We Have Contact

By TERRY TEACHOUT

In the '60s, broadway and musical comedy were all but synonymous. Of late, though, the Great White Way has become a neon-lit recycling bin for tributes (Fosse), revivals (Annie Get Your Gun, Cabaret), retread movies (Footloose) and British imports that were creatively dead on arrival (any Andrew Lloyd Webber show). Yes, Stephen Sondheim still strikes sparks, while a few up-and-comers, especially Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins), show signs of vibrant life. But it's long past time for something really fresh. Contact, the exhilarating dance play by choreographer Susan Stroman and writer John Weidman that opened last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is just what the play doctor ordered.

Contact consists of three spoken one-act dramas--Stroman calls them short stories--performed by dancer-actors and accompanied by a delectably eclectic jukebox of recordings by everybody from Benny Goodman and Stephane Grappelli to Robert Palmer and the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Nobody onstage sings a note. In Swinging, Fragonard's 1767 painting of an aristocratic young lady (Stephanie Michels) frolicking in a forest glade becomes a real-life menage a trois even kinkier than it looks. Did You Move?, set in an Italian restaurant in Queens circa 1954, is a bittersweet vignette about an unhappy housewife (Karen Ziemba) who takes refuge in increasingly wild fantasies of life as a ballerina. Contact, the finale, shows what happens when a despondent advertising man (Boyd Gaines) botches a suicide attempt, wanders into a swing-dancing joint and lays eyes on a mysterious dish dressed in yellow (Deborah Yates).

All this may sound implausible on paper--how can you have a musical without singers?--but the results are magical, especially when seen on the three-quarter-round stage of a theater so intimate that you can look every performer right in the eye. "We use real theater dancers, Broadway dancers, because they're such strong actors," Stroman explains. "It's almost like a dance company and an acting company coming together." The feel is that of a trio of exquisitely tooled MGM-style production numbers, but updated (Fred Astaire didn't use the F word in The Band Wagon) and given emotional weight. Each playlet is peopled with lonely hearts longing to reach out to someone, and when they finally touch, your own heart will do all the singing necessary.

The most affecting performance is that of Ziemba, a hugely admired Broadway veteran whose face, a clown's mask of quiet desperation, suddenly dissolves into maniacal glee as she hears music in her head, grabs the headwaiter and pulls him into a clinch. The happiest surprise is Yates, a svelte ex-Rockette with legs that could make an archbishop sweat. But all the pistons in this engine stroke in the right order, and while you won't recognize any of the names unless you're a theater buff, their collective star quality is unquestionable.

In the end, the true star of the show is Stroman. Broadway discovered her in 1992 with Crazy for You, the all-Gershwin musical whose fast-moving, plot-driven choreography won her a well-deserved Tony (and which, doubtless not by coincidence, will be telecast Oct. 20 on PBS in a revival by the Paper Mill Playhouse). But Contact may be the vehicle that finally gives her the name-above-the-title standing of a Bob Fosse or Jerome Robbins. Whether crafting a wicked ballet parody or a jet-propelled swing-dance version of Sing, Sing, Sing, she knows how to bring every square inch of a stage to fizzing, finger-popping life. Working in tandem with Weidman, her equally celebrated collaborator (his third musical with Sondheim, Wise Guys, opens later this season), she uses dance to plumb the deepest desires--with the lightest of touches.

In recent weeks, Stroman, a native of Wilmington, Del., who is cheerfully coy about her age ("You can say that I feel and look 33"), has taken on the becoming flush of a woman who wonders if she might possibly have a smash hit on her hands. "I love stories," she says. "I have a million stories to tell. If Lincoln Center right now said to me, 'Do a Contact 2,' I could, absolutely." It's a lovely idea, but there's one catch: Contact 1 may be monopolizing the Newhouse Theater well into the next millennium.