This Dancing Diva, at 66, still light on her feet

Sunday, May 28, 2006 | 7:41 a.m.

Ann Vizzaccero started dancing eight years ago and singing two years ago. In between, she squeezed in comedy.

At 66, she's a redheaded knockout, who insists that laughing keeps her young and doesn't worry that her dance career will be halted because she's 4 foot 10 "and shrinking."

Next Saturday, Vizzaccero will be kicking it up with more than a dozen other women - all 50 or older - in the 90-minute variety show "Hooray for Cabaret" at UNLV's Paul Harris Theatre.

The show includes the dance group Fine Wine, local comic Bobby Rogers, Vizzaccero's vaudeville troupe (The Backstage Revue) and dancers from UNLV's Senior Adult Dance Program, who call themselves the Dancing Divas.

"I'm bringing in the best of the best in the valley," Vizzaccero says unabashedly.

The Las Vegas resident didn't start performing until later in life, she says, because "I had to work for a living." A career in marketing, Vizzaccero says, was augmented by an assortment of other jobs: "You name it, I've done it - except hooking. Everybody already had the good corners."

(Rimshot, please.)

So have her jokes ever bombed?

"Of course!" she says. "I know that I've offended some people, but if you can't laugh at yourself at this age, you've got a problem. I don't want you to take it personally, but if the shoe fits, wear it."

Vizzaccero, who is working on her master's degree at UNLV in senior adult theater, is in the middle of writing her second play, "Forever Pompoms." It's a musical about women getting together at their 50th class reunion.

Still, she doesn't consider herself creative, just restless: "My mother told me that a moving target was harder to hit, and I took it literally."

The Backstage Revue tours local nursing homes, hospitals, conventions and community centers. In one of Vizzaccero's songs, she wears Depends and a bra - size "34 long."

Richard Havey, a UNLV dance professor who choreographed some of the show's numbers, says working with seniors "takes a lot of understanding of the body and knowing what they're capable of doing and not doing."

He has 16 women in his senior adult dance class, most in their 60s and 70s.

In "Hooray for Cabaret," they perform a Bob Fosse number as well as a country line dance, tap and the jitterbug. One selection is even set to punk rock.

And a chorus line of dancers, dressed as penguins, joins singer Erik McMillan for "Puttin' on the Ritz."

"It's not going to be one of those shows where the people onstage are having more fun than the people in the audience," Havey says. "It's completely different from anything on the Strip."

"Hooray for Cabaret" will be on stage at 2 and 7 p.m. June 3 and 2 p.m. June 4. Tickets are $15, $12 for students, seniors and military. Call 895-2787.