Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks

Dancing Shoes a Good Fit for two Showbiz Veterans

In this odd couple of unlikely soul mates, one wears a skirt.

Richard Alfieri's Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, previewing tonight and opening Friday at Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse, pairs an easily irritated preacher's wife and a caustic middle-aged dance instructor for squabbling, snippets of hoofing and the revealing of secrets. Antagonism gives way to sentimental comedy in a play that is, more than anything, a showcase for its two actors.

The Grove's duo -- former Golden Girls star Rue McClanahan and STAR WARS veteran Mark Hamill -- both have what it takes to fill their characters' dancing shoes.

The Oklahoma-born McClanahan trained as a dancer before becoming an actress. She dates her love affair with theater to kindergarten, when she played the mother cat in Three Little Kittens -- ''a character actress even then,'' she jokes.

And despite her huge success on television and in film, she says she's still drawn to the stage because '. . . theater has everything that movies and TV don't. There's the possibility of getting better . . . and deeper as the months go by. Every night I'd drive home from doing an episode of Maude or The Golden Girls and think, 'Oh, now I know how to play that.' ''

Hamill, the well-traveled son of a Navy captain, remembers making his stage debut as the wolf in a San Diego elementary school Spanish Club production of The Three Little Pigs. (''Soy el lobo. Tengo hambre,'' he recites.)

He worked in television and soaps before STAR WARS made Luke Skywalker -- and Mark Hamill -- household names in 1977. After fame found him, he mixed film, theater and voiceover work, then took on the challenge of a musical in the mid-'80s. He plunged into a month of intensive, challenging dance classes before starring in the musical Harrigan 'n Hart at the Goodspeed Opera House and fleetingly on Broadway, and observes, "Once you get it in your body, you get an elation you can't describe.''

Though not a world premiere like this season's Urban Cowboy (which opens on Broadway a week from today) and Romeo & Bernadette (which ends its run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse Sunday after winning another round of raves), Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks shares the intention of making the leap from Coconut Grove to New York.

Alfieri's play premiered in June 2001 at the Los Angeles-area Geffen Playhouse, with legendary actress Uta Hagen as lonely Lily Harrison and David Hyde Pierce of TV's Frasier as gay dance instructor Michael Minetti. After Hagen suffered a stroke, the play was shelved until director Arthur Allan Seidelman paired McClanahan and Hamill, who had worked with him on different projects. The actors' chemistry is bubbling, thank goodness. As McClanahan observes, "Can you imagine what agony it would be if we didn't get along?''

On stage, though, it's at least initially a different story.

''These characters are as different as two people could possibly be,'' Seidelman says. "They're ornery. You think there's no way they're ever going to get together.''

Hamill, who says he took the part because it isn't like anything he's done before, agrees.

''I start out with this abrasive character that people will hate,'' he says with a smile, savoring the idea.

"I'm so almost fired before the play is 10 minutes old. There's no adjustment for respect for the elderly or for being an instructor. . . . He should never deal with the public.''

McClanahan, who played sexy senior Blanche Devereaux on the set-in-Miami Golden Girls, plays a very different Florida retiree in Lily Harrison.

''She was married to a Baptist preacher, and one of my uncles is one, so I know what they're like -- very strict,'' she says. "Lily has been extremely repressed, trained to do what others think best. And now she's confronted with this bombshell of a person who comes in, who's from Mars, a total uninhibited alien. She's always [secretly] wanted to be that way instead of being Miss Goody Twoshoes.''

Playwright Alfieri, who grew up in the Tampa area and modeled Lily in part on his mother, is now busy turning Six Dance Lessons into a screenplay for Universal. He set his play in a St. Petersburg condo with a sweeping view of Gulf Coast sunsets but says he feels every bit as comfortable in Coconut Grove.

''As soon as I get near humidity, I feel at home,'' he jokes.

The Miami Herald :: March 20, 2003