Posted: 9/24/06 at 2:18am
"MANY of the performers in the new revival of “A Chorus Line” were not born when the original opened in 1975. And some were just learning to talk when it closed in 1990.
So it might seem that the stories of aspiring dancers would be a stretch for the young actors in the revival, which opens on Oct. 5 at the Schoenfeld Theater. How could they possibly understand what it was like to be a dancer in 1975, when Times Square was a place tourists avoided; the gay rights movement was just six years old; no one had heard of AIDS; and “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Lion King” were not even in a New York actors’ vocabulary?
The tales in “A Chorus Line” are real, after all, based on transcripts from the stream-of-consciousness reflections of a group of dancers who gathered in the winter of 1974 to talk about their lives, and the threats to their livelihood. In many cases the dancers’ stories went directly into the script, verbatim. Collected and given shape under the direction of Michael Bennett, then a 30-year-old star choreographer, the result was a kind of musical documentary, a portrait of an industry at a certain moment in time.
But it was just as much a portrait of youth and romanticism. And how could anyone but a 20-something dancer with dreams of stardom really know what these characters are going through? Six of the 19 principal performers in the revival spoke about their characters, their own stories and what has changed about growing up and getting to Broadway. "
For the rest of the article:
‘A Singular Sensation,’ a New Generation
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