It’s Good to Be John

For the next two decades, he stayed in the Twin Cities (“I’m not really a gypsy,” he says. “I’m more of a homebody”) and added many professional credits to his resumé. He joined the now-disbanded Edgewater Eight cabaret group and worked with Gary Gisselman, who brought him to Chanhassen for the inaugural production of How to Succeed in 1968. Following his debut at Chanhassen, he performed in forty-five other productions there, as well as a dozen shows at the now-defunct Chimera Theatre and numerous industrial shows and commercials. In 1984, he staged the dances for Prince’s film Purple Rain, and in 1988, he cochoreographed the half-time show for Super Bowl XXIII, a salute to Bob Hope with 2,700 dancers.

“By that point,” Command says, “I was tired of Minneapolis. So when Lorna and Loni told me to come out to Hollywood, I did.” He worked at a lot of little theaters and choreographed cruise ship shows, but soon made a name for himself choreographing for television, staging all the dances for The Golden Girls, Evening Shade, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step, and other sitcoms.

Work was often spotty, so to make ends meet, Command also taught high school courses to what he describes as “behaviorally disordered” teens in a juvenile detention center. But even when he did have a gig with a sitcom, the work itself ultimately proved unsatisfying. “It was like bad community theater,” he says. “Golden Girls had a great cast and it was brilliantly written, but with the frantic pace, everyone was always kind of winging it.”

While in Hollywood, Command maintained his connections with Minnesota by coming back each summer to direct the Riverside Theatre in Anoka. “Then they got all smarty-pants and dropped me in favor of Michael Brindisi,” he says. “[After that] the theater closed down within two years.”

By 1994, Command had tired of the disingenuousness that seemed to pervade LA. But it was the Northridge earthquake that led him to return home. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It was a nightmare, a feeling of imminent death.”

Back in Minnesota, Command assumed full-time care of his ailing mother during the last six months of her life. After she died, he started graduate school at the University of Minnesota, intent on getting a Master of Fine Arts in directing. But he abandoned the program shortly after enrolling when he realized he was learning from “people who didn’t know as much as I do. How stupid they are at the U? It became meaningless, all the Mickey Mouse crap you have to put up with.” He returned to making his living as a professional director and choreographer, working at the Mounds View Community Theatre for six years before being hired away by BCT in 1997.

It might seem incongruous to find this cosmopolitan choreographer, who has worked with stars from Barbra Streisand to Prince, comfortably ensconced in a St. Louis Park split level and working for Bloomington Civic Theatre. But at sixty-two, Command is content to let others struggle for stardom. On the same recent trip to New York, he ran into an old friend, actor Joseph Joyce, whom he’d worked with at Chanhassen. Joyce was rushing off to a meeting with his agent. “How awful to still be fighting for auditions,” Command says. Still, he accepts the limits of his own career, but lays the blame squarely on ageism. “When they find you’re sixty-two, they don’t hire you.”

Despite his age, Command exhibits youthful passion and exuberance. While his gray hair bespeaks his age, his lithe, trim body still bears the hallmarks of his career as a professional dancer. His movements are elegant and extravagant, even flamboyant.