probably more than others do. I think we find ourselves in the field parodying ourselves. I think the old Vice sometimes went into areas ill-prepared and taking on risks that maybe they weren't fully prepared for. Isobel and I are very frank with each other and our crews and our management about what our concerns are with the places that we're going and to make sure that we're fully prepared and have the best security and are really understanding the places and the culture that we're going to. I think it's a new company now and I encourage more parodies, but I think we've turned a page thankfully.