I always felt that Ed was probably one of the great unsung heroes, and I'll tell you why. "We've lost the real mainstay of the show. At Kleban's memorial service, Hamlisch, the last surviving member of A Chorus Line's creative team, spoke of his word-making partner: He'd won Oscars for The Way We Were and The Sting, but like Kleban, Hamlisch was new to theater. It's just too brutal.'" So they changed the ending.Ī Chorus Line was composer Marvin Hamlisch's first Broadway show. You have to leave the door open a little - you know, give them some hope.
"'You can't step on all the hopes and dreams of the entire audience and send Cassie home. "'You can't do that,'" she said, according to Kleban.
People who haven't been personality problems all evening get the job, if you notice."īut Marsha Mason, then married to the playwright Neil Simon, saw the show in previews and got the director on the phone. "We very carefully considered who would get the job. "It certainly can be argued that in real life someone's ex-lover who is being troublesome the entire evening is not someone that you would cast," he says. In an early version, Cassie did not get the job. The director of the show she's auditioning for was once her lover. One of the dancers, Cassie, is back in New York after trying to make it in Hollywood. The show is about who gets picked for a chorus, and who doesn't, how they got there from childhood miseries, cruel parents, dull hometowns. With its earnest, striving, caring, dancing job-hunters, A Chorus Line put the heart back into Broadway musicals. Steven Sondheim was writing cool, cerebral shows. When A Chorus Line opened in 1975, the era of the big musicals, like Hello Dolly, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady, was in decline.
#The chorus line character description full
They came for a show full of dancing and drama, conceived, choreographed and directed by the brilliant Michael Bennett - "A show about hope," Bennett said. Nearly seven million people saw A Chorus Line in its 15 years on Broadway. It's the rare performance of 'At The Ballet' that doesn't make me cry all over again. "I just think it's a very honest, very compelling tale of, you know, unhappy home life and into the artistic process as a salvation for those people," he said. But there was one song he loved: "At The Ballet." Despite the Pulitzer Prize, the Tonys, the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, Kleban liked only about 65% of A Chorus Line. In the last months of 1987, as he was dying of cancer of the mouth, the 48-year-old found solace in Beethoven's stringed quartets - and no solace in most of his own songs. After A Chorus Line made him a millionaire, Kleban wore custom-made shirts with stripes. He collected dictionaries and began subscribing to the New Yorker magazine when he was 16, and it was still definitive. Witty, creative and idiosyncratic, he took naps every afternoon from noon to three and simply could not deal with the Lincoln Tunnel. He was one of my dearest friends, since high school. Kleban was a notorious perfectionist, a stickler, impossible sometimes. "Anyone who wants to play an instrument, or to sing any songs or music - with the exception of the composition 'What I Did for Love,' which I do not wish to be performed at my funeral - should also be allowed." In fact, Kleban disliked that song so much that he put a note about it in his last will and testament, read at his 1988 memorial service by Linda Kline, his longtime companion: It didn't do what he thought theater songs should do: further the plot, reveal character. He objected to it precisely because it was written to be a hit. "I like that the least, actually," he said. He didn't like the other hit song in the musical, "What I Did for Love," either. "They were the hardest, in a way - the lyrics to 'One,' because they had to sort of say nothing and everything at the same time." I asked him if the lyrics he wrote for "One" were his favorite in the show. In 1983, when Chorus Line became the longest running musical in Broadway history - that record was broken in 1997 by Cats - Kleban talked to me about his show and "One," its singularly sensational song. But in this show, "One" also stands for the united facelessness of all those gypsy hoofers desperate to dance. "One" is the term for that number a chorus performs behind the star to make her or him look good. Peter Stone, stage and screenwriter (no DAT available) Linda Kline, life companion of Edward Kleban (no DAT available) Interviewees: Michael Bennett, Director (no DAT available)
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