Broadway's siren call.

Any hard-working choreographer facing the uncertainties of fundraising, low grants, sporadic work, and recital dates might be tempted to heed Broadway's siren call. Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, Jerome Robbins, and Lar Lubovitch -- to name a few -- have done so. This year a number of established choreographers who don't usually work on, or even off, Broadway are working on musical shows. Currently Garth Fagan is choreographing The Lion King, Mark Morris is directing as well as choreographing The Capeman, Eliot Feld rechoreographed On the Town for the New York Shakespeare Festival's Central Park season, and Doug Varone has taken on The Triumph of Love, a musical based on the comedy by an eighteenth-century playwright, which opens this month at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

For Varone Triumph is a step forward and also a look back. "I grew up wanting to be a tap dancer." he says. "From eleven on, I took part in every kind of school and amateur theatricals -- Oklahoma!; Kiss Me, Kate; South Pacific; Hello, Dolly!; et al. -- and summer stock while still at school in Syossett, New York. I always felt Broadway was the direction I was going to move in. Living on Long Island, I could get in to see all the shows. I vividly remember one of my first, Oliver!, in 1963. But when I went to Purchase College I realized there was another way to speak in terms of movement; I became intrigued with creating dance. Purchase gives you a wonderful overview of styles -- Graham, Cunningham, Limon. Your body becomes a honed tool, then your mind begins to figure out the direction your body wants to move in."

Renouncing the notion that he was destined to become the next big Broadway star, Varone committed himself to finding his way in the contemporary dance world; he joined the Limon company and then Lubovitch's, eventually forming his own group. In 1996 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. "I hate pretense in dance," he says. "One of the things that always impressed me about movies -- and I'm a film devotee -- was the spontaneity of dance, how on a moment's notice they began to move. Without specifically using film's dance vernacular, it's the direction of the movement style I'm creating. I don't throw away technique; I want to incorporate it in a spontaneous event, a sense of happening for the moment, so people say, `Was that improv?' But it's all carefully choreographed."

Triumph came about through an earlier collaboration with director Michael Mayer on America Dreaming off-Broadway that had found them theatrically compatible. After they initially worked together on a production of Triumph last year for Center Stage in Baltimore, Mayer has assembled a cast for Broadway that includes Betty Buckley, Susan Egan (the first Beauty in the musical Beauty and the Beast), and Robert LuPone.

Initially Varone found it difficult to work with actors who can move. "I was used to my dancers, who have great intuition.... They don't ask questions. [The actors are] great collaborators but question, Would my character do this here? What is the motivation?' ... At first it took a lot of getting used to, because it stops the flow of imagination." After Triumph was staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven last January, it looked to many as if it will indeed be just that. Meanwhile Doug Varone and Dancers have been busy on tour overseas and in the U.S. Next February they'll be appearing at the Joyce Theater again in New York City.

One transition from ballet to Broadway took place some years back for British choreographer Gillian Lynne, known on these shores for her work in musicals such as Cats and Phantom of the Opera. A soloist with Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet at sixteen, she got her big break years later after producer David Merrick spotted some of her contemporary dances at the Edinburgh Festival. He recommended that she choreograph Cats which on June 19, at its 6,138th performance at the Winter Garden, passed A Chorus Line as the longest running show on Broadway.

"It's a special year for me," says Lynne. She was recently awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire). Currently she is engaged as director, choreographer, and cowriter of Burt Bacharach's new musical, What the World Wants Now, slated for a Roundabout Theatre workshop next year.

Always on the go, Lynne, a lively, svelte seventy-one, does a vigorous daily exercise program and insists on full workouts before rehearsals; she demonstrates the over-the-head kicks, splits, and pirouettes she wants from her dancers. "Energy breeds energy" is one of her dicta. "You don't really get anywhere resting," she says. "You have to have passion or not do it at all." Often it's tough being the only woman on a team on Broadway or in the West End: "But as you can see, I'm a survivor." Like Cats.