An actor shows his many other sides

McCarter Theatre Center presents

Herringbone

, an intense musical starring BD Wong. His tour-de-force performance will surprise you if you know Wong only as the psychiatrist on

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

- he sings, he dances, he plays a dozen characters. Of course, you may also know him as the actor who won the Tony for

M. Butterfly

.

This multilayered vaudevillian drama begins before the audience is in place: Wong is sitting in front of a mirror in an onstage dressing room, apparently unaware of our presence, texting somebody on his phone. Then the dressing room vanishes, a three-piece onstage band appears, and he becomes George Herringbone, a song and dance man, who will tell us how his career began.

Then things get strange.

It's 1929 in a small town in Alabama, and a family in dire circumstances urges its 8-year-old boy to save the day by making a fortune in Hollywood. When he's taken to Mr. Mosley, a local has-been, for acting lessons, little George is suddenly possessed by a 37-year-old ghost named Lou - a dead tap-dancing midget who was "Frog" to Mr. Mosley's "Chicken" when they were a vaudeville act 10 years before.

Lou, who has a croaky voice and a nasty will to succeed, needs George's body. George suddenly can dance. And he does, obsessively. The drama of their weird partnership involves Wong's playing everybody - including a grandmother, a lawyer, George's parents, Mr. Mosley, a tailor, a sexy hotel clerk, and - well, everybody. When the characters argue, he snaps his voice and body into each one, often in the space of a single line. They sing, they dance, they struggle. It's fabulous.

Is this bizarre plot a metaphor for talent, for that drive that makes actors want to perform at any cost? Or a metaphor for child actors and how they are driven by their families to wealth and fame? Or, as BD Wong suggested in the talk-back after the show, an allegory for growing up, for the crossing over from childhood to adulthood and the need to accept the dark side of life. Regardless, this is a show about show business, about acting: Transformations are the name of the game.

Herringbone

's book (Tom Cone) is rich and complex, its lyrics (Ellen Fitzhugh) remarkably complicated and clever, and the music (Skip Kennon) wildly varied and difficult. There's a trunk, a chair, a door - and an enormously talented actor. As George sings in the show's first song (of 16), "What the hell, what's life without a window ledge?" Wong shows us the passionate daredeviltry that controls the whole evening.