Chorus line

A detailed Summary of Chorus line

On May 21, 1975, a spectacular new Broadway musical opened. The musical was unique because it told the stories of the dancers in the show rather than letting the audience just watch the dancers perform. A Chorus Line, a musical by Michael Bennett, was very popular when it made its day view and continues to be shown today to marvel its audience.

Michael Bennett's inspiration for the idea to put together A Chorus Line came mostly out of frustration of the society he lived in the 1970's. In Bennett's eyes the Watergate conflict brought out the falsehood and deceit in America. Bennett wanted to see the truth on stage and to say something positive about his country, which at the time was suffering a severe questioning of its values.

Growing up, Bennett loved to go and watch Broadway shows. He had noticed that the quality of the shows had gone down due to economic changes in America. Bennett's real love was to dance on stage. Along with many other dancing hopefuls, he felt the frustration of a dancer trying to succeed. Bennett understood that through a whole dancer's life maximum effort in his or her dancing career had to put forth. He also knew that the no one had been affected more th

The musical would start out with several dancers trying out for a dancing part in a musical. Some of the dancers were then cut and Michael put in a character, Zach, who was to be the director of the musical who chose sixteen people out of the whole group of dancers auditioning. These dancers were told by Zach to talk to about their dancing experiences, as well as their experiences growing up. From these people he would chose four boys and four girls for the final cuts. Every character in the musical had a different story, such as Paul's story of growing up gay, taken after the real story of Dante. Another important character to the musical came to be a girl named Cassie. This character's part in the show was to be Zach's "mirror."[Mandelbaum]

When the show opened on Broadway in 1975, it turned immediately into big hit because it was so different from most Broadway shows. If someone is to watch Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line the hope is that they really feel as if they are a dancer.

The making of A Chorus Line seemed simple to the public eye, but in reality it was a long process with a lot of work involved. In the beginning, Michael had a simple idea that his show would begin in a rehearsal room with one dancer at the dance bar, then another would join, and the scene would show the feelings between the dancers. He wanted to convey what each dancer was feeling without having them directly tell the audience verbally. Bennett invited all types of dancers to come to talk about their experiences through dancing. He wanted the biggest cross-section of dancers possible so he could find a common experience that all dancers had experienced. On January 18, 1974 Bennett and eighteen dancers gathered at The Nicolas Exercise center on East Twenty Third Street in Manhattan. Michael first had the dancers tak

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Category: Miscellaneous