Dancer leads by example

WASHINGTON -- Even at 82, Gillian Lynne is unmistakable as a dancer. It’s clear not just in her slim and leggy physique but also in the way she raises a foot onto a table in the lobby of the Lansburgh Theatre with a ballerina’s ease -- and in what is revealed once she takes off her shoe. Her toes wiggle, but the arch doesn’t budge, its joints fused into an immovable block.

“That’s from ‘Cats,’ ” she laments, lifting her foot back to the floor as casually as if it were a handbag. “Every move in that thing was worked out on this body.”

“That thing,” however damaging to the bones, made Lynne a very rich and -- in theater circles -- famous woman. The choreographer of “Cats” as well as “The Phantom of the Opera,” two of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history, she is surely one of the most successful dancemakers of all time, with her work appearing on a stage somewhere in the world just about continuously for the past quarter-century. Despite the welded foot and two artificial hips, Lynne is still at it -- not for big-money commercial productions in London or New York, but for the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where she recently staged the musical interludes in its production of Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” which runs through July 27.

Who knew Moliere was the original song-and-dance man? In this, his last play, the 17th century satirist who revolutionized French theater also foreshadowed musical comedy, incorporating the singing and dancing he’d dabbled in during his years on the road with a band of commedia dell’arte players.

“The Imaginary Invalid,” which skewers doctors as money-hungry peddlers of hot air and hypocrisy, is by no means loaded with dance numbers. Lynne’s work here is compartmentalized -- she gets the actors moving in a whirlwind, scene-setting prologue and a taut, stylized epilogue that has the cast wearing masks (a bit “Phantom”-esque) and sweeping cloaks, as well as two interludes. But the effect is memorable. Her snappy, fluid way with a crowd is fully of a piece with Keith Baxter’s careening, vigorous direction of the cast, led by the rubbery Rene Auberjonois as Argan, a hypochondriac so addicted to doctors that he schemes to make his daughter marry one.

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Transforming the body

Baxter, who like Lynne is English, said he came to know Lynne because they have houses on the Sussex seaside. He said he asked Lynne to stage the dances “first because we were friends and second because I knew she was brilliant. The kudos for ‘Cats’ -- you generally think of [director] Trevor Nunn, but ‘Cats’ is really Gillian’s own brilliance.”

Lynne took a notebook over to Baxter’s house 18 months ago, where the director played her the play’s original music by baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. But she says her work on “The Imaginary Invalid” has less to do with the physical gags of commedia dell’arte -- the bawdy Italian form of comedy that inspired Moliere -- than with two other influences: her years dancing with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (which later became the Royal Ballet), learning mime from the famed Russian prima ballerina Olga Preobrajenska, and the more contemporary work of the great French actor and mime Jacques Lecoq.

Lynne studied with Lecoq in the 1950s, learning “how to build character out of movement,” she says. “Thanks to him I can make my body go into any character. It’s become instinctive, how to translate your imagination into your limbs, with no holds barred, no thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ ”

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An autobiography

Watching Lynne as she bounces from point to point in her life story, it’s hard to imagine her ever thinking, “Oh, I can’t do that.” Her account is a mosaic of jubilant name-dropping -- “I’m the only one left alive who choreographed for David Merrick, the King of Broadway”; “Then I did a film with Errol Flynn” -- and physical theater. She’s wearing capri slacks, a couple of layers of form-fitting T-shirts and a string of crystal beads; with her firm skin and blond bob, she looks far younger than her years even when she’s not jumping up to demonstrate, say, how she eagerly scanned a cast list posted at the ballet one day to find that she’d lost out on a part to none other than Margot Fonteyn.

“I know that statement about being sick with disappointment,” Lynne says. “I rushed to the loo and threw up.”

That setback put her on the path to London’s West End, however. She started dancing in variety shows at the London Palladium, giving 16 performances a week.

“Fighting for that audience, it strengthened my technique,” Lynne says. “That’s why I tell dancers” -- here she stands and clasps her hands between her legs, as if there’s a harness lifting her at the crotch -- “pull up! Pull up! I am not tired!”

Working with dancers is one thing, but few of “The Imaginary Invalid’s” actors had had any dance training. Lynne put them through a boot camp of sorts, starting each rehearsal with stretches and abdominal exercises. Says actor Tony Roach, who plays Cleante, the beau of Argan’s daughter Angelique: “I think everyone is in at least slightly better shape than we started.”

Now it’s on to the next project: Lynne is finishing her autobiography. The title? She draws her hand through the air, as if seeing the words in lights: “Nipples Firing.”

“Because that’s what I always yell at my actors,” she says. “The first thing that enters space is this” -- she inflates her chest -- “and they have to be firing with energy, have to be something that lifts the audience up.”

From the sound of it, Lynne will shape her writing with the focused energy and intensity she brings to her rehearsals. For all her wealth and her years, she has no plans to retire, she says, because what else is there to do?

“In our world, if you come up through dance, you either give it up at 50 -- except I didn’t, because I did ‘Cats’ at 52 -- or you’re hoist with your own petard, because if you leave off you’d just disappear into a lazy, old, uninteresting person. I can’t imagine a life where I don’t think things up and go to rehearsal and help actors mold something they didn’t think they could do.”