There are some standout performances: Jess DiForte’s Val delivers a nicely vicious “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three,” about a biz that sent her to the plastic surgeon for bigger attributes; Jonah Nash’s fizzily charismatic Richie dances an already strong company off the stage. The finest monologue is the climax, in which a dancer named Paul (an excellent Rafa Pepén) describes his parents accidentally seeing him in a drag revue. After scaling these vulnerable heights, Paul then lands wrong in a jump and blows out his knee.
In Pittsfield, the dancing is touching, the singing is strong, but the dialogue scenes reveal certain weaknesses in Kirkwood and Dante’s material. The director Paul does a lovely job, though, of exploiting the show’s abundant candor and anguish. Parker Esse has beautifully restaged Bennett’s choreography (originally cocreated with Bob Avian), and that warhorse razzle-dazzle is still sharply thrilling. The production’s few hints that we’re not quite in the 1970s — a certain type of water bottle, say — prompt us to think about how little has changed.
The original creators clearly believed that the show’s poignancy rests with the character Cassie (Deanna Cudjoe) — they gave her a lovelorn back story with Zach and an extended dance aria in “The Music and the Mirror.” In the intervening 51 years, however, the romantic appeal of a coercive director has worn off. Choreographically speaking, too, Cassie’s once astonishing solo has dated poorly. Bennett and Avian reserved their ageless brilliance for the massed gestures, like the kick-line that turns the dancers’ legs into a row of flashing knives, wielded by killers at the lip of the dark stage.
And so the emotional fulcrum actually rests on the performer Paul and his destroyed knee. The fact that Paul appears in the ecstatic reprise of “One” — in which individuals in rehearsal clothes are subsumed into a gold-suited Busby Berkeley fantasia — makes the finale feel like an exciting nightmare. (If we can see Paul dancing, it must not be real.) And this quality of a bad dream is all too familiar. “I don’t want to hear about how Broadway’s dying,” shouts one defiant dancer. You could write that line today.
Choreographers say that their job is like being a “poet who has to pay the alphabet.” In “A Chorus Line,” the now-famous lineup at the front of the stage does, oddly, look like an illustrated ABC — as the characters hold up their headshots, the bodies below are majuscule, minuscule, bold, italic. According to my program, there are also 26 named characters, which doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
