The following is a human-made transcript of Episode 306 of the podcast Modern Technology Watches, the subject of which was the film A Chorus Line. The discussion has been lightly edited for readability without substantially altering the content; if you need a verbatim quote for reference purposes, please confirm it from the original audio if possible.
GILA:
Tell me about the Bronx.
ROB:
What’s to tell about the Bronx? It’s uptown and to the right.
GILA:
What made you start dancing?
ROB:
Who knows? I’m Puerto Rican. We jump around a lot.
(Opening theme music)
ROB:
Hey, Gila.
GILA:
Hey, Rob. What’s up?
ROB:
Oh, nothing. Nothing at all is up. There is nothing happening. There’s nothing going on.
GILA:
We just have the microphones on for fun.
ROB:
Yes. And since we randomly have the microphones going and the recorder going, and you know, our whole studio apartment studio set up, we might as well make episode 306 of Modern Technology Watches.
GILA:
306 of Modern Technology Watches – I know that show.
ROB:
Yes!
GILA:
I know that show! That’s that podcast, where I, Gila Drazen,
ROB:
And I, Rob Vincent,
GILA:
A married couple of film geeks, like to show each other movies from our joint collection that the other one has probably not seen before.
ROB:
That is what we do here. And we’ve been doing it for a while and we are approaching the halfway mark of our third season.
GILA:
Third season! My goodness. Oh, it’s my pick, isn’t it?
ROB:
It is your pick.
GILA:
Very exciting.
ROB:
Your pick.
GILA:
My pick.
ROB:
Your pick. You’re looking at me with a look on your face and a devious expression. And you’re doing the Mr. Burns thing with your fingertips.
GILA:
I know.
ROB:
And I’m not sure how to feel about any of it.
GILA:
Okay, I’m gonna go get it.
ROB:
Okay.
GILA:
Which means I will actually finally have to decide, but I’ll be right back.
ROB:
Oh, here I thought you were all prepared for this.
GILA:
The cue card slipped!
ROB:
Oh, so it did. Not the cue card for this podcast – this is entirely improv and unscripted. We have a cue card mounted on our wall that appears to have slipped a little bit in its frame. It’s a cue card from Wally Feresten, who writes the cue cards for Saturday Night Live and other productions on NBC. And he also makes his cue cards available to fans and admirers and people who want custom cue cards from the Saturday Night Live cue card guy and I got one for Gila for our anniversary. We have it framed; we have it on the wall. It is a delight and it has shifted a little in its frame and we need to futz with the frame. This is all terribly interesting. And this is also to keep the mic warm while you were off getting the DVD but it sounds like you’re back.
GILA:
Well, technically, I got a Blu-ray.
ROB:
Oh, you got a Blu-ray. We’re living that life.
GILA:
You can open your eyes.
ROB:
I’m opening my eyes.
GILA:
Okay. Hi.
ROB:
There you are.
GILA:
Hi!
ROB:
You’ve still got that look on your face.
GILA:
(laughs) I think that just may be my face, hon.
ROB:
You know, you may be right.
GILA:
Okay. Are you ready?
ROB:
What have you got for me?
ROB:
You have just handed me the Blu-ray for A Chorus Line.
GILA:
Yes.
ROB:
When… what…
GILA:
1985.
ROB:
This is 1985’s A Chorus Line.
GILA:
I think it was 1985.
ROB:
Yes, this looks like 1985, it says in the legal guff on the Blu-ray here.
GILA:
I’m glad because I would hate to think I said it so confidently and then was wrong.
ROB:
All right. You have been threatening to show me this for a while.
GILA:
I wouldn’t call it a threat so much as a promise.
ROB:
Okay, on the back of the Blu-ray case here:
“An enormously exciting, often inspired movie!” – The Hollywood Reporter
Often inspired?
GILA:
Just keep going.
ROB:
“Michael Douglas stars as a choreographer who subject 16 dancers to a grueling audition in this Academy Award-nominated adaptation of the landmark Broadway musical. Featuring Marvin Hamlisch’s Oscar nominated music and Jeffrey Hornaday’s (Flashdance) sizzling choreography, this thrilling portrayal of life behind the velvet curtain is truly ‘One Singular Sensation!’ After narrowing down hundreds of Broadway hopefuls, Zach (Douglas) leads a select group of dancers on the tryout of their lives. In an audition twist, Zach asks each performer personal and intimate questions – with results that powerfully affect not only the young performers, but the hardened stage veteran as well.”
All right, who’s in this credit block? We got… Oh, Richard Attenborough’s A Chorus Line?
