Once a little fan in the audience, ‘42nd’ dancer Cheri Condon is now in tap form onstage

Melissa Schorr

Friday, March 28, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Come and meet those dancing feet.

Specifically, Cheri Condon's, size 6 1/2s.

Condon stars as ingenue Peggy Sawyer in the tap-happy musical "42nd Street," which kicks off its 1997 nationwide tour in the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts on Tuesday.

One week before opening night, Condon is at her tech rehearsal, waiting anxiously for a new pair of tap shoes to arrive. "I need to start breaking them in," she explains.

Does she worry about getting blisters? "No," she sighs. "I think my feet are used to it."

It may seem trite to say that she's always dreamed of playing the role, but it happens to be true.

Back in 1980, when David Merrick adapted "42nd Street" from the original 1933 Bugsy Berkeley film starring Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Ginger Rodgers into a Tony-award winning Broadway musical, one of the members in the audience was 12-year-old Cheri Condon, in from Boston.

"It was the first show I ever saw on Broadway," she recalls. "I was on the edge of my seat. I thought, 'Wow, that's what I want to do.' The show has always held a special place in my heart because (of that) and because I love tap dancing."

The director of the Troika Organization's touring company, Tony Parise, was also present during that run, as an original cast member. "There's a special passion that he has for it," says Condon, "having been in the original production, that he brings and shares and passes on to us."

"42nd Street" is a cream puff of a musical that ably persuades its audience to accept the show's unlikely premise:

An aging diva injures her leg before opening night of a new production -- and the group of chorus girls unanimously annoint the newest troupe member as her replacement.

Now, anyone who's spent any time in the theater knows, in reality, the cat fight that would ensue.

Even Condon admits, "that might be stretched a little."

"But things like that could happen," she adds with a knowing laugh. For here she sits, a living, breathing, dancing example of the exception that proves the rule.

Just like her character, the 25-year-old former understudy has been catapulted from chorus girl to leading lady.

But unlike the play, in the real-life story, it is the chorus girl who injured her knee last year, took some time off to heal and was invited to return this year as the star.

Could it have been based on the strength of her understudy peformances?

"I really didn't go on in a performance except one time, only for a short scene," she says. "I was in my ensemble costume in place on stage. There was a quick motioning to me, they said, 'Quick, come off stage and re-enter as Peggy Sawyer.'" Condon didn't even have time to change into the right costume. "Usually, you have somewhat of a notice," she says.

So, as the show's most thrilling line reads, did she "go out there a kid and come back a star"?

"No, I feel the same -- I'm the same person I was before. I don't feel like a star or anything like that," she says.

Since graduating three years ago from Boston Conservatory's musical theater department, Condon has taken some star turns, though, as a performer in the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Show in Branson, Mo., and as a tap dancer in "The New Tap Generation" at New York's Apollo Theater.

Then, last year, she was sent abroad to Berlin for the European tour of "42nd Street." "People loved it," she said. "They loved the American musical."

Now, a week before she takes the stage, she hopes audiences here will feel the same way.

"The show is still very '30s, it's still got that flair," she says. "They haven't updated it at all."

And they don't need to.