When Paul, the elegant gay boy with a woman's sensibility (the excellent Gary Wood) is injured at the very point of likely securing his place in the show the line reforms but, heartbreakingly, with a gap where he once stood. Again and again we are taken in and out of the dancers' heads always to return to their place behind that line. The intricacy of the staging is breathtaking, the choreographic thrills many and varied - most notably the seemingly unstoppable crescendo of the Montage "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen", a classic of the modern day musical. And as the survivors of the first cull find their place behind that quite literal line on the stage between us and them, we stop thinking how convenient it is that all life is here - all shapes, sizes, and personalities - and simply buy into the whole joyously joyless experience. There's no business like show business, they still tell us, but no business either that celebrates the rejection, the humiliation, the heartache like this business does.Ī Chorus Line is that weird thing: a bleak show that lifts the spirits of anyone who has ever yearned for their moment in the spotlight and even those of us who merely watch. I know it was a first night, but I reckon the Palladium will explode every night when that happens.
#THE CHORUS LINE RUSSIAN FULL#
And we'll always get the same buzz when the lights come up on a stage full of dancers in rehearsal clothes (circa 1970s) and the same jolt when the rehearsal piano bows out and the band kicks in. So we will always be - as it says above the blacked-out stage - in that time, 1975, and that place, a Broadway Theatre. There's no business either that celebrates the heartache like this business does You don't dare touch a hair on its well-groomed head nips, tucks, and facelifts don't even bear thinking about. It is, no question, a wonderful show whose fabric of book (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante), music (Marvin Hamlisch) and lyrics (Edward Kleban) is seamless and, more importantly, whose vision - as originated by choreographer/director Michael Bennett - has achieved a kind of immortality.īob Avian, who assisted on the original staging back in 1975, is now the show's guardian and watching this timely London revival, imaginatively cast and wholeheartedly delivered, you realise that it isn't just nostalgia that faithfully reproduces it exactly as some of us remember from 1976 but the indisputable fact that as stagings go it's pretty damn perfect.
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