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The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

Aurora Theatre's current production of \"Sweet Charity\" is described as a \"chamber\" piece, in the sense that it pares down the show and otherwise cuts corners with regard to design and casting.

Bob Fosse was Broadway’s top director-choreographer in the 1960s and 70s. His signature style included a forward thrust of the hips, hunched shoulders, gloved hands, and turned-in feet. Fosse’s brilliance was apparent in his ability to move smoothly from a scene’s end to a dance number; he heightened the emotions at the end of the scene so the dancing and singing would not clash. Fosse was formally trained as a tap dancer, had no background in ballet or modern dance, and possessed a limited facility. He adjusted each dancer’s movements so they reflected his own dance strengths and limitations rather than those of the individual dancer. Some of his shows and movies include Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Liza with a Z, and Chicago. His work was highly acclaimed for its innovation; Cabaret won eight Academy Awards, and that same year he won a Tony for Best Choreographer on Broadway for Pippin, as well as an Emmy for Liza with a Z.

It's noteworthy that, in the musical, a laborious point is made of the fact that Charity Hope Valentine, the spunky protagonist, is merely a taxi dancer who sells only her \"time,\" never her body, to lonely customers.

Casting former teen queen [Craig Schwartz Molly Ringwald] as the titular dance hall girl with the heart of gold in \"Sweet Charity\" isn't as odd as it may sound. In the Cy Coleman classic at the Fox Theatre, Ringwald packages her incandescent personality and superb technical vocabulary to dazzling effect as the sweetly naive, haplessly romantic Charity Hope Valentine.

Judging by the wiggy dance number \"Rich Man's Frug,\" Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol would be right at home inside the psychedelic Club Pompeii, where fashionistas slither like lizards and Charity encounters the Latin lothario Vittorio Vidal (nicely played by Aaron Ramey). In the next scene, designer Scott Pask gets in a few laughs with his design of Vittorio's molto mod bachelor pad, featuring an endless red couch reminiscent of an erogenous zone. This is the setup for Charity's \"If My Friends Could See Me Now.\" As the daft heroine's saucy sidekicks, Amanda Watkins (who played Eliza Doolittle at the Alliance Theatre in 2004) makes for a wonderfully sparky, brutally honest Nickie, and Francesca Harper's Helene is a tall glass of attitude in a skimpy negligee. While Ramey delights in the pencil-thin stereotypes of his character, Jessica Leigh Brown, as Vittorio's paramour Ursula, brings to mind the hauteur of Maria Callas and Sophia Loren. What a pair. [Craig Schwartz Molly Ringwald], who appears to have moved from the \"16 Candles\" to the \"16 cakes\" phase of her career, has a good time with the sandwich- chomping, beer-guzzling scene in Vittorio's closet. In a form- fitting red valentine of a dress, Ringwald often looks like a sweaty, kewpie-doll cross between Melanie Griffith and Shirley Temple. But she's a terrific sport about it --- and a seriously good singer and actress.

  Yet there [Christina Applegate] was last week at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where Charity (*** 1/2 out of four) opened Tuesday, alive and kicking -- and I mean kicking. At the Sunday preview I attended, Applegate leaped and strutted and spun through Wayne Cilento's exhilarating choreography, gamely executing the very same steps she had learned before her bad break. No, she didn't dance the role of hard-luck heroine Charity Hope Valentine as dazzlingly as Gwen Verdon did in the Broadway original, I'm sure. Nor could Applegate summon the technique that her temporary replacement, veteran hoofer Charlotte d'Amboise, must have brought to the part. And Applegate's singing, particularly during and after her taxing dance numbers, could seem strained.

Before it came to Boston, \"Sweet Charity\" played in Minneapolis and Chicago, where, during a performance, [Christina Applegate] broke a bone in her foot and an understudy took over. Veteran dancer Charlotte d'Amboise, who had been performing in \"Chicago\" on Broadway, was pulled in as replacement. She performed the role here during the run that ended Sunday.

There is some other deft and sleekly simple staging here: the nightclub where [Charity Hope Valentine] falls for smooth Italian movie star Vittorio Vidal is cleverly conjured; the Coney Island big-wheel ride is beautifully done, and the closet scene executed with brilliant comic style and timing. But in the end this is a musical of big, in-yer- face numbers, and they are delivered with gun-shot velocity by a great cast, and expertly choreographed by Karen Bruce in a way that gives a nod to the Bob Fosse style but that is still original. This is an evening that turns out to be not just unexpectedly bittersweet, but also very neat indeed.

Charity Hope Valentine, the central character of the 1966 Broadway musical \"Sweet Charity\" -- with book by Neil Simon, music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Dorothy Fields -- is a tricky gal. [...]some of the other ladies at the dance hall where she works as a hostess are prostitutes in their spare time and we see Charity being plenty chummy with her regular customers.