Drama schools often choose plays more for their training opportunities than the expected payoff for the audience.

		'Contact' Where: Playhouse, 222 Craft Ave., Oakland. When: Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $12-$14; 412-621-4445.

But rarely can a college production so clearly designed to challenge a mixed cast of dancers, actors and musical theater majors have turned out to be so much fun for both cast and audience as Susan Stroman's and John Weidman's dance musical, "Contact," staged by Point Park students at the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

As previewed here last week, director-choreographer Tome Cousin was part of the original Lincoln Center ensemble that developed the Tony-winning show. But this is the first production since that, the subsequent tours and London. So Cousin had to figure out how to do the show with students, in the process bridging the gap between Point Park's separate dance and musical theater programs.

The happy result testifies as much to the spirit of his generous leadership and the students' wholehearted participation as to his technical solutions and the skills they have discovered.

Discovery is what it took, I'm told, for actors who find themselves dancing and dancers who have to speak.

"Contact" is a three-act dancical that tells its stories almost entirely through movement, using recorded music and a little dialogue but no song. It opens with "Swinging," a deliciously gymnastic divertissement based on Fragonard's painting of French aristocrats disporting themselves on a swing. Neither the physical/anatomical difficulties the swing presents nor the many folds of Joan Markert's luscious period costumes inhibit their inventive love-making a bit.

Act 2 is "Did You Move?," a fuller drama set in a 1950s New York Italian restaurant, to which a brutish husband brings a browbeaten wife yearning for romance. He won't comply, so she imagines her own, turning the whole restaurant (waiters, customers, chefs) into a triumphal comic fantasy of liberation, only to discover that reality is a hard, dark nut to crack.

That hint of tragedy prepares us for Act 3, itself called "Contact," in which an unhappy ad man contemplates suicide. But in what is really a full one-act play, he discovers a late-night dance club where he learns, mainly through the agency of a bartender guru and an enticing girl in a yellow dress, how to let loose the feelings within.

So the theme of all three acts is contact -- physical, playful and comic; rebellious, fantastic and comi-tragic; exultingly visceral.

To multiply the challenge, Cousin has double- and triple-cast some roles. In "Swinging," kudos especially to the gymnastic skills of Sean Ewing. Jennifer Perdue, his willing playfellow on the night I was there, lacks the demure surface the role can have, but has plenty of zest.

In "Did You Move?," the Wife was played with touching wistfulness and feisty spirit by Ansley Van Epps, partnered by Dan Karasik's stalwart Headwaiter and supported by a lively dozen more.

In "Contact," Thomas Sullivan was the suicidal ad man who learns to release his demons in dance, and Brittany Carricato was the exquisite Girl. They and the trickster-funny Bartender, Dale Spollett, were lifted up by an ensemble of 13, each with distinctive character and physicalization.

The music for "Contact" has always been recorded, as such varied material must be. It ranges from Stephane Grappelli's version of Richard Rodgers' "My Heart Stood Still," through a mix of Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Bizet to an amalgam of a dozen exhilarating swing-dance pop tunes.

I'm very sorry to report it closes this weekend.