A Chorus Line
It turns the confessions of nameless chorus dancers into song, and in the end gathers those voices into a single golden line and lets them vanish into applause.
At a glance 🔭💭
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The creators ⏳🌊
- ComposerMarvin Hamlisch
Fresh from winning three Oscars, he wrote his first Broadway score for this show, which earned him both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
- LyricistEdward Kleban
He kept the dancers' own turns of speech in the lyrics, and this was the only musical of his staged in his lifetime.
- DirectorMichael Bennett
The director-choreographer who grew a set of recording sessions into a full work, he designed the show's form and its finale.
- BookNicholas Dante
He wrote the book with James Kirkwood, and Paul's monologue was drawn from his own story.
- ProducerJoseph Papp
He developed the show at the Public Theater before moving it to Broadway.
- LeadDonna McKechnie
As Cassie in the original cast, she danced “The Music and the Mirror” and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.
I. Dancers before a tape recorder
(Tapes) In January 1974, Broadway dancers gathered in a New York rehearsal studio and talked late into the night in front of a tape recorder. They told how they had started dancing, what home had been like, and why they were still on the stage. The sessions were organized by the dancers Michon Peacock and Tony Stevens, and the director-choreographer Michael Bennett soon took them over. Out of those tapes came “A Chorus Line,” with a book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante. (Composer) The music was by Marvin Hamlisch. A piano prodigy who had entered Juilliard's preparatory division at seven, he began on Broadway not as a composer but as the rehearsal pianist for “Funny Girl.” For “Henry, Sweet Henry,” which Bennett choreographed, he arranged the dance music. In 1974 he won three Oscars in a single night for “The Way We Were” and “The Sting.” Soon afterward Joseph Papp of the Public Theater approached him, and this show became his first Broadway score. (Stage) The lyrics were by Edward Kleban. The show opened at the Public Theater in April 1975 and moved in July to Broadway's Shubert Theatre. It ran 6,137 performances through 1990 and held the record as Broadway's longest-running show until 1997, when “Cats,” also covered in this series, surpassed it. It won nine Tony Awards and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
II. Auditions on a bare stage
(Stage) The stage holds nothing but a single white line drawn across the floor and a wall of mirrors at the back. Zach, the director, appears mostly as a voice from the darkness of the house, while his assistant Larry teaches the dancers the combinations. Twenty-four have come, and after the first cut seventeen remain. Zach means to choose four men and four women. (Accompaniment) As the curtain rises, an accompaniment like a rehearsal-room piano drives on without pause, with Zach's counting of the beat laid over it. The music does not decorate the scene; it becomes the very time of the audition. The speed of learning the steps, the eye that singles out whoever gets it wrong, the bodies growing short of breath — all of it is heard as rhythm. (Inner voices) Whenever the movement stops, the dancers' private thoughts burst out as a chorus: the desperation of needing this job. Many voices repeat the same wish for different reasons until they merge into a single chord. Zach then has them set down their résumé photos and asks each of them to step forward and talk about themselves. (Form) That one demand fixes the form of the whole work. From here on, every song is a confession. If “Fame,” also in this series, portrayed the dreams of young people trying to get into a dance school, this show portrays where people stand after living that dream for a decade or so.
The opening number, which sets the audience down in the middle of an audition the moment the curtain rises. The dancers' desperation erupts at once in movement and in muttered thoughts.
- It begins with a vamp — a short accompaniment figure repeated over and over, like a rehearsal pianist's. Counting is laid on top of it, so it sounds less like a song than like the actual time of an audition.
- When the movement halts, the inner thoughts of many dancers overlap, each with a different story, and then gather into a single chord. This way of letting us hear the individual dancer and the group at once serves as the blueprint for the whole show.
- Each time the steps switch among ballet, jazz and tap, the rhythmic texture of the accompaniment changes too — so much so that the music alone tells you which combination is being danced.
