Danse Nocturne

By T.E.Kalem

BALLROOM

Directed and Choreographed by Michael Bennett

Dance has become Broadway's dominant metaphor for vitality, renewal and survival in the past few seasons. A Chorus Line pumped such tingling life into Shubert Alley that the entire theater district began pulsating with an almost forgotten excitement.

Hints of the dance revolution appeared as early as Follies and Chicago. Fittingly, Michael Bennett, who became a choreographer-king with Chorus Line, had provided the dance numbers for Follies. And Bob Fosse, the dance wizard who choreographed Chicago, enlarged his Broadway dominion with Dancin', a bookless paean to the sensuous dynamics of the human body.

With Ballroom, Director-Choreographer Bennett adds still another dimension to the dance musical, not in innovation, but in mood. He adds a grace note of affection. Here is a musical in which the key characters are not afraid to wear their hearts on their ballroom slippers. Past the prime of youth, dispossessed by happenstance and the ironic fragility of existence, but still possessed by fantasies and dreams, the couples who converge under the glittering lights of the Stardust Ballroom are embracing hope, renewing their lease on life. Ballroom is their middle-aged Saturday Night Fever.

The book, by Jerome Kass, is toothpick-thin. Bea Asher (Dorothy Loudon), a widow of one year's weeds who runs a secondhand clothes shop, is coaxed into taking a timid step onto the floor of the Stardust Ballroom by her breezy friend Angie (Patricia Drylie). There she meets Alfred Rossi (Vincent Gardenia), a portly, kindly mailman with taglines from Shakespeare on his lips. It is not that Bea and Al are made for each other, but, like many couples, they need each other.There is a compassionate understanding in their diffident wooing even though the book narrowly skirts sentimentality.

Eventually, Bea is crowned queen of the Stardust Ballroom, but her tiara has its thorns. Al tells her that he is married, and he is clearly not the sort of man who would desert his family. Bea not only has to brave her own mixed emotions but to parry the shocked rebuke of her singularly unfeeling sister-in-law (Sally-Jane Heit) who apparently regards a widow's proper lot as perpetual purdah.

Dorothy Loudon, who has a warm feminine vulnerability that is endearing, is less lucky with her singing voice which sounds a bit like a scratchy record. She is not helped by the show's grade-school lyrics, supplied by Alan and Marilyn Berg man, nor by its major deficiency, the Billy Goldenberg score, which would have benefited from golden oldies rather than shallow derivatives.

Of course, the dances are the evening's glory. Bennett puts his troupe through the arching rhythmic shapes of the tan go, samba and foxtrot with the authority of a choreographic Picasso, making the stage a canvas for a riot of disciplined motion. The costumes, designed by Theoni V. Aldredge, swirl with the grace of bull fighters' capes and may mark a renaissance of theatrical elegance. Robin Wag ner's revolving mirrors are the stuff that midnight magic is made of, and Tharon Musser's lighting sends out a tracer stream of romance.

In its rejuvenating enchantment, Ballroom may be what Ponce de Leon was looking for.

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