Shoe-In
Phil LaDuca has a retail space on New York City’s Ninth Avenue that’s not much larger than a cobbler’s shop. A pedestrian passing it on the way to the Cupcake Café or the Port Authority bus terminal might look at the display of shoes in the fellow’s window, decide that they’re a good deal fancier than shoes in most repair stores, and then keep going without noticing the large inventory of shoes in the appropriately shoe box-shaped interior or realizing that LaDuca is shoemaker for most of the musicals on Broadway.
At this location for only three and a half years and in business for only five — he initially worked from his kitchen — LaDuca has gone from a first-year income of $60,000 to a fifth year wherein revenues have exceeded $1 million. They’re wearing his shoes in Movin’ Out, Spamalot, The Producers, Hairspray, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, All Shook Up, Chicago, The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee, and even Wicked, for which LaDuca didn’t at first supply the footwear but does now. He has also shod performers in major productions in Japan, London, Rio, and Vienna, and his shoes will be seen in the recently completed film version of The Producers.
What’s the secret of his success? Well, it’s a broken shank and an elastic gusset. That’s right, show fans: Former hoofer LaDuca spent many of his dancing days wondering how to make a so-called “character shoe” that would allow him and his colleagues to achieve maximum extension of the foot in order to complete that much-desired long line of the leg. “I noticed that Randy Skinner, the choreographer, and the great dancer Gregg Burge always broke the shank of their shoes,” says the affable and enthusiastic LaDuca in reference to that part of the shoe which connects the sole to the heel. “But it’s not enough to make the shank flexible; the leather needs to stretch. If you stretch it too much, it loses its shape. So I got the idea of putting in an elastic gusset. You ask, ‘Why didn’t somebody think of this before?’ But nobody did.” So, seven or eight years after he began thinking about the need for a new shoe, he was in business.
With his dancer’s figure and saber-trimmed sideburns, LaDuca wouldn’t look out of place in West Side Story, a show in which he has toured. He’s seated at the back of his decidedly less than fancy shop. The only nod to style among the ceiling-high shelves of white shoe boxes is some leopard-skin material on a narrow banquette where a customer may sit. Opposite it is the long desk at which LaDuca does everything from designing to tackling administrative duties. While ruminating, he can focus on a wall of framed posters, costume designers’ drawings, and photographs of himself beaming happily alongside the likes of dancer-choreographer Ann Reinking and clothing designer Anna Sui.
Join him at his desk and you will see a drawing for a Doctor Dolittle costume, the production on which he’s laboring at the moment and for which he will eventually have to make “80 or 90 pairs of shoes.” (The show begins its national tour in Pittsburgh next week.) To be precise, LaDuca won’t make them himself; as he freely admits, “I am not a cobbler, and I had to force myself to become a businessman.”
His shoes are actually made by the Nicolazzo family. Recalls LaDuca, “Somebody said to me, ‘There’s a factory in Italy that makes shoes, and if you can explain your design, they can make them.’ After a year, I was their biggest client. They were never a dance-shoe company, really a fashion-shoe company. I told them what a dancer needs and they taught me how to make a shoe.” He took his lessons from the 28-worker-strong Nicolazzo establishment very seriously, and has since spent additional time perfecting a streamlined, dancer-friendly last for his product.
But what really put LaDuca on the map is “The LaDuca Strap.” Look at many dance shoes and you’ll see a T-strap. “You’re a genius, boy, but I don’t like a T-strap,” LaDuca quotes set and costume designer Santo Loquasto as saying to him. So LaDuca wasted no time in altering the T to a Y, which is now his signature and has been dubbed the Cherie. Why? It’s the shoe man’s tribute to dancer Cherie Bower, whom he partnered 25 years ago in Broadway’s Brigadoon revival and almost married. (The couple didn’t end up legally putting their shoes under the same bed, but LaDuca says that Cherie — with whom he’s lost touch — is now using the surname LaDuca anyway!)
Always ready to get up and demonstrate with a dancer’s finesse how the pointed foot looks in his generally round-toe shoe, LaDuca reports that his first customer was Radio City, where the Rockettes still sport his shoes. His first Broadway gig was The Producers. “I knew Susan Stroman before she was Equity,” he says. She apparently liked what he had to tell her about his idea and saw to it that he was signed on for the show. Throughout the smash musical’s Little Old Lady Land sequence, the comically doddering blue-hairs wear LaDuca’s popular Mary Jane-like model, which goes for $185 in the shop.
But some of his most satisfied customers aren’t in particular shows. For instance, costume designer Ann Hould-Ward once brought in Eartha Kitt, who was still pining over a pair of shoes she’d lost when doing her 1950 Paris revue. She had a picture of herself wearing the shoe, which featured a heel that looked like a stack of ball bearings. Could LaDuca duplicate the style? He wasn’t so sure that he could, but he sent the shoe to the Nicolazzos, who recognized the heel. Miracle of miracles, they had originally manufactured the shoe.
The parade of celebs and socialites to Ninth Avenue continues. LaDuca laughs as he tells me, “One woman said, ‘I’ve got my Manolo Blahniks, my Jimmy Choos and my Phil LaDucas. Now I’m complete.’ ” Another well-heeled lady barged through LaDuca’s door exclaiming, “Your store was the topic of conversation at a cocktail party last night. I had to be the first in Potomac, Maryland to own a pair of your shoes.” He raves about size-8-shoe Brooke Shields, the first of his customers to ever declare, “My feet aren’t big enough.” And he mentions a note from Meryl Streep.
When Jeff Goldblum was getting ready to play Harold Hill in the Pittsburgh CLO’s Music Man last summer, his girlfriend Catherine Wreford, a Broadway dancer, told him “You have to wear LaDuca shoes.” LaDuca says that the satisfied consumer later “gave me his phone number and said, ‘If you need anything, call me.’ ” Then LaDuca pulls out a picture of Antonio Banderas and talks about being flown to Los Angeles for a half-hour meeting with the star. (“He asked for me personally!”) There’s a signed photograph of Michael Crawford: LaDuca had made ankle-high green leather boots for the star to wear in Dance of the Vampires and, after the show closed, Crawford signed them and sent them back to their creator. On his computer, LaDuca accesses a picture of the $2,300 boots he made for rock legend Steve Tyler — his most expensive specialty item to date.
With LaDuca having passed the million-dollar-per-annum mark, with women pulling up to the curb in limousines and three-quarter-length red fox coats, and with 25 percent of his business now in fashion shoes, how long can it be before he’s the proprietor of a Madison Avenue store? Maybe not long at all; he’s already looking for a Los Angeles location, plus a knowledgeable manager. And he has signed a deal with Bloch, the huge Australian footwear firm, to “knock myself off before anyone else does.” When he looks at what he’s accomplished and the beautiful people with whom he’s associating, he asks himself, “Am I here because of my dancing? No, I’m here because of my shoes.”
