Stage Review: Suffering for art motivates 'A Chorus Line'
Behind-the-glam story tells of surrendering self for the greater goal of glitz
Why would anyone want to be a dancer on Broadway? To spend years in ballet and jazz classes, leave a pleasant little town in Kansas, move to New York, endure the ridicule and humiliation of auditions, be criticized for being too fat, too thin, too old, too good, and for what? To become the backdrop in a musical so that some star's grand entrance will be bathed in chorus boys and girls?
Paul Kolnik/Special to The Commercial Appeal
A revival of the long-running Broadway musical "A Chorus Line" brings its "One Singular Sensation" to the Orpheum through Sunday.
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There's one obvious explanation: Dancers are born masochists.
That's what director and choreographer Michael Bennett discovered back in the 1970s when he interviewed a host of hoofers and used their stories as the basis for "A Chorus Line," which made its debut on Broadway in 1975 and was revived in 2006.
Or maybe it's that they're all hopeless romantics?
It's hard to tell the difference in the Broadway tour of "A Chorus Line," running through Sunday at the Orpheum theater. When the actors, many of them with sparkling New York résumés, sing "I really need this job," they do so not with the passion of struggling artists but with the weary frustration of people who work too hard for too little. Which could certainly be true.
In the behind-the-scenes musical about life in the theater, a group of prospective performers spend a day at an audition. (The actual show is 2 hours, no intermission.) Of nearly two-dozen prospects, the director/choreographer Zach winnows the group down to 17.
He's looking for "4 and 4," four guys and four girls to be in a big-budget musical.
"I don't want anybody to pull my eye," he says, watching the show-stopping final dance number. As they sing the praises of "one singular sensation," the dancers are painfully aware that not only are they not it, they may not even be good enough for the chorus.
While "A Chorus Line" is about movers, it famously requires a cast of triple threats, performers who can sing, dance and act. The cast of the Broadway tour is generally triple talented, though some are stronger than others and for a few, the singing is a challenge.
There are also some acting flaws in the show. Michael Gruber is curiously one-dimensional as Zach, his voice coming across like a game-show host or a therapist. Indeed, the way his character is portrayed makes this staging of "A Chorus Line" seem as though every New York audition requires performers to proclaim their homosexuality, reveal their childhood secrets, discuss their breast implants and otherwise bare their souls. All for a part in the chorus.
A much more realistic explanation for Zach asking the performers to spill their guts at this rather unusual audition is that he's having an existential crisis of his own. When he asks the dancers what they would do if they couldn't dance anymore, Gruber makes it sound like a rhetorical question. It's not. But it sure sounds like it.
If one were to take this particular audition as an industry standard, and not a singular sensation brought on by a director thinking upon his own dedication to art and love, then the only people who'd ever dream of going into show business are the ones who couldn't otherwise afford group therapy.
'A Chorus Line'
The show continues through Sunday at the Orpheum theater. Shows are 8 tonight, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 1:30 and 7 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $15-$75. Call 525-7800.
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