This dime dance is really priceless

It is not often that a musical begins with silence, but "Ten Cents a Dance" is not your father's musical.

A somber man, in a faded suit, descends an imposing spiral staircase in a stillness that seems to grow (you can hear the audience cough and even breathe), with his slow steps to a piano. He slumps into a seat, still brooding, when his fingers begin to tickle the ivories and a familiar melody pleasantly takes shape, "Blue Moon."

"Ten Cents A Dance" gives you an evening of Rodgers and Hart (before Rodgers teamed up with Hammerstein) hung on an emotional arc, which can wrench as well as set the heart aloft.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart met at Columbia University in 1919, where they collaborated on an annual talent show and their legendary partnership went on to produce hit songs ("Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine") for unforgettable shows such as "Pal Joey," "On Your Toes," and "Babes in Arms."

Even if you were born well after the Depression, their melodies are familiar and this show will immediately connect with your visceral memory.

Director John Doyle opened his show at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachussetts in August to very solid reviews, and has been further developing it in Princeton where it opened last week on McCarter Theatre Center's Berlind stage.

The stage is reminiscent of a speakeasy or gin mill, those long steps might belong to Dante's Inferno, and along the walls old bar stools and musical instruments might be watching the yard from their prison cells.

Doyle finds the dark side to these melodies, giving some, such as "My Funny Valentine," a haunting quality. Jane Cox, the lighting designer works like an artist using greys, blues, purples and sharp reds and greens to texture the brooding atmosphere.

Malcom Gets, a Broadway veteran who played a song-and-dance man in the HBO film "Grey Gardens," is up for the job of setting the emotional thermometer through the 80-minute production. As soon as he begins "Blue Moon," in a voice tinged with romantic memory,  five redheads descend from the same colossal staircase: five Miss Joneses, perhaps the same woman through the years, who "bewitch, bother and bewilder" (a show-stopping number) poor Johnny.

Creator and director John Doyle is famous for having cast members double as the orchestra in his Tony award-winning revivals of "Sweeney Todd" and "Company," and he produces the same effect here. The five Miss Joneses play everything from triangle to trumpet to upright bass.

Donna McKechnie is the oldest Miss Jones and she along with Johnnie are the stars. But McCarter's production is more a true group effort. Diana DiMarzio, Jane Pfitsch, Elisa Winter and Jessica Tyler Wright, the other Miss Joneses, are all veterans of Doyle's ensemble style and have each previously performed in "Company" or "Sweeney Todd."

Musical and orchestra director Mary-Mitchell Campbell leads us through more than 30 Rodgers and Hart songs including My Funny Valentine, Manhattan,and Have You Met Miss Jones, with the cast swinging between moods mid-melody. The time flies by and we wish we could hear thirty more. Doyle brings us so many shades of memory, we experience the music in a fresh way while retaining the heart of the old classics.