'Chorus Line' still gets kick from group dynamic
What's surprising about "A Chorus Line," which officially opened last night at the Opera House, is how fresh and how classic it feels.
The show's original Broadway run began in 1975 and ended in 1990. But this national tour, which follows on the heels of the 2006 Broadway revival that closed this summer, reveals the enduring strength and ageless appeal of Michael Bennett's signature work.
"A Chorus Line" doesn't sound anything like the musicals that followed it; it has no "Rent" pseudorock or Lloyd Webber bombast. But it also doesn't sound like the classics that came before. More than 30 years after its birth, this tale of dancers competing at an audition for the chorus of a Broadway musical still has an invigorating simplicity and clarity that remind us how it broke new ground.
Perhaps best of all, "A Chorus Line" was and remains a singularly sensational demonstration of the very art that inspired it: dancing. Baayork Lee, who created the role of Connie and served as Bennett's assistant choreographer on the original, has restaged his dances with care and taste. From the opener "I Hope I Get It," with its interspersed soliloquies, to the sparkling reprise of "One" that molds the individual dancers we've come to know into a single chorus, this show's dances - especially the ensemble numbers - are as exhilarating, inventive, and precise as ever.
Some of the solos, alas, are less riveting. In a show that mostly offers just glimpses of the individuals who make up its chorus line, this isn't necessarily a problem; numbers like "At the Ballet" and "I Can Do That" show us types rather than fully rounded characters, so the performers don't need to be stars. But Cassie, the former girlfriend of the director who shows up at this audition because she needs the work, is more of a character, and she needs to have the kind of charisma that Donna McKechnie displayed in creating the role.
This tour's Cassie, Nikki Snelson, is no Donna McKechnie. Snelson sings and dances skillfully enough, but she is just not a strong enough presence to hold the whole stage on her own. So "The Music and the Mirror," which should be devastating, is instead merely admirable: solid, sturdy, but never quite crisp and passionate enough to make us gasp.
The show's funniest song, too, suffers here from a lack of star power. "Dance: Ten, Looks: Three," in which the formerly flat-chested Val unforgettably displays the surgical enhancements that gave her both "orchestra and balcony" (to quote one of her more printable lyrics), should bring the house down. But at the performance I saw, the combination of Natalie Elise Hall's congested voice and an overpowering brass section in the pit left the audience straining to hear. She's fun to watch, but she needs to be fun to listen to, too.
The good news is that whenever there's more than one person singing or dancing at once, the show really crackles with life. Just as James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante's book demonstrates how individuals come together to form a chorus line, so the ensemble here repeatedly coheres into a vital and energetic whole. Nowhere is this more evident than in the most overplayed song from "A Chorus Line," in which a single dancer, Diana, starts telling us "What I Did for Love" and then is joined by all the others who've made similar unregretted sacrifices.
Gabrielle Ruiz's strong, pure voice gives Diana the necessary intensity, but she also doesn't push too far into mawkishness. If you've ever written this song off as a hopelessly bathetic bit of showbiz narcissism, you owe it to yourself - and to the memory of Michael Bennett - to hear it, and see it, as it was meant to be heard: as one piece, admittedly sentimental but nonetheless moving, in a larger mosaic of life on the stage.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 