Dance theater.

On a February night in 1994, about 2,700 curiosity seekers went to City Center to witness the start of an experiment. It was a series called Encores!, and the idea was to resurrect old musicals--not the acknowledged masterpieces, but the ones that would otherwise languish unseen and unheard--in quickie productions poised somewhere between staged readings and straight concerts.

Three shows had been chosen, each to run for four performances. First up was Fiorello!, the 1959 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical about New York's colorfully crusading Mayor La Guardia, who had, in 1943, saved the City Center building from the wrecker's ball. Most of the stage was taken up by the Coffee Club Orchestra, led by Rob Fisher. The decor was a simple skyline. The performers, a roster of Broadway headliners such as Faith Prince and Donna McKechnie, carried their scripts throughout, except during the dance numbers. Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks reverted to his former life as an actor to play Fiorello H. La Guardia and former mayor Ed Koch brought down the house in a cameo appearance as a rival poi. Fiorello! was a triumph, and Encores! was off to a flying start.

Fast-forward to 2003. House of Flowers (which ran in February), The New Moon (March 27-30), and No Strings (May 8-12) are getting the Encores! treatment this season. Chicago, which was the third offering of the '96 season, was moved pretty much intact to Broadway and inspired the hit movie. Encores! offerings now play for five performances, and most of them sell out. Subscribers renew their seats at the astonishing rate of 90 percent without knowing which shows will be done. And critics are still pulling out adjectives like "delicious" and "irresistible" with regularity.

Any way you look at it, the Encores! experiment has been a huge success. And even though the primary impetus for the series is musical--adjustments are routine in the shows' books, but their original scores are religiously adhered to--dance is not ignored. Wherever the show's original audience saw dancing, the Encores! audience sees dancing. The remarkable thing is that it all happens in the ten-foot strip of stage in front of the orchestra.

Kathleen Marshall, the Encores! director-in-residence, has choreographed nine shows for the series, and she says the restrictions compel creativity: "Since you don't have the full stage at your disposal, you're forced to whittle everything down to the essence."

One of the things that makes it a little easier on choreographers is that the series uses each show's original dance arrangements. "You're following somebody else's road map," Marshall says. "And when it's by a master like George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, there's a dance arrangement and an orchestration that makes sense and is inspiring."

The dancers, she says, are always "amazing." For Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, Encores! borrowed Christopher Wheeldon from the New York City Ballet to choreograph the pas de deux originally done by Balanchine, and got NYCB's Jenifer Ringer and Jock Soto to dance it. Sean Martin Hingston, who was a featured dancer in Contact, and Karine Plantadit-Bageot, who does a memorable solo in Movin' Out, are among the dancers who have appeared multiple times in the series.

"We have an incredible alumni list," Marshall says, and Encores! directors and choreographers dip into it repeatedly. "Because of the speed at which we get the shows up," she says, "it's nice to cast veterans who understand the process and aren't freaked out by it."

But the fact is Encores! has become a prized gig for Broadway pros, and the casts are almost always studded with top-tier names. "Because we're a short-term event," says Marshall, "we get people who take vacations from their Broadway shows. We get stars to play supporting parts. When we did Do Re Mi, we had Nathan Lane and Randy Graft as the leads and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Heather Headley as the second couple. The second couple!"

Of course, not every theater company has such deep wells of musical talent on hand. But any local theater that can put on a credible Oklahoma! can dig a little deeper into the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon and put on a dressed-down Allegro, as Encores! did in 1994. They can dust off Call Me Madam and Wonderful Town. They can start their own version of Encores!, as Los Angeles did with Reprise. They can give their audiences the thrill of discovery, while at the same time helping to keep alive America's incredible musical-theater heritage.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.