- The stage audition opens with twenty-four people on a bare stage, but the 1985 film expanded it into a crowd of hopefuls lined up outside the theater, changing the scale of the scene.
III. The ballet class as refuge
(First confession) The first to speak is Mike. To a bouncy tap rhythm, he sings of tagging along to his sister's dance class and discovering he could do it better. Bobby rattles off the stunts he pulled back home in Buffalo, hiding his loneliness behind the laughs. In the short song that follows, one dancer after another hesitates before the question. (Three women) Sheila, Bebe and Maggie each tell of their childhoods in turn. None of their homes was easy: a cold parent, a broken marriage, a girl who never heard she was pretty when she looked in the mirror. For all three, the ballet class was the one place where everything was beautiful. Here, for the first time, private wounds turn into shared memory. (Idiom) Hamlisch and Kleban deliberately blur the line between dialogue and song. Most confessions begin as speech and at some point swell into melody. The cadences transcribed from the tapes survive in the songs, so the audience feels it is hearing not characters but the voices of real people. (Laughter) There are moments to catch one's breath, too: a brief duet in which Kristine, who cannot sing, never manages to finish a line, and her husband Al finishes each one for her. Set between the heavy confessions, this laughter regulates the show's breathing.
A song in which Sheila, Bebe and Maggie, one after another, tell of unhappy homes and of the ballet class that was their refuge. For the first time, private wounds are bound together in a three-part harmony.
- The opening lays out the family troubles in a clipped, half-spoken manner. When the story reaches the ballet class, the melody stretches out and swells. Barren reality and the place they dreamed of are contrasted in the very shape of the melody.
- The three voices sing separately at first, then at the end merge into a trio stacking different notes together. You can hear in the harmony that the three grew up in different homes but fled to the same place.
- Kelly Bishop, as Sheila, won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for the role. Sheila's sardonic tone sets the color of the song's opening.
- It is one of the few confession numbers to survive into the 1985 film.
IV. Twelve, thirteen
(Montage) At the heart of the show lies a long montage stitched together from adolescent memories. The first changes in the body, things done behind parents' backs, first loves, the moment of realizing one was different from others — these spill briefly from many mouths and then sink back into the chorus. Song and dialogue, solo and ensemble trade places without pause; the way this stage version is built comes close to film editing. (Diana) In the middle of the montage, Diana Morales's story cuts in. In an improvisation class at acting school, the teacher pressed her to feel something, but she felt nothing at all. The song confesses that failure comically, then by its end turns into the firmness of a sixteen-year-old choosing her own path. (Val) Val's song is far more blunt. Her dancing scored perfectly, but her looks scored low and she kept getting cut; she says without a trace of embarrassment that once she had surgery to change her body, the work started coming. Beneath the breezy surface of a showtune lies a bitter observation about the yardstick this business uses to measure people. (Shadow) The laughter in this section always drags a shadow behind it. Even while laughing, the audience cannot forget that these people are competing for eight out of sixteen places.
A long montage pieced together from many adolescent memories, and the longest track on the stage cast album. Brief confessions from many people pass the baton without a break.
- One person's solo, a snatch of dialogue, someone else cutting in with song, then the chorus again follow one another as quickly as film cuts. It is a montage technique, a single number holding many scenes at once.
- The chorus repeats the same refrain to form the framework, and individual memories slip in between. That is why the scene sounds like a single whole rather than scattered fragments.
- On the album, other parts of the montage are gathered into the same track. It helps to listen with in mind that onstage it is a long stream, broken into two or three installments.
- The 1985 film dropped this montage and put a new song, “Surprise, Surprise,” in its place. The new song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but many fans of the stage version lamented the loss of the original montage.
A song in which Diana confesses how she felt nothing at all in an improvisation class at acting school. It begins in laughter and ends in firm self-affirmation.
- It flows mostly like sung speech (recitative). Diana carries the story as though reenacting that classroom scene, making the audience laugh.
