Garth Fagan, Tony Award winner for best choreography in The Lion King and founder and artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance, will receive the Apple Award from Wayne State University's Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance. "A Conversation with Apple Award Recipient Garth Fagan" will be hosted at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 28, at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts, 6600 West Maple in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Fagan will appear in an Inside the Actors Studio-style interview and question-and-answer session.
Fagan, a Wayne State University alumnus, began his career when he toured Latin America with Ivy Baxter and her national dance company from Jamaica. Baxter and two other famed dance teachers from the Caribbean -- Pearl Primus and Lavinia Williams -- were major influences on Fagan. In New York, Fagan studied with Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Mary Hinkson, and Alvin Ailey, who were all central to his development. Fagan was director of Detroit's All-City Eastside Dance Company and principal soloist and choreographer for Detroit Contemporary Dance Company and Dance Theatre of Detroit.
Fagan was awarded the prestigious 1998 Tony Award, England's 2000 Laurence Olivier Award and Australia's 2004 Helpmann Award for his path-breaking choreography in Walt Disney's The Lion King. He also received the 1998 Drama Desk Award, 1998 Outer Critics Circle Award, 1998 Astaire Award, and 2001 Ovation Award for his work on the Broadway production, which opened in fall 1997 to extraordinary critical praise.
The Apple Award, named for Sarah Applebaum Nederlander, is given by the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance at Wayne State University on behalf of the Nederlander family. In 2001, the family formed a partnership with Wayne State's College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts, establishing the Sarah Applebaum Nederlander Award for Excellence in Theatre, an annual theatre award and a visiting artist fund.
The Apple Award brings a nationally prominent theatre professional to Detroit and the Wayne State University campus as a guest lecturer to interact with and educate the department's rising stars through master classes and a question-and-answer forum. Previous winners include Neil Simon, Carol Channing, David Stone, Stephen Schwartz, Mandy Patinkin, Patti Lupone, Marvin Hamlisch, Elaine Stritch and Tom Skerritt.
Tickets are $25 and are available online at wsushows.com, by phone at 313-577-2972, and at the Wayne State University and Berman Center for the Performing Arts box offices.