Dance theater.

HERE'S THE SAD REALITY OF TODAY'S BROADWAY: If your very favorite musical were produced--with love and care and a suitable budget--it would probably be a flop. Not an immediate, disastrous flop, because it's probably going to have other fans besides you, and plenty of people who've always wanted to see it and never have. But it's probably not going to have enough fans to give it the kind of long run--a couple of years, at least--that would allow it to pay back its investors.

Some shows pull it off: As I write, Cabaret, Chicago, and 42nd Street are still going strong, and the jury is still out on three of the season's new revivals, Gypsy, Nine, and Man of La Mancha. But recent seasons have seen beloved musicals--Oklahoma!, Follies, Flower Drum Song, Bells Are Ringing, On the Town, The Boys From Syracuse--fall flat with critics and audiences. And even as the invaluable Encores! series resuscitates under-appreciated shows from the past (see Dance Theater, DANCE MAGAZINE, April, page 66), it often demonstrates just why they ran into trouble in the first place.

So what are we to do with all that gorgeous, gorgeous music from shows that are not going to be produced again any time soon, if ever? It seems criminal that some of the most glorious achievements of twentieth-century American culture might never again be heard in a theater. Leave it to the dancemakers to come riding to the rescue. Jerome Robbins salvaged bits and pieces of his choreography for West Side Story and knitted them into West Side Story Suite, giving New York City Ballet audiences a chance to watch Tony and Maria fall in love one more time, a chance to listen once again to those brilliant Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim songs. One of City Ballet's hits this season is Carousel (A Dance), Christopher Wheeldon's magnificent homage to the 1945 landmark musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Without even alluding to clambakes or graduations or dockside robberies, Wheeldon manages to distill the essence of Carousel: the magnetic attraction between a tough carnival roustabout and a prim factory girl in the whirl of a New England summer.

In the old days it worked the other way around: The folks from Broadway would come to the ballet, see Robbins's Fancy Free, and decide to expand it into a two-act Broadway musical. That's how On the Town was born. But times have changed, and there's no reason to complain that the traffic is all in the other direction nowadays. In fact, ballet could well be the salvation of Broadway musicals that are too hokey to act but too splendid to forget. Carousel and West Side Story probably don't belong in that bunch, but by all accounts the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer musical St. Louis Woman does. It, too, is getting a second life thanks to ballet people. This summer's Lincoln Center Festival opens on July 8 with the world premiere of Dance Theatre of Harlem's hour-long jazz-tap-ballet take on St. Louis Woman.

The musical ran for only 113 performances when it opened in 1946--with Pearl Bailey making her Broadway debut and a book by the Harlem Renaissance writers Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen. But the musical, with its turn-of-the-century racetrack setting, has what DTH's Arthur Mitchell calls a "luscious" score, and it's had its share of adherents over the years. (The Encores! production with Vanessa Williams is available on CD.) "It's one of those stories," says Mitchell, "that everyone's heard about but no one has seen." It was Mitchell's idea to turn it into a ballet for his company, and he tapped Michael Smuin to do the choreography.

"It just screams to be danced," says Smuin, who has worked on Broadway and also adapted plays and movies into ballets for his own San Francisco-based company. "It's about fast women and fast money and all that great music." He concedes that the show's story is dated and its characters stereotypes--but Mitchell gave him a free hand to reshape and streamline. "It's not a matter of adding to it," he says. "It's a matter of taking away."

And that may be the secret: If you take your favorite musical, and strip away everything that doesn't work, you could well be left with--a dance!

Sylviane Gold writes about theater for Newsday and other titles.