- A short refrain, repeated several times, points to the emptiness she felt. By the end of the song, the same words seem to have shifted in meaning from self-mockery to resolve.
- Priscilla Lopez of the original cast recorded this song. In the same role, Lopez also led “What I Did for Love.”
- Because it was kept in the 1985 film, it is a good song for comparing the stage and screen interpretations.
V. Cassie before the mirror
(Cassie) There is one person at the audition who doesn't belong. It is Cassie, once a principal dancer. She once lived with Zach, and she made her name on the stages he created. She went to Los Angeles to try her hand at acting but couldn't find work, and now she has come back hoping for even a place in the chorus. (Confrontation) Zach tells her she stands out too much to dance in the chorus. Cassie counters that all she wants is to dance. Their exchange is so tangled up with talk of work and the leftover resentments of former lovers that it is hard to say who is right. (Mirror) What follows, “The Music and the Mirror,” is the show's signature scene, opening as a song and passing into a long solo dance. Before a wall of mirrors, Cassie dances alongside her own reflection, multiplied many times over, while the music shifts tempo and color to draw out everything her body can still do. (Unison) Right after, the dancers learn “One,” the number that will actually be used in the show. It is a glittering show number in praise of a star who never appears onstage. The chorus must match down to the tilt of the head and the tips of the fingers. Larry and Zach keep telling Cassie to dance less, to do exactly what everyone else does. The body that shone in a solo in the previous scene is singled out here as a problem, and the show's question becomes clear. How far must the individual vanish into the line?
This is the scene in which Cassie's plea to be allowed to dance again passes from song into a long solo dance. For the only time in the show, one person has the whole stage.
- The opening song is urgent but restrained. In the dance section that follows, the orchestra changes tempo and rhythm again and again, unfolding her skills one by one. The solo music is built like a short suite.
- The mirrored wall at the back of the stage reflects Cassie many times over. While the music supports a dance performed alone, the stage shows her as many at once. It can also be read as a device that foreshadows the line of “One” in the next scene.
- Donna McKechnie, of the original cast, won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical as Cassie, and the scene is remembered alongside her name.
- The 1985 film replaced this number with a new song, “Let Me Dance for You,” keeping only the first phrase of the original.
VI. Where the music stops
(Silence) The longest confession in the show has no music. When Zach calls Paul aside and asks him to talk, Paul calmly recounts the isolation he endured at school as a boy, his years working on the stage of a drag show, and the day he ran into his parents backstage. With no accompaniment and no chorus, only one voice remains. Because a show that has turned every confession so far into song leaves this very passage empty of music, the silence rings all the louder. The monologue was based on the life of co-librettist Nicholas Dante himself. (Injury) In the tap rehearsal that follows, Paul injures the knee he had surgery on not long before, collapses, and is carried off to the hospital. In that moment the remaining dancers see how their own careers could end. A career can end overnight, not by failing an audition but by one part of the body giving out. (Question) Zach asks what they would do if they could no longer dance. After a few halting answers, Diana leads “What I Did for Love,” and the dancers add their voices one by one. The song is a vow not to regret what has passed, and a tribute to the work of dancing itself. (Place) The number became the show's most widely sung hit outside the theater. For that reason, critics have long remarked that within a show built on a chain of confessions, this song alone sounds like a pop tune.
After Paul is injured and carried off, this is the answer Diana and the dancers give together to the question of what they would do if they had to stop dancing.
- It begins quietly as a solo, then swells into a chorus as the dancers add their voices one by one. The way one person's vow becomes everyone's vow is drawn in the thickening of the sound.
- As the song nears its end, a key change (modulation) that lifts the whole melody higher to sing it again raises the emotion. It is a passage that honestly follows the traditional way theater music builds to a climax.
- It became the most widely sung hit beyond the show. For that reason, critics have long noted that within a work that kept to the form of confession, this song alone sounds like a pop tune.
