Broadway the fast way for Keean Johnson

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 9, 2009 at 3 p.m.

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Photo by Michael Appleton / Special To The Rocky

After leaving Broadway's Imperial Theatre, Keean makes his way through midtown Manhattan on a push scooter to the high-rise apartment he's sharing with his family.

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Keean Johnson propels himself to work through midtown Manhattan next to his father, Mark, each riding a push scooter along car-choked streets before arriving at the Imperial Theatre, where Keean takes the stage in Billy Elliot.

These are streets that adult bikers approach with trepidation, but the 12-year-old easily scoots from home to work and back again.

Which isn't far off from how easily Keean has moved from his professional debut, in Denver Center Theatre Company's Plainsong, to Broadway in less than a year, where he plays a number of onstage roles and is a potential future lead.

He's also gone from his home in Littleton to a high-rise apartment he shares with his parents and brother, Cade. He's on a first-name basis with Elton John ("He's a really nice guy," Keean says). And his usual bedtime now is around midnight, after he checks the next day's schedule.

But it's the little things that still impress. For his 12th birthday, in October, the family went to the restaurant at the top of the Marriott Marquis.

"It goes really high up, and then you sit on this area and it rotates around," Keean explains.

But it was too expensive to eat there, so after drinks they went home for pizza and a movie. It was a good birthday.

Dancing to his own drum

Billy Elliot, based on the 2000 movie, intersperses the 1980s strike that decimated the English coal-mining industry with the story of Billy, a young boy who finds an escape in ballet. Keean began dancing at age 5, encouraged by his mother, Brenna, a former cheerleader for the Denver Nuggets.

"I would watch her," he says, sitting in the theater's mezzanine before a show. He would perform for the family, his parents making a stage curtain out of a bedsheet taped over two chairs. He didn't face the sort of abuse for his artistic bent that Billy does.

"At first, ballet was kind of weird," he says. "Hip-hop was pretty cool."

A few kids tried teasing him but stopped when they realized that "I didn't really care what they thought," Keean says.

He took gymnastics and then dance with Katrina Lairsmith at Colorado Contemporary Dance in Stapleton. Before Plainsong, he'd had a single acting experience, at Littleton's Town Hall Arts Center.

"It was Cinderella. I just walked on with a tree. That was fun, but that was not a big, huge play."

Dance was different, his father says.

"One of the shows he had done - they had like 25 numbers and I think he was in 19 of them," says Mark Johnson. "You probably got that energy from him: It's never enough. He's the quintessential Energizer bunny."

School and social life

The family learned about Billy Elliot, already a huge hit in London, and took Keean to San Francisco to audition. On his return to Denver, Keean auditioned for, and was cast in, his first professional play, Plainsong. In the adaptation of Kent Haruf's novel last winter at Denver Center, he played one of two brothers at the center of the story.

"Knowing that it wasn't any dancing or any singing, that was lots of fun to do," Keean says.

The family was already packing up its household when Keean got the call for Billy Elliot.

"We were about to move to Florida because my abuelita wasn't doing very well," he says.

Instead, the family moved to the Upper West Side of New York, where Keean and Cade continued the home-schooling their mother had begun a year earlier.

"They had so much going on, we decided that home school was good for them, and to be perfectly honest, my hat's off to all teachers, but for our boys, we saw the advantage to getting one- on-one attention," says Keean's father.

The boys get in plenty of social interaction, though. Cade, 9, already has an agent in New York, where he has shot commercials for the NFL and Burlington Coat Factory. He's also been on three photo shoots, but "he loves the commercials more," his father says. "And if you ask him why he loves the commercials, he'll say it's because he loves the food."

Keean began in the tutoring provided for the 23 children in the cast, a dingy basement room with kids he saw all day anyway.

"The room down there - it's so small it was hard to get our work done," he says.

Now he studies at home, rising at 9 or 10 a.m. (evening performances don't let out until around 11) and free to play as soon as his day's work is completed.

He gets plenty of play time in at the theater, as well, where eight boys share a dressing room, and Keean enjoys playing with "the small boys," two 7-year-olds.

"We sometimes do Simon Says, we do Scattergories," he says.

They used to play video games, but the backstage guardians - better-known as child wranglers - banned them when kids started missing cues.

The Billy club

The kids are known as much by their characters as by their real names - there are three boys who take different nights in the role of Billy, two who share the role of his best friend, Michael, and a horde of girls from the ballet class. Keean plays a few speaking roles, including a "posh boy" whose accent Keean borrowed from his British father.

"Socially, he's getting a lot," Keean's father says. "He's part of this group of boys and all the Billys and the Michaels, so he's getting a lot of social time at the theater itself.

"The dark day now is on Monday, so on Sunday after the show, we had three of the Billys and one of the Michaels over here for a sleepover. They all brought their Nerf guns over and waged war in our building's massive laundry room. The boys were up all hours of the night having fun, and we cooked pancakes for them all in the morning. He'll probably end up having lifelong friends from this, I imagine."

For opening night, the family headed to the designer discount store Century 21 "because it was one time to splurge," Keean says. "I got this really nice button-down shirt, and I wore a blazer over that."

The party was designed with the young cast in mind, held at the once-hot '80s club Tunnel and featuring pinball machines, cotton candy and a photo booth.

"Me and one of the ballet girls, Tessa - and she's actually 8 - with our popcorn that we had, we did a contest where we had to throw it in the air and catch it in our mouth," he says. "My dad likes to embarrass me, so he did his little dance moves."

Once the show opened in early November, Keean began understudy rehearsals to play Michael, Billy's flamboyant best friend with the showstopping numbers. But there's also the possibility that any boy in the cast could become the next Billy.

"I don't think about that a lot," Keean says. "Most of the time I'm thinking about the role I have."

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

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