By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In Contact, there's a girl in a pink dress and a girl in a blue dress, but it's the Girl in the Yellow Dress that matters.

Contact, playing the Aronoff Center through Dec. 29 as part of Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati, isn't quite an experiment. After all, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins flirted with marrying dance and contemporary drama a half century ago. But we are a society with a short cultural memory, so Susan Stroman's Tony Award-winning musical looks as good as new.

Contact is made up of three unrelated works, all about relationships, that center on the need to connect. There's some talk, but only enough to establish plot.

The girl in pink (Mindy Franzese Wild) is at the center of curtain raiser Swinging, appropriately set within a gilt frame and taking flight from a Fragonard painting. Well, not quite. The coquette on the canvas has lost both of her shoes; the living lady cavorting and gavotte-ing around the stage with a servant and master is wearing hers.

A pastoral turned upside-down, the trio does a fine job with their wittily gymnastic vignette.

The girl in the blue dress (Meg Howrey) is a brow-beaten '50s wife whose only escape from her boorish and abusive husband is to drift off into fantasy, which she does one evening at an Italian restaurant in Queens.

As she dances with waiters and customers and tentatively tries to re-find love in her marriage, Ms. Howrey captures the comedy and pathos of the short story-dance.

But both of these works suffer from being in a cavernous auditorium.

Contact's original home was Lincoln Center, where, I suspect, the reasonably intimate setting worked in the show's favor, letting its emotional content and theatricality pull the audience in.

In a theater as large as Procter & Gamble Hall, it all looks nice, but acting isn't given an equal footing with dancing, and the show suffers.

Not so the title piece, which is strong enough to hold its own. If the show's first half is weak Balanchine, the second half is strong Stroman. The dominant Broadway choreographer of the last several years, she cuts loose in Contact, which is sexy, electric and involving.

Contact is about successful but desperately lonely ad exec Michael Wiley (Daniel McDonald) who chooses a night of empty professional triumph to attempt suicide. (Yeah, it's hackneyed, but it's the dancing that's important.)

He finds his way to an after-hours swing club where every guy in the place is lusting after the coolly mysterious Girl in a Yellow Dress (Colleen Dunn).

Ms. Stroman and book writer John Weidman are far more comfortable on this contemporary terrain than they were in either period piece.

Mr. Weidman makes good use of messages on an answering machine to establish Wiley's life, and his story is as wry, cynical and funny as trying to make your way through a day in Manhattan.

Mr. Weidman gives the audience exactly the happy ending we're expecting, but it's not about the story, it's the dancing that counts. The nonstop, endlessly original swing moves are a knockout. And who doesn't want a comfy happy ending?

The dancing, set to dance hits from then and now, is a giant wow of fancy footwork, flying partners and the sheer joy of being young, gifted and fabulous-looking.

Contact, through Dec. 29, Fifth Third Bank Broadway in Cincinnati, Aronoff Center Procter & Gamble Hall, 241-7469.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com