She’s movin’ up

That, however, is the way things are. Downey is part of the company that’s been playing to packed houses at the Richard Rodgers Theatre since Oct. 24, 2002, and even longer, if you count the show’s workshops and the run it played in Chicago before coming to New York.
The show is, of course, “Movin’ Out,” the Tony Award-winning dance spectacle “conceived” by choreographer and director Twyla Tharp, to quote the verb used in the program notes, using the music and lyrics of Long Island’s favorite “piano man,” Billy Joel.
Lately Downey has been preparing to alternate in one of the show’s five leading roles, specifically Judy, the Long Island high school girl destined to lose her lover, James, a casualty of the Vietnam War. Three friends went to Vietnam, only two returned.
Tharp, famously known as one of the dance world’s most demanding workers, nevertheless encouraged her “Movin’ Out” performers at least a certain measure of freedom when it came to “creating” the roles they played, and even the “characters” they were dancing.
Downey remembered the circumstances surrounding the construction of a sequence involving Billy Joel’s song “Captain Jack,” a scene in which the show’s hero, Eddie, back from the war, a broken man, skids into a life of drugs and self-loathing, finding himself adrift and surrounded by individuals as lost as he himself is.
“When Twyla was working on ‘Captain Jack,’ she said, ‘I want perverts, sexual degenerates, drug addicts and crazy people,’ ” Downey said recently. “The first day, I thought I’d be some sort of dominatrix, but when she put the music on, somebody else was already doing that, so I couldn’t. Twyla said, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, either, but I’ll know by tomorrow.’ “
Downey went home and remembered an experience she’d had in Central Park. “The next day, after I’d thought about it, when she put the music on again, I made myself a flasher,” she said.
It was a long way from growing up in an Irish-American family in Columbus, Ohio, to making a Broadway debut in a vast musical, playing, among other things, a Central Park flasher, but those are some of the facts of Melissa Downey’s life.
“My father, Michael Downey, came to the city from Upstate New York and worked as a musician/bartender,” she said over dinner after a recent matinee. “He shared an apartment for a while with Janis Joplin. Then he met my mother, Cherie, who had put herself through City College, and they got married. When my mother was pregnant with my sister, they decided that Columbus, Ohio, might be a better place than New York to raise children.”
So that’s how Downey, who is now 31, and her sister, Sara, who is three years older, came to be born and raised in the Midwest.
Conventional as the dancer’s background may seem, in actual fact it isn’t, because of a decision the Downeys made early on concerning the education of their daughters.
“We were home schooled,” Downey said. “I went to kindergarten in a public school, and then I was home schooled, starting in the first grade. That’s when my mother started teaching Sara and me.”
Downey was quick to point out that what she thinks people’s automatic reaction to the idea of home schooling is doesn’t reflect the reality of the actual experience.
“People thought that it meant that I got to go downstairs in my pajamas, but it wasn’t like that,” she said. “I had a schedule, like anybody else, and, if anything, it was harder because I couldn’t get away with saying I’d done my homework when I hadn’t. When they took us out of school, I was going into the first grade and my sister was going into the fourth grade.”
The school officials in Columbus, however, weren’t necessarily thrilled with the Downey girls being educated at home.
“My parents were actually sued by the board of education for child neglect, because they hadn’t made us go to school. That was the way things worked then,” Downey recalled. “At that time, people were actually having their kids taken away if they tried to home school them. Now it’s fairly commonplace, but at that time you couldn’t do it.”
The Downey trial was cancelled and the case was dropped 10 days before the final hearing, for reasons that are still lightly unclear, although the dancer has an opinion.
“I think that at the time, there were several cases, and I think the court expected us to win,” she said. “My mom thinks they didn’t want to risk setting a precedent, so they let it go.”
Downey may not have had schoolmates in the usual sense of the word, but she spent time with youngsters her own age when she started to take dance lessons, which is something she knew she wanted to do from the time she was 3.
“By the time I was in the seventh grade, I had become a member of BalletMet’s pre-professional program, which meant that I had school in the morning and then I had the dance program from two until 6 every day,” she said.
BalletMet is a Columbus-based company, and every Christmas season it produces a version of “The Nutcracker.”
“I’d been doing ‘The Nutcracker’ for years, and then, when I was 15, I started doing corps de ballet work with the company,” Downey said. “Then, gradually, they started using kids from the school more and more. In my senior year in high school, I was in everything the company did, which included touring.”
Downey remembered a conflict between duties connected with her home schooling, and her life as a touring performer. “We’d be in places like Arizona, and everybody would be out around the hotel pool, and I’d be in my room, reading ‘The Odyssey,’ because I knew I’d have to write a report on it when I got back to Columbus,” Downey said.
Like most dancers, Downey would seek out dance studios for the sake of taking classes to keep in shape, particular when she was not actually working. It was because of one of those studios, in a way, that she eventually made her Broadway debut in “Movin’ Out.”
She had danced with the Louisville Ballet for two years, and then began working on a freelance basis. “I never really intended to move to New York,” she said, “but when I started to work freelance, I decided it would be good to be based here.”
While taking class at a studio called Steps-on-Broadway, she met Ashley Tuttle, a featured American Ballet theatre dancer who began working with Twyla Tharp, eventually creating the role of Judy in “Movin Out,” the part with which Downey is now involved.
“Ashley thought I should try out for Twyla, so I did,” Downey said. The tryout led to Downey’s being hired for the “Movin’ Out” workshop, which was about to begin. But there was a problem.
“I was hit by a car, as I was riding my bicycle toward Central Park, where I used to ride all the time when I lived about a block away,” she said.
The accident might have cost her the chance to work in Tharp’s show, but her recuperative powers were strong enough that she healed quickly and never missed a rehearsal for the workshop.
Downey’s rapid recovery can probably be chalked up, at least in part, to the line of hardy Waterford farmers from which she descends.
“My great-great grandfather had a dairy farm near a village that I think was called Grange. He came to America, settled in Upstate New York and started farming again,” he said. “He married a girl who had also come from Waterford whom he hadn’t known in Ireland, even though their villages were practically adjacent.”
The Downeys had 13 children, and the farm stayed in the family for a few generations.
“My great-great grandfather, Robert, and my great-great grandmother died on the same day. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage and he had a heart attack and died out in the fields,” she said.
Downey knows considerably more about her family background than could logically be expected of someone her age. She thinks she knows the reason.
“My family is very much into its lineage and its ethnicity, and so I know more about the past than most people of my generation do,” she said, “particularly coming from a family that’s been in America as long as mine has — it’s not as though I’m first generation or anything like that. My family is very proud of its roots.”
In a town upstate, Amenia, there’s a Downey Road. “There were any number of Downeys living there over the years,” she said.