'Forever Tango' review: Key steps missing

Of all commercial dance entertainments, "Forever Tango," which opened here in 1994 and returned Tuesday evening to the Marines' Memorial Theatre for a sixth visit, may be the most durable. Yet, the package, created and directed by Luis Bravo, seems diminished in this incarnation.

This diversion slinks across the stage like crazy for two hours and often sounds quite wonderful (if overamplified), but the original idea behind the show - to penetrate to the heart of the endlessly fascinating Argentine dance form it exalts - seems only incidental.

Even in its first version, the project was never adequately structured. At this point, "Forever Tango" resembles a string of high-voltage nightclub acts that could be rearranged without inflicting any harm.

Sadly, there's a potentially great narrative here. How the tango, an amalgam of movement strains from immigrant cultures, was born in the brothels of Buenos Aires' La Boca district and spread to glittering European ballrooms is a story eminently worthy of telling on a stage.

Yet you won't find that epic here. In Bravo's recounting, the tango seemed to make a detour by way of Las Vegas, where it acquired a few bad habits that it has not been able to shake off.

It's understandable why. Bravo is a superior musician (he plays cello in the eight-member onstage band) with impressive credentials. But he is not an ethnographer or a choreographer either. The task of preparing the dances has been assigned to the dancers, who are 13 in number. They have gone about their task with varying degrees of success. A shaping hand, a guiding sensibility are absent.

What one misses is the chaste sensuality, the erotic urge clothed in ritual that flares below the waist, as women's legs flare like Medusa's tongues and entrap their partners. In tango, the male may lead, but he is not really in control.

We get inklings of the show that "Forever Tango" might have been. Two men confront each other and we wait for the male duet that could spice the proceedings, but it's over before it really starts.

Too many couples are determined to wow us with sudden lifts and descents to one knee; very few of the duets build organically. You feel that these dancers, most of them from Argentina, might, under different circumstances, find the soul behind the steps. They certainly possess the chops.

The producers are advertising this run of "Forever Tango" as a showcase for Bay Area-born Cheryl Burke, a multiple champion on TV's "Dancing With the Stars." She is a versatile, technically impressive performer, who has eyes only for the audience, rather than her partner, Ezequiel López Hudyma, and seems to have been shoehorned into the production.

The patina of a great tango dancer, still missing in Burke, can be found in the remarkable Marcela Durán, a "Forever Tango" veteran whose duets with Gaspar Godoy find that wonted tone, somewhere between louche and soigne. They're the least sensational couple onstage, yet they're almost worth the price of admission.

Kudos, also, to singer Martin de Léon, bandoneón master Eduardo Miceli and violinist Rodion Boshner, the soloist in a grand rendition of Gade's "Jalousie."

Forever Tango: Dance revue. Through Jan. 12. Marines' Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., S.F. $45-$100. (415) 771-6900. www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com.

E-mail Allan Ulrich at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle