A five six seven eight!
As the curtains
lift on the stage of a chorus line,
we see a horde of dancers auditioning to a
bombastic jazz combination
and a loud chorus of desperate inner
thoughts all coming together
with one shared goal: getting the job.
God, I hope I get it!
I hope I get it!
After being put through their paces by
director Zach, the group dwindles down to
just 17
individuals, standing on the line, holding their resumes.
As the opening number ends, we are left
with a second to last dancer on the line
singing a soft inner monologue, making the
explosive ending of the song quickly
turn into a
personal, uniquely sentimental moment.
Paul: Who am I anyway?
The director asks the dancers to say
their names, age and place of origin.
We end with Diana, whose tough gal act
quickly gets caught off guard by him asking her:
Diana: Go on what?
asking her go on diana
go on what the auditionees are all taken
The auditionees are taken aback as they are, one by one,
asked to elaborate on themselves,
going from being completely uncomfortable to
opening up bit by bit
until the group becomes much
more intimate
both with itself and with the audience.
At the end however, only eight of them
become the dancing ensemble to zach's
show
leaving those rejected with salt thrown
on their wounds as they are
unceremoniously asked to leave the
building after baring their soul
Now, this scenario is not likely to ever
happen
and A Chorus Line's (ACL) director and
choreographer, Michael Bennett, has explained:
However, this situation is much closer to reality than one might expect
and the bittersweet ending of the piece is, in a way,
representative of the real
life experiences of the dancers behind ACL.
With an upcoming Netflix
series to be directed by Ryan Murphy
and a potential Broadway revival both
coming in the next five years,
I'd say it's about time to look back at
the process behind ACL
and understand how it was built upon not
only Bennett's genius,
but also on the stories of many Broadway
dancers,
who, in my opinion, do not get all the credit they deserve.
Sammy Williams: "It wasn't all Michael's doing.
Michael just took us and picked
and got all the information.
But it was us who created it,
you see but Michael controlled that."
You see,
ACL is important for many reasons,
but what is perhaps the most
remarkable one can be summed up
by Baayork Lee, one of the original cast
members:
"It was the first ever reality show to
make it to the stage.
ACL was a compilation of
stories by dancers in a company:
our struggles to make it to the stage,
why we love dance,
everything we gave up to work in this industry."
ACL was created through two
separate trains of thought.
The first was two broadway dancers,
Michon Peacock and Tony Stevens,
who, after being part of the disastrous
Raechel Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Forget It!),
which had closed after just seven preview performances,
had the idea, whilst drinking obviously,
of creating a troupe exclusively made of
Broadway dancers as a response to 70s'
inflation and cultural changes hitting
Broadway particularly hard.
Meanwhile, Michael Bennett, who had
already been nominated for and
awarded various Tony awards, particularly
for Sondheim's 'Follies',
had found himself wanting to put on a
show of people being honest with each other,
as well as one with only Broadway dancers.
"We had done
Coco and Promises and all these are big,
big, heavily produced, star-driven musicals,
and Michael always wanted to do
a show about dancers."
Peacock and Stevens would contact
Bennett about their idea, he expressed interest,
and so, at midnight
January 26th 1974,
at the Nickolaus Exercise Center in
New York,
18 to 30 (exact number unknown) dancers would come together
and just... talk.
Baayork Lee: "Michael didn't know what he wanted, if
this was going to be a play a musical or
a book or a movie, he just got a group of
people together and they were going to
talk about
the situation of Broadway and dancers
because we thought dancers were dying."
The first recorded line on the tapes was Bennett:
Starting with hesitant and somewhat awkward introductions,
the talking, as led by Bennett,
who would always answer his questions
first with surprising honesty,
quickly drifted into deep topics,
including childhood, worries, passions and more.
Of course, this
was fueled by the food and quote unquote
"cheap red wine" that Bennett had provided.
Not only that, but he also brought along
people who already had rivalries amongst
each other.
to help fuel the fire so to say.
"We went
from like 12 o'clock to I don't know
seven in the morning, eight in the
morning, we were drinking, smoking,
doing a lot of different things... and we
had started
we had started out with a sandwich and
then all of a sudden
you got very comfortable just talking to
these other people.
