When “A Chorus Line” opened on Broadway, it didn’t just win nine Tony awards. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a feat that in 95 years only eight musicals have managed – among the modern ones, the emotional powerhouses “Rent” and “Next to Normal.”
Making drama of the AIDS epidemic or battling mental illness is one thing. Making drama out of a dance audition is another.
That’s what “A Chorus Line” masterfully achieves in stringing together the personal stories of young Broadway dancers trying out before a demanding, often imperious choreographer. Based on actual taped interviews of top New York dancers, the show’s story line threads through their childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, bouncing from humor to poignancy as the characters describe their struggles to conform to the contradictory expectations of their peers, their families and their show business bosses.
Many of those interviewed went on to play the roles they inspired, including the director and choreographer of the Riverside production, Mitzi Hamilton. She inspired the role of Val and played in the original London production and later on Broadway, and has gone on to direct 40 productions of “A Chorus Line.”
The director and choreographer of the original Broadway show, the brilliant and legendarily difficult Michael Bennett, became Zach, who runs the audition. In and out of the audience’s view, as the empty stage fills with dancers in workout clothes, Zach explains at the start that this show he’s casting may involve a few spoken lines by the chorus members, and he wants to make sure they can all work together. The interviews on stage begin innocently enough: “What did you do in the Bronx?” “Tell me about your family.” “What got you dancing?” Where the answers go, though, keeps the audience in thrall.
For the premise to have held up for 40 years shows the Pulitzer was well placed.
For the opening night performance at Riverside Theatre to have been as stirring as it was speaks once again to the theater’s hiring decisions on stage and off, as well as its staff musical director, Ken Clifton, who led an excellent group of musicians through Marvin Hamlisch’s Tony-award winning score and whose fingers drummed the hypnotically driving five notes that are the basis of “One,” the final number and the chorus line’s reason for being.
The cast of more than two dozen, half of those in major roles, delivered on challenging song and choreography and even more challenging monologues that swing from sassy to wry to achingly sad.
Underlying all the desperate effort is the great irony: that the win here is just a spot in an anonymous chorus line, not some star-maker role in a spectacular new ballet. That very anonymity, and the dehumanizing sameness required of the dancers, is exactly what makes the minimalist plot underlying “A Chorus Line” so powerful.
The show closed in 1990, after more than 6,000 performances. It was revived in 2006, directed by Bob Avian, who co-choreographed the original with Bennett. (In the revival’s cast was Tom Berklund as Greg; he plays Zach at Riverside, and understudied the role on Broadway.)
The actors answering the invisible Zach’s questions are in fact spilling their guts out into the audience, breaking the fourth wall.
The answers spill out, hesitantly at first. “I just can’t go first!” sheiks Diana in a panic. Then Mike (Scott Shedenhelm) jauntily sings the optimistic “I Can Do That” about learning from his sister what she learned in dance class. When she refuses to go one morning, he goes instead. “I got to class and had it made. And so I stayed the rest of my life.” His sister, meanwhile, is now “married and fat.”
The lust-filled Sheila (Christine Cornish Smith) – who brazenly asks to sit in Zach’s lap – ends up revealing that she turned to dance to escape her hated home life. “Everything is beautiful at the ballet,” she sings.
There is pure comedy when the nervous newlywed Kristine (Emily Grace Kersey) screeches off key, “I could never really sing” while her adoring husband, auditioning at her side, fills in her memory lapses.
A meandering montage of adolescence comes in “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Life,” when sexual confusion creeps into their childhoods. Mike’s research convinces him he has gonorrhea when in fact a certain discharge has a far more benign origin. “There’s a lot I am not certain of,” he sings.
Indeed, for many of the men in the cast, coming out as gay is a defining moment. Paul (Jordan Fife Hunt), in perhaps the most moving scene, speaks insightfully of being gay and still wanting to learn how to be a boy and a man, and of the moment his father finally calls him “son.”
And then there is body type. Connie (Riverside acting apprentice Samantha Cho Grossman, who played the dog in last fall’s Riverside original, “Poodleful”) sings about being 4 foot 10. “I remember when everybody was my size,” she sings. She hung from a parallel bar trying to stretch.
And then there’s Val (Meaghan Foy), the character Mitzi Hamilton inspired. “When am I going to grow tits?” she demands.
For those revelations, the actual dancers whose lives formed the basis of the script were paid $1 for their tales.
They had gathered late one snowy night at a workout space in the East Village after their own curtain calls, the New York Times recounted in a story on the eve of the show’s 2006 revival.
Sitting in a circle was the then 30-year-old Bennett, already a huge name in choreography – Ballet Vero Beach’s Adam Schnell says he was known for his “ferociously difficult” combinations. Bennett began to explain why they were there.
“I really want to talk about us, where we came from, why we’re dancers,” he says on the tapes, which were locked in a safe deposit box after Bennett died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987, and that the Times reporter was allowed to hear.
One by one, over the next 12 hours, the dancers told their stories, which became increasingly personal as the night dragged on.
Nicholas Dante, whose story inspired the character Paul, went on to write the book with James Kirkwood Jr.
Mitzi Hamilton missed that first late-night session because she was in too much pain from recent breast implant surgery. But in a subsequent session, she told the story that would end up as the character Val, who sings “Dance 10; Looks 3” better known for its chorus, “Tits and ass…”
I was 23 and fresh from minoring in modern dance in college when I saw “A Chorus Line” in the 1970s. To a younger person seeing the show for the first time, “A Chorus Line” may still be mostly about dancers.
For an audience that has lived out a sizeable chunk of life since they last saw the show, it may mean much more. That ruthless dance audition has become a microcosm of the myriad try-outs we all have faced: college, jobs, relationships, parenting, even the changing roles we write for ourselves in our own health and happiness. Riverside has done a fine job delivering a show that stands up to the magnitude of that metaphor.
