Making Contact.

Imagine a dance work with a persuasive story to tell, a great score, and marvelous dancers. Which ballet is that, you ask? Not The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, or Coppelia. It's not really a ballet, per se. It's Contact, a "dance play" that opened at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, this fall and is a huge hit. Paeans of praise from critics have been heaped on it. Even before it opened, the word of mouth was such that the show was sold out. Brainchild of choreographer-director Susan Stroman and writer John Weidman [see Dancetheater, September, page 62], Contact is a musical without an original score. Instead, it uses classical, swing, and standard pop numbers. It is "danced through," not "sung through."

The first of three parts is a curtain-raiser based on Fragonard's famous painting The Swing, a copy of which is displayed before curtain time. The second, "Did you Move?" is set in an Italian restaurant in Queens, circa 1954. The third, and most substantial, "Contact," is about a suicidal TV executive (Boyd Gaines) who longs to make contact--initially through dance--with a frosty blond swing queen (Deborah Yates). It may seem slight fare on which to hang a musical, but Contact is the most original conception of dance-theater that has come along lately, eclipsing in excitement such bright retreads as Fosse and Jerome Robbins' Broadway with its up-to-the-minute theme: In this world of swift communications, human beings have serious problems making contact.

In the opening number, Stephanie Michels is charming as an eighteenth-century tease on a swing, attended by two lovers, the acrobatic Sean Martin Hingston and Scott Taylor. The second number showcases the fine dance and acting talents of Karen Ziemba, a star of Stroman's ill-fated Steel Pier (which should be given another chance). The strongly balletic choreography given Ziemba reveals Stroman's growing familiarity with classical vocabulary, employed most recently in the "Blossom Got Kissed" section of Duke/ for New York City Ballet last season. Creating dances around tables and props in this Italian restaurant scene is a jigsaw challenge, which Stroman and dancers meet with extraordinary skill. And Ziemba's past experience with the Ohio Ballet, before she switched to musical theater, is used to the full. She's in great form, zooming through lively pas de deux, expertly partnered by David MacGillivray, once a soloist with National Ballet of Canada. Ziemba plays a housewife, dominated by a mafioso husband, who indulges in fantasies. First, she seductively performs "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's incidental music for Peer Gynt; then she's a swept-away ballerina in the "Waltz Eugene" from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin; lastly, backed by a spirited ensemble, she's triumphant dancing the "Farandole" from Bizet's L'Arlesienne Suite No. 2. Yet in her waking moments, Ziemba never drops the sweet stoicism of her character.

But it's the third section, "Contact," with its swing dancing in some smoky dive, that's particularly impressive, both in its ingenious dance and staging and its greater emphasis on dialogue and plot. Gaines, a personable actor who until this show had little brush with professional dance, conveys hilariously and poignantly the plight of a nondancing mortal pursuing an unobtainable club habituee (Yates, ex-Music Hall Rockette, in her first starring role) who has all the poise, looks, and artistry of a Terpsichore. It is to his credit that Gaines, who has been exposed to the high-octane dance skills of the rest of the cast since rehearsals started, has managed to rein in his own burgeoning dance proficiency to remain a convincing stumblebum in a room full of swinging experts.

It's good to see Dana Stackpole, once of American Ballet Theatre and more recently in the featured dancing role in Lincoln Center's revival of Carousel, turning her talents to upbeat swing and hip-hop--but all the dancers perform at a high level. Jason Antoon, who is not required to dance but has kinetic roller-coaster eyebrows, is engaging as the nasty husband in the second section and the bartender in the last.

Contact will move to the Vivian Beaumont, a considerably bigger space with a thrust stage but similar sightlines, probably in March. New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley, not one to over-praise Stroman in the past (he roundly panned Steel Pier), in an over-the-top review said that the show deserved a Tony nomination, a sentiment I will second by predicting it will win at least one.

Speaking of over-the-top, Australian comedian Barry Humphries, otherwise known as Dame Edna Everidge, has brought his/her hilarious show, Dame Edna: The Royal Tour, to the Booth Theatre. Dame Edna combines satiric and music-hall styles (many of the insults are perpetrated on an indulgently cooperating audience) with the humor of British panto, in which Cinderella's or Dick Whittington's mum is always portrayed by male comedians in drag. She can purr with phony goodwill while undermining her targets with an acid contempt that makes for unsubtle fun. (Insulting a member of the audience, she adds, "I meant that in a nurturing way.") Onstage pianist Andrew Ross and two attractive "Ednaettes," Roxanne Barlow and Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman, round out the cast. Stephen Adnitt designed the magnificently vulgar spangled and sequined costumes ("Native Australians went blind making this dress").

In the TV clips that introduce the show, we see her in a pas de deux with Rudolf Nureyev. The excerpt is amusing but not nearly so as when, on another occasion--alas, not shown--Nureyev, egged on to tap dance by Dame Edna, tried to do so and proved that tap was the one dance mode he'd failed entirely to master.

Hilary Ostlere is a senior editor of Dance Magazine.