The songs are old ones. The music is recorded. And mostly it's movement, not words, that does the storytelling. But when director-choreographer Susan Stroman is the one spinning the stories, a Broadway musical can flout convention to embrace a different kind of creativity. And so it is with Contact, the Tony-winning ''dancical'' devised by Stroman and John Weidman. Opening on the final stop of its national tour at 8 tonight at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, the show's evolution began in 1998 with a call from Lincoln Center Theatre artistic director André Bishop to Stroman, who already had a pair of Tonys for choreographing Crazy for You and the acclaimed revival of Show Boat.

When Bishop offered to let her conceive and direct something, Stroman turned to Weidman, who had worked with Stephen Sondheim on Pacific Overtures and Assassins (as well as the new Sondheim musical Bounce, opening at Chicago's Goodman Theater in June).

In creating the title piece -- Contact the musical is actually three distinct stories -- Stroman and Weidman had two sources of inspiration.

''Stro said she had gone to an after-hours swing [dance] club and had seen a girl in a yellow dress; she was convinced that the girl would meet some guy and change his life,'' Weidman recalls.

``The girl would step out of the crowd when she was ready, then shake her head yes or no when someone asked her to dance. Then she'd retreat again. It struck me as a very vivid image about the state of relationships in a city like New York at that time. We started to talk about who the guy she danced with might be.''

That idea had its roots in an episode of [the old TV series] The Twilight Zone, one based on the Ambrose Bierce short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a tale in which a spy about to be hanged escapes his noose in a fantasy.

Stroman and Weidman made their guy a successful but suicidal advertising executive, a man ''. . . literally at the end of his rope, someone so overbooked and overworked that he has lost sight of making himself vulnerable enough to make contact with another person,'' Weidman says.

Colleen Dunn, who plays the life-altering girl in yellow, calls her `` . . . a femme fatale with a heart. The show is so sexy and powerful and poignant.''

That original piece, however, is only about an hour long. So Stroman and Weidman set about creating two others to make up an evening. Loosely, the results are connected by the themes of contact and with variants on the word ''swinging.'' Stylistically, the three stories couldn't be more different.

Swinging, set to violinist Stéphane Grappelli's recording of Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart's My Heart Stood Still, is a lusty, playful 18th-century piece inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 1767 painting The Swing.

''In that one, the three people have no problem with contact,'' says Stroman, who saw the painting [of two men watching a woman on a swing] when she walked through a London museum. ``It struck my fancy that [Fragonard] was thinking about more than a simple day in a grove.''

The middle piece, Did You Move?, is set in an Italian restaurant in Queens in the '50s, when crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin did a different kind of swinging. A domineering mob guy's wife, a woman who makes contact with no one, escapes into a wild dance-romance whenever hubby leaves the table.

''If someone told you not to move, what would be the most rebellious thing you could do?'' Stroman asks. ``The only way for her to survive is to daydream her way out of it.''

Weidman calls Stroman, who added to her Tony total with the choreography honor for Contact and both the director and choreographer Tonys for The Producers in 2001, a ''symbiotic'' collaborator.

''Our ideas seemed to mesh,'' he says. ``We were building on each other's ideas. It's a rare thing to find.''

Or maybe ''ideas'' isn't quite the right word for the dance-driven stories of Contact.

Says Stroman: ``All the pieces deal with fantasies.''

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Abril 2003