On May 21, 1975, a spectacular new Broadway musical opened. The musical was unique because it told the stories of the dancers in the show rather than letting the audience just watch the dancers perform. A Chorus Line, a musical by Michael Bennett, was very popular when it made its day view and continues to be shown today to marvel its audience.
Michael Bennett's inspiration for the idea to put together A Chorus Line came mostly out of frustration of the society he lived in the 1970's. In Bennett's eyes the Watergate conflict brought out the falsehood and deceit in America. Bennett wanted to see the truth on stage and to say something positive about his country, which at the time was suffering a severe questioning of its values.
Growing up, Bennett loved to go and watch Broadway shows. He had noticed that the quality of the shows had gone down due to economic changes in America. Bennett's real love was to dance on stage. Along with many other dancing hopefuls, he felt the frustration of a dancer trying to succeed. Bennett understood that through a whole dancer's life maximum effort in his or her dancing career had to put forth. He also knew that the no one had been affected more than the dancers of Broadway by the economic changes. Bennett thought that the general public viewing Broadway shows had a distorted perception of the dancers on stage. The audience most commonly looked at the dancers as the "background" of the musical and thought they were unqualified for bigger roles in the production. Bennett quoted, " Dancers kill themselves in a show, they are always the low man on the totem pole. They work like dogs and they don't get any real credit. I want to do a show where the dancers are the stars." Bennett wanted to create a show to pay tribute to the dancers on stage. [Mandelbaum]
The making of A Chorus Line seemed simple to the public eye, but in reality it was a long...