What They Did For Love
The Story of A Chorus Line
A Chorus Line by Michael Bennett
Derby Playhouse, 1996
“Something absolutely fabulous…”
In September 1983, to celebrate the record-breaking 3,389th performance of A Chorus Line at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway, director and choreographer Michael Bennett conceived “Something absolutely fabulous” – a unique gala reuniting over three hundred cast members on a stage which had to be specifically reinforced for the occasion. Each contributed bits from the parts they had helped make famous, and competition was keen for the choicest moments.
There were some surprises: for instance, no one had told the conductor that the Diana from the Japanese cast would be singing her solo, ‘Nothing’, in her other tongue. But although torrential rain later ruined $15,000 worth of flowers and $24,000 worth of specially donated carpeting which had been laid in the Shubert Alley outside the theatre, the national publicity the occasion attracted revived the fortunes of a show which had recently shown signs of running out of steam. The half a million dollars it cost to stage was recouped at the box office within a matter of days, and when the show finally closed in April 1990, it had been performed a record 6,137 times on Broadway alone, by over five hundred performers. Over 6½ million people had paid to see it, and its gross box office take across the country had totalled $280,583,900. It was, quite simply, the most successful musical ever.
“I hope I get it”
Its seeds were sown over a weekend in January 1974 when Bennett, fresh from his work on Stephen Sondheim’s Company and Follies, invited a group of twenty-four dancers (or ‘gypsies’ as they are known in the trade) to come together to talk over their life stories. Why did they do it, he wanted to know. Why work so hard when the odds against success are so steep and the potential career so short-lived? One of the dancers involved, Nicholas Dante, and the playwright James Kirkwood then devised a ‘book’ from this wealth of material, and composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban were brought in to create the score.
The show was workshopped at the Public Theatre under the auspices of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in April 1975, and after 100 performances there is transferred to the Shubert, opening on 25 July. It promptly won nine Tonys out of twelve nominations in all the major categories, not to mention that year’s New York Drama Critics’ Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The following year it picked up the Drama Desk Awards for Best Book, Score, Director, Choreographer and Actress (a tie between Donna McKechnie and Kelly Bishop), and in 1977 the London production at Drury Lane added the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical to the trophy case. Eventually, in 1984 the show received a Special Tony for being the longest-running production in Broadway history.
As the success of the show became assured and new companies evolved to take it on the road, Bennett kept a firm grip on the reins through his dance captains and stage managers. “There was a certain leeway in the solo numbers, but if it overstepped the boundary, it wasn’t A Chorus Line anymore,” Fran Liebergall, the original pianist, recalled. In time those on the road dreamed of being selected for the Broadway company and a kind of nervous tension developed between the two camps which, whether deliberately manufactured or not, conspired to keep everyone on their toes. The New York cast was informed the road crews were younger and more energetic; the road people were constantly warned that if they didn’t keep their standards up they wouldn’t have a hope of getting to the Great White Way.
“I can do that”
Hardly surprisingly, Bennett was keen to usher his brainchild onto the silver screen himself, but he found it impossible to bend to the conditions the film company MCA imposed on him. He had wanted to transpose the theatre experience completely to keep it in context, making the audition one for a movie musical, not a stage show. But he couldn’t convince the moneymen, so he abandoned the project. Then Sir Richard Attenborough started attending the show in the theatre, and it was assumed by most of the cast that they would walk into the film parts too. Wrong. DeLee Lively was up for Val, but lost out to Audrey Landers whose Dallas star was currently in the ascendant. Later, when Ms Lively was invited to dub some of Ms Landers’ dance steps, she not surprisingly refused.
Meanwhile, back in the theatre, things occasionally went wrong. Elaborate plans had always been in place to cover a performer having to go off mid-show whether through injury or some other indisposition, but all the same, when a glitch did occur, the dancers’ first thought was instinctively “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
The fierce rake of the Drury Lane stage had caused many injuries before the dancers could get used to it, and some nights entire casts of understudies found themselves unexpectedly being put through their paces. The roof of the Shubert Theatre developed a leak and deposited a highly inconvenient wet patch upstage left to the accompaniment of dripping water during the quieter sections. And some Vals had to pad their bosoms to look the part. One night an actress wearing three falsies each side felt her bra give way during the ballet sequence and the more desperately she danced, the further the padding migrated. She ended the number with the impressive bust she’d started with now sticking out of her back…
The end of the line…
But even this show’s phenomenal run had to end sometime. By the start of the nineties, A Chorus Line had started to lose money, producer Joe Papp was ill and the New York Shakespeare Festival was itself in financial difficulties. Further effort to keep the show at its peak in terms of props, costumes and set would have required a larger investment than they could afford. And besides, the show, while not necessarily dated, was fixed in a time which had now gone.