It was really, it was group therapy."
It would last 12 hours and soon a second
session would occur,
leaving Bennett with a total of 30 hours
of recorded tapes. Eventually the idea of a basic plot came to him:
Recognizing the golden potential of the
idea, Bennett then showed the tapes to
Joseph Papp,
owner of the Public Theater, who,
less than one hour into them, would agree to
give him the space to use for workshopping the project.
Soon enough the project would gain the rest of its creators,
including composer
Marvin Hamlisch, lyricist Edward Kleban,
choreographer Bob Avian and playwright
Nicholas Dante.
Considering the show was actually based
on real life stories,
you'd think that the dancers behind them
would be a good option for playing these characters onstage.
But not quite. In fact, the interview
In fact, the interviewed dancers were surprised to
find themselves having to audition for roles
that were telling their own
stories.
Michael Stuart: "It was never about how well you
danced or how well you looked.
It was what your being was about,
it was what your personality was about, it was
what your presence was about, what you
could bring to the stage."
Amongst the dancers that did not make the show
were Steve Boockvor and Denise
Pence,
a couple who had attended the group
interviews and detailed how it feels
when one of them got into a show and the
other didn't,
would be used as inspiration for Al and
Kristine, who,
in an initial version of the script,
would experience this exact
thing with Kristine making it through
and Al getting rejected.
In the final version however, both Al and
Kristine,
much like their real-life counterparts,
don't get cast in the show itself.
Similarly, the character of quirky
Texan Judy Turner was based on a life
story of Jackie Garland
but the role would end up being taken by
Patricia Garland,
her sister, who she attended the taping sessions with.
Patricia Garland: "My sister's here and she was one of the ones
that auditioned at that same time and
I did her monologue
Even Michon Peacock was not cast in
the show as the character representing her story,
Bebe, and the woman who was, Jan Robertson,
would leave the show in its workshop
stages in order to participate in 'A Matter of Time',
a show that ran for all of one performance.
And so the mantle would
be taken up by Nancy Lane instead,
who auditioned with the mindset that she
kinda looked like Peacock
which... yeah, fair enough.
Even among the dancers that were cast,
many of them would not be playing
themselves. For example, Donna Mckechnie,
who would play
Cassie, Zach's ex-wife, had her story
spread amongst various characters,
providing some of her family issues to
the various stories in the iconic 'At the
Ballet' number,
whilst her own character was the most
fictional one of the entire cast.
Even playwright Nicholas Dante's story
would become part of the show,
being used as Paul's monologue about his
experiences with sexuality and his femininity.
However, the very thing that made the characters
stories in ACL so genuine was
also one of the musical's biggest issues.
As Bennett's lawyer, John Breglio, told him:
"You can't have these people sitting
around telling you their life stories
for a show.
You're going to have 20 authors and 20 lawsuits.
You've got to get them to sign a release."
And so, in the break of the first
workshop for the show,
the dancers sold their life stories for...
Drumroll please...
a single dollar each, with the agreement
that their names would be changed if the
stories made it onto the show
right we did sign away our lives for a
Nancy Lane: "We did sign away our lives for a dollar,
all the rights, all the logo
things,
everything that you see our picture on
we get..."
Even those not involved in the
process beyond the interviews were contacted,
and, in the end, all of them signed away their stories.
Some, including Priscilla Lopez, who would
originate the role of Diana,
could tell they were making a mistake by
doing so and,
depending on how you see it,
they might have been right in thinking that.
Interviewer: "But you had no idea it was gonna be..."
Donna McKechnie: "No, I mean and neither did michael and it was everyone's risk
and okay, it was a
10-minute break and we didn't have a lawyer, okay...
But, but when Michael Bennett is writing a show for you,
and, in my case, you know I
I knew Michael for many years as friends, 
as
co-workers and, you know I was, I
said where do i sign?"
Tony Stevens would speculate that their
eagerness to take the deal
perhaps came from the dancer mentality
of not asking questions
but it's just as likely that they were
scared of what would happen if they
didn't agree to it
or that they just wanted to appease the
at the time
very popular Mr. Bennett.
Even with that out of the way, the show
was only in its beginning phase.
