Ballerina

WATCHING THE MUSICAL version of ''Grand Hotel'' is a little like booking a hotel room that is initially unappealing. In time, you get to like it, and in more time, you don't want to leave.That's the way it is with this show, the musical version of the Vicki Baum novel that was written in 1929. In 1932, it became an MGM film with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Lionel and John Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone in the cast. The movie is now a certified classic, so anyone brash enough to do it for the stage, is asking for it.Tommy Tune is the man who did the asking.

Tommy Tune would see them in the lobbies of the old grand hotels of Europe, the aristocratic class caught short by the fast-forward of time, as faded as the furniture, as once-elegant and now-tattered as their surroundings."