Into the Millennium: Inside the rehearsal room with Backstreet Boys

Before the Sphere lit up, there was tape on a black floor. How Rich + Tone directed and choreographed Backstreet Boys for the most talked-about stage in Las Vegas.

The Sphere is unlike any venue in the world: a wraparound screen that turns every seat into a front-row seat. For Backstreet Boys’ Into the Millennium, Rich + Tone were brought in to direct and choreograph the show for that stage. The work started far from the lights, in a rehearsal room.

Green tape on a black floor marks out the stage. Five mic stands stand in a line. The first job is the simplest and the hardest: where every member stands, when they move, and how five voices become one picture big enough for a room built around a screen.

Then comes the movement. The routines fans know by heart have to come back with the same snap, scaled for a stage where the backdrop is the size of a building. Hats, turns, hits on the beat, run again and again until every move reads from the last row.

In the final stretch the work moves to the monitors. Every number is watched back, set against the visuals and tightened. The choreography is only half of it. The other half is how it lands on camera and on the screen behind the band.

“Rich + Tone … have nailed the numbers.”

John Katsilometes, Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Review-Journal’s verdict: “a spectacle that literally rises to the level of its hype.” The hard work in that room is why.

Rauw Alejandro: Three Chapters, One Night

Red Bull Chapters made its debut at Forest Hills Stadium in New York, with Rauw Alejandro telling his story in three acts.

Red Bull Chapters is built on a simple idea: one artist, one night, a career told as a story. For its debut at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, that artist was Rauw Alejandro, and demand turned the one night into two.

The show moved in three chapters, past, present and future, with a narrator guiding the audience from one to the next and Puerto Rico’s music legacy at the heart of it. In the legacy chapter, Tainy and Chencho Corleone joined Rauw on stage.

A show told in chapters lives or dies on how each one feels different. Movement does that work. Each act needed its own physical language, so the audience could feel Rauw’s story shift as much as hear it.

“Rauw is a dancer and a superstar in the same breath. The show was built around that, so every chapter told his story through his movement.”

Rich Talauega

“Rauw has the instincts of a dancer and the heart of a storyteller. He was given a stage that let both of them lead the show.”

Tone Talauega

Becoming Michael: Back to the Movement

Rich + Tone toured with Michael Jackson as teenagers. For the film Michael, they went back to that movement to prepare Jaafar Jackson for the role.

The story starts in a club in Oakland, where two teenage brothers were free-styling when Michael Jackson’s choreographer spotted them. Within months of moving to Los Angeles, Rich + Tone were on tour with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Decades later, that history became the job. For the motion picture Michael, Rich + Tone prepared Jaafar Jackson to play his uncle: the posture, the hands, the timing and the spins. It meant teaching moves they had learned at the source, to someone who had to make them his own.

“There were moments that we could replicate, but there were other moments that he really had to dig deep and trust the process.”

Rich + Tone, Becoming Michael

It is a balance they know well. Rich + Tone are part of the creative team behind the Tony Award winning MJ The Musical, bringing Michael’s movement to Broadway. On film, the challenge was the same and different: honor the original moves, and leave room for the actor inside them.

In a recent interview with Gold House, the brothers talked through that process, from training Jaafar to balancing Michael’s choreography with their own interpretation, and how their Samoan heritage shapes their work.