“A Chorus Line” never works as well with established names. It thrives when populated by actors with a note of earnest desperation. I wouldn’t say every top note of “At the Ballet” is as carefully pitched and shaded as was the case in New York, but the emotional stakes feel higher with this group. As any chorus gypsy will tell you, a few weeks baring your soul for the good people of Costa Mesa and Cleveland, wondering if anybody cares, messes with your head.
Chicago, which must be a relief, is the beneficiary. We care here.
This is no revisionist “Chorus Line.” Nobody messed with the music or the mirrors. This revival was directed by Avian, Michael Bennett’s original co-choreographer, and Bennett’s choreography is re-staged, very closely, by Baayork Lee, an original cast member who has made a long, subsequent career out of restaging this show, like Joey McNeely did with “West Side Story.” The result is likely exactly the way you remember this show, as seen in New York between 1975 and 1990, and at Chicago’s own Shubert Theatre for a full year in 1978.
And if the realization that “A Chorus Line” is now some 34 years old messes with your head, you’re not alone and it helps you appreciate the show. One of its central points is the bone-crushing mortality of the dancer — and, by implication, the mortality of us all.
Lost yet again in the human fragility of this remarkable creation — Kevin Santos’ Paul monologue was especially moving this time around and Gabrielle Ruiz’s stone-faced but full-throated Diana is pitch-perfect — I pondered the force of this material.
Its key, I think, is its juxtaposition of the starkly factual interviews on which the show was based, with Marvin Hamlisch’s accessible, pop-Broadway score. You can see this show as prescient of the reality-TV obsession. But if someone tried to create a show like this today, the music would be as experimental and atonal as the material. That would be wrong. Hamlisch gave us “What I Did for Love,” “One,” “Nothing” and “At the Ballet,” gorgeously insistent melodies that lodge forever in your skull. And thus you feel the musical embodiment — the potential pay-off — of the dancer’s dreams of perennial popularity.
The line is very fine here, in so many ways. As Cassie, the generous-limbed Robyn Hurder shows both skill and failure. And in the deceptively difficult role of sexy, self-obfuscating Sheila, Shannon Lewis is delicious.
In recent years, the original dancers who formed this material have belatedly gotten some of the rewards they deserve. By putting their lives in Bennett’s hands, they created the ultimate tribute to those who somehow survive the brutality of a business that mostly delivers pain, poverty and rejection. They showed America’s parents the number they often do on their kids, especially the sensitive ones. If you have a teenager at home with showbiz dreams, take ’em. If they still want to dance after such open, heartbreaking consideration of its costs, you’ll know they have no choice.
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‘A Chorus Line’
When: Through May 3
Where: Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St.
Price: $18-$85 at 312-902-1400 and broadwayinchicago.com.
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cjones5@tribune.com
