Meet One Of The Few Female AAPI Choreographers/Directors Working On Broadway

According to research, in 2019, the last full Broadway season before the pandemic, just twenty-four percent of choreographers were female. And those numbers continue to remain low.

But JoAnn M. Hunter is one of those exceptions. The choreographer for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella, she has directed and/or choreographed his past five new shows. Making her Broadway debut in Jerome Robbins Broadway in 1989, Hunter has performed in more than 15 shows including Guys and Dolls, Damn Yankees, Chicago, Kiss Me Kate and Thoroughly Modern Millie.

“Choreographing allows me to have my voice and my point of view in how I would like to tell the story,” says Hunter who also choreographed School of Rock and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

The daughter of a Japanese mother and American father Hunter was born outside Tokyo. She came to the Untied States when she was four and the family ultimately settled in Coventry, Rhode Island, where she was raised.

As there weren’t any other mixed-raced kids in her town, Hunter felt shy and different. “We were so different,” she says of her and family. “We looked different, we ate different foods, my Mother had an accent. We just did not fit in.”

But Hunter found solace in dance, which took up by the time she was ten-years-old. “As a dancer every ounce of my inhibitions evaporated. When I danced I allowed another side of me to be released without fear of judgment or being made fun of for not fitting in,” she says. “As a dancer all I wanted as a dancer was to be the best I could be. I had great mentors who pushed me for they saw my potential. How lucky I was.”

Her life really transformed when one of her best friends in high school surprised her with a birthday gift to see the tour of A Chorus Line that came through Providence. “That show is a love letter to dancers and I loved every moment of it,” she says. “I knew I did not belong in Rhode Island.”

Between her junior and senior year of high school she received a scholarship to study with the legendary Charles Kelley in New York City. Considered one of the finest teachers in the United States he taught countless dancers who went on to have thriving careers in film, TV and on Broadway. “Once I arrived in New York, I knew that this is where I belonged,” says Hunter. “I told my mother I was not retuning for my senior year of school and never looked back. However, I did eventually receive my GED.”

After a serious injury in 2009, she made the leap from performing to choreographing. “I was playing a pickup softball game when I long fly ball came right at me. The guy playing center field did not hear me call the ball, at least I hope he did not hear me, and clobbered me,” she says. “it was like being hit by a Mac truck.”

A tibial plateau fracture along with crushed pieces of bone embedded in her soft tissue and subsequent surgery kept her out of commission for almost a year. “That gave me a lot of time to contemplate,” says Hunter. “I had begun to choreograph a little but had not really made the transition.”

Hunter had to figure out what to do. “Go back to school, get a degree in… what?” she says. “I only ever really wanted to perform.” She was petrified to come to choreography full-time. “What do I know? I thought. I had many people say to me that I should, but I did not believe in myself,” says Hunter who admits that she continues to sometimes doubt herself and can sometimes hear that voice that she doesn’t belong.

“But, I had to do something. I made the decision to do it and try to stop being afraid,” says Hunter. “I think my accident is what guided me or pushed me to jump to the other side of the table.”

Bad Cinderella, which features a new retelling of the fairytale Cinderella, is miles from a shrinking violet who needs to be rescued. “What I like about this take on the piece is that the Cinderella character is not this “oh poor me, oh woe is me, why does everyone hate me so I’ll sit back in the background,” says Hunter of Cinderella (played by Linedy Genao).

In fact, Hunter finds it refreshing that this Cinderella gets heat for not conforming to the “expected” world of the town called Belleville—where most people only value beautiful that is on the surface. “Cinderella rebels, but in doing so, she herself is a bit of a bully. That to me feels real,” says Hunter. “I really believe that most bullies are not born bullies but it is a defense mechanism to protect themselves. Some people recede, some people put on armor.”