Dancing for a Tony.

Last year around this time I was hoping that Kander and Ebb's Chicago would make it to Broadway after its highly successful revival at City Center's Encores! series. And did it ever! Now the show is indeed on Broadway and has won Tonys for its dancing stars Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth, plus the coveted Astaire awards for best choreographer (Ann) and best female dancer (a joint award this year: Ann and Bebe). Yes, it's good, if not logical, to have double "bests" -- the first such Astaire award in sixteen years.

Theatre Development Fund (TDF), sponsor of the Astaire awards, also administers, among other things, New York City's TKTS discount-ticket booths and a collection of 75,000 costumes available for minimum rental. This year TDF staged a cabaret-style presentation ceremony. Top showbiz names, relaxing with their peers, made it an all-star event in with past Astaire winners Tommy Tune cracking in-jokes, Wayne Cilento declaring he wants to return to dancing while directing, and Donna McKechnie promoting her solo show with a number about a tryst with Fred. His widow, Robin, introduced a short but exhilarating selection of film clips from his many performances.

A few days later Chicago raked in its Tonys. Reinking scored again as choreographer and Neuwirth triumphed as best leading actress in a musical.

It was hardly likely, however, that composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb would be given more Tonys for their latest collaboration, Steel Pier it closed last June. Though the show had eleven Tony nominations, including one for choreographer Susan Stroman [Dance Magazine, April 1996, page 63], a past winner of a Tony and an Astaire, it came away without a single statuette.

Pier was something very special for Stroman. "I really put so much of myself into this show," she had told me earlier. "Both the locale, Atlantic City, where I used to go as a kid in the summer, and the era the show's set in have a special appeal for me. It was a very rich period for social dance, and I pulled on it heavily for the show." Stroman had spent over a year steeping herself in the days of Lindbergh and the Great Depression, the time of dance-marathon competitions and wing walkers who danced the Charleston on top of planes in air shows (an idea incorporated into Pier emulating the number in RKO's 1933 Flying Down to Rio).

She investigated so-called animal dances like the monkey, grizzly bear, fishtail shag, and bunny hop, along with such better known ballroom favorites as the fox-trot, quickstep, lindy hop, Castle walk, polka, tango, and rumba, spinning out choreography that became the very fabric of the musical. Many of these dances, such as the mooche, were so ephemeral they disappeared after a few months, she says. Others, of course, are still with us, alive and being healthily taught in ballroom classes, glamorized to twinkle at dance competions, or transmogrified into something entirely different, such as that newest of hybrids, the sports dance.

There hadn't been much in the press about the skills of the dancers in Steel Pier who to my mind are some of the best of Broadway's gypsies. "Although they are beautiful dancers who can sing and act," says Stroman, "I wanted them to look like real people in a ballroom." Leslie Bell, Ida Gilliams, Angelique Ilo, Dana Lynn Mauro, Elizabeth Mills, and Casey Nicholaw are all alumni from Stroman's previous hit, Crazy for You; and the rest of the troupe have, for the most part, strong Broadway backgrounds, Partnered dancing was a novelty for them, however. Says Nicholaw, "At first we found it unusually hard; it seemed like a whole new thing."

If dance were the only yardstick by which a show were rated, Steel Pier would have been a serious Tony contender. Titanic, which won the award for best musical, features only one brief and somewhat conventional tea-dance sequence staged on the deck of the doomed ocean liner. Dream, staged by Wayne Cilento [Dance Magazine, March, page 106], failed to win him a Tony this time, though there were some rattling good numbers in it. The Life, set in Times Square circa 1980 before its clean-up, when it was inhabited by hookers and pimps, had a dozen nominations yet garnered only two awards, for best featured actress and actor (Lillias White and Chuck Cooper, respectively). As a show it makes Sweet Charity look like Little Mary Sunshine. The hardworking dancers toil to invest Joey McNeely's choreography, featuring more bumps and grinds than even a manic gogo girl might deliver, with energetic appeal. Like everything else in this gaudy melodrama of a musical, from Martin Pakledinaz's eye-cracking costumes to Cy Coleman's raucous score, elegant it ain't.

Judith Dolan's Tony-winning costumes for the latest revival of Bernstein's Candide (the show's only award) struck a motley note, perfectly setting off Patricia Birch's ingenious choreography. Birch is a Candide veteran, having worked with director Harold Prince on a previous production. This time around she says she visualized the characters "through funhouse mirrors," deftly dovetailing the action with the songs and dialogue so that everything bubbled merrily along. The traveling-sideshow motif, with characters exuberantly tumbling out of a circus wagon, gives the dancers a chance to show off their acrobatics. As the Old Lady, vivacious Andrea Martin brings particular skills to the show-stopping number "I Am Easily Assimilated" as she sings and dances with bearded dons in heel-tapping, cloak-flashing Spanish style.

All in all, the past Broadway season may not have been the greatest from a musical point of view, but it had its strengths where choreography was used. If shows cannot be shaped through dance, as Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse, Reinking, and Stroman have done, then we may be destined to be trapped on the Titanics of the musical -- Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, and Jekyll and Hyde -- where all the movement seems to be done by the scenery. For my part, I say what a song from Steel Pier demanded: Everybody dance!