Swing high, swing low.

Lar Lubovitch put a brave face on it when, a few weeks before the Masicall High Society opened, the original director, Christopher Renshaw, was replaced by show doctor Des McAnuff, and Wayne Cilento was brought in as the "assistant choreographer." Renshaw departed, but Lubovitch remained as the choreographer and musical stager of record. He says that being part of a production team (as he has been on five musicals) is what Broadway is all about. Last season several contemporary choreographers--among them, Mark Morris with The Capeman and Doug Varone with The Triumph of Love--have discovered that a brilliant reputation does not necessarily assure success in show business. Lubovitch says, "There comes a moment, usually around the tech [technical rehearsal] week and beginning of previews--a terribly crucial moment for any show--when a great many changes take place. Emotions are delicate, and decisions are made. At that dark moment everybody holds their breath, then go on or not. Those who stay fall into step to do the best show they can. It's a matter of teamwork. With High Society. I was looking, advising, and generally being part of the ongoing process."

All the show doctoring in the world, however, didn't save High Society from indifferent reviews. For Lubovitch, it might have seemed like deja vu, a reliving of the highly publicized misfortunes of The Red Shoes (1993), which closed after five performances. (Fortunately, his widely praised twenty-minute ballet subsequently went into the repertories of American Ballet Theatre and National Ballet of Canada.) Lubovitch insists there's no comparison: "Shoes was a show that had problems right from the workshop, when the director was changed. High Society was never in what we thought of as crisis."

The musical had problems, however, from its 1997 opening in San Francisco, when Christopher d'Amboise was choreographer. After Lubovitch was asked to take over, the show underwent a thorough makeover--new sets, costumes, a couple of cast replacements, and considerable pruning of songs and dances.

Based on Philip Barry's play The Philadelphia Story, which became a 1940 MGM movie with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, and then a 1956 MGM musical with songs by Cole Porter and starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly, High Society concerns the romantic entanglements of socialite Tracy Lord (the versatile Melissa Errico). The period is the late 1930s, the setting is a resplendent Oyster Bay mansion, and the servants function as a sort of Greek chorus throughout the show. Lubovitch says the musical "was intended more as a play with songs." But it never recreated the effervescent sophistication and the brittle, inconsequential fun of Barry's comedy or of the first film, directed by George Cukor.

Lubovitch's dances (which I saw before and after the show doctors had operated) had ingenuity and wit, as in an all-night party scene that intercut the high-society swingers with their equally but more subtly swinging house staff. As Lubovitch explains it, there were different movement languages for the servants and the sophisticates upstairs: "At a certain point, those languages become embroiled in what you might call the ever-present Party Dance in musicals." Tap and jazz steps are combined with social dances, and comic business involved weary servants finishing off the champagne and languishing on buffet trolleys while the indefatigable society guests party on.

Lubovitch had previously worked with director Renshaw on the 1996 Tony Award--winning revival of The King and I and on an earlier London revival of Oklahoma! He had made his Broadway debut in 1987 with Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods and earned praise, although he says, "I was working from an uninformed, intuitive basis."

More and more, he has turned to staging musicals and choreographing for ice dancers since giving up touring with his company. "In 1994 I made a change of artistic goals," he says. "The entire reason for having a company of one's own is to create-what I'd been doing for years. The pressure was incredible. I was where it all began and ended. I loved touring, but after twenty-seven years of it, I believe I'd earned my right to greater freedom as an artist ... What I love about working in the theater is that it's collaborative--a whole team of people with a Store of rich ideas to draw upon,"

These days, when not tied up with outside projects, Lubovitch works with a small group of dancers, many of them from his old company, in his New York City studio. He has been busy supervising rehearsals of Othello, his three-act ballet that premiered last season and is on ABT's roster again this year. He is also preparing for his company's thirtieth-anniversary gala in November, for which he's choreographing a new work and reviving others, among them the 1994 So In Love, a piece he set to Cole Porter songs and his last work for his old company before it stopped touring.

Hilary Ostlere is a senior editor of Dance Magazine.