Riffing on Broadway: shows find new life as choreographers' inspiration.

A confession: I've never liked Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite for New York City Ballet as much as I think I should.

There are many reasons to be grateful for this anthology of dances from his great, groundbreaking musical. At a time when full-scale Broadway revivals are ridiculously expensive and fraught with risk, this New York City Ballet staple keeps some of the musical theater's great treasures on the stage. Musicians perform Leonard Bernstein's ravishing score; dancers perform Robbins' ravishing choreography; audiences get a taste of an iconic show.

But somehow, it always leaves me unsatisfied. I've seen West Side Story Suite many times, and often with my very favorite City Ballet dancers. It doesn't matter--I always leave feeling as though I've just read a synopsis rather than a novel. Unmoored from the ebb and flow of the script, jostling one another side by side, the dances that were pure genius on Broadway lose their context and the emotional punch that they carry in the theater.

Robbins wasn't being particularly innovative when he plunked his West Side Story dances down on the concert stage. Balanchine had done the same thing in 1968, when he dipped into the work he had done in On Your Toes and brought Slaughter on Tenth Avenue into the NYCB repertoire. The difference is that Slaughter is exactly the kind of self-contained dance number that Robbins helped eradicate with his seamless integration of dance and drama in West Side Story. It's little wonder that Slaughter holds up well while the West Side Story Suite dances wobble a little on their own.

I've been thinking about all this because in December Doug Elkins presented a new work that suggests a way of transmuting our magnificent Broadway heritage into concert dance without either quoting it directly or appropriating it completely--which is what Michael Smuin did in 2003, when he borrowed the plot and the score of Harold Arlen's 1946 musical, St. Louis Woman, and turned it into a full-length ballet for Dance Theatre of Harlem. With Fraulein Maria, Elkins restores a beloved musical to the stage--just as Balanchine and Robbins and Smuin did; but he does so in a completely different, and ultimately more persuasive way.

Relax--hold the letters. I'm not comparing the choreographers or their work here. I'm comparing their differing approaches to a similar impulse. In Fraulein Maria, which had a brief run at lower Manhattan's Joe's Pub as part of the invaluable DancemOpolitan series, Elkins uses his signature mixture of street dance and modern vocabularies to refresh The Sound of Music.

It certainly helps that The Sound of Music is not known for its dancing. With both an onstage singer and the soundtrack recording, Elkins takes the opportunity to make a dance statement of his own--much as he would with any other existing music.

In this case, the statement is directly connected to the themes of the 1965 movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic that Elkins loved as a boy and that he now deconstructs with as much amusement as affection (just imagine Liesel portrayed by a guy). With its yearning sincerity and deadpan touches of hip hop, hula, and even male stripper moves, Fraulein Maria both sends up and pays homage to the original.

What I like about this way of tackling our Broadway musicals is that it makes something distinctly new of something distinctly old. And it allows us to enjoy the "musical" part of musical theater even when the "theater" part is just too hokey for contemporary consumption. Elkins chose to have some fun with The Sound of Music. But the method--coaxing a new concert dance out of an old musical--in no way demands this kind of ironic treatment. At NYCB, Christopher Wheeldon played it absolutely straight as he distilled both the carnival atmosphere and the poignant central romance of another Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, Carousel, into Carousel (A Dance). Used as raw material, a Broadway show can sustain any number of interpretations.

So that's another plus: Choreographers can be themselves. When they're choreographing directly for Broadway, they must serve the greater good. When they're choreographing for a dance company, Broadway can serve them. Why haven't our dancemakers been more eager to mine these riches, which come ready-to-use, with characters, themes, and, of course, music? With that in mind, here are a few tantalizing match-ups between some of my favorite shows and some of my favorite choreographers. It's something of a parlor game, of course, but I'm not just playing--I'm hoping somebody out there actually takes me up on it.

Guys and Dolls. I know, choreography isn't actually about hats. Still, doesn't Sky Masterson seem a custom-made hero for Twyla Tharp? (Did somebody say John Selya?)

Brigadoon. Probably I'm being too literal here, but, please, Sean Curran, wouldn't you like to have a highland fling with this?

A Little Night Music. The fevered, intertwined relationships make it an ideal starting point for one of Doug Varone's pieces about fevered, intertwined relationships.

My Fair Lady. Mark Morris, Mark Morris, Mark Morris.

West Side Story. Eliot Feld was in the original, and I can't help wondering what he would do with its score now.

Nine. This show doesn't really rank with the others on this list, but just think what fun the Trocks could have. And the rest of us as well.

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