Ziegfeld in a Kimono

It might have been the Winter Garden in 1935. The girls drifted languidly down an outsized ramp while the music came pumping out of the pit like an echo from a Ziegfeld revue. A couple whisked onstage to do a comic turn, punctuated with the oddly archaic slang of the hepcat: "Hey, baby! Let's have a ball!" Occasion : the Manhattan opening of Japan's all-girl Takarazuka Dance Theater, an amalgam of the Folies-Bergere, the Radio City Rockettes, and native Kabuki styles.

Founded four decades ago as a "musical bridge between East and West," Takarazuka (named after its home town in Japan) presents thinly disguised Broadway and Paris turns, together with jazzed-up versions of Japanese fairy and folk tales, all held together in a sukiyaki-like mixture of muted native music and brassy show tunes. The 400 girls of the Takarazuka company (their motto: "Be pure, be right, be beautiful") sing everything from high soprano to near baritone, and the male impersonators among them pass out pinup photos by the thousands to their frenzied teen-age following.

Last week's 42-member visiting troupe, now at the Metropolitan Opera House in the middle of a three-month cross-country tour, avoided the more blatantly Westernized confections in the repertory, such as Broadway Cinderella, in which the chorus line appears in white top hats and tails. Instead they concentrated on a number of vaguely oriental-flavored exercises, whose paper-thin plots were bolstered with barbarically blazing sets and sumptuously encrusted costumes. Pastel-colored paper globes hung in grapelike clusters, spangled parasols twirled like colored tops, flowery kimonos fluttered beneath frozen comic masks.

Occasionally, as in the military exercise known as Bo Odori, in which sticks, sickles and wooden swords were flourished in ritualistic confusion, the dance had an authentic feel. But more often, Takarazuka's "musical bridge" seemed a one-way street that fell 20 years short of its goal. After watching an animal turn called Shan Shan Uma, in which two dancers represented the front and hindquarters of a horse, the New York Daily News's John Chapman commented: "I kept muttering to myself 'Shan Shan Uma on the Rillera.' This helped some."

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