A Man for All Stages

Now she runs her own dance academy in Santa Monica, Calif., and had been asking him to visit.

Linda Gravatt, an actress set for the revival of "King Headley" in New York, was a friend from the early 1960s and remembers how tart Malone could be. "We were doing a production of 'The Music Man,' and there's the chase scene -- everyone is looking for the music man. Debbie and I would stay in the back, just waiting for the people in the town scene to pass. Mike yelled, 'We are not going to do a ballet for you two -- would you come downstage?' "

Over the years, I watched Mike work many times. One evening, during a rehearsal for the street theater play "Everyman," he had dozens of teenagers standing at the corner of 14th and T NW. They were moving around and laughing loudly, while keeping an eye on the nattily dressed director. He was patiently teaching them to transform their awkwardness into dance movements. He yelled, he coddled, and exuberance was the result.

When his "Black Nativity" was booked into the Kennedy Center, he was fretting during rehearsal that he was working the performers too much. "Sometimes the spontaneity is gone because they are so ready. Then you have to manufacture it and it doesn't come off as real," he said during a run-through. That staging of "Nativity" sold out for several seasons and Malone was nominated for two Helen Hayes Awards for the play, but won in 1994 for his choreography of "Spunk" at Studio Theatre.

His drive for perfection didn't change. In a rare break from Washington, he went to the Karamu House Theater in Cleveland in the early 1980s but returned to train another generation of students. Recent ones include Anthony Anderson and Taraji Henson.

Besides the talent that he nourished, an important part of his legacy was preserving the work and contributions of African American cultural leaders. "Mike had a specialty in advancing new work and new pieces . . . like Black Broadway," said Joseph Selmon, the chairman of Howard's theater arts department. "Secondly, he had a passion for bringing works out of the African American canon . . . 'Tambourines to Glory,' 'Timbuktu.' "

And he knew that each generation had to stamp its own uniqueness on the work. "Mike was not just about preserving the works of Langston Hughes, not just about dealing with slave narratives. He was also on the pulse of hip-hop narratives as well. He saw no conflict in fusing those forms," Cafritz said.

The Maloneisms, forged over the decades, would find their way.