Many people know the song “Mr. Bojangles,” about a raggedy man with a fondness for alcohol, a pain in his heart for his dead dog and dancing feet.
“A lot of people think the song `Mr. Bojangles’ is about Bill Robinson,” says Gregory Hines.
Well, those people are wrong, and in his latest project, Hines — a Tony Award-winning triple-threat actor, singer and tap dancer — aims to set the record straight on one of the legends of the vaudeville stage and early Hollywood.
In “Bojangles,” premiering Sunday at 7 p.m, on Showtime, Hines portrays Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who headlined vaudeville and Broadway for almost 30 years as the first black solo dancer in an era in which African-American entertainers weren’t allowed to perform alone onstage. Besides his stage work, Robinson is most widely known for performing in several movies, including “The Little Colonel” and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” with child star Shirley Temple.
When he died at the age of 71 in 1949, Bojangles’ massive New York City funeral attracted such attendees as Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Bob Hope, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Irving Berlin.
“It’s been a wonderful experience for me,” says Hines. “It was one of those experiences that I went into with the research done and that kind of information, but I came out of it having had a very deep emotional experience. In my life, the great information that I got that was wrapped in entertainment, I held on to. That’s what this is.
“I’m hoping to entertain people. I want to give them a sense of who (Bill Robinson) is and some information about him that might spark them or provoke them to do a little investigating on their own.”
Based on the book “Mr. Bojangles — Biography of Bill Robinson,” by Jim Haskins and N.R. Mitgang, the movie, directed by Joseph Sargent, also stars Kimberly Elise as Robinson’s long-suffering wife, Fannie, and Peter Riegert as his longtime manager and faithful friend, Marty Forkins.
Broadway tap star Savion Glover (“Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk”), who made his Broadway debut at 12 in “The Tap Dance Kid” — and co-starred with Hines on Broadway in “Jelly’s Last Jam” — appears as one of the up-and-coming generation of dancers that eclipsed Robinson.
Hines had long been eager to play Robinson, even though he doesn’t resemble him. “I experimented with a nose,” he says. “We tried to get a prosthesis that worked, but we were never able to get the right look with the budget that we had for the nose.
“So I had to try to do it from the inside out.”
One thing that couldn’t be faked was Robinson’s moves, including his famous tap dance up and down stairs. For Hines, who was born in 1946, that meant a physical challenge. “It would have been great (to do this 15 years ago). I could have done it easy then. But the great thing about the film is, I can do it all day until we get it on film. If I had to play ‘The Bill Robinson Story’ on stage and do it eight times a week, I’d go AWOL.”
But that doesn’t mean doing the role came without pain. “I did so much dancing. In order to do the stair dance, I did it all night one night. I was ready to go to sleep that night in a bathtub of ice.”
The script doesn’t gloss over the less-attractive aspects of Bojangles’ character, including his insatiable appetite for gambling. Did anyone ever ask for these rough edges to be smoothed off?
“Not really,” says Hines. “We always wanted to be authentic. I met a lot of people that knew Bill Robinson and hung out with him. There were many of them who didn’t dig him at all. But they respected him, and they admired his dancing.”
