Back in Stride as a Work in Progress : After being critically injured in a mysterious accident 10 months ago in Malibu, Ben Vereen has achingly rebuilt himself to step into the role of Chimney Man in ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’

NEW YORK — The man lies on his back on the floor of a Manhattan dance studio, arms stretched out at his sides. His athletic trainer grasps his right leg and slowly presses it upward until it is nearly vertical. Sweat breaks out on the man’s forehead and he winces audibly. The trainer presses farther.

“Uncle?” asks the trainer, Marijeanne Liederbach.

“Come on,” he says, and Liederbach presses his leg past vertical and nearly into his chest. His face is etched with concentration and pain.

The man on the floor is Ben Vereen.

It is beyond all expectation that he is here on the studio floor this afternoon in early March, bending, stretching and flexing. It is beyond expectation that he can move his body at all, let alone push it past normal limits of strength and endurance. It is beyond expectation that he is even alive.

Nearly 10 months ago, the renowned entertainer was critically injured when he was hit by a small truck as he walked along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Vereen was so badly hurt in the near-fatal accident--he sustained head and internal injuries and a broken leg--it was feared he might not walk again unaided. But slowly, painfully, Vereen did relearn to walk. And now, after months of grueling rehabilitation, he is learning to dance.

For Vereen, there is no time to lose. Thursday night at 8, he will be put to the test when he steps onstage at the Virginia Theatre opposite Gregory Hines in the Broadway musical “Jelly’s Last Jam.”

“I’ve gotta get back,” Vereen says. “The curtain’s going up.”

And Vereen expects to be ready, thanks to his Herculean efforts and those of a team of professionals--from doctors and physical therapists to choreographers and voice rehabilitation experts--that have helped put him back together again.

When Vereen steps onstage, their work will be inscribed in his every gesture: Each step he takes tells the story of hours in the dance studio, every graceful hand movement bears witness to a thousand dimes picked up, a thousand buttons buttoned. Muscle by muscle and inch by inch, Vereen is reclaiming his body and, with it, his identity as a performer.

It was a body that once bent effortlessly to his every command, serving him as a dancer, singer and actor. Vereen dazzled audiences with his nimble footwork, catlike sensuality and suave tenor voice in the Broadway musicals “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Pippin,” for which he won a 1972 Tony Award.

“He was phenomenal to watch,” says his close friend Liza Minnelli. “When you saw Ben Vereen, you saw an artist who knew every inch of the stage and how to take it and stalk it like an animal.”

Vereen moved on to films and television, where he is perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of the wily Chicken George in the blockbuster miniseries “Roots” and for his role as a streetwise detective in the series “Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.”

His career dipped into low gear in the late 1980s but had recently gained renewed momentum with a recurring role on the late-night police series “Silk Stalkings” and an Emmy-nominated performance in last year’s CBS miniseries “Intruders.”

But, except for the short-lived 1985 musical “Grind,” Vereen has not appeared on the Broadway stage in two decades.

Two years ago, “Jelly” producers were already considering bringing him back to Broadway as a high-profile replacement for Keith David in the role of the Chimney Man. “We had always thought about Ben because there aren’t really that many African-American personalities that can sing and dance and act and have the kind of name Ben has,” says co-producer Pamela Koslow.

Vereen had seen the show in 1991 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and had immediately fallen under the spell of the character, who is based on a voodoo folk figure that sweeps souls from this world to the next. He contacted Koslow, asking to be considered as a replacement. The accident intervened, but Vereen never forgot about the Chimney Man. And, last year, when Vereen lay in the hospital, his dancer’s body broken, he vowed the Chimney Man would carry him to the New York stage.

“It’s the perfect way to make his comeback,” Minnelli says. “It’s the theater, where he really just stunned and flabbergasted everybody.”

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These days, Vereen inhabits a stranger’s body. As the result of the accident and the strokelike episode that accompanied it, he has persistent problems with strength, balance and coordination, the most fundamental weapons in a dancer’s arsenal. His kinesthetic sense, the tacit knowledge of where the limbs are in space, was also vastly diminished.

“He has to relocate everything,” says Liederbach, an athletic trainer and choreographer affiliated with the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in Manhattan.

“It’s as if he were a baby again in many ways. . . . Not only does he have to come up to a pedestrian level, he has to then rise to the occasion of regaining years of dance training and stage awareness.”

In the dance studio that March afternoon, Vereen rises from the floor and Liederbach guides him through some simple spins. Attempting to balance on his right leg, Vereen wobbles and collapses into the trainer’s arms. Another attempt and he topples again. Finally, on the fifth try, he stands erect and completes the spin.

Next, Liederbach takes him through a series of jumps and then has him run across the studio floor. He trots somewhat stiffly, fighting the persistent limp on his right side. It is a red-letter day: the first time Vereen has run or jumped since the accident.

