DRESS HAS A 'TRAIN'

MetroCard couture in B'way show

What has more than 700 MetroCards but can’t get you on the subway?

That would be the dress Moya Angela wears in Broadway’s “In Transit,” opening Sunday night.

When she sashays onstage in it midway through the new a cappella musical about commuters, it stops the show in its tracks.

Granted, since all of the cards are expired, she’d never get past the turnstile.

“Do you know how expensive it would be if they weren’t expired?!” declares costume designer Clint Ramos, whose crew rounded up the cards on eBay.

Apparently, there are people who collect old MetroCards, though not all of the cards are the same yellow. To get the look they wanted, Ramos & Co. sifted through some 1,600 cards they bought in late September, a few weeks before the first rehearsal.

The cards are stitched together, chain-mail style, with polyester thread. The ones on the skirt were mounted on felt and accordion-pleated, letting them flutter when Angela — who plays, among other roles, a subway clerk — swings around.

Happily, the dress requires no dry cleaning after performances at Circle in the Square Theatre. “We basically just wipe off the cards,” says Ramos, whose work on a very different play, “Eclipsed,” won him a Tony Award this year. “The liner that touches her skin pops off for cleaning, but it doesn’t get any real shmutz on it because Moya just walks down a runway.”

His crew is already hard at work on a backup MetroCard dress, just in case. The first one took some four weeks to be assembled by the John Kristiansen costume shop.

All told, the strapless dress — which zips up the back and has a built-in, non-MetroCard bra — weighs about 15 pounds. It would have weighed a lot more if it were made out of subway tokens, but those were fazed out a decade ago. Did Ramos ever consider adding a train? “Oh, no!” he laughs. “There’s a conveyor belt on the stage, and it might get caught in the tracks!”