Susan Stroman 'Contact' reviews CONTACT at the Queen's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, from 23 October. Booking: 0870 890 1110 www.contactthemusical.co.uk Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

She is blonde and blue-eyed and laughs a lot and although she claims to be roughly 40-ish, she generates the infectious confidence and enthusiasm of a teenager. Which is just as it should be, because dance maker and director Susan Stroman, once a chorus line hoofer from Wilmington, Delaware, is New York's latest Broadway Babe. Showered with accolades for hits like The Producers, Crazy For You, Show Boat and Oklahoma!, Stroman is over here to mount her latest award winning hit, Contact, at London's Queen's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, starring Leigh Zimmerman, former Royal Ballet dancer Sarah Wildor and Michael Praed.

Classed as a dance show with words, Contact took New York by storm when it opened for an off Broadway try out in late 1999. Overnight it became New York's hottest ticket of the decade and 4 months later, in March 2000, became the latest sell-out at Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. It still is. The show tells through three scenes of dance and dialogue, Swinging , Did You Move? , and Contact! the characters struggle to connect with each other.

"And it's my own story", says Stroman. "People move to New York to be somebody, top of the heap. They climb the ladder of success and suddenly they look around and find they are all alone. It's about loneliness, in any city in the world. I moved to New York from Wilmington to make it there and I know all about trying to make contacts. But I was one of the lucky ones, I met and fell in love with Mike". British director Mike Ockrent was in New York working on Stroman's first hit show, Crazy For You. "Mike hired me in 1991 and when the show opened on Broadway a year later we were together". It was an idyllic marriage in 1996, conducted on both sides of the Atlantic, at home in London-born Ockrent's Bayswater home and Stroman's apartment on New York's 57th Street. Despite Stroman's decision not to have children of her own, the couple were surrounded by family, Ben and Natasha, Ockrent's children from his first marriage in London, and Stroman's sister's brood in Wilmington.

"Mike inspired me to create Contact, she recalls, because when I was working on the show I was losing him to cancer", her eyes suddenly fill with tears but she continues to speak as if they were not trickling down her cheeks. "He was in hospital suffering from terminal leukaemia. It was the only way I could carry on. The rehearsal studio was a solace between visits to Mike in hospital. I could catch my breath and gather strength to go back to the hospital. I would go into the basement and dance with all those wonderful dancers, because I was losing Mike. He died on 2 December 1999 aged 53, shortly after the show opened off Broadway and it's a lovely thing to know that the show is truly a memorial to my marriage to Mike."

Contact was conceived in the spring of 1998 in the meat-packing district of Lower Manhattan. The couple were checking out a pool hall that every Tuesday night at 1 am pushed back the tables and became a swing club. "We were there", remembers Stroman "because we wanted see people dancing in each others arms after 30 years of not touching on the dance floor. Everybody was totally dressed in black, usual in New York, and out walked this girl in a yellow dress. She unhooked from the bar and just stood there and after she had danced she melted into the scenery like Brigadoon. And I thought, that girl's going to change some man's life tonight. I didn t see her go but I hope it was with a man whose life she would change."

Photograph courtesy of the Contact website,
© Paul Kolnik

Amazingly even though this story is plastered around New York no girl has come forward to claim she's the girl in the yellow dress. "The day after the reviews came out, which were so incredible, I jumped into a cab to go back to the club because it was now part of Mike and me even though he was dead, but they were tearing it down. So when the show's producers called and asked me for an idea to develop I said the girl in the yellow dress."

"I don't know how other widows cope without something like the theatre to hang on to in the grief. Death gives you a different take on loneliness. But Mike is still around", she goes on, "and yes I love going back to my homes because they are both so full of him. I'm still the Best Aunt in the world to both of the families I pinched, I'm very good at birthdays and Christmases, I spoke to them all just last night, and Natasha and Ben are fine. Tash, 23, and Ben, 21, come and hang out with me here at the theatre when Ben is home from Leeds University and Tash isn't working as an assistant casting director. All my families gathered round me when Mike went and are still unbelievably loving and supportive."

"It's so important to surround yourself with life after the death of a close one and the theatre is a life force. And immersing oneself in the creative energy of the actors on stage and off, is a great thing. I have been criticised for not facing it properly", she adds, "and maybe that's why it still seems like yesterday and why it's still so difficult, but we all deal with these things differently. He was one of a kind and I hang on to that."

CONTACT at the Queen's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, from 23 October. Booking: 0870 890 1110