With all the stories that it
wanted, to tell the first workshop
presented a version that was five hours
long, only having one song,
which ended up cut, and 17 monologues.
"It played like gone with the wind on a bad day. Everybody had a crisis, everybody was
crying and we looked at each other and
said
'Ugh, this is awful' and it was."
It was apparently so bad that three
actors left/were
fired from the show at that point
including Barry Bostwick,
originally cast as Zach, a role that was
later taken up by Robert Lupone,
Patti Lupone's brother, who had
originally been cast as Al instead.
Robert Lupone: "My recollection is that Barry was
unhappy I think with
how the part was developing or something like that,
or that Michael and he didn't get
along, I don't know the specifics
all i saw was Barry's back walking out."
Clearly work had to be done, which is why
James Kirkwood Jr was brought into the
team as a co-writer.
Throughout the second workshop and all
throughout the rehearsal process,
much of the show would still change as a
result of the cast itself
though obviously not without Bennett's
influence on them.
The atmosphere of the rehearsals was
also supposedly engineered by Bennett to be competitive,
ensuring that the show itself would really have that audition type of vibe
As Sammy Williams, who played Paul in the
original production, describes the
experience:
Pam Blair: "I felt
like literally every night we were
auditioning for our jobs and it was a
necessary element in the show to make it
as successful as it was. Yes, it was
painful, but I always felt, did you not?
That there was always the element that gee, if you didn't do
what you wanted or Mr.
Bennett wanted you to do there was
always a possibility that you would be
in the wings and somebody else would be there."
For example, in the second workshop,
Bennett, during a dance combination,
fell to the ground clutching his knee in pain.
The dancer scrambled, all reacting differently to this,
some panicking,
some trying to help, only for Bennett to
reveal that he had faked the whole
injury in order to get everyone's reactions.
He would use said reactions in what
would become the alternative scene, where
Paull damages his knee and the
characters are forced to face the
realities of their career choice.
Another example of this was Richie's
character. Originally meant to be a female part,
the role and its story belonged to Candy Brown,
and even had its own solo
developed
((which sidenote is actually such a good
song and it's such a shame it got cut))
But Candy would eventually leave the
production in order to be part of Chicago.
Ronald Dennis would then be brought in
and 'Shoes' was cut, being instead replaced
by 'Confidence', a duet between Richie and Connie about
the difficulties of being a non-white
performer in auditions
Ronald Dennis: "It was about whether me being black and
Baayork being chinese, which one was better for the job."
which was removed for being too 'musical
comedy'.
Huh.
Seeing every other dancer get their own
solo and time in the limelight during
the rehearsal period would infuriate
Dennis.
This would last until two weeks before
the show's opening. At this time, Bennett
gave Dennis a rough draft of a song and
told him to work on it.
And so the number would eventually
become the super energetic 'Gimme the Ball' segment.
Dennis would recount the story in 2017,
adding that now he believes Bennett knew
exactly what he was doing in fueling his
passion by making him feel pushed aside,
but that he still regrets signing away
the royalty rights for helping make the
track.
Though some of Bennett's methods might
have been uh...
a bit questionable.
Sammy Williams: "Michael came up to me before,
just before I walked on stage
and he said 'I want real tears tonight'.
And I said to him 'Michael,
how do I do that?' and he said to me
'Just think about how much I hate you'
and turned around and walked away.
And I was totally devastated
but he pushed the right button that,
by the time I got to my monologue, I was
just the basket case, I was a mess!"
It's quite clear from various interviews
with the dancers that Bennett truly
understood how to push people to where
they needed to be.
Baayork Lee: "He really knew how to to
um get the best out of you."
By the time of the show's off-broadway stage,
only a few of the dancers from the
original taped sessions would remain.
Out of the main cast, there was Donna McKechnie as Cassie,
Renee baughman as Kristine,
Wayne Cilento as Mike,
Patricia Garland as Judy,
Kelly Bishop as Sheila,
Priscilla Lopez as Diana,
Thomas Walsh as Bobby,
and Sammy Williams as Paul,
as well as Pam Blair as Val,
and Baayork Lee as Connie,
who were in a personal session with Bennett rather than one of the group ones.
