NEW YORK DAY BY DAY; Times Sq. as Sound Stage

By Susan Heller Anderson and Maurice Carroll

Published: August 1, 1984

A young man in a leopard-skin leotard swung from a street light. A girl in a polka-dot tunic pranced below. Other capriciously dressed teen-agers hugged and mugged yesterday at Broadway and 43d Street.

They could have been the usual denizens of Times Square. Except that the usual denizens were across the street, quietly watching them.

''Who are those people, man?'' one Times Square habitue said with sniff. ''What is that girl doing?''

Life watched art. It made for an odd looking glass.

A producer, Ken Ehrlich, and the cast of the television show ''Fame'' were filming sequences for the fall season, one on a subway and one about dancing in the streets of New York.

The city provided a subway train free from graffiti. The dance number was more realistic.

Valerie Landsburg, Darryl Tribble and other ''Fame'' regulars are frolicking at a dozen locations, from Bowling Green to the South Street Seaport, for several days - all for a three-minute scene.

The number will be a reflection, in dance, of the youths' reluctance to part with the joys of summer and return to the confines of the classroom.

That, for those who were wondering, is who those people are and what they were doing.