Del Deo and Stern's new film records the tryouts for the 2006 revival of the big Seventies Broadway hit, Chorus Line. Fans of musicals and song-and-dance generally, as well as devotees of the joy and tears of the theatrical life and the fierce competition of Broadway, and certainly anyone who adored the original musical or its revival, will not want to miss this. Others may be left relatively cold by a film that at times tries to tell too many human interest stories, both about the makers of the hit musical (which opened in 1975) and about the experiences of (well some of) the thousands of hopefuls who turned up for auditions four years ago. But the thrill and the excitement are there, as well as the heartbreak. And the sheer fun of witnessing a moment or two when somebody absolutely "nails" an audition, and shows a just-right-for-the-part talent as an actor, singer, and dancer, all at the same time. These sweet-spot moments don't come often, but when they do, they can take your breath away and they can make you weep.
Immensely popular and a hot ticket at the time, Chorus Line itself plays to hardcore Broadway show fans. In conventional terms, it's not a play, and it's not a musical either. It's a "chorus line." It is built on the stylized conceit of presenting a literal line, a row of a dozen men and a dozen women ranged like soldiers along the stage in front of the audience who tell stories and entertain by singing, dancing, and, of course, acting. One by one, and in alternation, they tell their stories, which in turn are in some sense the universal stories of show people -- the early talent, the inspiration, the commitment -- the one-way bus ticket to Manhattan with a few dollars in the pocket and a small valise of clothes and a big dream. Bob Avian and Michael Bennett were the original collaborators, with Charlotte d'Amboise and others on the team that put the thing together. The genesis was a series of sessions where a group of dancers got together with Avian and Bennett in a loft with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a big bottle of bad red wine and blabbed into a microphone about their lives. It was Bennett's belief, which Avian endorsed, that these collective and individual stories could in some way or another be made into a show that people would want to see and that would be exciting and fresh. A show with choreography added and the songs built out of the stories crafted by the gifted composer Marvin Hamlisch.
It was a collective process to decide how to make it work. One of the essential tricks was not to be too literal in linking certain testimony to a single voice or character and to keep all the two dozen of the "line" somehow in play. Individual soliloquies were important, and solo songs, and also ensemble song-and-dance numbers. What emerged was a collective picture of theatrical life built out of real individual experiences from the spoken words of the tapes.
One of the things that put it across as a show on Broadway was that Broadway fans are fascinated with the individual stories of how real people make it to the glamor and the bright lights, and that this somewhat vérité style of presentation used in the play seemed radical and original and of-the-zeitgeist. Chorus Line was Chorus Line and nothing else. It was at once every musical and no musical ever done before. It fit the somewhat radical taste of the Seventies and also the very Seventies interest in the confessional mode. Because some of the stories were very sad and very personal.
You've got to hand it to the film: it thoroughly documents this process of creation, while skillfully juggling the story of the three thousand or so hopefuls who showed up and got gradually whittled down to two dozen for the revival. But beyond this statement, it's very difficult to summarize the film, because too many people are involved. There is an eight-month gap between the original tryouts and the final auditions, and one woman with solid Broadway experience fails because she's asked to recapture the innocence of her first portrayal of the part, and she just can't remember what she did back then.
One moment you won't forget is Justin Tam's "tour de force" speech as the gay character Paul, who recounts as a young dancer being hired to play dressed up as a girl, and then discovers that his parents, who don't know about him, have come to see the performance, but do not judge him. Inexplicably, Tam's reading just makes you cry from the first sentence, and he broke up the whole table of audition judges, who applauded him after it was over. Something magical happened for Tam: he had incarnated the role totally and appealingly, and there wasn't much doubt about who would get the role after that. This is the mystery, and also the heartbreak, of auditions. Lots of talent comes in, but even when the sometimes narrow requirements of look and body type and voice, etc., have been met, how can you "hit it" just in those five minutes you get to perform? You don't need much: just major amounts of work, talent, heart, intuition, and luck. And this dedication the film and its participants celebrate.
The film seems at its most desperate and uninformative when it edits the performances of a single song and dance by three men -- and the men's auditions are very unrepresented to begin with -- into a single excerpted performance. It tells you nothing about the performers or the song. Ultimately, Del Deo and Stern have too much material to work with.