Of course then there was also the rest of the cast,
including the other seven
main auditionees,
10 early rejectees that would also
function
as the show swings and understudies
Zach the director and his assistant Larry.
*DEEP BREATH*
That's a full cast.
Yeah sure, not everyone was telling their own story but
real stories were going to be told nonetheless.
So, was all the effort worth it?
The cast and crew were initially very
nervous that it was
too uniquely about the industry and that
audiences wouldn't really appreciate it,
but, fortunately for them, these worries
proved to be unfounded.
The show would open off-Broadway in the
Public Theater in April 1975,
and it was an absolute success.
Joseph Papp moved the production to the
Broadway stage specifically the Shubert
Theater just three months later
and the show was hugely successful there
as well.
Remember how the 70s had been a really hard moment for dancers on Broadway?
Well, ACL may or may not have
saved the industry at that time
bringing Broadway's attendance from 6.6
million in 1974
to 7.2 million in 1975.
Phil Donahue: "All ACL has done
is win nine Tony awards, five Drama Desk
awards, the Pulitzer prize,
a Drama Critics award
a London Evening Standard award, it has
won a special tony in 1984 when it
became in 1984
it became the longest running show on
Broadway."
Until it was taken over by Cats, that issss.
So it was definitely a
financial and critical success,
and, fortunately for the dancers, the
show's success trickled down into their
one dollar deal with Bennett as well.
He and his lawyers, including the previously mentioned John Breglio,
would create an arrangement where the 37
actors involved at any point in the
creation of the show
were divided into three groups and
compensated accordingly.
There was Group A, who had participated
in the original taped sessions,
and/or had participated in both
workshops,
Group B, who had only been in the taped
sessions, and Group C,
who had not participated in the early
parts of the show at all,
with some dancers supposedly recalling a
promise that Group A
and B would also receive income from any
future production of ACL.
We'll get back to that part later.
This deal meant that Bennett would be giving
away about a third of his income from
the show,
which was not all that bad considering
he was earning millions,
and so some of the dancers involved will
be earning as much as ten thousand
dollars a year at the show's peak
popularity.
For some, like Steve Boockvor, who actually
did eventually play the role of Zach,
the deal was considered a blessing.
He would praise the man,
explaining that, although he somewhat
manipulated the dancers and their stories,
he also undoubtedly created a masterpiece,
one that would be considered
one of broadway's greatest, especially at the time.
On April 18
1990, the show shut down after a whopping 6137 performances
and the cast members would go their own through life.
Sammy Williams, after winning a tony for his portrayal of Paul,
would leave acting to study floristry for 10 years,
Patricia Garland would have
to stop professionally dancing after a ligament rupture on her knee,
Kelly Bishop would play a main role in Gilmore Girls for several years,
Wayne Cilento would become a prolific Broadway choregrapher...
And Bennett's last major project was
co-directing the original Broadway
production of Dreamgirls in 1981.
In 1987, he would unfortunately pass away
from AIDS-related lymphoma
at age 44, with the tapes being passed
down to Bob Avian,
ACL's co-choreographer, and
John Breglio.
The story of ACL's dancers and
their relationship with the show
wouldn't end there however.
In 2006, the show would be revived for
Broadway,
now being directed by Avian and produced
by Breglio,
with the original choreography reconstructed by Baayork Lee.
Whilst this production didn't do quite as well as the original,
lasting only two years and not winning any major awards,
it was still quite praised and helped
keep the show alive on stage and on the
audience's minds
However, it also brought up some
bittersweet feelings from its original cast.
As it turns out, the agreement that had been signed in 1974
did not include any royalties from future first-class productions
meaning the dancers would get no financial benefit
from major market
tours or Broadway revivals.
Donna McKechnie: "I mean, no one... I don't remember any one of us
going to him and saying 'don't you think
we are owed?'. Nobody did and he was,
you know, initiated that. So all these
years later, of course you can go back
and go 'Gee, well.' but I, you know,
along the way, I mean that's our business,
isn't it?"
This would leave the dancers in a hard position.
Kelly Bishop would add that, while there
obviously would have never been ACL without Bennett,
the show also would never have happened without the dancers either.
