'CONTACT' MOVES MORE THAN ITS DANCERS.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

For maximum ``Contact'' connection, take time now and again to forget the movement. Admittedly, this won't be easy. Any dance play created by Susan Stroman, one of musical theater's most inventive choreographers, begs its audience to concentrate on some very nimble footwork. Stroman's work is on fine display through the summer at the Ahmanson Theatre. So by all means, watch and admire those flying feet and the agile limbs and bodies to which they're attached.

But remember to look up and study the faces where ``Contact's'' dramatic muscles flex most powerfully. Watch, for example, the sheer ``I can't believe I'm doing this'' bliss of actress Meg Howrey as she transforms a nightmare of a meal into a sweet dream. Or study the torture turned to rapture of Alan Campbell's suicidal ad executive when he partners with a dream girl, changing from a clumping creature out of Mary Shelley to something with a little more grace. Even statuesque Holly Cruikshank, whose swing-club siren is the most striking form on stage, can convey dozens of messages through a series of head shakes. As for Mindy Franzese Wild, who practically authors a new chapter of the Kama Sutra on a flexible swing, well, her thoughts are readable, too.

More than a year after capturing the Best Musical Tony award for 2000, ``Contact'' is finally here, and if the touring production that arrived at the Ahmanson on Sunday isn't quite equal to the show's hype (the New York press has all but canonized Stroman), it's still more than a little bit magical. The narrative power of dance has rarely been tapped in quite this manner. Here is dance as release, as sexual gamesmanship, as longing. Above all, here is dance as a form of liberation. Watching this kind of movement, nobody should feel it odd that this ``musical'' contains neither a live orchestra nor any singing by its cast members.

Like ``3hree,'' which played the Ahmanson before it, ``Contact'' connects its trio of one acts, all different animals, by the vaguest of thematic links. ``Swinging,'' in which Stroman and author John Weidman imagine the scenario behind Jean-Honore Fragonard's 1768 painting, ``The Swing,'' has none of the darkness of the two tales that will follow. Watching a girl (Wild), her aristocrat suitor and his footman (Andrew Asnes and Keith Kuhl) get gymnastically frisky on a swing to Rodgers and Hart's ``My Heart Stood Still,'' we may be wondering what strange fantasy we've stepped into. The piece is acrobatic, playfully racy and - even with its kinky little twist - frothy.

Not so the second sequence, ``Did You Move?'' The forest glade disappears, the score goes classical, and set designer Thomas Lynch transforms the stage into a comfy Italian eatery in 1954 Queens where a cowed wife (Howrey) and her smoldering, abusive husband (Adam Dannheisser) have met for dinner. When he visits the buffet - each time ordering his wife to stay put - she goes into full daydream mode, dancing ecstatic ballet all over the stage. First she's alone, and then she includes the waiters and busboys, and finally the restaurant patrons. No surface or prop is sacred.

``Did You Move?'' contains the weakest of Weidman's dialogue (I know, I know, this is a dance play), leaving Howrey - a marvelous dancer - to get her point across through all the things she can't say. The different emotions that cross her face at the end speak as eloquently as the vaulting and pirouetting. ``Did You Move?'' could be facile. Howrey - picking up the mantle from Tony winner Karen Ziemba - keeps it honest and very poignant.

Then there's Michael Wiley and his Girl in the Yellow Dress, aka Segment No. 3, aka ``The Price of Admission.''

The hour-long segment is flat-out stunning as only the choicest fantasies are. It's more than simply the manic desperation of Alan Campbell or the va-va-voom grace of Cruikshank, who makes an awful color look fantastic. This dark night of the soul, set in an after-hours swing club, is the coolest depiction of salvation in recent memory.

It begins with Campbell's Michael drunkenly accepting his fifth award for some pointless campaign. The honor - and, by extension, his very existence - are worthless, and as Michael returns home to an empty apartment and an answering machine full of nattering messages, he breaks out the pills and the nooses. Enough, he figures, is enough.

After botching the suicide attempt, he ventures out into the night, ending up in a smoky swing club where Benny Goodman, Bobby Freeman and the Beach Boys alternate on the jukebox, and some very able dancers demonstrate how truly empty poor Michael's life truly is. He can't dance, can't make contact, even when Cruikshank's nameless, wordless Girl in the Yellow Dress clearly wants him to do both. They'd be a great pair, if they could ever connect.

If the piece ends predictably, Stroman and Weidman can be forgiven. With ``Contact,'' they've given a high-energy odyssey, by turns sultry, meaningful, frolicsome and endlessly creative. As dark as matters get, the creators clearly hope there's a Girl in the Yellow Dress in our future, too.

``CONTACT''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; through Sept. 1.

Tickets: $25 to $75. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Meg Howrey leaps for joy in ``Did You Move?'' - the second of three acts of the musical ``Contact,'' now at the Ahmanson.