GILA:
Richard Attenborough directed A Chorus Line. Yeah, because when I think musical, I think Sir Richard Attenborough.
ROB:
Music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban. This doesn’t actually have cast members in the credit block here.
GILA:
No, which is kind of the point. Obviously, we’ll go over it when we do the back half, but we’ve got Michael Douglas, we’ve got at least one other actor I know you’ll recognize and I’m gonna keep my mouth shut about that.
ROB:
All right.
GILA:
…and I have a lot to say. And we will discuss it afterward. Okay. I’m excited.
ROB:
I’ve heard of A Chorus Line a lot. You know, I was I was a theatre kid, I’m now a theatre grownup… technically. I’ve heard of this a lot, but I don’t know anything about it. And I’ve never seen it. So I’m going in completely blank.
GILA:
Fantastic. I will also tell you that if you want to learn more about A Chorus Line, we do have a documentary about the show itself.
ROB:
Okay, well, I’m sure we’ll go into that. So, this is a Blu-ray, of 1985’s A Chorus Line, and we’re about to dive into it.
GILA:
That we are. So let Torley play some music for the people. And we’ll be back after 1985’s A Chorus Line.
ROB:
A Chorus Line. Line it up.
(Interstitial music)
ROB:
Hey, Gila.
GILA:
Hey, Rob.
ROB:
Are we back?
GILA:
We are back.
ROB:
We are back. And we have had a successful viewing of 1985’s A Chorus Line.
GILA:
1985’s A Chorus Line. Now, I’ve seen it before, repeatedly, and we’ll discuss this. But what’d you think?
(A patting noise is heard.)
ROB:
That was a knee pat, in case you’re wondering.
GILA:
It was a knee pat.
ROB:
What did I think?
GILA:
What did you think?
ROB:
I thought it was fun. It was an interesting little movie. I found it a fun watch. I liked a lot of things about it. There were some things about it that were kind of iffy. But all in all, I think it was a quality filmgoing experience. And I don’t regret putting it in my ear holes and eye holes.
GILA:
Well, as we often say, not regretting putting it in your ear holes and eye holes is really, you know, the best we can hope for in this little experiment of ours.
ROB:
It passes the Tao of Steve test.
GILA:
Oh, God. it passes the Tao of Steve test. Yes. I mean, the Tao of Steve test being that I regretted putting that in my eye holes and ear holes, and it was my choice.
ROB:
Now you rewatched this for the first time in a while. Had you seen it since you were a kid, or…?
GILA:
I had. But as you very rightly noted, when I took it off the shelf, I had to remove the shrink wrap from the top because I hadn’t cracked this disc yet.
ROB:
So it had been a minute since you’ve seen it.
GILA:
It had indeed been a minute since I’d seen it. My brother and I used to watch this together compulsively. Compulsively. I don’t know what it was about it that we loved so much. But we definitely did. We would sing it, we would dance it, we… every single thing.
ROB:
And so watching it now, how does it hold up?
GILA:
You know, on the one hand, it’s still pretty good. On the other hand, I’ve learned a lot more about the original production since I was a kid.
ROB:
You mean the original theatrical version, on which this is based.
GILA:
The original theatrical version, the Broadway show. And it does say very clearly in the credits, on the DVD case, everything, that this is based on the play, this is not a direct interpretation of the play. Because obviously, you know, you can’t do flashbacks in the same kind of way that they were doing them in the movie, right? Because A Chorus Line’s stage version is literally 17 people standing in line on a stage.
ROB:
This entire movie takes place on a stage – well, most of it takes place on a stage where people are auditioning for parts in a stage show. And they cut away from it a few times in the movie, there are a few shots of people outside. And there are also flashbacks to complete other circumstances. But I was watching this and I was thinking this being based on a show, I could see how this would be a theatrical story. And it would be a show where the stage is the stage, and you’re just looking at that stage during the show.
GILA:
Absolutely. The conceit is that these are, again, people auditioning for a show. And the play is renowned and beloved and hit the theatre community like a bolt out of the blue because of its authenticity. Now, Rob, if you had to choose a word to describe the film, would that word be “authenticity?”
ROB:
I do not think the word would be “authenticity.” It’s a fun film. It’s a fun story. And you can see what they’re doing with it. But given my knowledge of how things work in actual theatre, even allowing for the conceit of, like, it’s a musical and there’s non-diegetic music and all this stuff. The whole process of it seems counter to how things tend to work in reality so far as auditions and casting goes.