Fortunately, Vereen’s coveted Chimney Man role is an actor’s part with little choreography, sparing him the show’s pyrotechnic dance numbers. But, for Vereen, whose right arm and leg were almost completely paralyzed, the role will be challenging enough as it is.

Although he no longer suffers pain from his injuries, the continued weakness in his right limbs, combined with a severely fractured left thigh bone--now secured with a metal rod--makes even a simple spin or jump an adventure in balance and control.

Vereen’s day starts at dawn, with a 60-flight workout in the stairwell of his Manhattan condominium or with a twice-weekly weight-training session at a private gym on the Upper East Side. Add to the weekly regimen two acting classes, a couple of sessions with an acupuncturist and masseur, physical therapy, three voice lessons, five dance classes and a flurry of rehearsals. He doesn’t have a moment to spare. “I don’t want one,” he says simply.

He could easily have chosen a less strenuous road to recovery than the relentless grind of an eight-show-a-week Broadway musical. But Vereen, who talks of someday working in Hollywood again, hopes the show itself will prove the greatest therapy of all.

“I want to get this going because I’m looking at doing films and TV,” he says. “I want to be able to go chase the bad guy down the block.”

His 90-minute dance session over, Vereen hops a taxi to the Upper West Side studio of William Riley, a singing teacher who specializes in voice rehabilitation. Just as Vereen is relearning to dance, he is also relearning to sing.

When he first arrived at Riley’s door in November, he could scarcely sing. Physical changes stemming from the accident--including scar tissue left by an emergency tracheostomy--combined with vocal organs that had lain fallow for many months, left Vereen’s bright tenor voice low and gravelly.

“To reteach him to sing, it’s like starting over as a freshman at the conservatory,” Riley says. “His breath was different, his teeth were different, his throat was different.”

In Riley’s book-lined studio, Vereen launches into some of his numbers from “Jelly.” At first, his voice comes out tight and raspy, but on the second try, it’s full and resonant. As the tempo picks up, Vereen begins to move in time to the music, his voice growing in power until it fills the small room. It goes on like this, two steps forward, one step back, day after day after day. Through it all, he has come to think of himself as a work in progress, watching his old movies to spur himself toward his goal of complete recovery.

“I keep seeing where it was, and where it’s going to be,” he says during a rare unfilled hour in his New York apartment, a tiny, light-filled condo near Lincoln Center. Casually dressed in jeans and a black sweat shirt, Vereen is a soft-spoken, somewhat shy man. His trim 5-foot-9 frame makes him look younger than his 46 years. When he dons his little wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like a professor or perhaps a seminarian. In fact, he studied briefly to be a Pentecostal minister before heeding the call of the stage.

In the last 10 months, he has drawn heavily on his faith, an ecumenical and highly personal blend of traditional Pentecostalism, Eastern mysticism and New Age thinking. These days, it is supplemented by a holistic regimen that includes herbs, crystals, incense and four daily glassfuls of a rust-colored fluid dubbed “Ben’s Magic Drink,” prepared by an herbalist friend in Los Angeles.

Vereen rises and walks to the window, where pictures propped up on the sill offer a visual chronicle of his recovery: Vereen with the intensive-care staff at UCLA Medical Center, his first stop after the accident; Vereen with patients and staff at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, the West Orange, N.J., facility where he spent seven months after his release from the hospital.

He picks up one of the pictures, a framed drawing by his 15-year-old daughter, Karon, who sat steadfastly sketching at the foot of his hospital bed in the weeks that followed the accident. The picture shows a masklike face that appears split down the middle, half in shadow, half in light. “That’s Daddy’s picture,” Vereen says softly. “She kept saying, ‘Daddy’s coming back. Daddy’s coming back.’ ”

That’s not how it seemed when he arrived by helicopter at UCLA in the pre-dawn hours of June 9, unconscious and in profound shock. His wife, Nancy, and their daughters, Malaika, 22, Kabara, 17, and Karon, flew in from the family’s home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Around the country, newspapers had his obituary ready to go. But the UCLA trauma team went to work and Vereen hung on.

Along with his robust dancer’s body, Vereen very nearly lost his identity in those early days. He can laugh now at the memory of the nurse who entered his room shortly after the accident, when he was still mired in confusion. “OK, Mr. Morris, time for your medicine,” she sang out, using the alias contrived to protect Vereen’s privacy.

“All this time I thought I was Ben Vereen,” he said to himself. “Oh, well. I must have been dreaming.” It would be a long time before he felt ready to be Vereen again.

To this day, no one is certain what Vereen was doing alone on foot on the dark ribbon of highway. He’d already suffered a car accident a few hours earlier, when he lost control of his own automobile and ran off the road into a tree, hitting his head on the car roof.

Vereen, who says he has no memory of either accident, believes now that some time after he totaled his car, he may have tried to walk home to his Zuma Beach condo. It was then, he speculates, that damage caused in the first accident to a cerebral artery resulted in the strokelike episode that sent him running, dazed, into the oncoming truck driven by Oscar-nominated composer-producer David Foster. No charges were filed.

