Listening to ACL OCR

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:01pm

Man, I wish I was going to be in NY to see this again. I saw it in LA when it toured years ago. I would love to see it again with a strong cast.

The songs, the internal stories, the images that come to mind when I hear all of the songs . . .

"At the Ballet" speaks to those who found refuge in the arts, or in sports, or in anything that helped them for a minute look outside oneself to see what could/should/would be there.

So many songs make me think back to choices, chances, and opportunities lost and found. And, I am not a performer.

Curious as to what many of you think. I had not listened to it for a few years, and now I cannot stop.

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:09pm

I go through my ACL stage at least once a year, and always get goose bumps. I was actually pondering whether I could make it to San Francisco.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:13pm

yeah, ywiw, make the trek up.

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:15pm

It'll for sure be the one show I see when in NYC for the holidays.

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:23pm

Holy Crap - I just realized I will be in SF on August 14th. Me thinks I will get tickets!

For some reason I thought it was already gone.

[DG]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:28pm

I have no objectivity with this piece. It opened just as I was 'coming of age,' and like many others, I thought it spoke directly to me. Also like many others, I drove my family insane blasting the cast recording and singing along - over and over and over.

It was my first Broadway show, which somewhat spoiled me for life. I ended up seeing it every time I went to NYC, which was frequently. I'm somewhat trepidacious about this revival, as I have quite an iconic vision in place - but I know nothing will keep me from it.

I just wish it could be at the Shubert - that seems like its home.

[Bettyboy72]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:38pm

Wouldn't that be fantastic if it was at the Shubert? DG, you raise such a nice point. How lovely that would be...

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:40pm

*tear*
My first b'way show as well. Sat at the Shubert, front row of the Mezzanine. Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, 1988.

I see the tour whenever it comes by, and have seen too many regional productions.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:40pm

I have no objectivity with this piece. It opened just as I was 'coming of age,' and like many others, I thought it spoke directly to me. Also like many others, I drove my family insane blasting the cast recording and singing along - over and over and over.

It was my first Broadway show, which somewhat spoiled me for life.

Though it wasn't my first Broadway show, it was the first as I was coming of age to have such a profound and visceral impact on me. Which is why I am rather saddened to be working on an essay called "Lost: One Major Chorus Line Fan" that describes how completely put off the entire revival I have been by the process of just simply trying to get myself a pair of tickets for my next birthday, which was going to be my special treat for a milestone year. (It's a 5 year not a 0 year, so maybe it's a mini-milestone.)

Between the AmEx Gold Card member weeks of ticket sales and the fact that a huge number of decent seats seem to have been put aside for "Premium Seating" (at a mere $250 a pop!) I have to say I just no longer care. It's a freaking revival. With a bunch of kids who look like they're wearing their parent's 1970s clothes.

And I realize, big deal. So they lost me. They don't need me, I guess. But what's kind of bad, considering how I've seen many pro and regional productions is how I actively don't WANT to see the revival now. Which is a shame, because I think I am one of the audience members they could have had eating out of the palms of their hands.

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:44pm

Whoo Hooo - just called my friend - she wants to go as well, and is going to get tickets for August 13th. Yeah!

Tickets are still available.

And them my meeting is Monday morning at 10:30 - PERFECT!

[NYadgal]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 2:52pm

It wasn't my first Broadway show, but it spoiled me for life and also had a profound and visceral impact on me.

I bought my OCR album the day it was released, and can't imagine how many thousands of times I've listened to it over the years. (Though now in the form of a CD).

I can still see that cast on stage in the Shubert. I remember every move, every line, and every emotion.

This is a show that I need to share with loved ones. My niece who is 14, who is not much younger than I was when I first saw it and fell in love with it. A friend who was born just after it opened. I'm praying that this revival is more than just a bunch of kids wearing their parent's 1970's clothing. I'm hoping that this show can mean to a new generation what it meant to me so many years ago. And still does.

