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Song and dance man Maurice Hines opens new season at the Delaware Theatre Company

Delaware Theatre Company
The Delaware Theatre Company kicks off its new season Wednesday.

The musical “Maurice Hines is Tappin’ Thru Life,” opens a new season at the Delaware Theatre Company Wednesday night.

Immersed in personal reflections, the show follows Hines’s six decade-plus career and pays tribute to his younger brother Gregory, who died in 2003.

The Hines brothers were just 7 and 5, when they made their dance debut at the famed Apollo Theater for its popular Amateur Night.

The idea for “Tappin’ Thru Life” was sparked, Hines says, by an article on tap dancing that omitted any mention of his brother.

“I was choreographing in Rhode Island at a college and I was reading this dance magazine and it was a pretty big one, and the dance magazine did a whole article on tap and didn’t mention my brother at all,” he says. “And I said, what no Gregory Hines? Oh, please!”

For the show, Maurice Hines is backed by a nine piece all-female orchestra.

Additionally, several young tappers from Delaware will dance in the show. Hines held auditions at the Wilmington theater last month and says he discovered a high level of talent in the First State.

“The tap that I do and my brother did and Savion Glover does is a very specialized tapping,” says Hines. “It’s not like the Busby Berkeley type; it’s rhythm tap. So I get here and we found three kids, and I’m talking about really great tappers. Wilmington has really great tappers and I don’t say that about every city because they don’t.”

“Maurice Hines is Tappin’ Thru Life” kicks off the new season at the Delaware Theatre Company on Wednesday night.

Ticket information is available at the Delaware Theatre Company website.

This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.