- In the 1985 film it became a love song Cassie sings as she leaves the stage. A song devoted on stage to work and dance became a song addressed to a lover, so the object of the lyrics effectively changed.
VII. A single line of gold
(Roll call) When the moment of the final choice arrives, the music steps back. The dancers line up again on the white line holding their headshots, and all that remains is the sound of Zach calling names and the silence of waiting. Who stays and who goes is better seen for yourself. Still, it is worth remembering that the composer did not cover this moment with accompaniment. The full weight of the outcome is left to the actors' faces. (Finale) On a stage that goes dark for a moment and then brightens again, the audience sees the finished performance of “One.” The nineteen people who were set apart by their own stories throughout the audition come out one at a time to take a bow, then stand in a single line, all in identical gold costumes. The same number they worked on earlier in sweat-soaked rehearsal clothes now rings out as dazzling show music led by the brass. (Ending) This show has no conventional curtain call in which each actor receives applause. The lights go down while the line of high-kicking dancers keeps dancing, and the audience sends these people back into the nameless chorus. The most glittering music is given the loneliest ending. (Film) In Richard Attenborough's 1985 film, Michael Douglas played Zach. The film cut most of the montage and added new songs, one of which, “Surprise, Surprise,” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
This is the finale, in which “One,” learned in rehearsal clothes, returns as a finished show number in gold costumes. The individuals who had been confessing become a single line.
- The melody first heard in the rehearsal scene returns in a lavish arrangement led by the brass. Thanks to this reprise, a repeat of an earlier number, the audience realizes how much the meaning of the same song has changed.
- The lyrics praise a star who never appears onstage, yet the only people actually on the stage are the chorus meant to make that star shine. The irony at the heart of the number is that this glittering hymn ends up illuminating the place of the chorus.
- The lights go out while the line of high-kicking dancers (the kick line) keeps dancing. Because the ending has no conventional individual curtain call, the music sounds as if it fades away without ever ending.
- On the original cast album this track closes the record. In the 1985 film, too, the same number served as the large-scale ensemble finale.
Lesser-known stories
At the workshop stage, the show's ending was not settled. The creators tried choosing different dancers to be selected at the end of each performance, but the costume staff objected that they could not keep up with an ending that changed every night, so the ending was fixed. When audience response at early tryouts felt unsatisfying, the actress Marsha Mason reportedly told Bennett that a character who had done everything right ought to get the job. The present ending took shape through this kind of on-the-ground adjustment. The rights to the stories the dancers told in front of the tape recorder are known to have passed for $1 through contracts signed during the workshop process. The contracts are also said to have included a clause on the use of real names. When the show became a huge success, Bennett drew up a new arrangement giving the original nineteen dancers 0.5 percent of the weekly box-office gross. The question of how to put a price on the lives that became the show's raw material lingered long afterward. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts holds reels of recordings documenting the work before the opening. The 40th-anniversary reissue released around 2015 drew on these reels to release early songs and versions such as “Joanne,” “It's All in Here,” and “Shoes” as bonus tracks for the first time. Through these recordings, even listeners who knew only the finished stage show could hear how the confessional form was refined. When Kleban died in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, he left more than a thousand songs that had never made it into a produced show, and his will expressed the wish that a stage work be made from them. His longtime companion Linda Kline and Lonny Price assembled these songs into “A Class Act,” a musical portraying his life. The show was nominated for the 2001 Tony Award for Best Original Score.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Concept musical
(Literal meaning) A concept is a framework of thought, a central idea. The name carries the sense that a single theme or form, rather than a plot, drives the whole work. (In film·musical-theater music) A musical that, instead of telling one person's story from beginning to end, weaves many scenes and songs around a single situation or theme. A Chorus Line, which lays out the confessions of many dancers within the frame of a single day of auditions, is a classic example. Think of a class anthology in which each student takes a turn writing about the same day of a school trip from their own point of view. The story is simple, but a single frame holds all the pieces together.
