Is it a ballet? Is it a play? Is it a musical? Well, yes... and then again no. Our critic gets to grips with Contact, Broadway's baffling hit show



TITLES ARE IMPORTANT. So when Susan Stroman’s Contact won the Tony Award for Best Broadway Musical of 1999, it officially became a musical. Never mind that there’s no live orchestra, no singing and no original music.

Approaching the box office of the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, you meet an arresting sight. Splurged across the double swing doors is a lifesize image of the dancer Sarah Wildor, legs scissored in a wide extension. To enter the foyer there is no other option than to push open one of her legs. If I were Sarah Wildor I might happily strangle the publicist whose bright idea that was.

WITH a show like this, it’s almost impossible not to get bogged down in definitions. No one sings, so it can’t be a musical; almost everyone dances, so it can’t be a play. In the world of the theatre, Contact is a one-off, a hybrid of dance, theatre and musical that takes three short stories, links them with a single theme and calls it a night out at the theatre

Contact is ponderously trivial. It sets up the premise for one cliché after another, it gives you aeons in which to think "Well, obviously we're meant to expect that plonker, so surely it'll do something more subtle instead", and then, just as you have already got the yawns, it delivers the plonker, dead at your feet. It's like being asked to pay too much for fast food, being made to wait hours for it, and then finding it's congealed.

Thin and derivative as dance, Contact is thinner and more derivative as theatre. The three short stories it tells don't feel short: they feel like tepid one-minute anecdotes that have been agonisingly extended. The girl in Fragonard's painting of The Swing two-times her rich lover with the hunky servant. End of Story One. The 1950s suburban wife in a bad Italian restaurant has dance-daydreams in which she kills her husband, snogs the waiter, and carries on dancing. End of Story Two. The suicidal loner has a fantasy of plucking up courage to dance with a glamorous chick at a club, and then puts the fantasy into practice when she turns out to be the girl downstairs. End of Story Three, and end of evening. No, these aren't the world's worst stories. It's the way they tell 'em - slowly and predictably - that blights what little bloom they might have had.

British dancers are good these days, but not quite as good as their Big Apple counterparts, and this strange and original show, which isn't quite a musical, isn't quite a play and isn't quite a ballet, seems totally rooted in the values and customs of Manhattan. It's stylish, it's slick, it's sometimes sentimental - qualities that haven't always gone down well in England.

Nevertheless, I found myself enchanted all over again, although the Queen's is a dire venue for a dance show. The stage is ridiculously small for choreography that was created for a far bigger stage in the Lincoln Centre, while the sightlines from the stalls are appalling. Yet the production overcomes even these deficiencies.

Who cares about definitions? People are supposedly worried about Contact. If it's a musical, why is the music only on records? Can't be a play because the plot is told in dance, nor a ballet because the dancers talk. So what: it's a show, and an entertaining one. Surely that's enough

Although Susan Stroman's Contact has won awards on Broadway as an outstanding musical, it's more of a dance triple bill. Luckily, Britain now has the dancers to do it justice, with a few American imports. Stroman has invented a hybrid theatrical form, in which minimal words are spoken (not sung) while the characters communicate through movement. Stroman's triumph is to make us care about them - so that when the suicidal leading man (Michael Praed) can't bring himself to partner his dream girl, we urge him on. He'll lose her and his life if he doesn't.

Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman does a good line in humour, too, and puts it to highly original use in Contact, a trio of "dance plays" on a single theme. The least dancey of these, "The Swing", is a somewhat scurrilous animation of the famous Fragonard painting. What begins as girlish flirtation turns distinctly rutty as the young beau disappears to find a corkscrew for the picnic and the girl turns her attentions on the lackey. Many suggestive contortions of the swing later, there is a twist in the tale which (just) saves it from Benny Hill-dom.