Oldies who really are alive and kicking

THE cast of Gotta Dance are limbering up at rehearsal in New York when Stefanie Powers raises a leg and rests it on top of a prop.

My eyes are on stalks because the actress is 73 and she’s doing a workout performers half her age would struggle with. That’s almost the point of the musical Gotta Dance, which its director Jerry Mitchell jokingly calls ‘A Chorus Line, for seniors’.

Ms Powers ( pictured) appears with Andre De Shields, Georgia Engel, Lillias White, Lori Tan Chinn and Nancy Ticotin as a group of not-so-young folks who answer an ad to become half-time dancers for a professional basketball team. But the number choreographed is hip-hop! And the oldies get into conflict with youngsters running the show.

It’s glorious fun — poignant, too — as it discusses the issue of seniors treated as invisible people. It was the best musical I caught this trip — even though I only saw it in rehearsal.

The show, by Bob Martin, Chad Beguelin, Matthew Sklar and Nell Benjamin, is based on a documentary and it opens this month in Chicago.

There’s talk of it hitting Broadway next year.