GILA:
But it’s interesting because the way that the show was developed – there were these, like, focus groups, dancers, chorus dancers. And they talked about their lives. They talked about their histories and their families and how they started dancing and what life has been like in New York. And those stories were transcribed into this play, and some were adapted for the songs. And that’s where it came from. So to be telling the stories of these people who are not often celebrated, that’s where this show came from. That was the whole point. And we kind of lose some of that, I think, in the flashbacks, in the montages. There’s something, I think, to be said for… you think about authenticity, and then it’s synthesizers, synthesizers everywhere. And part of that, yeah, it’s 1985. So A Chorus Line hit Broadway in 1975. This movie was released at the end of December 1985. And if we look at it on a continuum, what’s the smack in the middle between A Chorus Line premiering on Broadway and the film premiere of Chorus Line?
ROB:
Yeah, we were talking about this: Fame came out in 1980.
GILA:
Yes.
ROB:
And that was just a film. It wasn’t based on theatre. But it was funny, because partway through the movie, I asked you, “So this is basically Fame, but for grownups.”
GILA:
Yeah, you could say that. You remember, near the end of Fame, there had been that senior that Doris had such a crush on? Who’s played by Boyd Gaines.
ROB:
Right. And he goes off and has some big acting job lined up. Later in the movie, he’s the waiter.
GILA:
Yeah. If Fame is Fame, A Chorus Line is alumni day. So one thing to get into before we start talking about the cast, and then the plot and the songs, which is: this movie. How do you think it was received at the box office?
ROB:
Now, I would have guessed before knowing more about it – because I have since looked at the Wikipedia article – I would have guessed that this movie did okay.
GILA:
Do you think?
ROB:
I would guess, but I know this to be untrue.
GILA:
It face-planted. It face-planted so hard. The budget was $25 million. It made 14. It bombed.
ROB:
That’s a bomb.
GILA:
It’s a bomb.
ROB:
And let me just pull something up here. The site is USInflationCalculator.com and you can put in the years and a certain price of a thing, and it’ll tell you what it’s worth in today’s money. So that $25 million budget in 1985 is equal to about almost $68 million today. And so losing $11 million. That’s like $29.9, it’s almost $30 million that it lost in today’s money.
GILA:
Yeah. But if you think about, you know, how quickly Elon Musk lost $180 billion, like overnight?
ROB:
Oh, you had to bring it there.
GILA:
I mean, given inflation, what does money mean anymore? In the same way that since the beginning of the pandemic, what does time mean?
ROB:
This is true.
GILA:
Okay, we are going to talk about the cast.
ROB:
Let’s talk about the cast. Now, one thing I noticed when you handed me the Blu-ray case was that in the credit block on the back of the case, there are not any actors listed. Usually there’ll be a couple, like, maybe the stars would be in there. But there are absolutely no actor names in it. And I asked you, you know, “who’s in this?” And you preferred to just…
GILA:
Let you be surprised?
ROB:
Let me be surprised.
GILA:
Because – for two separate reasons. Number one is that having above-the-line stars would defeat the entire ethos of this film. And yeah, the way that the cast is presented both in the opening credits and in the end is that everybody’s there in alphabetical order. Everybody’s given equal weight, which I think is impressive and important.
ROB:
Yeah. And it’s interesting how they go about that. For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about when I say “credit block,” you’ve all seen the really skinny text at the bottom of a movie poster or the back of a video case that has all the, basically, vital statistics: who produced, directed, and so on and so on.
GILA:
Cinematographer, writer… I made you read the credit block for Bernie? Yes. So you could see Dick Poop.
ROB:
Dick Pope, for Mr. Turner.
But yes, and they’re those very condensed, very skinny letters, so they could fit as much information as possible into it. And it makes it all look like the monitors from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
GILA:
They list no cast at all.
ROB:
There was no cast. And the only reason I knew Michael Douglas was in it was because he was on the summary on the back.
GILA:
Right. So the way that this is laid out on the Wikipedia page for A Chorus Line (film), because there’s obviously a very separate page for the play. There are four people listed first, and then it’s “dancers” – so, the people who are auditioning. Now here’s something I noticed looking at this page: the dancers all have last names. The choreographer, the director, and the director’s secretary don’t. And I think that’s very interesting. Because if the whole idea here is to give a voice to people who don’t normally get them, I think that’s pretty cool. These people get to be whole people, especially when, as you find out later, the whole idea is to blend.
ROB:
Yeah, there aren’t really main characters in this, although the film tries to kind of force it.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
We’ll talk about that.
GILA:
Oh, we sure will.
ROB:
But I think the way to go with this particular cast list on the Wikipedia article for A Chorus Line (film), is to start from the top and go down.
