Verastique fantastique.

Out Broadway dancer Rocker Verastique explains how he gets his kicks in the Tony-winning dance extravaganza Contact

When the cast members of what would become the Tony award-winning musical Contact signed on for a six-week workshop with choreographer-director Susan Stroman, few of them predicted the show's phenomenal success. Maybe they would have had higher hopes had they relied on the track record of hoofer Rocker Verastique, who knows how to pick a winner. He had already opened three Broadway smash hits in a row: Carousel, Victor/Victoria, and Chicago.

Verastique, who portrays both a cocky Italian busboy and a downtown lounge lizard in two separate acts of Contact, is a perfect fit for Stroman's combination of hightech dancing and serious acting skills. "Hardly anyone speaks in the show, and I am one of the blessed ones who get to speak," he says.

For Verastique, "it was a chance to work with Susan Stroman" that prompted him to leave Chicago for another creative outlet. "She's one of these choreographers who loves for people to take risks," says Karen Ziemba, who won a Tony for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her role in the "Did You Move?" section of Contact. "She's got these wild ideas in her head, these incredible visions. She wants you to bring the story to life."

Ziemba is equally enthusiastic about Verastique: "The thing that is so wonderful about Rocker--and I knew this when I did Chicago with him, also--is that he is an incredibly trained ballet dancer, and yet he is so adept at so many different styles of dance--hip-hop, jazz, and Broadway-style Fosse. He's quite a chameleon."

Deborah Yates, who stars in Contact in the now-legendary role of the Girl in the Yellow Dress, adds that "he has a terrific sense of humor and has brought some wonderful little moments to his roles. There is a childlike playfulness to Rocker that is charming onstage."

Like Yates, Verastique is a Texan who sought out a performing career in New York. As a teenager, he was working with the American Ballet Theatre's apprentice company when Debbie Allen asked him to sign on for the TV series Fame. ("She offered me a lot more money than I'd ever seen.") While filming in Los Angeles, he was also prominently featured in numerous music videos, including Janet Jackson's "Nasty," choreographed by Paula Abdul. During the taping of Lionel Richie's video of "Dancing on the Ceiling," Verastique met his boyfriend, Danny Herman, a musical-theater choreographer; they have now been together for 14 years.

In the middle of a ballet class one day in 1986, Mikhail Baryshnikov walked up and asked him to join the American Ballet Theatre. "Without even thinking twice, I said yes," he recalls. "I really wanted to do it."

Feeling somewhat lost in a company of 100 dancers, however, Verastique left ABT after four years. "I was miserable," he says. "I knew I could do so much more. But I finally got the ballet thing out of my skin."

Verastique was then asked to join the national touring company of The Phantom of the Opera, followed by a job as a dancer in the Broadway cast of Miss Saigon. Since then he has danced in Broadway shows uninterrupted for nearly seven years.

Although Verastique has only played one gay character --a fierce drag queen who performs an apache dance in Victor/Victoria--he feels that Broadway is becoming more progressive in its attitudes. "Musical theater is opening up to life as reality," he says. "It would be great, though, to see a family musical like Beauty and the Beast or Annie with a gay character."

The theme of Contact is the entertainment of fantasies, whether they be sexual, romantic, or exalting. Perhaps not surprising for a Broadway baby, Verastique owns up to the inspirations of his own childhood fantasies: "Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret were my role models growing up. I guess that's the dichotomy of who I am."