Dance fever Swing! don’t (have to) mean a thing BY IRIS FANGER
	Swing! Original concept by Paul Kelly. Original direction and choreography by Lynne Taylor-Corbett. North Shore Music Theatre production directed and choreographed by Richard Stafford. Set by Howard C. Jones. Lighting by Kendall Smith. Costumes by Jay Woods. Musical direction by Milton Granger. With Everett Bradley, Stacia Fernandez, Rick Hilsabeck, Davis Kirby, Erica Piccininni, Anya, Matthew Bedell, Beverly Durand, Mark Stuart Eckstein, Parker Esse, Benito Garcia, Michelle Gaudette, Kitty Skillman Hilsabeck, Bernard Jackson, Jennifer N. Jones, Jason Marquette, Pamela Otterson, Mahri Relin, and Jonathan Stahl. At the North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly, through October 10.

What’s not to like in Swing!, which fits the North Shore Music Theatre mold of casting the best of the coming-up Broadway babies, not to mention its penchant for revivals that wrestle the urge of the original into the circumference of its arena stage. The performers even spill out dancing in the aisles in their exuberance and pull up customers to join in at the end.

Making no apologies for what it has not — no story, no fictional characters, no original score — while reveling in the genre of pure dance and period style, Swing! boasts a cast of 14 "Rug Cutters," as the dancers are identified; five lead singers, or "Canaries"; and an on-stage band who produce a sound echoing recordings from the 1940s when swing music and dance — the Lindy, the jitterbug, the mambo, and C&W line dancing — had couples swaying on ballroom and nightclub floors and in high-school gyms. The NSMT cast members are either veteran Broadway gypsies or titleholders from the various ballroom-dance competitions that form a world of their own. The singers also move in syncopated rhythm; they’re led by the genial Everett Bradley, a member of the original Broadway cast with a personality that seems to ooze the spirit of Swing! from his pores, and the elegant Rick Hilsabeck, the Hubbard Street Dance Company veteran who graduated to the Broadway stage and was last seen in Boston in the title role of a touring production of The Phantom of the Opera. Warbler Stacia Fernandez is particularly sultry in pouring out the angst of "Blues in the Night."

The era is World War II, when pop composers/performers Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Johnny Mercer, and Hoagy Carmichael were writing classics to fill the American Songbook. Think "GI Jive" or "It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)," a mere sampling of the music that the "hepcats" at NSMT resurrect in song and dance. Indeed, the finale of act one takes place at a USO, complete with an Andrews Sisters sound-alike trio. Back in the ‘40s, local girls in every port city served as USO hostesses for the guys who were coming through and shipping out to overseas destinations that would be censored from the V-mails they wrote back home. Swing! glosses over the carnage of those years, when American soldiers were fighting and dying in foreign lands, unlike modern-dance choreographer Paul Taylor’s Company B, which is set to some of the same music but backs the dancing with a shadow parade of American soldiers falling on the battlefields.

Neither does the choreography by Richard Stafford, reset from Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s original, compare with the Jerome Robbins masterpiece Fancy Free, his 1944 ballet that later became the Broadway musical On the Town. Robbins combined the best of many techniques, including ballet and modern dance, to wrap into the patterns of social dance, and he developed characters who portrayed the emotions of the times in movement. Later, mining the same sources as Swing!, Bob Fosse made the vernacular an expression of his highly individual style. The choreography in Swing! does none of the above but is composed of souped-up, well-defined renditions of the social dances of the period performed by an expert cast. The jitterbugging men think nothing of flipping their female partners in a 360-degree turn by the neck or trailing them up their bodies and down their backs as if unpeeling a twisting vine.

The show’s two acts are filled with a progression of dance numbers performed by either the full ensemble or individual couples, as if to replicate the craze for ballroom-dance contests. There’s even a number set at the Harvest Moon Competition, which I remember watching on television as an awestruck child. The gimmick here is an Arthur Murray dance-by-chart for two inept fledglings who are nothing like the virtuosi who actually populated that contestant pool. Swing! is a welcome change from the musicals with a message: it delivers entertainment without guilt or a thought beyond the fun in its bouncing heads and flying feet.