The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical

5. A Chorus Line: The Benetton of Broadway Musicals

 143  5 A Chorus Line The Benetton of Broadway Musicals You do step-kicks in America and the audience applauds. It’s depressing —Michael Bennett When A Chorus Line closed on April 28, 1990, it had racked up an astounding 6,137 performances, making it, at the time, the longest-running musical in Broadway history. Grossing almost $150 million on Broadway alone, the show was a financial juggernaut and went on to earn over $280 million on tour and internationally and was seen by over 6.6 million people in its fifteen-year run. The show won the hearts of its audiences from the moment it premiered downtown at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1975 before transferring to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway, where it walked away with nine Tony Awards in 1976 including Best Musical. It even garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, not a poor take for a show about a group of dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical. Of course, a great deal of A Chorus Line’s magic and staying power was due to its conceiver, choreographer, and director, Michael Bennett, whose staging was so integral to the show’s concept and structure that even today most productions of the musical still re-create his work. The musical also featured a tuneful score by Marvin Hamlisch (his first original score for Broadway) with lyrics by Edward Kleban, plus a funny and moving book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante. It was all of these elements working together that made A Chorus Line the hit it was. But is there more that accounts for the musical’s success? On its surface, A Chorus Line is about what it means to be a performer on Broadway, but 144  The Great White Way what drives the show forward is the racial politics of the seventies, which were infused with ethnic multiculturalism, new sparks from a thenburgeoning gay rights movement, and the previous decade’s civil rights activism. This ethos, subtly woven into the fabric of the show, imagines a world in which everyone has an equal chance to succeed in life and where one’s racial or ethnic background is not a hindrance to that success but an identity to embrace and a reason to celebrate. Though some of these factors are never explicitly referenced, they color and shape the form, characters, and content of this groundbreaking work and reveal just how central race is to the American musical. In imagining a world in which race has no impact whatsoever on the hiring process or the social forces that order our world, A Chorus Line offers lasting appeal to audiences of all backgrounds because it serves up the American Dream in all its unattainable glory. A Chorus Line epitomizes a new genre that blossomed in the seventies known as the “concept musical,” whose action is not structured by a significant forward-moving plot but rather by an overarching concept or idea (in this case, dancers auditioning for a musical). Nothing particularly noteworthy happens in A Chorus Line. A minor romance transpires between a dancer (Cassie) and the director (Zach). Paul, a gay Puerto Rican dancer, is injured. Performers are selected and rejected. The musical is confessional in nature and structure, with each dancer singing and talking about his or her life. A Chorus Line opens with a mass audition already in progress in which the dancers express their desire to be picked for the job (“I Hope I Get It”). This initial sequence results in the selection of seventeen individuals, eight men and nine women, who tell us about where they grew up, how they came to dance, their moments of sexual exploration, and the difficulties of being a dancer. From this information and based on how well they move, Zach, the show’s director and choreographer, will select a final eight who will comprise the chorus line of the unnamed new musical he is casting. “I need people that look terrific together—and that can work together as a group,” Zach explains. A straightforward enough request, which he then immediately complicates: “I think it would be better if I knew something about you—about your personalities.” This desire for personal, intimate details about the dancers’ lives is a more unusual request, a strange audi- A Chorus Line  145 tion tactic if there ever was one. But more than that, placed side by side, these requests...