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"There are only three kids in this show who ever acted before. I just wanted them all to be themselves, talking. I didn't want recording-studio sound, which is like watching a giant TV set up onstage. I worked hard to keep the sound of the kids' voices real. I didn't want them to sound like Ethel Merman by merely whispering into a mike. Neither did I want their faces to look plastic. The boys wear no makeup, and the girls are in street makeup. There are no baby-pink gels to make them look theatrical. They are under hot white lights, which are hard on a face. This show isn't about tricks, it's about emotions."
Much of A Chorus Line is taken from Bennett's own life and feelings about the theater. He was born in 1943 in Buffalo, the year Oklahoma! started Broadway on a musical bonanza. His mother worked as a secretary at Sears and his father as a machinist in the Chevy plant. They still do. By the time Michael was three, he was an incurable dancer to any music from the radio. His parents started him in dancing school, and he has never stopped—dancer in West Side Story and Subways Are for Sleeping, choreographer of Company and Follies. At 32, Bennett is a thin, elfin figure with a short beard. He still works all the time and lives alone. Although he has just signed a million-dollar, three-picture deal with Universal, he collects only $75 a week from his business manager. "I have no possessions," he says. "I don't own this apartment, I have no car or country place, and I do not wish to have anything except my American Express card, which means I can escape. But I still spend a lot of time at home. I work on developing my imagination between 12 and 4 a.m. I just sit at my desk and think. I don't really need to dance any more. Dancing is only part of what I do. I want to do a movie musical about New York in the '40s. I am very much into words, and maybe I will write something, possibly an autobiography. I can always dance around my living room a lot."