By Cricket Desmarais
Pamela Stephenson Connolly watches her dancers sway in an open embrace across the floor of her Southard Street dance studio with a focused intensity. The Latin ballroom dance is elegant, sophisticated and downright sultry. Bodies rock together in syncopated rhythm, hips tilted, rolling, the sensuality building. In a visceral instant, there’s a whipping spin; hair flies and the woman drapes backward over the arm of her partner in a deep arch of ecstasy.
“I love Brazilian dance — all Brazilian dance,” Connolly says. “And this is the most beautiful, most connected Brazilian partner dance you’ve never heard of. It’s the partner form of samba, called Samba de Gafieira.”
Connelly calls herself a closet dance historian. She is, in fact, many things — a sexologist and clinical psychologist, bestselling author of her comedian husband Billy Connolly’s biography and several other successful titles before it, the weekly “Sexual Healing” columnist for The Guardian, former star performer on BBC’s “Strictly Come Dancing,” and an actor and comedian with hundreds of creds that include “Saturday Night Live” and Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part I.”
But her passion reigns in dance and is evident in the name of her Key West studio, Pasión Project (pasionproject.com). More than two dozen performers have gathered there over the last several weeks in preparation for the upcoming true-crime musical comedy, “Bum Farto – The Musical,” that Connolly wrote and is now producing and directing.
“In this show, we have all the Latin dances: salsa; cumbia, which was a precursor to lambada; bachata; Argentine tango; merengue; Carolina shag; swing; jive; ’70s disco; tap; country line dance; and crazy druggie show dance — stuff I don’t even know where I got it.”
Connolly’s world of dance began with ballet when she was 5, a practical means to address her polio-stricken limbs that evolved into a lifelong exploration as a performer. She discovered Brazilian dance accidentally during a book tour in her native New Zealand and after, went to Brazil to study it.
“I noticed there were a lot of street kids who didn’t have any prospects at all who have amazing dance ability,” she says. “I mean, incredible, including capoeira — they could do everything — high level, athletic dance, and very, very brave, with amazing lifts and tumbles,” she said. “They just pitch themselves into it and think nothing of it and just try anything.”
Connolly gives her creative visions an unequivocal forward momentum, likely powered by her ability to break limits and reinvent the rules to match her depth and fierce compassion. Unlike many traditional companies that rely on dancers with decades of training, Connolly formed a dance company with these non-traditional students, then put them into shows and festivals she created in Brazil, all of which have been met with great success for everyone involved.
“I’m very bloody minded. So I’ll just do it,” she laughs. “There have been elements of blind trust in it, but I have also been doing theater since I was 5 years old.”
These days, Connolly is happiest doing theater as a producer and director. “Bum Farto – The Musical” opens Thursday, Oct. 13 at San Carlos Institute and runs until Oct.27 (bumfartothemusical.com). The show is based on a bona fide infamous Key West character — the 1975 fire chief who went down in a federal drug bust known as Operation Conch. Connolly saw a “Where’s Bum Farto?” T-shirt during the COVID shutdown and was compelled to dig in, using the story as a base and adding elements of fiction that revealed themselves as she wrote. From creation to performance took less than a year.
“It just seemed to write itself,” she says. “I think a lot of that was because we had no plan. That’s the beauty of it. There was no pressure, there was no thought that I would ever mount it. I said, ‘Why don’t we just do this for fun?’ which is how a lot of the best things happen.”
The show is a swift 90-minute production with acclaimed actors, dancers and musicians from around the globe and locally — including Broadway’s Aaron LaVigne, the Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” who trades his crown of thorns for a tourniquet and needles to play Brutus, the heroin-addicted snitch. Dan Krysa — a true musical genius and award-winning producer — created a rollicking score of more than two dozen song-and-dance numbers. And vibrant lighting design coupled with historic images and news clippings projected against sparse but colorful sets put 1975 Key West and Bum Farto back in the spotlight.
“It’s a glorious celebration of an infamous but iconic man whose fate and place in history was linked to so many others,” she says.
The musical also pulls narration in as a key element, something that lends well to the true crime genre and was an ingenious solution to a potential problem.
“I didn’t write scenes at first because I wasn’t sure that my dancers would have the acting background to be able to make that work,” she said. “People didn’t seem to mind that the fourth wall was broken, that performers are explaining things and introducing themselves as characters from that era, then walking back into the scene. They just bought it.”
How her famous family ended up in Key West is an answer both simple and familiar: the weather, the water and the people — the sort that treat a celebrity like anyone else in their One Human Family. So when life in New York City proved too cold for Billy Connolly to adequately manage his Parkinson’s symptoms, Connolly intuitively jumped on a plane to the Southernmost City, a place someone told her was “not like the rest of America.” Being a fan of diving, the marine environment added to the draw for Pamela.
“Fortunately, it turned out to be the thing for my husband too, because he loves fly fishing. I didn’t even know he and his son had previously been fishing here several times with Capt. Will Benson when I suggested Key West,” she says.
But the clincher came during a walk on Duval.
“I saw this girl walking her dog. She was wearing a lime green tutu and nothing else — she had marijuana leaves painted on both breasts. There were all kinds of people on the street and no one was taking a blind bit of difference. Nobody was bothered. This just doesn’t happen everywhere.”
After that, she bought a house online — without seeing it.
“What could be so bad? What could possibly go wrong?” she said. “It’s always my motto — What could possibly go wrong?”
From the looks of things, it seems to be working out more than fine.
Quick Q&A with Pamela
What’s something you’d like to learn? Patience.
What are you reading now? My Bum Farto script. Over and over and over…
What is your superpower? Only ONE superpower? I need THREE. My first superpower would be having the ability to breathe under the sea. Then I wouldn’t fear hurricanes, would I? I’d just dive into the Gulf of Mexico and hide in a sea-cave with the sharks. Secondly, I’d like to be a creature that doesn’t need sleep. Imagine how much more could be accomplished. And finally, immortality. Is that too much to ask?
