To Attenborough’s credit, he has not meandered out of the theater and into flashbacks in the lives of his desperate dancers. Every chance we have at momentum or empathy is sabotaged by casting, by cutting away (even whacking off the dancers’ feet) or, in one mysterious case, by a little trip the camera takes up to the blackness of the ceiling and back down again as a number is being performed. In the famous final number, “One,” you can see a hint of his style, but everything else has the stamp of Jeffrey Hornaday, who perpetrated the “Flashdance” vulgarities. Bennett’s choreography has been all but erased. The film is virtually the same length as the play but it travels in fits and starts.
A clean bill of health from their dentist or podiatrist might be more to the point.īut most of all, “A Chorus Line,” performed without intermission, had an urgent coherence and its choreography was crisply elegant. Such was Bennett’s assurance that it hardly ever occurred to us to question just why the innermost secrets of their lives needed airing when they were simply going to be chorus members, good and true.
The distance from our theater seat to the stage was also Bennett’s ally, as 16 auditioning singer-dancers confided snatches of autobiography to Zach, an omnipotent and unseen choreographer at the back of the theater. And if we saw through it, we agreed to let ourselves be manipulated emotionally: It was, in effect, what we did for the love of the theater. That was a secret well disguised by the exuberant theatricality of the original production, conceived, choreographed and directed by Michael Bennett and produced by Joseph Papp. In this stately and fairly slavish representation, directed by Richard Attenborough, what pokes through with the pain of a broken bone is how thin the material really is. If you’ve never seen the stage piece, you may come out wondering what in the name of goodness all the fuss was about 10 years ago (and even now, since it is still playing at the self-same Shubert Theatre in New York). If you were one of that legion who saw “A Chorus Line” more than once in the theater, the film is enough to make you doubt your judgment. Tossed into the ether, the singing and dancing are often not much to sing and dance about, and both the zest and the pain are rationed out in such miserly fashion? Skip it and dig up your "Playbill" of the stage original.“A Chorus Line” is here at last (selected theaters) and on its trip has gone from champagne to Champale. How much can you really like a musical when the direction is flat, several good songs are
Is it any wonder that half a dozen directors signed on for this one, only to throw their hands up in despair?ĭouglas plays Zach, the director who puts the young singer-dancers through their paces, demanding not only that they strut their stuff but that they also reveal something of their backgrounds and dreams.
Unfilmable enterprise lies with the power of watching "actual" auditions in a theater. The story, for those unfamiliar with Kirkwood and Dante's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, revolves around the auditions for the chorus of an unnamed musical, and part of the excitement behind this Really hurts for those who remember the dazzle and emotional depth of the let's-put-on-a-show original. It took nearly ten years for the longest-running Broadway musical of all time to make it from stage to screen, and although director Attenborough's film version has a couple of pleasant numbers which serve as oases amidst the dullness, it
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