Peter Gennaro, Big Talent on a Small Screen.

Gather round, children, and let me tell you about a time, not so long ago, when theater dancers could actually become national celebrities. Of course you know about Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who became famous in the movies. And you probably know about Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, whose names were well known, at least in the show-biz neighborhoods of New York and Hollywood. But unless you're old enough to remember Perry Como's television show and Your Hit Parade, you probably don't know about Peter Gennaro, who died late last year at the age of 80. He was, for a while--in the late 1950s and early '60s, anyway--probably America's favorite dancer-choreographer.

His jaunty, strutting style, whether expressed by the handpicked Peter Gennaro Dancers or by the lithe form of the choreographer himself, was familiar in living rooms across the country, to people who couldn't see a Broadway show or even a bus-and-truck rendition of a Broadway show. For a while there, it seemed that if the TV was tuned to a show that featured music, you were going to be seeing the Peter Gennaro Dancers and the jazzy, ebullient choreography of their boss. Between 1957 and 1964--the formative years, as it happens, of much of the boomer generation--the Peter Gennaro Dancers were regulars on music shows like Judy Garland's and Polly Bergen's, as well as Your Hit Parade, The Kraft Music Hall and The Entertainers, a variety hour that starred Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart.

But their most-watched gig was with long-running crooner Perry Como, for whom they performed as regulars from 1960 to 1963. Week in and week out, Gennaro devised numbers that brought the badly needed dash and pizzazz of show dancing to a broadcast whose overly relaxed atmosphere bordered on the soporific. At least, that's what you thought if you were one of those boomers, already listening to rock on the radio and looking in vain for any sign that it existed on the television shows your parents had on; for us, the Peter Gennaro dance numbers hinted at the existence of a cooler universe.

At the same time that he was animating television's variety shows, Gennaro was imprinting on a generation his own high standards of choreographic invention and crisp performance. Of course, he was himself the coolest of Peter Gennaro Dancers. With his characteristic stance--hips tucked back, shoulders forward--he looked as if he were about to burst into the air, a self-propelled dancing rocket. His light, super-speedy footwork gave his dancing a distinctive snap, and he made it all look easy as pie. What's more, he and his dancers always looked as though they were having fun.

It turns out they were. At the memorial service held in New York earlier this year, over a dozen former Peter Gennaro Dancers were among the many friends and colleagues paying tribute to him. And studding everyone's reminiscences was the memory of the vibrant enjoyment he brought into the studio with him. Dancers were never late to Gennaro's rehearsals, Lee Roy Reams said, because who wants to be late to a great party?

As Chita Rivera, Martin Charnin, Jacques d'Amboise, and others talked about his life and career, it became clear that there wouldn't be, couldn't be another Peter Gennaro. Not just because he had unique talents, but because the days when a dancing choreographer could have mass impact are gone. With the variety shows defunct and the dancers and choreographers of the music-video industry anonymous, there is no longer a medium for a career like Gennaro's.

He started, as so many do, very young--winning New Orleans-area Charleston contests as a 4-year-old. He saved his pennies to pay for lessons from local dance teachers and embarked on a serious career after he came home from World War II. He got his first Broadway show in 1948, and in 1954, Fosse pulled him out of the chorus to join Carol Haney and Buzz Miller in the famous "Steam Heat" number in The Pajama Game. He did the "Mu-Cha-Cha" with Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, the 1956 musical that returned to the boards this season in a revival starring Faith Prince. At the same time, he was giving dance lessons and getting his first choreographing jobs; and in 1957, he was made co-choreographer with Jerome Robbins on the epochal dance musical West Side Story.

Unlike Robbins, Fosse, and Michael Bennett, Gennaro never moved from choreographing the dances to directing the whole musical, and so despite his good work and the nearly universal esteem in which he was held, he never became a major force in the theater. His credits after West Side Story reflect the up-and-down nature of the business: hits like Fiorello! and The Unsinkable Molly Brown along with less-memorable shows like Bajour and Mr. President. His best-known work, the one for which he won the Tony, was in Annie, and no one who saw it will ever forget the charmingly discombobulated moves Gennaro gave the raga-muffin orphans and scheming villains of that show.

But for those of us who first got to know him from television, Gennaro will always be a wonderful dancer first, the head of a ubiquitous dance ensemble second, and a Broadway choreographer third. He was not the only dance personality to make a name on the tube. We knew June Taylor, whose dancers did Busby Berkeley-like routines on The Jackie Gleason Show, and we knew Marge and Gower Champion, who had been onstage and in the movies and appeared frequently on television as guests on variety shows. (They even did a short-lived sitcom.) But Gennaro, with his long-running weekly showcase, was the biggest and best known, and while it's tempting to say he was the last of the breed, guess what? Marge Champion is back on Broadway in the revival of Follies, the Stephen Sondheim show about--what else?--the ghosts of dancers past.

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for the Boston Phoenix, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications.