Jerry Mitchell, Legal Eagle: the choreographer tries on his directing hat.

For Jerry Mitchell, there's a lot riding on Legally Blonde, which opens this month on Broadway. If it's a hit, he joins the storied ranks of choreographers who've become successful directors. If not, well, he'll always have his Broadway Bares benefits. But back in January, just as Legally Blonde was about to begin a five-week tryout in San Francisco, Mitchell was surprisingly cool, trying to figure out whether to keep or dump the show's Irish dance, deciding which of the Nell Benjamin and Laurence O'Keefe tunes should go into the entr'acte, and wondering how much of the climactic "Bend and Snap" number would be too much.

"The audience will tell us," he said from the theater, where tech rehearsals were under way. "That's why we're here in San Francisco. By no means is the work done."

But Legally Blonde had looked very close to done at a run-through in a Times Square rehearsal studio shortly before the company headed west. It's a musical version of the smash Reese Witherspoon movie about a blonde sorority queen from Bel Air who has to rethink her--ohmigod!--whole life when her ambitious boyfriend leaves her for someone less frivolous. And it was just brimming with energy and good humor and talent. Elle Woods, who heads for Harvard with her mascara, her pink outfits, and her Chihuaha, is played by Laura Bell Bundy, familiar to Mitchell fans as the super-conceited Amber Von Tussle in Hairspray. Of course, if the heroine is blonde, the super-conceited nemesis has to be a brunette, and here she's a Harvard Law student--an Eastern girl who "wears black when nobody's dead"--played by former Miss America Kate Shindle. But the key to the musical is the way Elle's sorority sisters accompany her in spirit to Gambridge, where they can pop up as needed--with pompoms--to provide advice, moral support, and a production number or two.

Now that he's the director as well as the choreographer, Mitchell has a lot more to worry about than the big dance moments. In fact, the producers brought him on board even before they had a script or a score. He's worked on the show over two years, helping to choose the writers and the rest of the creative team. But his focus has stayed the same as it was when he was choreographing: "The most important thing is to get the story right," he said. "The audience will give you a lot of leeway if they're enjoying the characters and the story."

Mitchell loved the movie's message, he said. "If Hairspray says it's OK to be fat, and Wicked says it's OK to be green, Legally Blonde tells young women that it's OK to be smart. Studies show that girls decide at a very early age to either be smart or be pretty--and often they think guys don't like smart girls." But he thought the storytelling could use some improvement. "The people in the theater want to see a love story. But in the movie, you never saw the relationship develop." For the musical, he hired Christian Borle, from Spamalot, to play the teaching assistant who helps Elle navigate law school. "He's a comic genius who oozes charm, so it's easy for the audience to see why Elle would fall for him."

Having rejected Pilates machines as useful props for the exercise number, Mitchell went out and bought a jump rope. The result, which opens the second act, is an exuberant homage to vaudeville jump-rope acts. To accomplish the speed and precision with which a stage-full of performers do their unison routine, Mitchell devoted an hour a day during the early weeks of rehearsal to rope-skipping. "At first it was 50 jumps in a row, and then we worked our way up to 500. I knew it would become a stamina thing."

Mitchell's been working on musicals long enough to know the drill--his first choreography gig on Broadway was assisting on Jerome Robbing Broadway, in 1990. But there were still some surprises. In addition to adjusting to the enormous workload, he said, he finds himself missing the camaraderie that comes with the choreographer's job. "When you're a choreographer working with the director, you have a partner in crime." He still has a team, of course; Marc Bruni, who was his associate choreographer on La Cage aux Folles, and Denis Jones, who worked with him on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, are on this show as well. "Now they're my partners in crime," he said. "But it's weird--sometimes, I think how nice it would be just to be the choreographer, just to have the chance to concentrate on one thing."

But then the mood passes.

Sylviane Gold has written on theater for Newsday and The New York Times.