LaDuca Shoes, seen on Broadway dancers in everything from Aladdin to Wicked, may be handmade in Italy, but they are celebrating 25 years as a Hell’s Kitchen company. Phil LaDuca stepped up to tell us his silver-lined story.
The innovative, flexible “character” shoes are designed to allow dancers to point, flex and leap in comfort without sacrificing style. These shoes have become a global theatrical standard. They are the chosen footwear for long-running Main Stem hits such as The Book of Mormon and Moulin Rouge, as well as newer productions like Lempicka, The Wiz, Cabaret and Tommy. Beyond Broadway, these shoes also grace the feet of the famed Radio City Rockettes. They have even appeared in concert performances by stars like Shania Twain, Cher, Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Katy Perry during her Super Bowl Halftime Show, among others.
Under the leadership of founder and CEO Phil LaDuca, Chief Creative Officer and designer Brian Bustos — a Hell’s Kitchen resident — and a dedicated staff of sales associates, the LaDuca brand has shone.
This year, the brand plans to celebrate its 25th anniversary in a grand style. How? By introducing a special line of custom silver-and-diamond-accented character heels during the store’s annual “LaSale”. Phil shared the exciting news with this reporter, a former sales associate of the brand.
Our conversation took place on a bustling Friday, amidst the team’s fervent preparations for the upcoming Broadway season at their W45th Street store. “I always say, ‘If you’re going to do a custom shoe, make sure people know it’s a custom shoe,’” said Phil. “A lot of our shoes are quite classic, but I love playing with design.”
The initial design for LaDuca Shoes was anything but classic. A Broadway performer himself in shows like Brigadoon, Pirates of Penzance, and Singin’ in the Rain, Phil was intimately aware of the biggest pitfall of dancing in “hard sole” theatrical footwear. “If I hadn’t popped a disc in Vienna, there would be no LaDuca Shoes,” he said of the compounding injuries he sustained during both performing and choreographing thousands of shows. “It’s always that twist of fate that makes you change directions.”
For Phil, the twist of fate came in 1997 while teaching at a ballroom convention in Germany. “I ran into a dance shop owner who wanted to know a good shoe for jazz dance,” he told W42ST, “and I said, ‘Well, there’s a jazz slipper, a dance sneaker, and heeled character shoes.’ He said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of shoes!’ and I kind of off-handedly said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there was a shoe that can do everything?’. He replied, ‘Why not?’”
Despite his “not knowing anything about shoes,” Phil said, the shopkeeper put him in touch with the family-owned Elata shoe factory in Casarano — appropriately “right down on the heel of Italy”. There, he asked proprietors Salvatore and Paolo if there was a way to construct a shoe that presented as street footwear, but functioned as a flexible dance shoe. “They looked at each other like, ‘This guy is crazy,’” laughed Phil. “They said, ‘That’s the wrong way to make a shoe’ — and I said, ‘make me a wrong shoe.’”
The ensuing prototypes, and very first models (a flexible boot no longer available in the LaDuca line) made their way stateside in 2000 when Phil was back in New York, recovering from back surgery. He asked a colleague at Broadway Dance Center if they would let him sell his shoes in the lobby. “I would push this little storage cabinet out on the third floor of Broadway Dance Center, and put out my shoes,” said Phil. “A good week, to me, was selling three pairs.”
While Phil’s fellow dancers were enjoying their newly flexible footwear, LaDuca shoes might have stayed a successful side hustle if it weren’t for a fortuitous call from The Radio City Rockettes. “The wardrobe mistress, Barbara, was one tough cookie,” said Phil. “She called me and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, but one of my dancers will only dance in your boots — I can’t have one girl in a different boot because everyone will want one, so I’m going to give you a try.’”
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The trial run led to a massive, multi-design account with the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and Phil quickly found himself outnumbered by shoes in his 9th Avenue apartment. “I had people like Sandy Duncan and Twyla Tharp coming to my apartment, which was filled with boxes, and saying, ‘Phil, you have got to get a store,’” he added. Finding availability in the ground-floor space of his building (534 9th Ave bw W39/40th St), Phil set up shop in Hell’s Kitchen — an ideal location, he said, for its adjacency to the Theater District and his own loyalty to the neighborhood as a resident. “Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, loyalty was first to family, then to your neighborhood,” he said. “I felt that in Hell’s Kitchen — there was the Stiles Fruit Market, the Greek deli on the corner, the Italian woman who baked bread, the fish market — it just felt like a neighborhood, and I was very protective of it.”
The store and the brand flourished, with Phil expanding the line not only to outfit the Rockettes and other Broadway shows, but also expanding his designs to include homages to famous dancers that he has worked with or been inspired by, including Ann Reinking, Elizabeth Parkinson, Bob Fosse, Rachelle Rak and Luigi. “I designed the lasts [the model to which each shoe style is fit on],” Phil said. “I never studied design, never studied engineering, it’s all just common sense — I’m a dancer and I know where the balance needs to be.”
After ten years, the shop moved to their next home at 319 W47th Street (bw 8/9th Ave, now home to HK Best Barbers), where they remained until 2019, when they moved to their largest flagship yet at 517 W45th Street (bw 10/11th Ave). The intervening years had seen massive growth for the brand — in addition to an ever-increasing portfolio of Broadway shows, the company had expanded to film, TV and concert design work, in part thanks to Phil’s move to California. “I joke when people ask, ‘What brought you to California?’ I say, ‘Katy Perry,’” he told W42ST of his long working relationship with the pop star and her stylist, Johnny Wujek. Winning the Super Bowl Halftime Show spot “was huge” and “the worldwide reach was powerful,” he said.
The worldwide reach eventually led to the fulfillment of a longtime dream. to open a London location of LaDuca Shoes. There was “a big demand” for the brand to be able to serve the massive West End theatrical market, he added, and despite the challenges of finding partners to help him open the business from continents away, the store opened in 2019.
The curtain came down, however, in March 2020 — as the theater industry, and the world, shut down indefinitely. The yearly LaSale – previously an in-store event designed to help alleviate the brand of extra custom shoes and discarded Broadway designs — pivoted online, a move that Phil said “saved the company” during the uncertain quarantine period. In just a few weeks, “we made half of the yearly sales,” said Phil of the newly-incorporated online sale. While excited dancers still line up on the sidewalk to camp out in hopes of snagging a limited design, the brand plans to keep the online portion of the sale event. “We’ve opened the box — Pandora’s box,” he laughed.
The brand has seen other changes, too — like the rollout of a more inclusive shade range and the early stages of designing a new non-binary boot to better fit dancers of all genders. They’ve also kicked a leg into the popular Australian market, with an eye on potentially opening a third LaDuca location “Down Under,” he added. “Behind Broadway and the West End, that’s the biggest market.”
And as the company embarks on its next quarter-century of operation, Phil reflected on the last 25 years of LaDuca Shoes and what he’d learned. “Listen to dancers,” he said. “And — I always say, ‘I’m not the star, the shoes are the star.”
I can’t wait to get a pair and I loved reading Phil’s story.
I remember walking past that store on Ninth Avenue & stopping to stare longingly at the window, thinking “someday”. I told everyone I knew to go look at the most beautiful shoes that I had ever seen. I never longed for a pair of Manolos, only a pair of LaDucas.