Games, performed by the African-American Dance Ensemble 
at the American Dance Festival, Durham, N.C., 1986

British columnists had already made much of the rehearsal tensions. Visionary playwright John Barton had walked off the set, indignant with the drastic surgery on his 14-play cycle. Two English cast members followed, along with a third of the directorial team. In that cutthroat atmosphere, the cast found McKayle a godsend.

"He's a sweetheart," says Christina Pawl, the "quadruple threat" chorus member at Maggiano's. "He's fun. I've worked with other choreographers who can be very harsh and insist you do it their way. He's to-the-point about what he wants, but he gets it across in a kind and helpful way."

Tantalus was, in other ways, a typical McKayle project - not a dance show, but a show enhanced with movement: Thetis dances contemptuously before Zeus; the chorus moves gracefully into a wedding dance for Orestes and Hermione; the Thracian king begins a delicate toe dance to relieve his physical pain. "They weren't set pieces that stopped the action," says McKayle. "My job was to continue the dramatic energy of the moment." He borrowed what he'd learned from India, Africa, China, even gypsies.

McKayle's work also faced brutal cuts and rearrangements. Moreover, rehearsals started but the English half of the Anglo-American team hadn't arrived.

"Rehearsals were really tough. We wondered if it would ever come together. He was patient and positive and resilient," says Pawl. "If he hadn't been, it could have sucked the whole project down the drain."

At Maggiano's, the evening is waning, and the plates of gnocchi, garlic shrimp and calamari fritti have yielded to tiramisu, cannoli and tartufo Romano.

A voluptuous Quebeçois chanteuse at the table, 50ish, in a revealing black leotard with skin-tight pants and a mass of platinum-blonde hair - yet another chum of McKayle's - stands up and sings a bawdy song in a low, husky voice to the restaurant. She then sits down to applause.

As one might expect, there is no sign of opening- night tensions and jitters, no sign of the bruises and batterings of six months of rehearsals at this multi-ethnic, multi-generational table, weaving into its own kind of harmony as the evening lingers. Tantalus is already a dream coming true.

McKayle is hardly reflective - in fact, he's already looking ahead to his upcoming stint with the Limón Company in New York, and his work with students at UCI.

"As long as your dreams are larger than your memories, you'll never get old," he says.

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