‘Palpable and moving’
A Chorus Line
Festival Theatre, Stratford
So how do you stage A Chorus Line — the very title of which would seem to demand a proscenium stage — on a three- sided platform like the one at the Stratford Festival? Simple. You build a proscenium on the platform. It’s all done with mirrors. Or at least, some of it is.
The 1970s did not seem, to those who were there, like a great period in the history of the American musical. That was then. Seen from now, after decades of musical misery, it looks like a golden age. Consider the four shows that were up for the Best Musical Tony award in 1976. One was Bubbling Brown Sugar, an early jukebox musical, long and justifiably forgotten. But the others were Pacific Overtures, Chicago and, yes, A Chorus Line, all major works. A Chorus Line was the predestined winner: the awards show was built around it, rather like with Hamilton this year.
Its prestige has dimmed somewhat in the intervening years; Pacific Overtures now seems, as indeed it always did, a more intelligent and adventurous show, while Chicago, because of its phenomenally successful revival, has become far more visible. A Chorus Line is softer; it has a veneer of toughness, but it’s one of Broadway’s valentines to itself.
In particular, it’s a tribute to the wonderful and seemingly inexhaustible breed of actor- singer- dancers. We’re at an audition. Zach, a director- choreographer, needs eight people — four male, four female — to dance attendance on his leading lady. He has seventeen to choose from. On the thin pretext that they will also have lines to speak, he gets them to talk about themselves, about their growing up, about how they got into dancing and what they expect to get out of it. My favourite spoken line: “I don’t want to hear that Broadway is dying, because I just got here.”
The show has one of the most electric openings of any musical. It was great in Michael Bennett’s legendary original production, and it’s great again in Donna Feore’s Stratford staging. Those auditioning are being put, rigorously, through their paces; and just the sight of them brings the house down. The number that follows has a documentary authenticity about it, an excitement that’s maintained even when they burst, less realistically, into song with I Hope I Get It.
Nothing else in the show has quite t hat i mpact. There’s a gulf between this number, where they dance because they’re dancers, and the subsequent autobiographical ones where they dance and sing because they’re in a musical. The most extended of these is Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love, in which they share with us their experiences of puberty. Though it’s supposed to give the show universal appeal, it actually distracts from the reason we’re interested in these characters in the first place: they are performers, on the line for a place in the line. And yet, it’s a terrific number, masterfully conceived and thrillingly executed.
Feore’s choreography, here and elsewhere, doesn’t seem all that different from what I remember of Bennett’s, but that’s hardly a bad thing. Michael Walton’s lighting is great — again like the original. Michael Gianfrancesco’s set gives us a false back wall, which periodically revolves to become the bank of rehearsal- room mirrors that have always been the show’s signature. Laura Burton conducts a taut rendition of Marvin Hamlisch’s music, a score that’s serviceable in the best way; except, that is, for the atrociously non- specific What I Did for Love, a transparent attempt at a detachable hit song.
Among the cast I especially liked Ayrin Mackie, in the role of Sheila, oldest, tallest and sassiest of the chorines, and Matt Alfano, who has the evening’s first solo and in many ways its best. It’s called I Can Do That, and indeed, he can. Juan Chioran, acting mainly from the back of the auditorium, is a commanding martinet as Zach. Dayna Tietzen is Cassie, his ex-flame, who angers and embarrasses him by turning up for a place in the chorus when he thinks she should be a star. Their relationship has always been the least convincing thing in the show, and it still is. Cassie’s cri de coeur solo, The Music and the Mirror, never seems to work. It’s a dance of frustration that is itself frustrating, refusing to take off.
A number that always works is the infernally catchy One. It’s introduced, with sadistic cunning, in a rehearsal sequence in which we almost see, almost hear it, so that we’re left panting for the full experience. And then at the end of the show, after the lucky eight have been chosen and the others regretfully dismissed, we get it: a full- scale full- stage reprise, the entire company orbiting in gold suits around their invisible star. It’s part epilogue, part curtain call. At least it was in 1976. This time it’s just curtain call. The lights have gone firmly down on the preceding scene, and the audience dutifully applaud as if they’d been given a happy ending though it is, at the most, bittersweet.
We enjoy the closing number as a number, detached from everything else. There’s a strong vein of sentimentality in the show, and in this production it’s stronger than ever. I still prefer it to the assembly-line cynicism of Chicago. And the performers’ commitment is palpable and moving. After all, it’s their story.