Television’s search for the first great musical drama has been a fraught journey, with a few expensive dead-ends. Either the music was there and the story wasn’t (“Smash”) or the story and the music never meshed (“Vinyl”). On August 12, movie director Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”) will attempt to right all wrongs with “The Get-Down,” his dazzling, sensuous ode to the last days of disco and the rise of hip-hop. Set in the rubble of the South Bronx, in the bad old days — 1977, New York City’s nadir — the story is told through the eyes of the kids who lived and dreamed on those mean streets.
Ezekiel “Books” Figuero (Justice Smith) is a poet who doesn’t know it, the kind of kid who thinks in rhyme but doesn’t know where to take it next. He’s smitten with his gorgeous neighbor, Mylene Cruz (Herizon Guardiola), whose musical ambitions cannot be satisfied by the singing she does in the choir of her father’s church. Ezekiel meets aspiring DJ Shaolin Fantastic (Shamiek Moore), a squatter who supports himself doing the bidding of Fat Annie (Lillias White), a local gangster whose club, Les Infernos, hosts neighborhood dance contests.
In the 90-minute pilot, gorgeously directed by Luhrmann, the kids weave in and out of the disco and hip-hop worlds, always following the music. Mylene sneaks into Les Infernos to get a demo tape she’s made into the hands of Malibu (Billy Porter), a flamboyant DJ with record-industry connections. Mylene and her girlfriends, in dresses slit up to there, dance the Hustle and The Electric Slide to songs such as “Devil’s Gun,” by C.J. & Co. Later on, Ezekiel finds himself at a dance held in an alley between two burnt-out buildings where Shaolin is trying to get DJ Grandmaster Flash (Mamaoudou Athie) to teach him how to spin records. The dancing is “a freefall,” says Rich Talauega, series co-choreographer with his brother, Tone. “The majority of the dancing was on the ground. On all fours. Wild.”
Teaching kids who’ve never done disco-dancing or break-dancing was a chore for Rich and Tone after working with stars like Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. The duo often worked until sunrise out at the Glendale (Queens) studio where the series in being filmed. “They were like fresh clay that we could mold,” says Tone of the neophyte performers. “More than trying to get anybody who has two left feet and two left arms to do a two-step, we have to build up their morale.”
Still, Rich admits the girls were a whole lot easier to work with than the guys. “The girls … we did a lot less cussing and yelling at them. I love all the kids but the boys — s–t! — they’ll tell you it was hard.”
Dancing wasn’t the only baptism by fire, for the newcomers. Casting directors Ronna Kress and Rori Bergman reveal that final casting wasn’t completed until all the eligible performers tried out for several roles in a week-long workshop. “By the end of the week, we had sent everyone home who wasn’t working in the ensemble,” she says. “It’s a unique process.”
Afterward, Smith, 20, went to an informal “rap class” to get ready for production. “I sat down with [associate producer] Kurtis Blow and he taught me how to move and how to rap in the style of the period,” he says. “I would work on each rap with Kurtis or Rahiem [of the Furious Five]. Nas wrote the raps. And they would guide me and try to make sound as authentic as possible.”
The completely untrained — and stunning — Guardiola, 19, reveals production “hired a voice coach for me just to keep my voice healthy because I was singing so much. It was me just practicing every single day.”
“The Get-Down” is the most ambitious project yet for Netflix, but fortunately, the series has so many echoes of classic New York-based musicals — everything from “West Side Story” to “Saturday Night Fever” — that nostalgia may be enough to keep it going. If not, there’s always the music and dancing. The men and women never stop touching.
“What was really sexy about the ’70s is that people weren’t on all these protein shakes,” says Rich. “The men were like really slim. The women were lovely and beautiful. The fashion was all about sex. Whenever you saw a couple dance in a club, they probably didn’t know each other. But one thing that was evident was the chemistry of a man and a woman dancing in rhythm to a song that made their emotions come out even more as the song progressed. So you had Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers meets black/Latino flavor, Italian New York. There was something so sexy and beautiful about that scene.”
Meet these new TV faces:
“The Get Down” casting directors Ronna Kress and Rori Bergman — and “Rosewood” star Lorraine Touissaint, who acted with Herizen Guardiola in the 2015 movie “Runaway Island” — talk about the up-and-coming stars of the new Netflix series.
JUSTICE SMITH (Ezekiel “Books” Figeroa)
“He had done this film, ‘Paper Towns,’ and I had him come read for us,” says Kress. “He’s amazing. Soulful. And lovely and smart and talented. We adore him.”
HERIZEN GUARDIOLA (Mylene Cruz)
“When we were working together she was getting ready to start the Netflix show,” says Toussaint. “She’s got the head of an artist and the beauty card to play. Not a bad combo.”
SHAMIEK MOORE (Shaolin Fantastic)
“We know about him from the movie ‘Dope.’ These kids can all sing. They can rap like crazy. That’s all him in the first episode. Unbelievable dancer,” says Kress. “How could all of these kids be so talented in so many areas?”
SKYLAN BROOKS (Ronald “Ra-Ra” Kipling)
“He’s the most extraordinary young man I’ve met,” says Kress. “We thought he could play Justice’s part, but he was too young We just loved him so much we couldn’t let him go. We reconstructed the story to include him.”