How a 79-year-old Film Director Learned to “Fly” on a Trapeze

It’s Never Too Late is a series about people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.

There are people who dream of directing a play or a movie. The director Tom Moore has done both. But he has always dreamed of “flying.”

“It was a childhood fantasy,” said Mr. Moore, 79, a film, TV and theater director whose credits include the original Broadway production of “Grease” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “’Night, Mother.”

“I liked the circus, but loved the ultimate act, which was the trapeze,” he said. “I would wait for that.”

But Mr. Moore never thought he had the athletic ability to swing, stretch out, then fly from a long horizontal bar, often 30 feet in the air. He wasn’t good at baseball, and, at 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds, he was too small for football at West Lafayette High School, in Indiana. “I just assumed I was not good at sports,” he said.

So instead of running off to join the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Mr. Moore, who grew up in Meridian, Miss., before moving to Indiana, went to the Yale School of Drama. He did rather well, with “Grease” on Broadway back in 1972, which ran for more than 3,300 performances; the show “Over Here!” with the newcomers John Travolta, Marilu Henner and Treat Williams; and the play “’Night, Mother,” which he also directed for the 1986 film starring Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft.

His TV credits include episodes of the 1980s drama “Thirtysomething,” “ER,” “Felicity” and “Ally McBeal.” Along the way he was nominated for two Tonys and three Emmys. (More recently, he coedited the book “Grease, Tell Me More, Tell Me More,” for the Broadway show’s 50th anniversary this year.)

Around the age of 50, after the demise of a relationship, he was looking for new adventures. (He is single now and cheekily describes his longtime partners as “a series of valued novellas rather than the one great American novel.”) In 1996, while on vacation at the now-defunct resort Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico, he was drawn to a trapeze rig on the beach, and signed up.

Trapeze was a perfect blend of theatricality and athleticism, and he loved it. He made a “catch” — that is, he managed to grasp the bar in midair — on his first try, and even took part in a show at the end of the week.

This spoke to his nascent acting ambitions. “I was never a good actor,” he admitted. “Acting is all about revealing and opening oneself up, and I couldn’t do it.” But…