Dancing Till They Drop

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?

AUTHOR: MUSIC BY ROBERT SPRAYBERRY; LYRICS AND BOOK BY NAGLE JACKSON

WHERE: DENVER CENTER THEATER

THE BOTTOM LINE: A gritty Depression-era musical with Broadway potential.

FEW KINDS OF CIVIC BETTERMENT have enjoyed wider approval than the regional nonprofit theater movement. But the acclaim has tended to obscure three dirty little secrets. First, many of these institutions have been afflicted with an edifice complex, caring more about glistening facilities than about what goes on inside them. Second, the regional houses have been loath to risk developing new plays and, even more, new musicals. Third, at many of them the acting is mainly mediocre. A seeming example of the first and third shortcomings is the Denver Center Theater. The four-stage complex is as impressive an array of arts buildings as can be found short of New York City or Los Angeles, but the resident company is sometimes plain embarrassing.

When it comes to new works, however, hardly a troupe in America has so rich a record. Denver has sent Quilters to Broadway, Hyde in Hollywood to American Playhouse on PBS, and Circe and Bravo and Veterans Day to London's West End, among others. At the moment, the troupe has four full-scale premieres on its stages, and next month brings staged readings of eight more.

By far the most ambitious of the current efforts is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The gritty, poignant musical about a Depression-era dance marathon is derived from the same Horace McCoy novel as the 1969 film starring Gig Young and Jane Fonda. The phenomenon of the endurance dance is grimly compelling in itself: couples shuffling around the clock for months, withstanding exhaustion, injury and humiliation in pursuit of the cash prize for the last pair standing. But the script evokes the '80s as well as the '30s and suggests the sick symbiosis, then and now, between would-be stars grabbing at a grimy corner of show business and the prurient, prying public come to watch.

Unlike a British adaptation a few years ago that relied on well-chosen period tunes, this Horses features a good new score, blending old-fashioned novelty numbers and ballads with contemporary character songs for fully a dozen roles. In the exquisite ensemble number Sunday Morning, a lilting series of one- and two-line vignettes recalls the everyday normality that the contestants once enjoyed and that the Depression destroyed. But while Nagle Jackson's book is shrewdly and tightly constructed, his lyrics frequently sound clankingly obvious and unrevealingly generic ("We found the Depression depressing, and so we just went on dancing").

Director Alan Bailey and designers Andrew Yelusich (sets and costumes) and Charles MacLeod (lights) achieve just the right balance between the seedy and the dreamlike in this California pierside. Most of the 25 actors are only adequate, however, and not one has a first-rate singing voice. Jeff McCarthy has a sledgehammer unsubtlety as the unscrupulous impresario Rocky, Thomas Nahrwold is bland in the underwritten lead role of a failed film director, and Kathy Morath plays his despairing partner with an unrelenting snarl.

The Denver company's managers are hoping to see this show go on to Broadway. That will take significant rewriting and much recasting. But at the swaying and footsore end of that marathon should be a prize worthy of the struggle.