Updated On: 7/18/06 at 02:52 PM

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:05pm

I wonder if they are going to change some of the references . . .

"Robert Goulet, Robert Goulet, oh my God Robert Goulet"

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:07pm

I had a conversation about this recently... my hope is that the director/choreographer can work with the cast to get them to really connect with these characters... and that it's not just all about the staging, choreography and music. If they don't feel it, the show loses it's true heart.

[DG]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:07pm

NAMO – I can’t believe how unbelievably sad that just made me feel. I don’t doubt it for a minute, as that’s where the Broadway industry has been for some time.

But, just invoking the memory of A CHORUS LINE takes me back to when I hadn’t learned what the world was – even before it had become what it is now. And that eye-opener makes me realize how far, far away my youthful idealism has become.

But Addy, I do hope you’re right, and that despite all the mercenary business tactics, the piece can rise above it all and reach the hearts and minds of young folks the way it reached us. I don’t see why it couldn’t – despite all the cynicism that has engulfed the world, the stories still speak to a hopefulness of youth that I think still remains, if somewhat dimmed.

[NYadgal]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:11pm

DG, I had the same reaction to Namo's post. It made me so sad...

This show lives in our hearts. It exists in the connections we make to the hearts of the characters. That's ageless and timeless.

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:13pm

I wonder if they're going to have a lottery or something like that. You'd think that of all shows, this is the one show they would make an effort to make affordable to the masses.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 3:53pm

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

[NYadgal]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:01pm

Thanks for sharing that, PalJoey. Profoundly meaningful...

I've been wondering... if anyone even realizes the origin of the infamous thread here on the OT Board. The 'Adult Smoking' thread...

Updated On: 7/18/06 at 04:01 PM

[billygoatgirl300]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:07pm

I haven't seen the show ( It closed when I was 1 and half) but I will see it in Sept for my 18th brithday.

My mom and dad bought the OCR and I just see in love with the show. I'm not a dancer myself but I can realte to the people in the show it was mostly during the Hello Tweleve montage. But I think everyone can realte to that number.

I was able to meet Donna McKchnie last summer when she was in Folles and we began to talk about the revival and she was saying how happy she was that it was coming back to Broadway.

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:10pm

PJ,

Your message has just made me weep. Weep of sadness, losing all those great people at a time when no one seemed to notice, care. Weep of happiness, that you got to experience it at the Newman. Weep at the different meanings all those songs can take. Weep at missing the days when the gay community was actually fighting for something. And weep of hope... hope that a new generation will be exposed to this most wonderful of shows, and the hope that there will always be a line for all the chorus boys and girls.

[Incognito]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:11pm

ACL, was my show of shows. I came out and I knew this was the best I would ever see.

When it started I felt as if someone had yanked the spine out of my back and I had to hold onto the arm rests to stop sliding down.

The finale, was bittersweet. How I adored it, the music was sublime but every step they took was a step nearer the end.

I bought the vinyl at the theatre (London) and played it non stop for two years. My father used to stick his head around the door and say, "Haven't you got anything else"?

A very special place in my heart is reserved for this piece. I'm thrilled beyond belief for the revival and everything is crossed for a new cast recording: - )

Updated On: 7/18/06 at 04:11 PM

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:17pm

Thanks for sharing that PJ.

It is good that my office has a door I can close, because I too, started to get a bit teary-eyed reading your response.

[NYadgal]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 4:57pm

That finale... So bittersweet. So real!

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 5:27pm

I openly cry at the finale... I'm glad it's loud and only the people next to me can hear me sob!

Funny, sort'a, story... the last time I did the show, the director really had NO IDEA what every little thing in the show meant. And, of course, in the cast there were two of us CLFs. (Chorus Line freaks). Anyway, opening night, after the finale, the entire cast ran back onstage for a bow! We (the CLFs) were aghast! We had to explain to her (and the cast) the whole meaning of the finale (which we'd had to do about MANY things), and reluctantly she asked the rest of the cast not to go out for a bow after the bows.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 7/18/06 at 5:27pm

Well you certainly trumped my essay-to-be with your essay-that-is, PJ, and I share many of the same touchstones as you. I was at the NIH and the Kennebunkport protests. Somebody drew chalk outlines around me at the die-ins.

