Trivia / A Chorus Line

• Box Office Bomb: The 1985 film adaptation cost $25 million; it grossed $14.2 million by the end of its run.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Kelly Bishop, the original stage Sheila, noted, "It was appalling when director Richard Attenborough went on a talk show and said 'this is a story about kids trying to break into show business.' I almost tossed my TV out the window; I mean what an idiot! It's about veteran dancers looking for one last job before it's too late for them to dance anymore. No wonder the film sucked!"
  • Michael Douglas doesn't think much of the 1985 film adaptation; when he was interviewed for the 2014 documentary Richard Attenborough: A Life in Film, he said he did not consider it to be a highlight of his career - or of Attenborough's.
• Dueling Works: A Chorus Line acquired an unintentional dueling work in Chicago, which also debuted on Broadway in 1975 and was directed and choreographed by Michael Bennett's longstanding rival Bob Fosse. Both musicals focus on aspiring performers, with ACL exploring their vulnerabilities and Chicago exploring their ruthlessness. A Chorus Line won the first round by winning nine Tonys (including Best Musical) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while it ran for a record-breaking fifteen years compared to two for Chicago. However, Chicago came back stronger with a revival in 1996 that is still going today (setting its own records for longest-running revival and longest-running American musical on Broadway) and a Best Picture Oscar-winning film adaptation in 2002.^note  Fosse alluded to the duel in his 1979 film All That Jazz, opening with a sequence in which his Author Avatar oversees a "cattle call" audition for NY/LA, the Show Within a Show version of Chicago, as if to say "I can do A Chorus Line better than Michael Bennett."
• Enforced Method Acting: In the trial run, the eight dancers chosen for the chorus line changed from one performance to the next, so the anguish on the faces of the dancers who were not chosen was genuine. Eventually, the script settled into choosing the same eight dancers for each performance (Mike, Cassie, Bobby, Judy, Richie, Val, Mark, Diana).
• Fan Community Nicknames: Die-hard fans of A Chorus Line are colloquially known as ACLholics.
• Focus Group Ending: Cassie was originally not one of the final eight dancers chosen for the chorus line, as Zach felt she was overqualified. A few weeks into the original run, this was changed,^note  Among other things that prompted this, Michael Bennett brought in Marsha Mason, a Broadway veteran and then-wife of Neil Simon, to punch up some of the comedic lines; Mason argued that Cassie didn't do anything wrong and so didn't deserve to be passed over. and ticket sales increased significantly.
• He Also Did: Tony Fields was the Satanic rocker Sammi Curr in Trick or Treat.
• Reality Subtext:
  • "The Wizard on Park and 73rd" was indeed a world famous plastic surgeon, Dr. Howard Bellin, and yes, the musical gave him a Colbert Bump.
  • Larry in the film is played by Broadway lifer Terrence Mann (best known for being Rum Tum Tugger in Cats and the original Broadway Javert in Les Misérables).^note His best known film role other than this? One of the bounty hunters from Critters. Mann’s wife Charlotte d’Amboise would later originate Cassie in the first Broadway revival.
  • The musical itself was based on a series of interviews with many dancers, with some of the anecdotes winding up in the musical while, and eight interviewees ending up in the original cast.
    • The reason for doing the interviews in the first place was because of the subtext that pervades the entire musical: a sense that Broadway was a dying business, and Bennett wanted to document the lives and nature of the business before it was gone for good... Then the show opened, became a, well, singular sensation, and is widely credited for bringing audiences back to Broadway, setting the stage for the widely successful 80s and the subsequent decades of packed houses. The show meant to preserve and document the last dying days instead became the catalyst for its rebirth.
• Throw It In!: In "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love", Bebe mentions Robert Goulet as one of her teenage celebrity crushes. In the 2006 revival, Alisan Porter (best known for playing the title character in Curly Sue fifteen years earlier) typically sang the relevant passage while facing straight ahead, but in one performance, she was looking toward the rows of seats on the left... because she had spotted Goulet himself in the audience.
• What Could Have Been: Michael Bennett, the director of the original stage show, was attached to direct early in the film's development. His version of the film would've presented the film as an audition to cast the movie version of the stage play, instead of a literal translation of the play.
  • The creators toyed with the idea of selecting a different random woman from the audience each night to be the star of the Show Within a Show that the dancers are performing in. During the finale version of "One", they'd guide this woman, frame her, make her look incredible while she didn't have to do all that much. This would make the point that the so-called "stars" of these shows weren't necessarily any more special than the backup dancers, since it was the chorus that really made this rando from the audience stand out, and that the anonymous, faceless chorus line was more important than audiences thought.
  • In early drafts of the script, Cassie was to have arrived late to the audition in a fur coat, claiming that she thought it was an audition for the lead role of a different show...but what the hell, she was here, and she just so happened to have a leotard with her, so she might as well audition for the chorus. Only later would she reveal that she was down on her luck and her ambitions of stardom had come to nothing, so she'd been here to audition for the chorus all along and was covering up out of embarrassment. Bennett and company eventually decided against it because they felt it put too much emphasis on Cassie when everyone in that line was supposed to have equal importance. So they rewrote it to reveal Cassie's backstory in a way that made it only one of the stories that was revealed during the course of the show, not necessarily any more or less important than the others. We don't even find out that she and Zach were once an item until three-quarters of the way through the show. Of course, the film version did something very similar to the concept that the original creators REJECTED, therefore doing exactly what said creators never wanted...giving too much weight to one character over the others.

---