Even during his college days, it was clear that Gregory A. Minahan ’76 was headed for a life on the stage.

The Crimson’s 1976 Commencement issue predicted that “Broadway sits as the pot of gold at the end of Greg Minahan’s rainbow—he’s caught a glimpse in the distance and he can’t stop following the colorful road there.”

With the help of a little song and dance, Minahan made the trip.

His resume now includes three years with the American Dance Machine, his “graduate school of dance,” and an eight-year stint with Cats on Broadway.

In the past few years, Minahan has made his home off-Broadway—as a music appreciation teacher at his daughter’s old elementary school. But the allure of the great white way is calling him back and he expects his return to the bright lights of Broadway is inevitable.

College roommate Thomas E. Harter ’76 says the path Minahan took doesn’t surprise him.

“Greg had stars in his eyes,” Harter says. “He was never driven by money or power or that sort of thing, he just loved to sing and dance.”

Although he is the son of a dance instructor, Minahan actually focused on singing during his early years. He graduated from high school musicals to Hasty Pudding Theatricals and Agassiz Theatre productions during college.

His fondest memory of Harvard, he says, is when he directed and played the lead in the musical George M. during his senior year.

“I went to college not knowing what I wanted to do, but by the time I was graduating I was doing as much [theater] as I could,” he says.

The unofficial theater concentrator moved to New York after graduation, intending to pursue his passion for singing. His work with the Pudding’s 1976 production, Tots in Tinseltown, led to his first job out of college when the Tots director hired him.

But his real break and the starting point of his dancing career came a year and a half later, when he landed a spot in the bus-and-truck tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar. Minahan says the Harlem-inspired musical, which was one of the first shows to feature a primarily black cast, inspired him to prioritize dancing for the first time in his life.

“That was the first time I was ever around dancers, and I figured I should take it seriously,” he says.

His successful audition for the American Dance Machine, a company Dance Magazine’s John Gruen has proclaimed as being “dance-historic, far reaching, and visionary,” marked the beginning of his dance career.

Founded by director Lee Theodore, a career Broadway dancer who played the original Anybodys in West Side Story, Dance Machine reconstructed and performed classics of Broadway choreography.