GILA:
I would agree. So – here we are. “Michael Douglas, as Zach, choreographer.” Director, Wikipedia, get your act together.
ROB:
And Michael Douglas, I wouldn’t have guessed he would be in a theatre-y film. it was interesting seeing him in this.
GILA:
It’s true. I mean, he’s in a theatre-y film. Can you buy Michael Douglas as a choreographer?
ROB:
Not really, like in 1985, I probably wouldn’t have seen a lot of Michael Douglas’s stuff. But in the following years, when I was growing up and watching movies, and I would see Michael Douglas in movies, he was usually the no-nonsense, tough, square-jawed dude, like he was the cop, or the detective. Like he was in Basic Instinct. He was in Fatal Attraction.
GILA:
He was Gordon Gekko.
ROB:
Yeah, he was Gordon Gekko.
GILA:
I mean, he wasn’t Gordon Gekko yet at this point, but no, but coming soon.
ROB:
And that’s the kind of character that I would have thought was a Michael Douglas character, you know, the imposing kind of scary dude, whether he’s the good guy or the bad guy. He’s still just like, you know? (puts on gravelly voice) “I’m Michael Douglas, don’t F with me…”
GILA:
And here he plays right into that.
ROB:
He really does. As the choreographer character, his job there is to be grumpy and impatient, and bark at people up until they forcefully soften him partway through, but it’s a Michael Douglas part, he does well in it. And this was of course, long before he played Liberace and…
GILA:
Decades before he played Liberace. Which you still haven’t seen, right?
ROB:
I still need to see that. Yeah.
GILA:
Interesting. So that’s Michael Douglas. He sits in the back in the dark and talks into his microphone and smokes. A lot.
ROB:
Yeah, so much smoking in this movie, but of course, it’s 1985.
GILA:
All right, up next we have Alyson Reed as Cassie.
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
Now you asked me…
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
Three separate times,
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
While we were watching this movie, and once afterward, who that was. And I kept saying, Alyson Reed. And you said, “why do I recognize her?” and I said, “I don’t know.” Because she’s most recognizable these days from her role in the High School Musical franchise. She was in all three High School Musical movies. She’s in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
ROB:
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
GILA:
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
ROB:
And High School Musical, The Movie Film for Theaters.
GILA:
And High School Musical, The Musical: The Series: The Lunchbox,
ROB:
High School Musical: The Flamethrower.
GILA:
All of the above. She’s done a lot. She’s been a working actor for a really long time, lot of stage work, but I can understand your not recognizing her right off. But she looks very familiar.
ROB:
She does. She has like a basically kind of generic face. And she looks like, I guess, a zillion other actors. But I kept thinking I recognized her for something and you kept rattling off things she was in, none of which I’ve seen…
GILA:
What, you haven’t watched High School Musical: The Musical: The Series?
ROB:
Strangely enough, I haven’t.
GILA:
Even just because it’s fun to say? Go on, try it!
ROB:
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
GILA:
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
ROB:
“It’s one plus two plus two plus one, not one plus two plus one plus one.”
No. The thing with her is she she comes in and she wants to be one of the dancers. But she’s also the director’s ex. And so she shows up and it causes drama and uncomfort. And her role is to come in and basically insist upon herself.
GILA:
Well, it’s also to say that none of us – and obviously we’ll get to this in the plot, but – no one here is any more special than anyone else. And we all have to work to be part of this. We all have to try. We all have to audition.
ROB:
Right? She comes in and says that which is interesting, but in the beginning, she’s basically forcing herself in on the situation, making Michael Douglas uncomfortable. And that’s her job. She’s not one of the dancers – until she is, but we’ll get to that.
GILA:
We’ll get to that.
All right, up next – and this is the reason I didn’t want to tell you who was in this movie – is because up next on the cast list we have Terrence Mann as Larry, assistant choreographer.
ROB:
Terrence Mann. And it was such a kick seeing him in this because we have been watching the show Sense8.
GILA:
We have been watching the show Sense8 on Netflix. That’s the word “sense” and the number 8.
ROB:
Yes, and this is a series I had seen when it went out and I really enjoyed it. I wanted to rewatch it, and you’ve been good enough to rewatch it with me and get into it, and Terrence Mann is in that show. He is a Big Bad. He is a villain. He is an extremely creepy character. And I hadn’t really seen Terrence Mann in other things that I remembered. So that’s my reference point for Terrence Mann. And then here he is in this being the baby-faced, young, fresh choreographer; very, very nice guy. Probably the nicest character in the whole movie. Yeah, now I can see why when Terrence Mann showed up as the villain in Sense8 you were kind of boggled and going like, “I can’t deal with Terrence Mann as the bad guy.”
