Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks

'Dance Lessons' pirouettes through Emotional Range

Rue McClanahan remains spry enough to be a Golden Girl, and Mark Hamill has reached the cusp of Golden Boyhood. That's a perfect match for a comically poignant duet at the Coconut Grove Playhouse called Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.

She's a conservative elderly matron in a St. Petersburg condo overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. He's a former chorus boy giving private dance lessons to make ends meet. Each has secret disappointments to eventually share and resolve -- but first, their contrasting personalities ignite an hour's worth of laughs.

Playwright Richard Alfieri's polished serio-comedy makes this sturdy formula seem young again, while Arthur Allan Seidelman's sure-footed direction choreographs McClanahan and Hamill fluidly through their series of emotional pirouettes. Six Dance Lessons premiered in Los Angeles last year, and Alfieri is already at work on a screenplay for Universal Pictures. In the meantime, the sparkling Grove engagement is being treated as a warm-up for a possible New York transfer.

There's no reason why it can't. The show's stars are in perfect orbit, at the controls of a tailor-made vehicle. Too, this is the kind of dramedy whose arc from hilarity through bitterness to a sweet ending is the bulwark of feel-good commercial theater.

For starters, Roy Christopher's set is as stylish as all get-out, including a picture-window view of the Gulf's rolling waves and persimmon sunsets complemented by Tom Ruzika's lighting. Helen Butler's costumes range from the flamboyant to the dumpy, reflecting the emotional ups and downs of the story as well as the dance lesson themes.

McClanahan is Lily Harrison, wife of a Baptist minister who timidly opens her door to Hamill, as flamboyant dance teacher Michael Minetti. Both are tense and each erupts at the other repeatedly during the early stages of the course. Their meetings are verbal fencing matches as well as dance lessons.

By intermission, a tentative personal relationship has begun that will blossom in the second act. Like the dances themselves -- the swing, tango, fox trot, waltz, cha-cha and more -- the steps are familiar. But it's a pleasure for the audience to be taken to the ball by someone who knows how to lead.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel :: March 25, 2003