In the final month, camera crews from around the world jostled for the best positions in the stalls. The last week played to capacity, and on the final night, Saturday 28 April 1990, the box office had to replay the symbolic pulling down of the blinds over a dozen times in order to satisfy the numerous TV networks. The original company which had opened the show fifteen years before were called on stage to take a bow, but even at the death, some bitterness was apparent between the two casts, old and new. The real final performance, it was felt, had been given at that afternoon’s matinee. The evening show was about something else.
…and after
The moving spirit behind it all, Michael Bennett, followed up A Chorus Line with the inevitably less successful Ballroom, which nevertheless won him his sixth Tony Award and, in 1981, he picked up his seventh with the backstage musical Dreamgirls which ran for a healthy 1500 performances. He died in July 1987 in Tucson, Arizona at the brutally early age of forty-four.
As for the hundreds of actors, singers, and dancers who had strutted their stuff along the famous white line, while some profited from the experience, others merely developed a ‘Chorus Line mentality’ which prevented them from seeing any future beyond this one show. Exceptions like Ann Reinking could move on, as they were already stars and received salaries to match. A few were labelled forever as the characters they had played and it didn’t advance their careers one step. But the majority were simply grateful for the opportunity it gave them to live out, if only for a moment, their part in the Great American Dream. As one of them, Ron Dennis, said, “It gave me my fifteen minutes of fame” – a singular sensation indeed.
PS
A Chorus Line was one of the greats all right so this was one of those articles it was a pleasure to research and write. I’d already learnt the album off by heart by the time I saw the London production, presumably in Drury Lane, and I happily sang along under my breath with a big stupid smile on my face. To a slouch like me, who hadn’t been fit since his last football game in the sixth form, the athleticism and the sheer energy and excitement of all those lithe, limber bodies in their figure-hugging leotards moving in sync was quite the turn on. And the famous gold-suited finale was certainly a high spot, though one struggled in vain not to think about so many Benson & Hedges fag packets twirling about…
My wife, pre-us, had gone to see it en famille and she says one of her party came away indignant at the bad language. They thought the cast must have spiced it up deliberately for the matinee, not prepared to accept someone would actually have written such things into a script designed for public consumption. I don’t know whether they were being particularly sensitive that afternoon, but having acted a bit myself, and familiar with the complacency and boredom that can set in when you’ve said the same thing the same way one too many times, I can well understand the temptation, in the middle of a seemingly endless run, for the cast to occasionally want to mix it up a little, just to keep things fresh.
Not that creator Michael Bennett would have had much truck with any of that kind of nonsense, by the sound of him. I had heard before that he could be quite the taskmaster, he and his mentor Jerome Robbins. They sound to me like the TV chefs of the theatre world, swaggering about in their self-generated cloud of mystique and ready to fly off the handle at the slightest imagined slight. What is it about dance and cookery that gives its would-be top-end practitioners the right to think they can treat others with such volcanic disdain? I can see how a top choreographer or dancer or musician may develop a titanic sense of self-importance simply because the stresses they put on their bodies and the endless discipline they are obliged to give to their art demand levels of dedication that not all of us require to earn ourselves an honest crust, but a cook? I liked what stand-up comedian Micky Flanagan once said in a routine upbraiding Gordon Ramsay for his foul mouth: “Gordon. We’re doin’ a bit of dinner, mate. We ain’t sortin’ aht the middle East ’ere, you know what I mean? If it all goes tits up I’ll get us a bargain bucket…”
Translated to the Shubert Theatre this might have been, “Michael, it’s a lovely bit of hoofing, son, but at the end of the day it’s just people having a bit of a song and dance, you know? We appreciate what you’re doing, but nobody forced you into this line of work did they? Now, do you want this chicken sandwich or not?”