Burn the beat around!

If, during Burn the Floor's first act, you keep wondering when the hell's this show gonna break for intermission, it's probably not because you're having a bad time. Most likely, it's because you're feeling an urgent need to get your blood pressure checked, your pacemaker readjusted or, at least, your sweaty brow mopped.

Australian director-choreographer Jason Gilkison has finally brought his decade-old success story--with its international cast of Latin and ballroom whiz kids--to Broadway's Longacre Theater. It belongs on Broadway. Though it will close on October 18, it should run here a much longer time.

Why? Well, simply because I could manually flip this show upside down like one of its fantastic dancers and turn it inside out and not find a single thing wrong with it. Staging, lighting, costuming, pacing, dancing, singing, and music playing--have I forgotten any other "ings"? Breathing? Being?--are all top notch. That's why.

I scoffed, at first, and avoided taking one of my serious concert dance friends or serious theater friends to see Burn the Floor, fearing their reaction to anything with the whiff of Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. (Indeed, most of Gilkison's champion performers--like charming Sasha Farber and sultry Peta Murgatroyd--have done time on those shows, and he was a SYTYCD guest choreographer.) So, I went alone. But I was wrong. If any of my friends could not enjoy themselves at Burn the Floor, I might have to rethink our friendship.

So, if you don't care for sexy and romantic dancing--or for Broadway musicals, for that matter--you might want to stay away. Or come with an open mind and give it a shot. If you do love ballroom and Latin, waste no time getting to the Longacre while there's still a floor left because, yes, they do burn it.

The title works because these dancers blaze. Curtain's up, they're ready to go and rarely ease off a driven pace. Samba, rumba, foxtrot, swing, tango, paso doble, even swoony Viennese Waltz get a fresh treatment and vigorous workout from imaginative Gilkison and his intrepid corps. Dance segments magically flow into one another and, in the absence of a narrative, the sweet-natured vocalizing of Ricky Rojas and hot-mama belting of Rebecca Tapia hold it all together.

And you're simply swept along without time to doubt or protest. At times, I definitely felt that I was dancing, too. When intermission arrived, a woman sitting behind me gasped, "I'm exhausted! I could collapse right now!" Kind of alarming, given the apparent average age of the audience!

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