A Chorus Line

Go to this old thread on the OT Board.

Listening to ACL OCR

And read it! Read it! Read it !

A CHORUS LINE was groundbreaking for various reasons. One that comes to mind is that it was conceived out of long interview sessions Michael Bennett and his creative team conducted with some of their theater/dance colleagues. many who would go on to be in the show.

It was also a musical that was also molded in a series of workshops that at the time was not common practice.

It was an ensemble piece, no one in the cast was an above the title Broadway star when the show premiered and in spite of that it was one of the must see shows of it's time.

On the surface A CHORUS LINE is seen as a show business musical about dancers and their struggles to make it on Broadway but on a deeper level it's really a microcosm of life, and that is why it resonated with so many people.

It also possessed one of the best scores written for any musical and Michael Bennett's choreography was top notch and his staging was truly groundbreaking - - - creating atmosphere, time and space within a black box stage that consisted of a line downstage, inventive lighting and use of mirrors.

I'm sure there are others on this board that will be more than happy to give you more information in much greater detail about what made this musical a phenomenon.

Updated On: 7/14/15 at 08:58 AM

You may also be interested in the following books:

On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line by Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee and Thommie Walsh

One Singular Sensation: The Michael Bennett Story by Kevin Kelley

What They Did For Love: The Untold Story Behind The Making of A Chorus Line by Denny Martin Flinn

A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett by Ken Mandelbaum

All but On The Line are out of print but you can try amazon.com Marketplace, ebay or your local library to try and obtain a copy.

A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett is a personal favorite.

Updated On: 7/14/15 at 09:36 AM

You're very welcome! Glad to be of help!

I think something else that makes it interesting is that most of the show is delivered straight out to the audience. The creators used the device of having the director at the back of the theater, and for most of the show, just a disembodied voice, which forced the actors on stage to look straight out into the theater, breaking the fourth wall.

"I think something else that makes it interesting is that most of the show is delivered straight out to the audience. The creators used the device of having the director at the back of the theater, and for most of the show, just a disembodied voice, which forced the actors on stage to look straight out into the theater, breaking the fourth wall."

Musicals have been doing that since THE BLACK CROOK, Goth. If there was a difference in A CHORUS LINE it was that they didn't pretend to be talking to each other.

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To the OP, I think ACL was important because it was so brilliantly staged and performed, but also because it dealt seriously with subjects that hadn't been well-covered by Broadway musicals before. The treatment of the homosexual, Paul, is (a) compassionate if sort of condescending to us now and (b) unusual because he wasn't the only gay character in the show. He was also not just gay, but has worked as a seedy drag queen, much to the shame of his parents.

And ACL acknowledged that not everybody can realize his/her dreams all the time. Only a minority of the dancers make the cut and we know from the beginning that most will be disappointed. ACL wasn't the first musical to have unhappy endings, but it may have been the first to have so many. As such it celebrated American aspirations while acknowledging limitations in a decade in which a President of the U.S. resigned, we lost our first war in Vietnam and Americans in general were cutting back because of oil embargoes and inflation.

There is no central love story or supporting, comic love story, both standard in the American musical since OKLAHOMA! There are no stock characters that one recognized from every other musical of the R&H period. And by using the dialogue and problems of real people, it had a ring of authenticity that contrasted sharply with the book librettos based in vaudeville routines that had dominated Broadway for most of the century. I wouldn't call it "gritty", but at the time it seemed a lot more "real" than something like APPLAUSE.

Yet it's overall tone was determined and even inspiring. "What I Did for Love" may be cheesy, but it also reflected the love and dedication of artists for their craft. The characters aren't trying to be stars (as the chorines of Busby Berkeley had been in the 1930s), they were just trying to be serious dancers. It was easy to root for that.

APPLAUSE and 42nd STREET are still essentially Cinderella stories set in a fairy-tale show-biz milieu. In A CHORUS LINE, characters talk about things like Mom finding a strange woman's earrings in Dad's car and pretending not to care, about how the cast of a show stands in for a cold and unloving family, about how teachers can be especially cruel in the arts because the class work is so personal, etc.

No, it isn't PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, but it's pretty down-to-earth for a Broadway musical.