Stage Magic Makes All Things Possible.

IT STARTS WITH FAIRY TALES: An ugly duckling turns into a beautiful swan; a cinder-stained servant morphs into the belle of the ball; a lowly frog is revealed as a handsome prince. Tales of transformation are imprinted on us at a very early age, and we seem never to tire of them. We outgrow children's stories, go to the movies, and thrill as the dork takes off the spectacles and becomes irresistible. Or we turn on the TV and find Maury or Sally busily making over some woman who looks too much like a frump or a tramp.

But somehow, when we see such stories in the musical theater, the transformation often involves dance steps. Even the non-musical theater resorts to this metaphor for change: Remember Stepping Out, the 1987 Broadway play set in a church rec room, where tap-dance classes provided a life-changing boost for an array of characters in a dreary London neighborhood? And it's a natural for musicals, where we've seen, for example, the King of Siam transformed from a bully to a man when he learns to polka. Last season on Broadway, Boyd Gaines started out with two left feet and ended up partnering the girl of his dreams in Contact. And in The Music Man, which is about the power of music to change lives, the effect of the title character's arrival in River City was conveyed in the evolution of Susan Stroman's dance numbers for the ensemble, which moves with tight, mincing steps at the beginning and breaks into strutting, all-out parading at the end. And this season, we've got The Full Monty, in which six unemployed mill workers practice, practice, practice and develop from a crew of klutzy losers to a reasonable facsimile of Chippendale dancers.

As in the 1997 movie, each one has an obstacle to overcome. And I walked into the show remembering enough about the film to know that it would all work out by the final curtain. But when the character known as Horse limped onstage, I thought, "Oh my God, what has happened to poor Andre De Shields?" Dragging his left leg, stiff in every joint, moving with evident difficulty, he looked like every dancer's nightmare of physical decline--especially to someone who remembered the wonderfully slinky title character he created in The Wiz in 1975; his silken savorer of illicit substances in Ain't Misbehavin's "When You're a Viper" in 1978; and his Tony-nominated performance in Play On in 1997.

Of course, there was the possibility that the limp and the stiffness--even the graying hair--were just part of the show. But it had been a while since I'd seen him, and there was also the distinct possibility of arthritis. That possibility was erased, thank goodness, as the show progressed and De Shields proceeded to stop it every time he came center stage to do a few moves. And then I started wondering how this terrific dancer had had me believing he could hardly walk just a short time before.

"It's my opportunity to really play 1,100 people for suckers," De Shields says, laughing. "I've been in the business for thirty-one years, and I always thought of myself as an actor first. But being a black man in this industry, the first questions you get asked are `Can you sing?' and `Can you dance?' Well, luckily, I could."

To him, the task of convincing an audience that he can't is strictly an acting exercise. "You have to play against type, against the natural elegance and grace that you normally want to bring to a role," he says. "But you use the fitness, the vocabulary you have learned to create an illusion. If the audience at the Eugene O'Neill doesn't believe that this guy is disabled, they'll never believe the rest of the story. I like these opportunities to psych out an audience. And on the whole, the people have been fooled, which means that I've done an effective acting job. So I go home after every performance saying, `Yay! Yay! I finally made it! I'm finally doing what I came to New York to do.'"

Happy as he is to be acting, he's also quick to point out that he relishes the chance to dance as well. "It's unfortunate that we put our dancers out to pasture so early in this country," he says. "I tell people that it has taken me fifty-four years to get this good. Why should you be doing retraining and transitioning just because you're 40?"

The routines De Shields has been given by Full Monty choreographer Jerry Mitchell are, he says, "the kind of dancing that has been with me all my life: street dancing. It's a way of moving that the professional dance world always wants to dismiss, and some dancers have it trained right out of them. There hasn't always been much call for it in my career, but the body never forgets." Except, of course, when it wants to.

Good bet: It looks as though Wendy Wasserstein, who is writing the book for a stage musical of the movie classic An American in Paris, is getting a head start on the dance end. When her new play, Old Money, opens this month at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, the transitions between scenes will be accomplished with dance passages. "It's about changes in society and culture," says her assistant, and Wasserstein, who deftly used rock songs to mark the passing of time in the sublime The Heidi Chronicles, is a dedicated dance lover. Besides, even without a single lick of dance, a new Wasserstein play would be a must-see.

Sylviane Gold is the former arts editor of The Boston Phoenix and Newsday/New York Newsday. She has written theater criticism for the SoHo Weekly News, The Boston Phoenix and The Wall Street Journal. Her dance reviews appear regularly in Newsday.