GILA:
I can’t deal with Terrence Mann as the bad guy. It’s very hard for me. But also Terrence Mann – I mean, this was 1985. Through the ’80s and the ’90s, Terrence Mann did such significant work on Broadway. All right. Let’s talk about a couple of roles Terrence Mann originated on Broadway. Rum Tum Tugger in Cats. Javert in Les Mis. Beast in Beauty and the. And I saw him when he was in Pippin. My mom and I went to see the Pippin revival and he was playing Charlemagne and his wife was playing his wife. The Queen whose name completely escapes me right now.
ROB:
But it was his real wife.
GILA:
Yeah, his real wife whose name is Charlotte D’Amboise. And wait for it. When they did the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line. Guess who played Cassie?
ROB:
Who played Cassie?
GILA:
Charlotte D’Amboise.
ROB:
That’s neat.
GILA:
And there’s something else, but we’ll discuss it later in the cast list because it’s just too good. It’s just too good.
ROB:
So in this movie, I loved Terrence Mann so much.
GILA:
Wonderful. He was taking care of everybody. He… you know, there’s a dancer who gets cut in a kind of really horrific way. And who starts crying and he puts his arm around her make sure she’s okay. Like, yeah, he’s the den dad.
ROB:
Yeah. As theatre kids and people who’ve worked in the performing arts, as we both have, there’s always that person in any functional theatre, who does take on that sort of den mother role of taking care of people, making sure there’s everything people need, you know, probably stocking the toilet paper in the bathrooms as well. That one who takes care of people while the director is directing and bruising egos as part of their job, and the actors are having all kinds of emotional whatever. There’s always that person that is taking care of everything and everyone. And in this movie, that’s the choreographer who’s doing that. And it’s Terrence Mann, and he’s so sweet. I love him so much in this.
GILA:
Isn’t he great? And again, that’s why I freaked out when we started watching Sense8.
ROB:
And also seeing Terrence Mann, what, 40 years younger than than I’m used to seeing him, 30-something years younger than I’m used to seeing him. And he’s got that, like, fluffy ’80s afro going on and he’s all clean-shaven and baby-faced…
GILA:
And wearing spandex and a sweatshirt and dancing.
ROB:
He’s really cute. And he’s fun to watch in this.
GILA:
He’s adorable.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
Closing out the top section with Sharon Brown as Kim, Zach’s secretary.
ROB:
And she’s there too.
GILA:
She is there, too. She has the most awkward line in this whole show, which is when she says to Cassie, “you used to be a dancer, didn’t you? I saw you. It was in this theatre. You stopped the show. I was in high school. Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” And there you go. That’s basically the entire role in a nutshell.
ROB:
Yeah. I don’t know that actor from anything but she does the job.
GILA:
My favorite fun fact about her is that she kind of pulled back from acting for a while after she got married to Billy Blanks, Jr., son of Tae-Bo.
ROB:
Billy Blanks the Tae-Bo guy?
GILA:
Yes. His son, Billy Blanks, Jr. She married Billy Blanks, Jr., son of Tae-Bo. And was doing Tae-Bo-y type stuff for a while, but she just… her most recent credited role was in 2020, and that was after a significant pause.
ROB:
It’s never too late to go back.
GILA:
It’s always nice to have you back.
Okay, the next section is the dancers.
ROB:
As the dancers go, a lot of them didn’t make a huge impression on me. So you’re gonna have to remind me who was who?
GILA:
Absolutely. And here’s the other thing is that a lot of these folks, they were Broadway dancers. And if you look on Wikipedia, more than half of them don’t have linked pages. And those who have linked pages it’s for other reasons, not necessarily their acting careers.
ROB:
Yeah, it looks like eight and eight for non-linked and linked.
GILA:
Right. And at least one of them has probably very little to do with her acting, or her dancing, or her singing. But we’ll get there. All right. Are you ready?
ROB:
Let’s go.
GILA:
All right, let’s go!
First off, because we’re going in alphabetical order, Michael Blevins, as Mark Tobori.
ROB:
Now, which one was Mark?
GILA:
Mark was the youngest one – yellow sweatpants, red sweatshirt – and he’s the one who’s like, “if I get this show I’ll work really hard.”
ROB:
Okay, I don’t think I remember him much.
GILA:
He was there.
ROB:
He was there.
