A Chorus Line is a musical about the craft and hardship of dancing for Broadway musicals, and what it takes to get there.
It’s also about bullying, domestic violence, plastic surgery, popping pills, having a sideline as a stripper or drag artist to make ends meet, and finding oneself only through dance. Yet, tune out of the lyrics and you wouldn’t pick up any of it, such is the mesmerising and uplifting effect of seeing synchronised dancing on stage. All you take in are glorious dancers as they move in formation.
Neuroscientists have studied the pleasure we derive from watching and experiencing synchronicity of movement. Indeed, rhythmic entrainment as a mechanism to induce positive emotions is a field of study in its own right: never again feel guilty for enjoying a chorus line dance routine.
The story revolves around a single audition, where the choreographer needs to whittle 24 dancers down to eight: they need to be not just great dancers but must be great together. The unorthodox method he uses to find this out is asking each to tell the story of how they came to his audition and their motivation for dancing. As their stories unfold, they rehearse dance numbers, sing, and grow closer to each other. Somehow chemistries begin to emerge.
The whole plot works through three key juxtapositions: the craft of chorus dancing versus lead dancing, the glittering spectacle of Broadway against the dreary reality of actually making a living out of it, and a dancer’s frighteningly short career split in two: before and after Broadway.
Just to place it in its historical context, when the musical first debuted on Broadway, in 1975, viewers would not have been exposed to the tragedy of AIDS, the gay rights movement was only just gathering momentum after the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots, and feminist movements were barely starting to see equal pay legislation. Musings about gender being something other than biological sex were still embryonic. Listen to the lyrics carefully and you’ll see how revolutionary it was to put these dancers’ stories, drawn from real performers’ testimonies, in a piece of theatre. A Chorus Line went on to be performed on Broadway uninterrupted until 1990, for 6,137 performances.
Sadler’s Wells is the perfect place to celebrate and deconstruct dancing as a key element of musical theatre. Often seen as the lesser performing skill in a musical, quite the opposite is true: singing while dancing requires a type of breathing and posture that few can muster. You only need to see one musical with bad choreography and poor dancing to realise how much this art form and source of pleasure is taken for granted.