HOLLYWOOD CLASSICS ENJOY A REVIVAL

Broadway musicals based on movies are nothing unusual, but the recent crop of shows adapted from classic Hollywood dance musicals represent a strange, new breed of crypto-revival.

Because the dance numbers in the original films are so familiar, audiences at such shows as Gower Champion’s “42nd Street” and Twyla Tharp’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (bothcurrently running in New York) experience an eerie sense of double vision. Like the ghosts in “Follies,” black-and-white images of Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor seem to haunt the stage, dancing alongside their contemporary counterparts. Often out dancing them too.

Though not actually an adaptation, “George M!” invoked the twin specters of Cohan and Cagney as early as 1968. But “42nd Street” effectively launched this subgenre just five years ago (and has since played a long run in Los Angeles). Based on the 1933 Warner Bros. film, it incorporated numbers from other Busby Berkeley musicals of the era--almost always diminishing their notable scale and invention.

Consider Berkeley’s imperishable staging of “Lullaby of Broadway” for “Gold Diggers of 1935”: a stunning Expressionist view of Manhattan high life complete with visions of irresponsible opulence, fascistic tap and a decidedly noir link between celebrity and death.

Champion’s version, 45 years later, offered nothing but a big, simplistic, stylistically anonymous paean to New York--the Broadway cliche that Berkeley had so brilliantly demolished. Even when Champion borrowed Berkeley’s style--as in “We’re in the Money” (from “Gold Diggers of 1933”)--his unimaginative tap choreography and the constricted space of the number made it a paltry reduction of its source.

At that, Champion had it relatively easy: We may remember the look of the Berkeley numbers, but seldom the choreographic details--the steps Keeler danced, for example. Thus there was abundant latitude to refocus and paraphrase the original films’ dance material.

In contrast, every umbrella-twirl and puddle-splash of the 1952 MGM “Singin’ in the Rain” seems to be etched on the American psyche. So, in her recent debut as a Broadway director-choreographer, Tharp and Don Correia (in the Kelly role) attempted a step-for-step theatrical reconstruction of the title number with a choreographic fidelity we’d be lucky to encounter in a production of “Swan Lake.”

“Fit as a Fiddle,” “Good Mornin’ ” and “Moses Supposes” also shifted from screen to stage more or less unchanged--and so did the off-the-wall (and sometimes through -the-wall) solo “Make ‘Em Laugh,” until it became obvious that it just wouldn’t work that way. (These comments are based on a performance right before the scheduled opening--an opening postponed until a platoon of play-doctors helped revise the book and structure of the show.)

Only in interpolated songs (“Temptation,” for instance, from the 1933 MGM film “Going Hollywood”) and in revisions of the weaker numbers in the Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen film, did Tharp’s distinctive talents emerge strongly.

In her suite depicting early sound musicals, a sensational rag doll trio offered a heady dose of the wiggly/floppy motion for which she first became known--and a tap-dancing horse (portrayed by John Carrafa and Tom Rawe of Tharp’s own modern dance ensemble) represented the last word in multilegged, polyrhythmic dazzle.

Tharp’s major gamble was junking the “Broadway Ballet” of the film--an anachronism, since it transposed the style of Berkeley’s “42nd Street” to the late 1920s. Instead, she set her alternative in the same era as the costume drama (“The Dueling Cavalier”) supposedly being filmed by Monumental Pictures--and made Hollywood anachronism its biggest joke.

Besides parodying all those happy peasants who mindlessly cavort in period films--and classical ballets--Tharp introduced such wonders as 18th-Century tap dancing, 18th-Century roller skating and a bluesy 18th-Century apache dance for Correia (in Gene Kelly’s role) and Shelley Washington.

But even here, Tharp’s characteristic reticence--her unwillingness to announce or dramatize dance effects and her avoidance of punchy endings--muted the impact of her work in such a large house as the Gershwin Theatre. You had to look hard to see just how fine the new choreography and all the dancing really were.

Where Tharp and Champion wouldn’t/ couldn’t make their shows more than footnotes to movie lore, “My One and Only” (currently at the Ahmanson) sets its seal on material just as enduring and as potentially troublesome for its abundant cinematic associations.

No, “My One and Only” isn’t based on any film musical but, like Donen’s 1957 Paramount film “Funny Face,” it builds a new plot around a handful of songs from the 1927 Broadway “Funny Face” and adds songs from other sources.

Fred Astaire starred in both the ’27 and ’57 “Funny Face”--and two songs added to “My One and Only” come from his 1937 RKO film “A Damsel in Distress.” Thus much of this score is identified with the greatest dancer in films. Other songs with no Astaire signature carry their own inescapable connections: “Strike Up the Band,” for example, has been choreographed by everyone from Berkeley to Balanchine.

No matter. Co-directors/choreographers Tommy Tune and Thommie Walsh do escape, supplanting their predecessors with unusual contexts for even the most familiar songs. “ ‘S Wonderful” accompanies a playful splash in the surf. “Strike Up the Band” becomes a heartsore anthem for a hero with only fame waiting in his future.

The title song serves for both a show-stopping tap encounter (Tune learning lessons in nearly subliminal suavity from Charles “Honi” Coles) and a delicious throwaway ensemble (veiled Moroccan houris embellishing the song with exotic torso undulations and delicate finger-cymbals).

Obviously, the show is an homage to the past--in Coles’ emeritus status most of all. But no flickering phantoms intrude because Tune and Walsh work as freshly, inventively, definitively as Berkeley in the ‘30s, Kelly and Donen in the ‘50s, Astaire throughout his career.

Thus “My One and Only” has not only some of the brightest, cleverest show-dance in recent memory but something even more remarkable in a nostalgia musical: no ghosts.

Nice work if you can get it. And you can get it if you try.