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She had 10 days.

"It really was like Mickey Rooney and hey, let's put on a show," Ann Reinking says. "The stars just aligned."

She's talking about "Chicago," resurrected in 1996 for the City Center's popular Encores series. Starring Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth and Joel Grey, it skid past the planned four-day run, moving to Broadway with a spare production, Reinking's reinvention of Bob Fosse's indelible choreography and A-side stars. The following year "Chicago: The Musical" won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical Revival.

The road show spin-off of the Broadway production, which is still playing at the Ambassador Theatre in New York, opens Tuesday and runs through April 16 at the Phil. Michelle DeJean plays Reinking's breakout role, Roxie Hart.

"It was so happy," says Ann Reinking of her recreation of the choreography of Bob Fosse's "Chicago: The Musical" for its 1996 revival. Reinking appeared in the 1975 original production and is considered the foremost acolyte of Fosse's unmistakable brand of dancing. "I wondered, though. Am I going to be haunted or what? But it was like having him back."

"I called Gwen Verdon and asked is it OK to use the original choreography on 'Hot Honey Rag,'¤" says Reinking, who, after a 15-year working friendship (and sometimes love affair) with the choreographer, is considered the keeper of the Fosse flame. Verdon, the late dance legend and premier Fosse product, navigated a difficult 27-year marriage with Fosse and after his death in 1987, shepherded his legacy. Verdon died in 2000.

Verdon agreed to using the piece as Fosse envisioned it, and asked which incarnation Reinking wanted to use — the one Verdon originated in 1975 or the version Fosse later cut-to-fit Reinking, who played the same role, Roxie Hart, in the revival. "I told her that I thought I remembered mine the best."

Which is none too shabby. In 1996, New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley wrote that Reinking's Roxie Hart was "the most entertainingly erotic cartoon character since Jessica Rabbit."

She laughs. "When 'Fosse' was running right next door" — That was pastiche of trademark Fosse works Reinking co-directed for Broadway — "you could see the Gwen version in 'Fosse' and mine in 'Chicago'." If you timed it right you could see both the same day."

She laughs again.

Reinking, 56, talks in the soft-graveled voice and Hello Kitty giggle that somehow conjures fresh-faced farm girls, cabaret chorines and scenes from "All That Jazz," Fosse's 1979 semi-autobiographical fantasy which featured Reinking as a young dancer in love with Roy Scheider's juggernaut choreographer. If only for its haunting verisimilitude, the 1979 film beats out "Micki & Maude" and "Annie" as Reinking's most memorable screen appearance.

Of course, she never appeared in Rob Marshall's film version of "Chicago," which gave the story of two aging murderesses-cum-vaudevillian stars a Hollywood cant to full-out beautiful faces and young bodies. If you ask, though, Reinking will carefully endorse the movie, which was released in 2002. "When you're doing movies you do have to have something the bank will give you money for," she says obliquely. "But I think it honors the art of it, the beauty and the style."

Reinking talks about "Chicago" with the kind of molasses warmth of a cherished love affair. But then, her appearance in the original production — she replaced Verdon as Roxie — marked the early days of a love affair that lasted six years.

"You know, we were friends, always friends," she says, moving through her memory in great gulps. "But there was a huge age difference. I was just so much in love. I think love helps a lot — and sharing the same ideals and points of view and working together. Somebody you love, if not your best friend, should be one of your best friends and that never went away. Nor did the respect and the care. Gwen worked with him for 25 years and she was the same way.

"It was life."

She takes a rare pause.

"I was with him when he had the heart attack and also when he was doing 'Chicago,' so I really had close contact and the vision of what was going on. It was very important to me that I honored it."

And to hear her tell it, everyone involved in the revival felt the same way.

"Everyone who did this loved Bobbie, loved John (Kander) and Fred (Ebb)." Kander and Ebb wrote the lyrics and for score for "Chicago" as well as "Cabaret" and were involved in the revival. "And I can't name one person that's been in this show that didn't like it. That's because everybody was used so well. That's the mantra: They loved to make stars. They loved talent and to show it. Not only the piece is the star."

That's what Terra MacLeod loves about "Chicago." "I love that every woman in the show has a voice, has a story," says MacLeod, who has played Velma Kelly in various road-show productions since 2003. "Even doing it now, the dancers are really an individual. I love that about Fosse. You are somebody all the time. You're never Girl Six from the left.

"That's the genius of Fosse."

Like Fosse's style, which pivots on coolly isolating movements like his archetypal gloved finger snap or pelvis twitch, the musical was built like a Lego strip mall: Modules that could be lifted out and jimmied to accommodate the conveyor belt of headliners and not-quite-stars moving through it.

Reinking, MacLeod says, is not cookie-cutter choreographer. Like Fosse, she trims and jiggles parts to fit the strengths of its players.

"I did what Bobbie did," she says. "I used his principles."

She laughs, a soft trill that is more musing than amusement.

"He didn't think it was as good as it was," she says of Fosse and "Chicago."

"For a guy that forthright, there was equal amount of insecurity."

A pause. "I think creative people, they know how good they are and they don't know how good they are."

A FOSSE PRIMER

• Bob Fosse was born in Chicago in 1927. Oddly, this is the setting and time period for "Chicago."

• One of his first pieces appeared in a local nightclub, where he emceed. A portent of things to come, it involved four girls manipulating ostrich fans to Cole Porter.

• Although the stylistic flotsam from the influences of Fred Astaire, choreographer Jack Cole and Fosse's time in burlesque house are evident in his oeuvre, Fosse is unmistakable: the miles legs in fishnet stockings; the bowler tipped low on the forehead; the gloved fingers splayed dramatically. The trademark pelvic thrusts, hip flicks and the bowed legs and shoulders were strikingly hurky-jerky, drawing you into an intimate moment of angular cool even as it the all-for-myself sexuality thrusts you away.

• Fosse met dancer Gwen Verdon in 1954 during the production of "The Pajama Game," which cemented Fosse's reputation as an innovative and hit-making choreographer. They married in 1960 (his third) and remained so until his death. However, his open affairs — including those with dancer Ann Reinking and actress Jessica Lange — effectively ended the marriage in the '70s. Their daughter, Nicole Fosse, is also a dancer.

• Fosse was the first director to win the dramatic trifecta in one season, 1972-73: a Tony for "Pippin," an Oscar for "Cabaret," and an Emmy for the Liza Minnelli TV special, "Liza with a Z."

• Even at his most famous, Bob Fosse was listed in the Manhattan phone directory.

• He moved into film in the early '70s, directing "Lenny," the moody and evocative film of Lenny Bruce's life and death in 1974 and an autobiographic fantasy, "All That Jazz," in 1979. He planned a film version of "Chicago" with Madonna.

• After years of hard drinking and chain smoking, Fosse died in 1987 much as he imagined in "All That Jazz" — of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., even as he was celebrated for the revival of 1965's "Sweet Charity."