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On Stage: 'A Chorus Line'

courtesy Music Theatre Wichita

In July of 1975, a musical unlike any Broadway had seen before made its debut at the Shubert Theatre: A Chorus Line, directed by Michael Bennett, who also was co-choreographer for the show with Bob Avian. The musical is based on interviews with actual Broadway dancers, and uses their personal stories to introduce each character during an audition process.

The project began with taped sessions conducted by dancers Michon Peacock and Tony Stevens, who hoped to use the tapes to help them create a dance company that would conduct workshops. They asked Michael Bennett to sit in as an observer, but it wasn't long before Bennett took over the proceedings. There has been some controversy and several lawsuits regarding who actually came up with the concept for the musical, which was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won nine, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976. Marvin Hamlisch composed the score, Edward Kleban created the lyrics, and James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante wrote the book.  

In the original version of the musical, the jobs the dancers were auditioning for were filled randomly from the cast, with the idea of genuinely surprising the cast members, but this proved to be difficult for the costumers, so the idea was changed to filling the open roles with the same characters each time. You can see Music Theatre Wichita's production of A Chorus Line onstage at Century II, July 10 through July 14.

Sanda Moore Coleman received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1991. Since then, she has been the arts and community editor for The Martha's Vineyard Times, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and an assistant editor at Image. In 2011, she received the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange prize for fiction from Poets & Writers magazine. She has spent more than 30 years performing, reviewing, and writing for theatre.