Advance word had created such a demand for tickets that the entire Off-Broadway run sold out, so producer moved the production to Broadway two months later. After much more tightening, they opened at the Public in May 1975, 16 months after those first all-night talks, starring Kelly Bishop (Sheila), Priscilla Lopez (Diana), Donna McKechnie (Cassie), Sammy Williams (Paul), and Robert LuPone (Zach). There was trimming to do, so Bennett asked playwright singles mi to rework the book for the second workshop in December. The first workshop in August was almost five hours. That spring, Bennett called the dancers to audition for the workshop - and compete against other dancers to play themselves in the show.
He asked, one of the dancers who also wrote, to help edit the material into a script, then he arranged for a workshop at the Public Theater and secured flirt hub apk and biblical dating to write the score.
He listened to those tapes for several months, before the audition idea came to him.
In the end, Bennett had accumulated about 30 hours of material. … We’ll just talk.” Late into the night, the dancers spoke about their lives. “I don’t know whether anything will come of this. “I really want to talk about us, where we came from, why we’re dancers, what the alternatives are, why we think we’re in this business,” he said. Bennett started the evening by describing his idea for a show called A Chorus Line. The first session was on a snowy Saturday in January 1974 at the Nickolaus Exercise Center on the East Side of Manhattan. The musical was formed from several taped sessions with Broadway dancers that Tony Stevens and Michon Peacock helped Bennett organize.
That’s the simple conceit behind A Chorus Line, a show “dedicated to anyone who has ever danced in a chorus or marched in step … anywhere.” As director Michael Bennett noted, “There is truth on that stage - nothing monumental or astounding, but truth nonetheless.” The director invites them to step forward, one by one, and tell him something true about themselves. LuPone and McKechnie in "A Chorus Line" (1975)Īt an audition, 18 dancers vie for eight openings in the chorus line of an upcoming musical.