If ever an image captured the life of a city, it’s certainly the one from the third act of contact, the all-danced show that was created by choreographer/director Susan Stroman three years ago and made off with most of Broadway’s 2000 awards (it returns to Boston this week, March 4 through 9). After a curtain raiser that replicates the famous Fragonard painting of a girl on a swing and a vignette set in a 1950s gangsta restaurant in Queens, we see a group of New Yorkers clad in de rigueur black threads at a downtown club twisting to the beat of the music. Suddenly the crowd parts as if Moses had raised his staff over the Red Sea, making way for the Girl in the Yellow Dress. A mysterious goddess animated by sex appeal, she became the unobtainable answer to Everyman’s prayer and, given her ubiquitous presence on billboards and color print ads, a press agent’s dream icon. So it’s fitting that the current inhabitant of the costume is Colleen Dunn, a Broadway baby herself, with a story that reads like a backstage-musical scenario. She spoke to us not from Heaven but from New York.
A Pittsburgh native who fled to New York in 1988, just after high-school graduation, Dunn found work within a month in Legs Diamond. "My sister was an actress, living in SoHo. I’d come up to New York several times a year to take dance classes around the city. I knew from the age of 12 or 13 that this was the life I wanted." From the look of her résumé, which includes eight other Broadway shows plus a stint as a Rockette (a distinction she shares with contact’s original Girl in the Yellow Dress, Deborah Yates), Dunn hasn’t stopped working since leaving Pittsburgh. Her credits also include a number of TV soaps and a current contract with Dannon Yogurt as the wife in the funky television commercials. "Whatever you can do to make a living."
Dunn followed Yates to perform for a year on Broadway. She also starred in the PBS telecast last fall. (Holly Cruikshank, who introduced the character to Boston audiences in late 2001, is currently dancing on Broadway in the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel musical Movin’ Out.) In Dunn’s mind, the Girl is more than just a sex symbol, "and I don’t carry my role much past the stage. There are so many elements that go into making the Girl in the Yellow Dress captivating. William Ivey Long’s incredible design of the dress, which is elegant and sophisticated but also very sexy and smooth when you’re dancing. Stroman’s brilliant choreography and staging make the piece, predominantly danced, really clear in its acting intentions. As an actress, I have to play moment to moment as opposed to playing an idea. I think the Girl has a veneer of self-confidence but underneath she’s looking for someone she can love. I play her more vulnerable. It’s what we all ultimately want: love and contact with other human beings. I mean, it’s all we have."
Meanwhile, Dunn’s husband, a financial manager for American Express, remains back in New York while she’s out on tour. "He has a very serious job, we balance each other well, we don’t have to compete with each other. But it’s difficult going on the road."
In two months, when the tour shuts down, Dunn will be looking for work, despite her skills, her experience, and her time in the dress. "I’ll go back to auditioning. It’s amazing, because when you’re in a show, it’s all-consuming. But then it ends and you’re back to square one."
Contact plays at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District, March 4 through 9. Tickets are $28 to $73; call Telecharge at (800) 447-7400, or go to www.wangcenter.org, or visit the Wang box office.
