Every Little Step

Every Little Step, the new documentary focusing on the musical A Chorus Line, and in particular on the 2006 Broadway revival, tells one part of a very large story. The saga behind A Chorus Line could furnish many documentaries – from the time director/choreographer Michael Bennett and dancers Michon Peacock and Tony Stephens first interviewed a roomful of dancers about their lives, to months of workshops as Bennett, composer Marvin Hamlisch, lyricist Edward Kleban, and playwrights James Kirkwood and Nicolas Dante shaped the piece, to the triumphant first run, to subsequent controversies over ownership rights to the dancers’ stories, to the recent revival.

This documentary is a love song to Bennett, in part, and many of his huge cadre of collaborators are mentioned very little or not at all.  It is also a love song to Broadway performers and would-be Broadway performers, the sort of people who inspired the original musical.  The documentary cleverly takes the subject of A Chorus Line—the audition process—and makes it the core of the film: the triumph of achievement alongside the disappointment of the hundreds or thousands talented performers who “really need this job” but aren’t lucky enough get it.

The movie is about the making of art, a messy, complicated process that defies formula.  Ironically, the movie achieves what the revival, according to most reviewers, did not achieve: it captures the soul of the musical, itself one of the first of a genre currently in vogue among the downtown crowd—documentary theater.  In the original run of A Chorus Line, the actors onstage were telling their own stories, speaking and singing their own words. In this documentary, a whole new set of stories is told, about performers trying to make it on Broadway by fitting inside the skin of those dancers who told their stories thirty years earlier. 

The hidden truth of the musical is its very dark core.  A line of desperate dancers stands in front of an unseen, dictatorial director who makes them bare every inch of their souls so that he can judge their fitness to join the chorus of his upcoming musical.  They submit to the process because they're hungry to work, because jobs are scarce, and all around them are others just as talented waiting to take their place.

Yet revealed in the process are the joys of working in theater, there in the moment one young man (Jason Tam) moves director Bob Avian to tears with a monologue he has heard hundreds of times, from hundreds of actors. The joy is there in all the dancers’ bodies, as they come to life onstage, trying to “eat nails” as choreographer (and original performer) Baayork Lee commands them. The desperation is there as well.  It is no coincidence that "eating nails" is the masochistic metaphor Lee uses for the opening dance, the first audition.

So what defines artistic success?  It doesn’t end with getting the job.  The reviews of the revival indicate that what works in the audition room doesn’t necessarily work onstage, in front of an audience. One of the many ironies of A Chorus Line is that it was a musical about an audition that was created without an audition.  It was created by the company as a whole, in a long workshop that would be impossible today--the rules of Actors’ Equity would certainly not allow it. I suspect that the reason the revival was a critical failure was that these performers were asked to tell other people’s stories, not their own.

In this movie we get to hear those stories, mixed with the stories from the past.  And for that reason, just for capturing the spirit of those dancers past and present, it succeeds.

                                                          Edward Einhorn