A show arrives on Broadway this week that demonstrates all over again that the most potent theater in America is still song and dance. Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line began as the smash of the off-Broadway season (TIME, June 2). It tells a somber story, lining up 27 dancers in competition for eight roles and making them play show and tell. As each character speaks, the ambitions and frustrations of a lowly chorus dancer become synonymous with everyone's battle for a place in the sun. Yet A Chorus Line is both insouciant and seductive, full of the exuberant energy that can bring audiences nightly to their feet.
"It all started the summer of the Watergate hearings, 1973," Bennett told TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin. "It was a bad year for Broadway and not so hot for me. I hadn't danced in two years, and I was 25 pounds heavier. That summer I sat out in Bridgehampton, watching the hearings and thinking, 'God, truth! Would I like to see some truth in life. I would like to see some truth on the stage.' I wanted to believe in our country as a place where people trust again, and in a strange way I didn't want to judge people any more. The goal-success orientation of our country had made this happen.
"I could relate the success syndrome to my own life. I have been driven by it too. I began thinking of my own life. I began thinking of the chorus days of my life when I belonged to a group of people who had everything in front of them. I'd always wanted to do a musical about dancers, and so it began to ferment in my mind."
One night Bennett gathered together 24 dancers he knew—kids from choruses—and told them he was going to go around the studio with a tape recorder. He asked each one to tell why he or she had decided to dance and to recall childhood memories up to the age of twelve.
About Emotions. "Sixteen hours later, we got to age 21," Bennett says. "And what happened was that we ended up talking about life. It was like a group session, only everybody was listening and nobody was criticizing or judging. The next morning when I walked out of that studio, I was happy. That night had released a lot of guilt in me. I had thought I was the only confused kid, but it turned out that a lot of our lives had been similar. We all found that dancing was something that we could do to get out of the house. And I knew I had some kind of a show here."
By August of last year, Bennett and one of the dancers, Nicholas Dante, had converted the tape into a five-hour play with no music. They put it on in workshop but decided it was too heavy. Bennett then called in his old friend and dance arranger, Marvin Hamlisch, who arranged the Oscar-winning score for The Sting. "I wanted an opera-ballet," Bennett explains. "The music only stops three times in the whole show. I wanted the music to stop for talk rather than a show where everyone talks, and then they sing and dance.