Steel Pier

ACT I
Prelude: Stunt Pilot Bill Kelly lies face down on the ground, his flight jacket torn, a cloud of smoke hanging in the air over him. He manages to stand up, looking at a raffle ticket he holds in his hand. It’s good for three weeks. Ethereal dancers in white moving through the shadows sprinkle sand on the ground to transport the scene to the beach at Atlantic City in 1933. One-time celebrity Rita Racine is waiting for her partner so they can enter the dance marathon on the Steel Pier. Bill appears and watches Rita dancing in the surf. Known as “Lindy’s Lovebird,” Rita made her name as the first woman to kiss Lindbergh when he arrived back from France. Bill tells her he admired her singing act on the midway at the Trenton Air Show, but when he asks if she’ll dance with him in the marathon, she tells him she’s already got a partner. If he ever turns up. Bill goes off to find a partner of his own, while Rita sings of the home she’ll return to after this one last marathon (“Willing to Ride”).

Inside the Steel Pier ballroom, Mick Hamilton, the Master of Ceremonies, gets the marathon underway (“Everybody Dance”). The rules: for forty-five minutes in every hour the contestants must dance; if they fall, collapse or just stop moving, they will be disqualified. Waiting until the last minute for her no-show partner, Rita is forced to accept Bill’s offer to dance (even though he has two left feet). He tells Rita about his daredevil stunts at the Trenton Air Show, where he crashed his plane but bought a winning raffle ticket for a kiss and a dance with “Lindy’s Lovebird” (“Second Chance”). He is obviously smitten with her, but Rita is secretly married to Mick, the Master of Ceremonies. Mick’s scheme is simple. Rita adds glamour to the marathon, Mick makes sure she wins, they take the prize money and move on to the next town. Mick has promised her that this will be her last marathon, but as he confides to Mr. Walker, his assistant, winning is “A Powerful Thing.” The other marathon contestants include Shelby Stevens, a former cook in a lumber camp, and her partner, harmonica virtuoso Luke Adams; struggling young newlyweds from Utah, Precious and Happy McGuire; Olympic wrestler Johnny Adel and his partner, one-time socialite Dora Foster; and vaudeville brother-and-sister team Bette and Buddy Becker. Since Bill isn’t up to Rita’s level as a dancer, Mick himself shows her off on the dance floor while Bill watches from the sidelines, admiring the woman he loves (“Dance with Me / The Last Girl”). Mick gets the band to turn up the musical heat, as the dancers compete for sponsorship (“The Shag”).

As time passes, the contestants begin dropping from exhaustion, and Mick tries to liven things up with their specialty acts, starting with Shelby’s (“Everybody’s Girl”). Another of Mick’s schemes is to trump up a romance between Bill and Rita, culminating in a wedding on the dance floor – only pretend, of course – and he insists that Rita tell Bill, in spite of her misgivings. After the Two Step, on their hourly fifteen-minute break, Rita finds Bill on the boardwalk, at the tank of the Diving Horse, where he shows off and she dares him to jump in for a swim (“Wet”). But before Rita can tell Bill of Mick’s plan, their break is over, in time for Luke Adams’ Harmonica Specialty. When Mick brings Rita and Bill up to the mike to announce their engagement on the nightly radio broadcast, Bill proposes unprompted by either. In celebration, Mick has Rita sing her signature tune (“Lovebird”) as we flashback to her act at the Trenton Air Show where Bill first saw her. The scene shifts back to the Steel Pier where, in order to knock out some of the competition, Mick announces that it’s time to run “The Sprints.” Rita falls, but Bill somehow manages to stop time and run it back again so she won’t be disqualified before his time is up. This time she doesn’t fall, as the marathon continues.

ACT II
As the publicity stunt wedding approaches, Rita is drawn to Bill in ways she can’t admit. He even enters her dreams during a fifteen-minute nap, taking her on a celestial airplane ride (“Leave the World Behind”). The young farmer, Happy, has dropped out of the marathon, in hopes that his wife Precious will come home with him to Utah. Precious has other, grander plans for herself, but when Shelby offers to take her place with Happy (“Somebody Older”), he gently turns her down. On the phony wedding night, Mick takes Rita up to the roof to show her the lines of people flocking to buy tickets. Suspecting her growing feelings for Bill, Mick insists she get him to drop out as soon as the wedding’s over, and leaves. Rita is consoling herself with her dream that this will be her last marathon when Precious comes looking for Mick, who clearly has taught Precious more about show business than his secret marital status should allow. Rita’s world seems to be coming apart (“Running in Place”).

The circus-like atmosphere of the wedding is heightened by the cellophane costumes the wedding party wears. In exchange for her personal favors, Mick has featured Precious in the ceremony as the personification of Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy (“Two Little Words”). For the titillation of the crowd, Rita and Bill are given their fifteen-minute break in a honeymoon tent on the dance floor, one Rita knows can be ripped away at any moment. When she wishes she and Bill could escape, Bill offers to take her away in his plane, telling her that anything can happen if you believe in your dreams (“First You Dream”). But Bill’s time has run out. As he explains to Rita that his three weeks are up, the tent is ripped away and the hurt and confused Rita runs from the dance floor. Bill watches her go and then leaves. Mick tries to force Rita back onto the floor to finish the marathon with another partner (“Steel Pier”), but Rita is determined to go home, to the house that Mick angrily informs her he had to sell long before. As Rita packs to leave, Mick furiously reminds her of everything he has done for her. Grabbing the Air Show raffle ticket Bill had given her out of her hand, he reminds her how her act failed in Trenton after some “hot-dog pilot” got himself killed in a crash. Suddenly everything becomes clear to Rita. For three weeks she has been dancing with a man – falling in love with a man – who was only with her on borrowed time. As she realizes what a loveless trap her life with Mick has been, the world around her fades away and Bill appears. Urging her to take a chance on her life, he asks her at last for the dance he won in the raffle (“Final Dance”). When their tender dance is through, he is swept away by the dancers in white and the world of the marathon returns. Rita is surrounded by the exhausted surviving contestants, but she picks up her suitcase and, with a triumphant sense of hope and determination, she leaves the marathon behind forever.