“There’s no way we would ever know, but it’s certainly possible,” says Dr. Gill Cryer, chief of trauma and surgical critical care at UCLA Medical Center, who attended Vereen.

Even though Vereen passed a sheriff’s sobriety test after running into the tree, the Hollywood grapevine soon was abuzz with rumor. Some speculated wrongly that Vereen had plunged back into the drug and alcohol abuse that ravaged him after his 16-year-old daughter, Naja, was killed in a highway accident in 1987.

Others thought he was trying to end his life. “Committing suicide was the last thing on my mind,” Vereen says, his customarily gentle voice turned harsh. “I’m sad that my daughter died, but I have my other children to think about.”

As Vereen lay in the UCLA intensive-care unit, he knew he had to dance again. He’d already danced his way out of Brooklyn’s tough Bedford-Stuyvesant section where he grew up, and into Manhattan’s prestigious High School of Performing Arts, which launched his career.

On July 22, he flew East and was admitted to Kessler. He arrived in a wheelchair, unable to walk without support or lift his arms over his head.

“When I first started in rehab and started moving again, I felt like I was in Dance Class 101,” Vereen says. “It looked so awkward, I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror for a long time.”

But with each small milestone--the first steps without a cane, the first full turn--the hunger to get the feel of dance back in his bones grew more intense. After Vereen left Kessler and moved into Manhattan, he’d sometimes go to a nearby dance studio just to watch the young performers take their class. As he stood on the sidelines of the mirrored room, his eyes would fill with tears.

“We dancers defy gravity,” he says as he sits in his living room. “We go down, we go up, we move through air, we tilt. We do marvelous, wonderful things with space. Oh, it’s wonderful to be able to loosen the body and write poetry in motion.”

His shyness disappears as the words tumble out. His voice is reverential, his face rapturous. “And tap is like playing the rhythms of the Earth through your body,” he says. “You are ‘playing’ the sound, but what you’re actually doing is bringing up the rhythms from the Earth.” His voice drops lower. “Earth tones, Earth tones,” he whispers. “That’s why I want to move again.”

And he does move. A few weeks before opening night, Vereen arrives for a fitting at Vincent Costume, a theatrical costumer in Chelsea. He steps in front of a large three-paneled mirror and dons the Chimney Man’s first-act outfit, a black tail coat with a black-and-silver checked vest and black trousers.

As owner Vincent Zullo and “Jelly” costume designer Toni-Leslie James look on, Vereen tests the outfit for ease of movement. Slowly he arcs his right arm into the air, glides his left leg out to the side and suddenly, for one breathtaking moment, he is dancing.

It was the Chimney Man who kept him going all along. Indeed, on Oct. 9, Vereen’s first night as an outpatient from Kessler, he saw “Jelly” once again. He sat in the audience in a neck brace that came down over his chest. At the end of the show, Hines, who stars as Jelly Roll Morton, welcomed him from the stage. “At that point he was physically unable to go backstage,” Hines recalls. “We had to go into the house to greet him.”

Throughout Vereen’s long recovery, he was never dropped from consideration for the role, co-producer Koslow says. “Of course, nobody wanted to have the absolute insensitivity to call and say, ‘Gee, are you getting better?’ ” Koslow says. “So we just waited, and it seemed like he was making a miraculous recovery.”

By December, his six-month commitment to “Jelly” was secure. Producers are hopeful that his presence will bolster the marquee after Hines leaves the show May 2.

Two weeks before the opening, Vereen and Hines sit under a work light on the empty stage and run through their lines. When they launch into a song, Hines sings sotto voce, saving his voice for the evening’s performance. Vereen makes his voice lift and swell to fill the empty theater.

As Hines explains, the choreography designed for Keith David, the original Chimney Man, has not been altered for Vereen. “In the few rehearsals I’ve seen Ben do, already he’s infused it with 100% more movement,” he says. Sometimes, Hines says, cast members will sit in the wings as Vereen rehearses, just to watch him move.

Soon others will be watching too. On Thursday, when Vereen steps out of the shadows and into the light, many of the people who have had a hand in his rebirth will be on hand to see him. His family will be there, of course. Minnelli plans to come. So do Liederbach and Riley and a host of doctors and therapists from Kessler. By now, Vereen says, he’s so eager to go onstage that he may slip into the show as early as Tuesday to test his wings.

But, until then, there is work to be done. As the rehearsal pianist strikes up the show’s opening notes, Vereen and Hines rise from their chairs. Clad in the Chimney Man’s black top hat and white gloves, Vereen makes his entrance, striding majestically downstage. His right foot turns out slightly, a legacy of the stroke, but his movements are fluid and precise. A few minutes later, as they launch into the up-tempo number “Chicago Stomp,” Vereen struts vigorously across the stage and back, arms pumping in front of his chest.

For another actor, the trip across the stage might resemble little more than a brisk walk. But the man on the Virginia Theatre stage is Ben Vereen. And he is dancing.