By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

True story: One summer night a few years ago, a pre-Producers Susan Stroman, still primarily a choreographer, was hanging out at an after-hours swing dance club in Manhattan's West Village.

Everyone was in chic black except for a girl in a yellow dress who would appear from the crowd when the music began, silently accepting or denying partners, then disappear again when the music ended. She danced into Ms. Stroman's imagination.

IF YOU GO

• What: Contact • What: When: Opens 8 p.m. Tuesdayand plays 8 p.m. weeknights through Dec. 29, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. No performance Christmas Eve. • What: Where: Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati, Aronoff Center for the Arts Procter & Gamble Hall • What: Tickets: $20-$60. 241-7469.

And so Contact was born, a thoroughly original and sexy dance musical that went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2000. It opens Tuesday at the Aronoff for a two-week run as part of Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati.

Contact ends with the girl in the yellow dress. Her story, told through dance, not dialogue, is about how one night she changes the life of an advertising copywriter who has been failing at everything, including a suicide attempt. He stumbles into a swing club and spots a girl who gives him a reason to live.

The three episodes of Contact are about contact, says John Weidman, who wrote the book for the almost wordless musical. "It's about people struggling to connect one way or another; it's about a guy finding a way to make a connection he didn't know he needed to make."

Action story driven

Contact may not use many words, but its action is entirely story driven, says Mr. Weidman, who started his stage book-writing career in 1976, collaborating with Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince on Pacific Overtures.

Mr. Weidman points out that a non-verbal musical isn't such a reach. British shows, including Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera, are largely sung. The trickiest aspect of Contact, he says, is that "it's an anthology. It's three short stories. Creating a structure that enabled us to tell the stories most effectively was the challenge."

They would get together once a week and talk and soon "Swing" became the word that connects the action across the evening.

Starting with "swing dance" and that girl in the yellow dress, Ms. Stroman and Mr. Weidman built the rest of the show to heighten the impact of the ending.

The bawdy opening vignette, "Swinging," is playfully literal. It's about the goings-on aboard "The Swing" in Rococo artist Jean-Honore's Fragonard's famous painting. In this version, two gentlemen and a lady get up to all manner of naughtiness. It's all implied; it's impossible to see anything under those voluminous skirts.

This "contact," Mr. Weidman chuckles, points out that "of the ways of making contact, sexual is shallow, it doesn't amount to much."

Vocabulary is dance

The musical's second episode was originally going to be about "swingers."

"We were playing with the idea of a Rat Pack-y monologue in Las Vegas," says Mr. Weidman. Then it became clear as Contact developed that "the vocabulary of the evening wanted to be dance."

The second section stayed in the 1950s but moved to an Italian restaurant in Queens and evolved into a movement drama about an unhappy wife who can only escape from her verbally abusive husband through her dancing fantasies.

John Weidman fell in love with musicals and Broadway dance with his first experience.

"It was the mid-'50s," he says, "I was sitting in the orchestra, it was Li'l Abner. I had an absolute feeling of exhilaration. The dopey Dogpatch scrim didn't matter. I fell in love, and ever since I've always been intrigued by the role dance can play when it's in the hands of someone brilliant, like Jerome Robbins or Bob Fosse or Susan Stroman."

Mr. Weidman, 56, claims he's had "an accidental life - make that an accidental professional life," he amends.

At 28, after studying international politics and earning a law degree, he wrote a play, Pacific Overtures, and sent it to director Harold Prince. It became a Stephen Sondheim musical and was the first of three collaborations, the others being Assassins in 1991 and Gold!, which is set to open in Chicago in the spring.

Along with doing final prep on long-time-in-the-making Gold!, Mr. Weidman is adapting Contact for the screen and he and Ms. Stroman are again "talking" every week about another project.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com