GILA:
He was there. Yeah. He reminds me of someone. Years ago, my brother and our sister-in-law, they had an Uber ride in Madison. And their Uber driver was making conversation and said, “oh, so what do you do for work?” And they told him and he said, “oh, I’m a singer-songwriter.” And he had ads for his shit all over the inside of his car, and he gave them his Instagram and his YouTube and everything. This actor reminds me of that dude, whose name I will not mention, but I’ve made you listen to this song.
ROB:
Yes, I’m remembering this and it was it was fairly dreadful.
GILA:
Yeah, but that’s who he reminds me of. Yes.
Okay, next we have Yamil Borges as Diana Morales.
ROB:
She was the Latin American woman.
GILA:
She was. She was the Puerto Rican one with the red outfit. And interestingly enough, she refers to herself as “Diana” and everyone else calls her “Diana,” but in the opening segment, Terrence Mann says “Dee-anna,” and then everybody calls her Morales for the whole entire show anyway. And even in the closing credits, it just says as Morales. Although, you know, she’s supposed to be born in the ’60s and a lot of girls named “Diana” at that point, so I can understand going by your last name.
ROB:
But also just to drive home that point, “okay, you’re a Latin American, aren’t you?”
GILA:
Yes, exactly.
Up next we have Jan Gan Boyd as Connie Wong.
ROB:
“Always Wong…
GILA:
“Never white.”
ROB:
Yes. Which is how she introduces herself.
GILA:
Indeed. She was there, she got the job done. And we’ll talk more about her later,
ROB:
She was also very cute.
GILA:
Up next we have Gregg (reading the word “Burge”) “Burj,” or “Burg,” probably “Burj” as Richie Walters.
ROB:
Richie Walters.
GILA:
Richie Walters. So he was the young Black man. I squealed during the closing credits because turns out this actor was also an associate choreographer on the film.
ROB:
And he was also a lot of fun.
GILA:
He was a lot of fun. Very energetic.
ROB:
He’s the character – we were talking about the choreographer taking care of everyone, and there’s one scene where they’re all doing the combination they’re practicing and he goes a little overboard and, like, leaps through the air and…
GILA:
Lands on the choreographer.
ROB:
Lands on the choreographer who catches him out of the air. And just says, you know, “tone it down a little.”
GILA:
“You’re doing great. Just just bring it down a little bit.” There’s a wonderful scene where he’s dancing and he does like a triple pirouette. And every time he turns, you can see sweat beads flying off of him like he’s Cathy.
ROB:
“Aack!”
GILA:
“Aack!” It’s amazing. He unfortunately is no longer with us. He died at age 40 of a brain tumor. Yeah.
ROB:
That’s a shame. In this movie he is one of the more memorable of the dancer characters. I liked him a lot.
GILA:
Definitely.
Up next we have Cameron English as Paul San Marco.
ROB:
Paul San Marco. Yeah, he came out and I was asking who’s this guy who looks like the pupal stage of John Leguizamo.
GILA:
It’s true. Would you like to know my favorite fun fact about this character, though? Okay, so his stage name was Paul San Marco. Yes, but each of the characters has to introduce themselves with their birth name, their stage name if it’s different, and their age. So his birth name is Efren Ramirez. Okay. That’s the actor who played Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite.
ROB:
Efren Ramirez.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
He couldn’t have purposely been referring to that guy.
GILA:
No, not even close.
ROB:
Paul San Marco is his stage name. And there’s one point where Zach is asking him, “if you’re Puerto Rican, how come you’re trying to seem Italian with your stage name?” And he’s just like, “I wanted to be someone else.” Which is funny because he does resemble John Leguizamo, who plays Italian plumber Luigi Mario in the Super Mario Bros. movie from 1992. We have to bring it back to the Super Mario Bros. movie from 1992, which is an awesome movie.
GILA:
Everything comes full circle.
Up next we have Tony Fields as Al DeLuca.
ROB:
Al DeLuca.
GILA:
The big dumb one.
ROB:
The one with the wife.
GILA:
The one with the wife. Yes. The big dumb one with the furrowed brow and from the Bronx.
ROB:
Big rockabilly hair.
GILA:
Yeah, yeah. Tony Fields, check this out: was a Solid Gold dancer.
ROB:
Of course he was.
GILA:
Of course he was! Could you explain Solid Gold to the children?
ROB:
I don’t even know if I could explain it to myself. But Solid Gold, if you grew up in the ’70s or ’80s – I’m an ’80s kid, so I remember this – it was a disco show. It was about disco music and disco dancing. And they would have disco artists come on and pretend to sing their disco hits. And it was kind of – if you’re familiar with UK culture, you might liken it to like Top of the Pops; in American culture it might have been like the disco version of something like Soul Train or American Bandstand. It was very sparkly, so much gold and silver lamé in every episode –
GILA:
Wait, I think I got it. Okay, come with me on this. Let’s put together a continuum of whiteness. And on the white end is American Bandstand. Yes. You don’t get whiter than American Bandstand. On the Black end, you should pardon me, is Soul Train.
