The Smell of the Greasepaint.

WE ALL REMEMBER our first Broadway musical, no matter what. But I was particularly lucky with mine: it was Gypsy, which is actually worth remembering for the rest of your life.

Arthur Laurents's book was one of the best ever written for a musical. Jule Styne's lustrous score included classics like "Small World" (which became a hit record for Johnny Mathis) and "Everything's Coming Up Roses," and delicious novelty numbers like "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" and "If Momma Was Married." Stephen Sondheim's perfect lyrics had both wit and heart. Gypsy featured a legendary Broadway star--Ethel Merman--in a tailor-made role (and, as it happened, the not-yet-famous Jack Klugman as her devoted swain). And best of all, it was directed and choreographed by the peerless Jerome Robbins, who brought his scorn and affection for the seamy side of show business and his unerring eye for colloquial dance forms to the story of the burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee.

I was just 12, and my parents had bought three tickets way up in the balcony as my birthday present. That night, I had my first experience of live dance. It was the first time I'd ever shared the air with a professional orchestra. It was the first time I'd ever heard real singers performing without the mediation of microphones or amplifiers. And all those thrills had been assembled into a dramatic package that just made my head spin.

Naturally, I loved it all. But what I loved most was the simple, low-key number in the middle of the second act in which Tulsa, a member of Madame Rose's traveling variety troupe, describes to Rose's daughter Louise the very Fred-and-Ginger nightclub act he's been secretly working on. As he shows her the moves, we see that she has a dream, too, and he is it. Using only music and movement, Robbins had contrived to escort me inside two souls.

Many years later, I got to watch Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova in another Robbins duet, Other Dances. The performers couldn't have been more different. The idiom was something else entirely. But the formula was the same: music and movement in the service of a dream. Theater and dance have always been pretty much in the same line of work--they just use slightly dissimilar means. They both exist so that someone on a stage can pierce the defenses of someone in a seat and change the world for a minute. Or two. Even if no one had ever invented that bizarre hybrid, the Broadway musical, could great dance do without drama? Could drama work without some kind of ordered movement, a.k.a. dance?

I think not, and that is why this column is in business. The barrier separating theater from dance is a permeable membrane, with bodies and ideas passing back and forth freely. Before Julie Taymor created The Lion King, she was directing Shakespeare. Robert Wilson has his actors count as dancers do. Martha Graham staged Greek tragedy. Lighting designers and costume designers and choreographers and performers travel regularly between the two worlds; and so shall we.

But don't look here for the party line--this is a party of one. I remember seeing Bob Fosse's acidic production of Chicago twenty-five years ago, with Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera, and being bowled over. The critics weren't that impressed, and the show ran on the strength of its stars. By the time it was revived by Ann Reinking some twenty years later, critical and popular taste had caught up, and it became the smash it had deserved to be from the start. When I saw Pacific Overtures in 1976, I found it an extraordinary synthesis of Eastern and Western modes of theater, a real breakthrough in style and content. The critics didn't love it and audiences rejected it--until its acclaimed 1984 revival at an off-Broadway theater. But is it any surprise that John Weidman, who conceived this bravely cross-cultural experiment, should be a co-creator, with Susan Stroman, of Contact, another brilliant experiment in form?

Contact sneaked into town below the radar of last year's pre-season hype; no doubt this season will have happy surprises as well. But here are some things to look forward to. The Full Monty, which opened in June at the Old Globe in San Diego, will preview on Broadway this month, with its Terrence McNally book, David Yazbek score and Jerry Mitchell dances. Ann Reinking returns to choreograph The Visit, a John Kander and Fred Ebb musical based on Friedrich Durrenmatt's sour play about a millionairess--to be played by Angela Lansbury--with scores to settle. And, as we know, Kander and Ebb can do wonders with sour.

You already know the stories that Seussical! is based on, though Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who did the super-serious Ragtime, seem an odd choice to provide the songs. (Kathleen Marshall is the choreographer.) Children's tales are also the jumping-off point for Martha Clarke's production of Hans Christian Andersen, which uses the score of the Danny Kaye movie; it's testing the waters right now at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Another musical clearly hoping to tap into the kiddie vein on Broadway is Little Women, created by Broadway neophytes and scheduled to open in early November.

Personally, I'm most curious about The Night They Raided Minsky's, inspired by the life of the 1920s showman Billy Minsky and the fondly remembered 1968 film comedy that starred Jason Robards and Elliott Gould. With a book by Evan Hunter and music by Charles Strouse, it has the potential to be a warmly funny look at the world of burlesque. Sound familiar? Makes me think it might be just right for a precocious 12-year-old's birthday.

Some thirty-five years after the fact, my mother and I were reminiscing about Gypsy. It had been my parents' first Broadway musical too, because even though Times Square was only a twenty-minute subway ride away, theater tickets---even the cheap seats--were an unaffordable luxury in our Bronx neighborhood. I asked her what had possessed her to buy them, and how she had chosen Gypsy. She looked at me in wonder. "Don't you remember?" she asked. "You said it was what you wanted."

Even then.

Sylviane Gold, who joins us as our theater columnist, 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.