I am on a dance kick as of late, so here is one of my favorite numbers from Holiday Inn (1942) with some insight into Fred Astaire's thought process behind it. It took him 3 days of rehearsals. At the end his shoes were auctioned off to support the Naval Relief Society, fetching $116,000. I cannot write this any better than he could, so here is a paragraph from Astaire's Steps in Time autobiography.
"I had a solo dance that paid off for me. The firecracker number, in which I threw torpedoes to explode in a rhythmic conglomeration with my feet, took an awful lot of planning and rehearsing. I also had the stage wired to set off what looked like strings of firecrackers with visible flashes as I stepped in certain spots. It was a great satisfaction, that dance, being able to explode things expressing emphasis on beats here and there. Sometimes you want to bang your feet down so hard in a tap dance that you get shin-bucked or stone-bruised. In this one I had a completely satisfactory outlet with those dynamic noises"
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