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."