Contact, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre. Director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s Broadway hit boasts a Tony for best musical, but despite a skimpy script by Stroman and John Weidman, this is a dance concert marketed as a musical to attract a mainstream audience. Performed to recorded music (including classical, big-band jazz, hard rock, and cowboy swing), Contact consists of three variations on the theme of sexual longing. “Swinging” portrays an 18th-century lady on a swing being pushed by a servant as her aristocratic beau watches; when the lover leaves, lady and servant engage in erotic aerial acrobatics. In “Did You Move?” a beaten-down Mafia wife finds release in a fantasy pas de deux with the headwaiter of an Italian restaurant. “Contact,” set in contemporary Manhattan, concerns a successful but suicidal advertising exec who finds new meaning in life when he picks up and partners a gorgeous gal at a late-night dance club.