ROB:
Yeah, no one would argue with that.
GILA:
Solid Gold was in the middle. Solid Gold was the mathematical mean of American Bandstand and Soul Train.
ROB:
Yeah. But that’s what it was, it was disco music and people dancing to disco music, and so many sparkles and so much freakin’ glitter. Yeah.
GILA:
And this guy was a Solid Gold dancer.
ROB:
And this guy was a Solid Gold dancer.
GILA:
He unfortunately also is no longer with us. He died of cancer secondary to the AIDS virus.
ROB:
That’s a shame. I mean, this is one of those movies. You know, sometimes you’re watching stuff from the ’80s and you’re like, “okay, how many of these people survived the ’80s?”
GILA:
Well, I mean, thinking about the people whose voices we’re hearing, right, because these, the interviews and stuff were from the mid ’70s. And the show was directed by Michael Bennett, who did not survive the ’80s. So to have these voices is incredible. Absolutely incredible.
ROB:
Because this is the mid ’80s. Of course, in real life, we had the AIDS crisis just starting to build up around this time. But since the words are from the ’70s, none of that was going on yet. It was interesting to see. And he is the big jock-like dude who has this little shy retiring wife, who we’ll get to. I guess he did that job in that part.
GILA:
Yeah, he did. I mean, there’s a moment where you hear him say, “I’m not too bright. But I’m not too dumb. And I’m not too talented. But if you show me what to do, I’ll do it the same way, eight shows a week forever.” And he was a Solid Gold dancer. And he was the most naked of the male dancers. But we’ll get there. We’ll definitely get there.
ROB:
Yes, there was chest hair happening.
GILA:
Oh, was there chest hair happening.
Okay, up next we have Audrey Landers as Val Clarke. Hey, Rob.
ROB:
Yes?
GILA:
What’s this show about? Like, if you had to choose one word to describe the people in the show you would call them…
ROB:
Dancers?
GILA:
Right! Audrey Landers? No, no, no, not a dancer. Audrey Landers is an actor, and a singer. And she and her sister had a singing group called the Landers Sisters. Right. So let’s cast her in this show that is notoriously about dancing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
So, fun fact for listeners: If you watch the great big group numbers in this, you can see her head. If you watch the smaller group numbers, she’s not there. She vanishes in the big dance numbers, because the bitch can’t dance.
ROB:
No, and you had told me this during the movie, so I was able to watch for it. And yeah, like clockwork, she vanished as soon as the choreo started getting interesting.
GILA:
Yeah. So during her big solo she just walks around the stage. We’ll talk about that when we get there.
ROB:
But it was funny as hell watching her suddenly not be there because the dance is complicated. But also the thing about her part is they give her this particular song to sing, and we’ll talk about it when we get to it. But she is not the one to be singing that song. She is not.
GILA:
No. No. All right. That’s what we have to say about Audrey Landers, as Val Clarke.
Next on our list is Nicole Fosse as Kristine Evelyn Erlich DeLuca.
ROB:
Nicole Fosse.
GILA:
Nicole Fosse. And I said to you, “Nicole Fosse,” and you said,
ROB:
“As in?”
GILA:
And I said, “as in.” As in you remember her as a character from a show we watched and like a lot called Fosse/Verdon, for those are her parents.
ROB:
Yes, famous choreographers and dancers Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, who were incredibly talented, hugely well-known in real life. She’s their daughter.
GILA:
She is, in fact, their daughter. And her character – unfortunately, first of all, the song that Kristine and Al sing in the stage production was cut from the movie. It’s called “Sing,” it’s a lot of fun. And her character is kind of ditzy, and her voice is grating, and she’s a good dancer and that’s that.
ROB:
Yeah, I mean her character is basically “she doesn’t really want to be there.” That’s her character; that wraps it all up. But she’s there because she’s –
GILA:
With her husband.
ROB:
Al. Yeah, she’s with her husband, Al, and he really wants to be there. And he really, really wants them both to be there. And she’s like, at one point, “can we just leave?” And he’s like, “no, we’re here. We’re gonna do this.” And for somebody with that huge a name, it seems a tiny part.
GILA:
But that’s also, I think, part of the ethos of this show. Yeah, everybody’s there. Everybody’s got a story.
