Disco On Stage? Mamma Mia!

EVER SINCE AGNES DE MILLE redefined the American musical by giving the cowboys in Oklahoma! cowboy dances to do, choreographers have faced the challenge of making a show's dance numbers work within the context of the story. Over the years, dancing baseball players, dancing Hasids and even dancing dishes have all had their moment on Broadway. But what would appear on the face of it to be the simplest kind of dance interlude to create has been fairly hard to find: Broadway has seen very few successful dance numbers in which contemporary characters dance to a contemporary dance tune.

Not that it's impossible. As will be borne out by a quick trip to the video store, one of the most brilliant sequences in a musical replete with brilliant sequences is the gym dance Jerome Robbins created for the street kids of West Side Story. No one who saw Sweet Charity will forget the deliciously arch "Rich Man's Frug" choreographed by Bob Fosse. And Susan Stroman's marvelous way with the lindy is on view in Contact on Broadway right now.

But overall, theater choreographers have not had a particularly impressive record with such moments. Audiences have not been going to see Footloose, which is touring the country through May, and Saturday Night Fever, still running in New York at the Minskoff Theater, for the dancing--even though the ostensible subject of those musicals is dance. Somehow, from Hair right on through Rent, rock-based musicals have been more memorable for their music than for their dance--even though rock 'n' roll has always been at least as much about dancing as listening. And when Mamma Mia!, the London hit concocted from twenty-two ABBA songs, opens this month at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco prior to a Broadway opening at the Winter Garden Theatre in October 2001, you can bet that the dancing--whether judged wonderful or just OK or downright awful--won't have much to do with whether or not the show does well.

The deliberately low-tech, low-glitz story that's been created by Catherine Johnson as a framework for the songs of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus is about a young woman who wants to know which of her mother's ex-boyfriends is her father. According to the choreographer, Anthony Van Laast, "every eyebrow and eyelash" in the show is choreographed--but it doesn't look it. Van Laast, who has done the choreography for casino shows in Las Vegas (Siegfried and Roy), for musicals in the West End (Whistle Down the Wind, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and Broadway (Jesus Christ Superstar), and for touring spectacles (Burn the Floor, Holiday on Ice), points out that "none of the songs are actually performed directly to the audience--they are not performed as if it were a tribute band." Instead, the characters are meant to look as if they're improvising dance movement on the spot. "A show like this," Van Laast says, "can be harder to do than the kind with the big showstoppers."

But setting showstoppers to rock music has its own pitfalls. Before setting off to start rehearsing the American production of Mamma Mia!, Van Laast was working in London with a group of disco dancers and hip-hop performers on Bounce, a dance show intended for the West End in 2001. And for all his experience--including the choreography on some of the earliest music videos, made for the British pop star Kate Bush--he was finding it a challenge.

"You cannot put a discotheque or a nightclub on the stage," he says. "If you were to take what these dancers do on the streets and in discos and just put it on the stage, it would become boring in thirty seconds. Because after a while, it doesn't matter how hard kids dance--there has to be more. The dance has to have some form of theatricality."

Van Laast concedes that all-out rock dancing can be exciting. But only for a moment. "The actual language of street dance is very limited," he says. He thinks it can work on film--as in music videos--because the editing lends the movement a variety and visual interest it doesn't actually possess. "In the end" he says of music videos, "it doesn't matter what steps you put together. You don't need a choreographer. You just need an editor, and dancers jumping."

The more serious drawback to the use of the pop idiom on the stage, he says, is the limits it imposes on storytelling. "It's impossible to make it a narrative," he says. "The only narrative you can use it for is competition."

Van Laast's solution is to try to do what he says Stroman pulled off in Contact: "Take a theme and develop it, give it some kind of structure, orchestrate it as you would orchestrate a very basic musical phrase," he says.

As for Stroman, she once explained why she's happier choreographing in period than for contemporary characters: "Contemporary times mean something different to everyone," she said. "That book hasn't been written yet. There's nothing to fall back on when you choreograph something contemporary."

Good bet: Theatergoers first fell in love with Nathan Detroit, Sky Masterson, Sarah Brown and Miss Adelaide fifty years ago this month, when the Frank Loesser musical Guys and Dolls opened at the 46th Street Theatre. Based on Damon Runyon's Broadway "fables," the show ran for 1,200 performances, was turned into a movie starting Frank Sinatra and Marion Brando, and was revived in 1992 to great acclaim. To mark the anniversary of the November 24, 1950, opening day, the Museum of the City of New York is mounting a season-long exhibit of photographs, costumes, paintings and other memorabilia connected with the show. (It runs through June 10, 2001.) With Times Square now transformed into a wholesome family theme park that has no room for lovable mugs and floozies and thus no need for soul-saving "mission dolls," "Guys and Dolls: The Fabled Musical of Broadway" will be a trip down Memory Lane in more ways than one.

Dance Magazine theater columnist Sylviane Gold bas written theater criticism for the SoHo Weekly News, The Boston Phoenix and The Wall Street Journal. Her dance reviews appear regularly in Newsday.