Voice of Dance

SUSAN STROMAN: MAKING CONTACT

Since beginning her career as a choreographer, Stroman has involved herself in every aspect of a show. "The more you know about every department, whether it's the book or the lights or the costumes or the sets, the stronger your own department is going to be," she says. "You can do the most beautiful dance step in the world, but if it's not lit right, it won't matter. It's all about seeing the big picture.

"It's very important to me to work closely with the dance arranger," she continues, "and help develop the arrangements for my choreography. I learned this from watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, where I discovered how the music went hand in hand with the choreography, how every dance step was motivated by a particular instrument or arrangement. So part of what I do is help build the songs to match the staging. I think of myself as a writer of dance: it's as tangible to me as pages in a book."

She works out all the choreography before rehearsals begin, creating on an assistant and the show's two dance captains. "But when I get in front of the cast, the movement takes another form," she says. "I ultimately want the dancers to feel as if they've made it all up, so we will try things together. I always have a basis for them to fall back on, but I also feed off the actors. So if someone turns another way, or does something that comes out of his character, I just go with it."

 Stroman looks for actors and dancers who are fearless, who are willing to take risks. "At auditions, I give a combination appropriate for that particular show," she says, "and then I'll toss out emotions for them to play doing that same combination. I'll tell them to do the combination aggressively or flirtatiously, or as if they've had six margaritas, or as if this is the last time they're ever going to get the chance to dance. I want to see if they can look completely different each time, and that they're not afraid to do it, not afraid to make fools of themselves."

 It was Stroman's own fearlessness that enabled her to do Contact, which is not so much a musical as it is dance theater. The show rose out of the ashes of Steel Pier (1997), which had the shortest run of any Broadway musical with which Stroman has been associated. (Even the very disappointing Big, which opened a year earlier to dismissive reviews, ran longer.) Although critics could muster up little enthusiasm for the show itself -- which starred Karen Ziemba, the quintessential Stroman dancer -- most were impressed with the choreography. Among those who admired Stroman's work was André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, who called her and said that if she had any idea she wanted to explore, he would help her develop it.

She went to work with writer John Weidman on a story inspired by a girl in a yellow dress she had noticed one night while out swing dancing. "The girl would step forward and dance with someone, and then disappear into the crowd," says Stroman. "As I watched her, I thought to myself, 'She's going to change some man's life tonight.That episode became the inspiration for the eponymous Contact, the last of the three short stories. "Even though the three stories look completely different, they all revolve around people's ability or inability to make contact," she says.

The show does not have an orchestra or singing, and there is a minimal amount of dialogue. The stories are told mostly through dance, accompanied by an eclectic array of recordings. "I started out with the third short story," says Stroman, "and I wanted it to have the sound of a club, which means CDs. But the main thing was that it was about a man who was about to die, and his whole life is flashing before him. In that situation I didn't want him to be thinking of a new Broadway score. I wanted him to be thinking of songs that meant something in his life."

If the critical response to Contact was ecstatic, the response to Stroman's giddy, witty direction and choreography of The Producers was euphoric. She had originally signed on as choreographer; the director was to be her husband, Mike Ockrent, whom she met on Crazy for You. But the talented Ockrent died much too young of leukemia in 1999, and Mel Brooks asked Stroman if she would continue on as director as well as choreographer. He could not have chosen a better collaborator: her direction and choreography are seamless. Stroman matches Brooksantic comedy and verbal dexterity with raucously funny choreography, sight gags, and physical humor that let up just long enough to allow the audience to catch its collective breath.

"When I begin working on a show, I have this image -- I know it sounds crazy -- of immersing myself in a big water barrel, the kind that you saw at the beginning of the old TV show 'Petticoat Junction,'" says Stroman. "I'm surrounded by a sea of actors and designers and creative people. And I stay in that water barrel until the show opens. Then I come up for air and there's all this hoopla, as there was with The Producers, and it's overwhelming." But only momentarily. Just until she's back in the water barrel, embarking on a new project that just might change someone's life.

• Read Allan Ulrich's review of Contact, the Musical.
• Look at images of Contact in our Image Gallery.
• The official website of Contact, the Musical.