But my beef isn't exclusively (ha!) with AmExGoldCard. My beef is mostly with this fake unavailability of tickets the producers have created. For one thing, did AmEx Gold Card members HAVE to have weeks of exclusive ticket purchasing rights? Wouldn't a few DAYS have been just as good? And you know, I've thought of taking an AmEx Gold Card when they offer them to me, but do I REALLY want to have to pay an annual fee for a card that lets me buy full-price tickets to a show that already has all sorts of high fees attached? The answer to that question is a resounding no.

And so, patiently, I waited for the tickets to go on sale to the dreaded general public, the nameless chorus members of the ticket buying world who stand in direct opposition to (or is it behind, in the shadows of?) those stellar Gold Gard members. And what do I find? Nothing in the orchestra that's out from under the overhang of the mezzanine. Nothing decent upstairs.

Unless, unless... unless I want to pony up 150% more than what the advertised price is for an orchestra seat. Which I don't. I won't. Not unless it includes a ride in a time machine back to 1976 at the Shubert Theater.

PJ wrote, "The premium seats are like house seats--as it gets closer to the date, they release the unsold premium seats." I get that, and that may very well be what pisses me off the most.

What was exciting for me as a kid to get tickets to the hottest show in the world on Broadway was that they were hard to get because they were sold out. Not because people were trying to create an illusion of a low supply to increase the demand.

And it can backfire badly. Recently, when I bought tickets to see Sandra Bernhard's "Everything Bad & Beautiful" I saw that the tickets were $55 but the first three center rows were "premium seats" for $95. I adore Sandra, and seriously considered buying those. Instead, we took row four across the aisle for a discounted $45 thanks to a code that was available.

And what did Sandra end up with for an audience? Front rows of dud audience members, barely responding to her or her material. Two longtime fans in row four across the aisle were laughing our heads off, into mostly a void of people who probably bought those "premium-just-like house seats" at TKTS or some other way with very little knowledge of what they were about to see. I think at least five or possibly six pairs of people walked out before the show was halfway over.

At one point Sandra, feeling the low vibe, asked "Is this a New York crowd? If so, you should be ashamed of yourselves. And if you're out of towners, could you at least fake it?" It was sad, really.

Which brings me back to A Chorus Line. I am so filled with resentment about the fact that getting a ticket is being set up to be a real ordeal that I do not CARE to see the show anymore. I don't want to have to visit the website every day to find out if tickets have become available. (And something tells me a whole LOT of tickets are going to become available.)

I made an effort, it was for naught, and I now actively don't care. I don't care that the cast is blogging about their fabulous, dream-come-true experiences. (I am reminded of the last blogging effort with a musical, granted the movie of RENT, which didn't do a damned thing to get asses in the seats). I just don't care.

It just makes the superior experience of getting tickets to Hairspray before it opened stand out in stark relief. Word from Seattle was extremely strong. Discount codes were available for the Neil Simon. I ended up with TERRIFIC mezzanine seats the Monday night before opening for 60 bucks a piece. And there was so much good will in that audience that it carried out into the world for months to come.

THAT is more like the airline model. Early purchasers get the great deals and end up spreading enthusiastic word-of-mouth. It was a sales model that served Hairspray very well.

But A Chorus Line has gone with the other model. Make people THINK tickets are hard to come by so that the high ticket prices seem reasonable. Make a show about low-payed gypsies an "exclusive," high-end ticket price experience.

And that's fine, that's their prerogative.

I'm just not going to be scrambling to get in the doors.

Updated On: 7/18/06 at 05:27 PM