It Started with Watergate

A show arrives on Broadway this week that demonstrates all over again that the most potent theater in America is still song and dance. Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line began as the smash of the off-Broadway season (TIME, June 2). It tells a somber story, lining up 27 dancers in competition for eight roles and making them play show and tell. As each character speaks, the ambitions and frustrations of a lowly chorus dancer become synonymous with everyone's battle for a place in the sun. Yet A Chorus Line is both insouciant and seductive, full of the exuberant energy that can bring audiences nightly to their feet.

"It all started the summer of the Watergate hearings, 1973," Bennett told TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin. "It was a bad year for Broadway and not so hot for me. I hadn't danced in two years, and I was 25 pounds heavier. That summer I sat out in Bridgehampton, watching the hearings and thinking, 'God, truth! Would I like to see some truth in life. I would like to see some truth on the stage.' I wanted to believe in our country as a place where people trust again, and in a strange way I didn't want to judge people any more. The goal-success orientation of our country had made this happen.

"I could relate the success syndrome to my own life. I have been driven by it too. I began thinking of my own life. I began thinking of the chorus days of my life when I belonged to a group of people who had everything in front of them. I'd always wanted to do a musical about dancers, and so it began to ferment in my mind."

One night Bennett gathered together 24 dancers he knew--kids from choruses--and told them he was going to go around the studio with a tape recorder. He asked each one to tell why he or she had decided to dance and to recall childhood memories up to the age of twelve.

About Emotions. "Sixteen hours later, we got to age 21," Bennett says. "And what happened was that we ended up talking about life. It was like a group session, only everybody was listening and nobody was criticizing or judging. The next morning when I walked out of that studio, I was happy. That night had released a lot of guilt in me. I had thought I was the only confused kid, but it turned out that a lot of our lives had been similar. We all found that dancing was something that we could do to get out of the house. And I knew I had some kind of a show here."

By August of last year, Bennett and one of the dancers, Nicholas Dante, had converted the tape into a five-hour play with no music. They put it on in workshop but decided it was too heavy. Bennett then called in his old friend and dance arranger, Marvin Hamlisch, who arranged the Oscar-winning score for The Sting. "I wanted an opera-ballet," Bennett explains. "The music only stops three times in the whole show. I wanted the music to stop for talk rather than a show where everyone talks, and then they sing and dance.

"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."

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