- The chorus line cast sue movie#
- The chorus line cast sue tv#
It’s also really sad: in a monologue that broke boundaries in 1975 because of a dancer openly talking about being gay in “What I Did for Love,” as all of the cast members grapple with the idea that their time on stage won’t last much longer in the ending, when just a few of the characters are selected. You’ll recognized the uncredited contributions of Neil Simon as the dancers tell their stories (“…and then I realized that committing suicide in Buffalo was redundant.”) but most of the show’s humor comes from the quirky behavior of its memorable characters, led by disillusioned Sheila, who flubs a dance move after she is shoved to the back of the stage during auditions and then, when asked if she knows the move, cracks, “I knew it when I was in front.” It’s almost as if the audience is learning the steps along with the performers so that, by the final moment when they’re all united in a chorus line, it feels like we share in their triumph. Most musicals these days aren’t really about the dancing. The chorus line cast sue movie#
If you know “A Chorus Line” from the dreadful movie that starred Michael Douglas, you don’t know “A Chorus Line.”
The chorus line cast sue tv#
Director/writer Michael Bennett, himself a former Broadway dancer, re-purposed some of his ideas in his next show, “Dreamgirls,” Bob Fosse cribbed the audition idea for the opening scenes of his film “All That Jazz,” and the whole group-of-competitors-gradually-whittled-down-to-the-winners idea will be familiar to anyone who watches TV shows such as “American Idol” or documentaries such as “Spellbound.”
Even if you haven’t seen it, you sorta know it, because it has been imitated. “A Chorus Line” dates to the era when Broadway shows produced hits, with its best-known song being the ode to the sacrifices of dancing, “What I Did for Love.” But every song in the score, which includes “Nothing,” “At the Ballet” (which has one of the most famous high notes in all of musical theater) and the raunchy “Dance Ten, Looks Three,” is a gem. The songs, by Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleban - which earned one of the show’s nine Tony Awards and helped it win a Pulitzer Prize for drama - are classics. But the original references all work in the show’s remember-when context. Some productions have altered the pop culture references in “A Chorus Line” - Robert Goulet, for instance, or Anna May Wong - to try to make them more broadly understood. That thing about it having to be set in the ’70s? We’re now far enough away from that avocado/poppy red/harvest gold era that the snapshot element of the show is pretty cool. It’s always fun to take a look behind the scenes to see how theater works, and “A Chorus Line” - which takes place as dancers audition for a fictitious Broadway show that sounds very much like “A Chorus Line” - lets us peek in on the hard work and passion that go into a Broadway show. Forty-one years after its first performance, here’s why you should have love it, too: I have high hopes for the Ordway’s production of the show, which brings together local and national talent to re-imagine what was once the longest-running show in Broadway history (playing for 15 years, it’s still the sixth-longest). It’s a tricky show to do because it requires more than a dozen performers who can sing, dance and act and because no one has figured out a way to divorce it from the time in which it was created and first performed, the mid-‘70s (largely because of a pre-gay-acceptance storyline and jazz/pop songs that scream “Danskins” and “polyester”). I will see any production of “A Chorus Line” under any circumstances - including a local production in which the lead role of Cassie was played by a woman who appeared to be twice as old as 30-ish Cassie - and I will find something to love in it, even if it’s not great.
The first Broadway touring show I ever saw remains my favorite and the one I’ve seen the most productions of: “A Chorus Line.”
Stars of Ordway’s ‘A Chorus Line’ recall most memorable auditions.