Not only that but, also in 2006,
they were requested to give permission for their
real names to be used for any future
project that involved release of the
original tapes.
In the end, only three of them agreed,
including Boockvor and Pence,
while the rest held off on accepting this.
It would take 16 months of deciding on the exact intentions behind Bennett's old contract
for the dancers that helped build ACL and the beneficiaries of
Bennett's estate to come to a conclusion.
Finally the artists whose life stories
the show was based off of
including Michon Peacock and Tony Stevens,
the two whose idea back in the
early 70s would snowball into one singular sensation,
a share in both the revival and any future first class productions of the piece.
Though using real people's stories in
the piece created, well
a lot of issues for all parties involved.
Most everyone in the original production still holds much love for the show.
Priscilla Lopez, for example, has
explained how much she loved the
experience of ACL and wouldn't trade any of it,
but the problems surrounding the dancers not getting their due for so long
made part of her feel weary about it.
Ultimately it would seem that not only did the characters mirror real life,
but the play itself does too.
There's the obvious parallel of how the auditionees
open up to Zach the same way that these
dancers had opened up to Bennett, with
some getting cast and others not,
but then there's also the finale, 'One
Reprise'.
In it, the characters we have spent the
last hour and a half getting to love
put on the same glittery gold clothes and
suddenly we as the audience can't tell them apart anymore.
Their individual stories in the grand scheme of things no longer matter.
Perhaps we can consider this bizarre feeling
as representative
of how the original dancers lost their stories
and these have just become one
part of the script
with a lot of people not even knowing
the full story behind the show.
Hell, maybe we can look at 'What I Did For
Love' as a mirror to the real life
feelings of the cast towards the
production.
Robert Lupone: "Clearly the history that we have in the
experience that we had doing this show
will never compare to
any other company"
Priscilla Lopez: "You just wanted to be the best you could for him
and, you know, I'm very aware you know
everyone says manipulation and that's
all true but I didn't mind that".
Donna Drake: "Baayork and I were Thommie's caretakers for his last year.
And we were with him every day and he loved Chorus Line
... more than anything."
Donna McKechnie: "I just want to say thank you to Michael Bennett for giving us the greatest gift
the gift that keeps giving."
Orrrr maybe that's a bit too pretentious of me to say.
I don't know.
But I also don't think it's entirely fair to completely criticise Bennett.
Sure, some of his actions weren't ideal but
he did build one of the most influential
pieces of musical theater of all time by
immortalising these stories and,
at the end of the day, it's as Bennett himself said:
Not only will ACL's legacy and that of its dancers live on but,
as of 2016, John Breglio has plans of
bringing the show back for yet another
revival in 2025 in order to match with
the original's 50th anniversary
though he wasn't sure of whether it'd be
the same show or potentially a new
version of it
addressing more contemporary issues that
dancers face.
If the latter happens to be the case, well...
I can only hope that it'll maintain that same magic and ingenuity as the original.
No matter what form the show comes back in,
one thing is for sure
it isn't the end i mean chorus line does
Michael Bennett: "It isn't the end of A Chorus Line,
it does very well and I think Chorus Line is going
to be around
on Broadway for a few more years and i
certainly think that, you know,
it will be around for a long, long time.
Hi, i'm the person that did that whole
video just now.
I know I'm not the usual person who
posts on this channel,
that's my boyfriend. I've been working
behind the scenes this entire
time but I figured you know this is a
topic that I'm personally
so invested in that i figured i should
do a video about it myself.
This is a topic that i've been very
passionate about
for years ACL has been my
favorite musical for at least
two, three years and um just recently,
this year,
before everything went to shit, I was
actually in a production of it where I
played Paul, it was great ahhhh such a good role
my god
so long that monologue! I hope that this
topic was as
interesting to whoever made it this far
as it is to me. I have a lot of love for
everyone
involved in the project, from the cast
the crew
even Michael Bennett you know, like I
said, you can judge him for some bits, juuuust a
little bit
but, at the end of the day, it's an
amazing product that came out of it
and something that I personally connect
with.
Anyway, I hope that you guys have enjoyed
this absolute beast and um
like, subscribe and I'll see you later!
