Sorry about your Amex experience, Namo. I've had bad experiences with Gold Card Events on this and other events. But I think your beef is with Amex not A Chorus Line. I ended up getting 3rd row mezzanine center for the last Friday of previews and decided to take them. The premium seats are like house seats--as it gets closer to the date, they release the unsold premium seats. It's a bad system and if enough of us complain to American Express, maybe they'll change it.
I was in college when the original opened at the Public. My mother, who was a theater buff, saw it in previews with her friends Estelle, Gert, Sally and Zelda (I kid you not). They went to the theater every Tuesday night and saw everything. EVERYTHING.
She called me at college and said, "This is going to be your favorite musical ever" and bought me two tickets for the next weekend. I will never forget what it was like to see it at the Newman and what it was like to see it that summer at the Shubert, where it actually got better not worse, in large part because it was on Broadway, where, of course, it belonged.
The specificity of the script and score to the dancers' lives and the universality the show somehow achieved through that specificity were dazzling and astonishing. They still are.
Two years later, I graduated and came to NY to work in theater. (I don't any longer.) All of my chorus-boy friends--and chorus-boy boyfriends and buddies and crushes--were either in the show or the national tour or auditioning for the show or the national tour or had been FIRED from the show or the national tour. Several who had been fired were subsequently re-hired--and fired again! I loved talking theater with my chorus-boy friends--they knew EXACTLY what was wrong with a show--and sometimes they were even right.
Everyone who worked with him had a story about "Michael"--a name they usually pronounced in whispers. They were afraid of him--petrified actually--but they loved him and revered him. I met him twice--once in a classroom setting and once at a party; five minutes with him was a mind-blowing experience. He liked blowing people's minds--onstage and in real life.
One young high-school girl named Bebe who worked afterschool at our college theater vowed to all of us college kids that she was going to "come to NY and play Sheila--on Broadway." We laughed at her, because she was so young and the character had to say "Can the adults smoke?" Well, the laugh was on us: little Bebe Neuwirth DID get cast, first on the tour and then on Broadway. Getting cast in A Chorus Line was for that generation of Broadway performers what playing the Palace was for vaudevillians: To paraphrase Judy: Unless you played the Shubert, you hadn't played the top.
Then the 80s happened. Suddenly a few of my chorus-boy friends and boyfriends started getting sick. Then a lot of them. Then they started dying. "What I Did for Love" took on a whole other meaning, as did so many other songs. Those handsome Aggies. Those beautiful Cagelles. "The Best of Times Is Now." "I Am What I Am." All those kittens who went up to the Heavyside Layer, especially my best-friend Reed Jones, leaving us "all alone with our mem'ries" of our days in the sun. Some of us had to go on singing "I'm Still Here," with what Bruno Bettelheim described after the Holocaust as the "guilt of the survivor": "Why them and not me?" Why am I here and they're not?
So we acted up, we fought back, we fought AIDS. We were here, queer, fabulous and we told people to get used to it. We protested at the NIH, on Wall Street, at Grand Central, even at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport. We changed the way experimental drugs are distributed in the United States, for patients with breast cancer and Alzheimer's and MS. Yet for so long no one in the government seemed to care. For too long, no one in the media seemed to care. We told them it wasn't just homosexuals who would die of this epidemic, it was women and minorities and multitudes in Asia and Africa. But they didn't believe us. Hamlet says "There is a divine providence in the fall of a sparrow," but no one seemed to care that my sparrows, the kids in the chorus, were falling. No one listened, until it was way too late.
Then Michael died. "Michael." And we looked around and saw that the disease wasn't just killing unsung kids on the chorus line; it was also felling giants, titans, geniuses--a whole generation. Gone. Finally, it was just too much.
And then the whole damn American musical theater seemed to die, leaving in its place European pop operas that seemed to miss the point entirely. And Sondheim. Thank God for Sondheim.
And then one day we woke up and it was the 90s, and A Chorus Line closed. And life went on.
Me? I can't wait to see this revival. I know if it's good, I'll be transported back to that moment when I got that phone call at college, when I heard my mom say, "This is going to be your favorite musical ever." And if it's not good, I'm sure we'll hear the voices of legions of chorus boys telling Bob Avian, "You want to know EXACTLY what's wrong with this show...?"
Updated On: 3/31/09 at 03:53 PM
