A Role to Kill For

It’s a killer role--in more ways than one, says Charlotte d’Amboise, star of “Chicago” at the Ahmanson Theater. She plays Roxie Hart, an unfaithful wife and celebrity-seeking good-time girl who finds the notoriety she’s always wanted when she kills her lover.

Each night, D’Amboise must milk the humor, sell eight Kander and Ebb songs, and exhibit the stamina of a racehorse. She has to be ditsy yet savvy, repulsive but sympathetic--despite the absence of redeeming traits. Her Roxie is “smart enough to charm us even as she disgusts us . . . no mean feat,” observed the Washington Post--one in a torrent of raves.

“It would have been nice to have a star who helped sell tickets,” said “Chicago” producer Barry Weissler of the fact that D’Amboise is not a household name. “But, in this case, talent willed out. Charlotte is a brilliant comedian and a beautiful girl/woman--threatening and vulnerable at the same time.”

If critics view the show as D’Amboise’s big breakthrough, the performer is more reality-based. Los Angeles, as the highly visible capital of the entertainment world, means a lot, she acknowledges. But after winning a Tony nomination for 1989’s “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” she didn’t work for two years.

“This is a great part, a wonderful show--but I still have to fight for roles,” said the actress, bare legs tucked beneath a micro-miniskirt in her dressing room. “I may have developed a profile on tour, but back in New York, it’s ‘D’Amboise who?’ ”

To devotees of classical ballet, however, the name means a lot. The daughter of the famed Jacques d’Amboise and Carolyn George, another principal with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, Charlotte started studying dance at the age of 8. Six years later, after appearing in children’s ballets such as “The Nutcracker” (with brother Christopher, twin sister Cate, and Dad), she gave up her toe shoes for musical theater and acting.

“Ballet never interested me,” says D’Amboise, 33, whose impish good looks, nonstop legs and big smile have led to comparisons with a young Shirley MacLaine. “It’s so one-note that I was bored. Nothing’s more painful than plies and tendus--concentrating only on the physical. Like Cassie in ‘A Chorus Line,’ I was too extroverted for that world.”

A student at New York City’s Professional Children’s School, D’Amboise honed her acting skills at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Academy of Dramatic Arts. She had three off-Broadway plays to her credit before graduating from high school in 1982. Enrolling briefly at Barnard College, she quit college when her Actors Equity card arrived.

At 20, she played Cassandra in “Cats,” where she met her husband-to-be Terrence Mann--the male lead in “Beauty and the Beast” on Broadway and in L.A. and a star in Broadway’s current “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” She later lined up roles in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance” and “Carrie,”’ the notoriously unsuccessful adaptation of a movie based on the Stephen King novel.

Early on, choreographer Margo Sappington (1976’s “Pal Joey”) forecast that D’Amboise would be the next Chita Rivera or Juliet Prowse. But parts for an actress-singer-dancer are increasingly rare, D’Amboise points out. Writers rarely create multidimensional roles for women--and when they do, profit-hungry producers go for a “name.” Though she appeared with the N.Y. Shakespeare Festival and in a regional theater production of David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow,” D’Amboise is not perceived as a “dramatic” actress. Straight dancing roles hold no interest for her and her voice won’t carry a “Les Miserables,” she concedes.

“I’m much more in the Gwen Verdon vein--which is why I do so many revivals,” says the performer, who scored when she took over the role of Lola from Bebe Neuwirth in Broadway’s “Damn Yankees” (1994). She also was singled out for her exuberant clowning as a Coney Island cooch dancer in a 1993 production of “On the Town.”

It was Verdon, in fact, who portrayed Lola in 1955--and “Chicago’s” Roxie 20 years later. Anne Reinking, a Fosse protegee who choreographed the current production, took over for Verdon in 1976 and played Roxie again in the 1996 City Center revival that captured six Tony Awards.

“Though I watched her on stage, I had no intention of imitating Annie,” said D’Amboise, who was initially called in for the role of Velma--Roxie’s vaudevillian rival played by Jasmine Guy in L.A. and Neuwirth in New York. “Our interpretations are very different. I play the character innocent. She plays her older, wiser, sexier--like someone who’s been around the block. What I did want to steal was Annie’s ‘abandon.’ She was a mature woman in a tight skirt giving 150%--in an era when everything is so ‘safe.’ ”

Fosse’s sensual choreography, his rolling shoulders and pelvic thrusts, made D’Amboise blush at first (“I felt like a stripper”). His steps are a “different vocabulary” demanding confidence and control, she says. Massage, chiropractic visits and Pilates workouts help keep her in shape. But, after a half week of performances, the star was sidelined with a knee injury last year.

“I was so insecure returning to a show everyone had been doing for two months,” D’Amboise says, popping a crumbled cookie in her mouth. “But I’ve grown with Roxie--making her more like me. I identify with her optimism, her childlike quality--to the passion that makes her push aside whatever gets in the way. Still, I’m overly sensitive and lack her ability to shrug off guilt. One not-so-positive comment by a critic and I go berserk. I can’t enjoy myself at a party unless everyone’s having a good time.”

* “Chicago,” the Ahmanson Theater, 135 N. Grand Ave., through July 5; $30-$70. (213) 628-2772. From July 7 through Aug. 2, D’Amboise will move with the production to the Shubert Theater, 2020 Avenue of the Stars; $35-$70. (800) 447-7400.