Repeating accompaniment (vamp)
(Literal meaning) The English word vamp originally meant to repair a shoe by patching new leather onto the front of the upper. In music it came to mean holding the moment by repeating a short accompaniment, as if patching it on, until the singing comes in. (In film·musical-theater music) An accompaniment that keeps repeating a few bars of short chords or rhythms while waiting for the next scene or song. The relentless piano accompaniment at the start of “I Hope I Get It” plays this role, holding the tension of the audition room without a break. It is like turning a jump rope at a steady speed in gym class so that a friend can jump in at any moment. As long as the vamp keeps going, the song can come in at any time. (Elsewhere) The English word vamp is also commonly used to mean a seductress who ensnares men.
Montage
(Literal meaning) Montage is French for assembly, fitting together. (In film·musical-theater music) A technique of joining many short scenes together to create a single flow. The term originally came from film editing. The adolescence montage in A Chorus Line packs the brief memories, songs, and lines of many dancers into one number, switching rapidly among them. It resembles the video shown at a graduation ceremony, in which photos taken over the year pass one after another in time with music. Each photo is brief, but strung together they become the story of a year. (Elsewhere) In police investigations, a composite portrait of a suspect, assembled from facial features based on witness statements, is called a montage.
Sung speech (recitative)
(Literal meaning) The Italian recitativo comes from recitare, to recite or declaim. The idea of reading as if singing is built right into the name. (In film·musical-theater music) A way of singing that conveys a story quickly by following the inflections and rhythms of speech rather than spinning out long melodies. It was used mainly in the plot-driving parts of opera, and in A Chorus Line it appears often in passages like “Nothing,” where a confession flows as if in conversation. When you excitedly tell a friend what happened yesterday, your voice rises and falls on its own; think of it as that way of talking transferred directly onto the score.
Ensemble (chorus)
(Literal meaning) Ensemble is French for together. Chorus comes from choros, the group that sang and danced together in ancient Greek theater. (In film·musical-theater music) The group of performers who sing and dance together behind the leads. They fill the stage and create a scene's energy, but their names usually go unknown. A Chorus Line is the show that made these very people its protagonists. Think of the classmates in the back row of the choir at a school arts festival. You can hardly make out any one of them, but without them the stage is empty. (Elsewhere) In fashion, an ensemble is an outfit made up of pieces designed to be worn together.
Reprise
(Literal meaning) The French reprise means to take up again, to repeat. (In film·musical-theater music) Singing a song heard earlier again later in the show. Even the same melody sounds different in meaning, because the story has moved on in between. The finale of A Chorus Line brings back “One,” the number learned in the rehearsal scene, as a finished stage number, prompting the audience to look back over the past two hours. It is like singing the cheer you practiced on the morning of sports day again after the games are over; the same song feels completely different. (Elsewhere) In fencing, a renewed attack made immediately after the first one is parried is called a reprise.
Kick line
(Literal meaning) A compound of the English kick and line, meaning a dance formation that stands in a single row and kicks its legs high. (In film·musical-theater music) A group dance in which the dancers stand shoulder to shoulder in a single line and kick their legs high in unison, on the beat. It symbolizes the glamour of old-time show stages. A Chorus Line ends with this formation, and at the moment everyone becomes perfectly identical, each person's story disappears from view. Just as everyone in a group jump-rope at field day must jump at the same instant so as not to catch the rope, in a kick line a single dancer out of step stands out immediately.
Key change (modulation)
(Literal meaning) Jeonjo (轉調) means 'shifting (轉) the key (調).' It refers to moving the pitch center on which a song is based to a different place. (In film·musical-theater music) A technique of raising or lowering the overall pitch partway through a song to change the mood. In musicals it is often used near the end of a number, raising the key a step to release a burst of emotion. The final climax of “What I Did for Love” is one example. It works on the same principle as karaoke, where raising the key a notch for just the last chorus suddenly makes it feel more overwhelming.