Dancers with Oscar dreams audition for big show

Lined up in sweatclothes and leotards, hundreds of sinewy dancers wait with paper numbers pinned to their chests and a singular hope within. Under gray, rainy skies, in dance shoes and bare feet, they've come to an open audition at a place called Center Staging with one dream: dancing on the Academy Awards program.

No. 149, April Thomas, brought her bundled-up 9-month-old son Kerrick along in his stroller. No. 37, Leah Adler, stretches and warms up after waiting outside in the rain. No. 26, the one-named Malaya, stands quietly in a crowd of her colleagues.

At the front of a nondescript room sits Academy Awards producer and choreographer Adam Shankman, who got his first big Oscar break as a dancer on the show 20 years ago. Flanked by some of the industry's top choreographers, Shankman presides over Friday's audition.

"I'll put on some soft music so that we can talk about you behind your back," he says to the group with a warm smile. He then separates the dancers by sex, lines them up and asks each to perform a pair of ballet moves — a double pirouette and an arabesque that take just seconds to complete.

Instantly, more than half of the would-be performers are eliminated.

Nos. 26, 37 and 149 make the first cut.

"I just love to dance. And the Academy Awards, you can't get better than that," says Thomas, No. 149, snuggling her baby boy.

"Honestly, I just want to work and be on a big stage," says Adler, No. 37, who belonged to a dance company in New York before relocating to the West Coast. "Everyone wants to book that big gig with that big choreographer."

Shankman is among the biggest in the business these days. The director and choreographer of the 2007 film "Hairspray" and regular judge on TV's "So You Think You Can Dance" has collected more than three dozen choreography credits since 1992, and it was partly his dance prowess that got him the Oscar show producing gig.

He invites those who made