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"The Best Musical. Ever." This proclamation adorns advertisements and posters for "A Chorus Line," which kicked off the Performing Arts Center's Broadway Lights series Tuesday night at Belk Theater.
The claim is hyperbole: This isn't even the best musical about show business. That'd be a toss-up among "Annie Get Your Gun," "Kiss Me, Kate" or "The Phantom of the Opera."
But "A Chorus Line" may be the freshest musical ever. Dancers will forever be angling for spots in the chorus of big-budget shows. Some will be uplifted, some cast down. Some will endure, some will be crushed. Their stories will eternally be new - and, when told with the honesty we find here, eternally interesting.
Baayork Lee, who restaged Michael Bennett's original choreography for this revival, danced in the 1975 production that was the longest-running show in Broadway history when it closed. (Bob Avian, co-choreographer then with Bennett, directed the new version.)
Lee and other principals sat in workshops with Bennett 35 years ago, and he shaped their real-life stories into a play with James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante.
So it's no surprise that she has faithfully re-created her late friend's dances, if I can trust memories from my trip to the Shubert Theatre 34 years ago. And it's no surprise the show still has the power to make us laugh at dancers' crazy foibles and weep over the short time they burn so brightly - often in anonymity - upon the stage.
"Line" catches so much of what makes dancers great and fragile: obsessive love for their short-lived art, refusal to yield to pain, the extended adolescence that comes when you must cling physically and emotionally to a youthful image.
Only two rounded characters emerge: Paul, who danced in drag until he understood what he wanted from life, and Cassie, who's approaching 40 with an indomitable spirit and the knowledge that she may never achieve the promise others saw in her. Joey Dudding nails Paul's moving monologue, and dynamic Robyn Hurder dances the ghost of 1976 Tony Award winner Donna McKechnie out of our memories, as every successful Cassie has to do.
"Line" is a tribute to dancers' dedication, of course, but also to their ability to mesh seamlessly into a unit. That's where the cast's greatest achievement and Bennett's conceptual daring lie: He lets us see them labor through an awkward, half-volume rehearsal of "One," then brings them on in top hats and spangles at the end for a crisp, full-out rendition of that number. (Note to folks who left when the orchestra struck up "One" for a second time: It's not a standard curtain call!)
By now, the play has been around longer than most members of this zestful cast, and knowing that adds poignancy to the evening. A new crop of young dancers always comes along to dream and strive for the short period their bodies allow. If "A Chorus Line" continues to be done with so much energy and love, their stories will always be worth telling.
P.S.: Two women with local connections held the spotlight Tuesday. Longtime Charlottean Sterling Masters, often an understudy on the tour, displayed elfin charm as the tone-deaf but vibrant Kristine. Emily Fletcher, seen in CPCC Summer Theatre's "On the Town" in 2001, oozed a sad, wry bitterness as alluring Sheila, whose mirror tells her she's passing her chorus-line prime at 30.