ROB:
Did Nicole Fosse do much else? In terms of films or…
GILA:
Let’s click over and find out!
ROB:
Okay, so she was a consultant and a co-executive producer of Fosse/Verdon.
GILA:
Her middle name is “Providence.” Lovely.
ROB:
She was in All That Jazz. She was in this and she was in a Gwen Verdon documentary. She was a guest on Miami Vice and she worked behind the scenes on Fosse/Verdon. So that’s it, that’s all that’s on the Wiki here. Yeah. I guess she didn’t want to be there.
GILA:
Wouldn’t you feel like that was your responsibility, if you grew up in that world? How do you do anything other than that?
ROB:
Well, there’s a lot of discourse going on right now about nepo babies.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
And it looks like she was kind of resisting the whole, the sheer force of it. But in the part of someone who didn’t really want to be there and was uncomfortable in front of everyone, she seems to have succeeded.
GILA:
Definitely, definitely.
Okay, moving back to the cast list. Next, we have Vicki Frederick, as Sheila Bryant.
ROB:
Was Sheila the one in the green?
GILA:
The older one, the one who said, “I’m going to be 30 real soon. And I’m real glad.”
ROB:
Yeah, the one in the darker…
GILA:
The one in the dark green.
ROB:
The older one. “Can the adults have a smoke?”
GILA:
“Can the adults please smoke?” “Why is it only my ass that ever gets invited places?”
ROB:
And she was one of the more interesting dancers
GILA:
And also she’s kind of pivotal to the plot. And obviously, we’re talking about this when we get to the plot, but she is kind of the one who undertakes the turn that it takes. Because when she gets serious, everybody gets serious.
ROB:
Yeah. At the beginning during the auditions and stuff she’s the snarky one, the one passing comments and being flippant about it all.
GILA:
One of my favorite moments in the whole movie is when Larry switches her with Val actually and says, “girl in the pink downstage, Sheila go upstage,” and she just stops and walks off. Larry says, “don’t you know it?” And she’s like, “I knew it when I was in the front.” And my brother and I say that to each other a lot.
ROB:
She was a fun character. And also, I think she’s most like the actors I’ve worked with in real life and in theatre.
GILA:
Yeah. Fun fact about her is that she was in the Broadway production twice. She played Cassie in 1977. And then she came back around after the movie, as Sheila. Which I just think is a lot of fun.
Okay, up next, Michelle Johnston, also sometimes known as Michelle Johnson, as Beatrice Ann “Bebe” Benson.
ROB:
And she was the other one in the green with the floofy blonde hair.
GILA:
She was the one in the green two-piece, not the green one-piece.
ROB:
She was in the bright green.
GILA:
She was in the bright green with blonde hair, as opposed to the dark green with brown hair.
ROB:
And she was there. And yeah, she didn’t make much of an impression on me.
GILA:
Until I said to you, “do you recognize her?” And you said, “no, should I?” And I said, “dude, she was in Showgirls. She was the choreographer in Showgirls.”
ROB:
Yes. And what is the character name in Showgirls that you clicked over to her IMDb and pointed out to me.
GILA:
The character’s name is Gay Carpenter. And for a moment, I was very confused, because I was like, wait, I thought she played the choreographer. I don’t remember there being a gay carpenter in Showgirls, assuming that they meant a very horribly caricatured lesbian carpenter.
ROB:
“These showgirls keep breaking my stairs, and I gotta fix them.”
GILA:
“Keep your marbles to yourselves, girls.”
The choreographer’s name was in fact, Gay Carpenter.
ROB:
Gay Carpenter.
GILA:
Gay Carpenter. Do you remember, like the lighting director in The Producers, the musical version, remember that “Keep It Gay” number in The Producers? Right. And the lighting director who came out who was, like, the butchest of the butch lesbians?
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
That’s the image I had in my head when I saw the name “Gay Carpenter.”
ROB:
So, unlike a lot of these dancers, she went on to great things, being in Showgirls.
GILA:
Yet she does not have a separate Wikipedia page.
ROB:
No, she doesn’t.
GILA:
Interestingly enough. One of my favorite things about her is how she dances with her face.
ROB:
There’s a mental image.
GILA:
Just bangs it into the floor. No, there’s a bit during the audition segment where her character gets pulled out to demonstrate something. And she just looks deranged. It’s – she’s so into it. It’s fantastic. Yeah.
ROB:
And she’s brought up as the example of, “everyone else look at this. This is right.”
GILA:
Yeah. And she just goes for it. That’s Michelle Johnston.
ROB:
Michelle Johnston.
GILA:
Up next we have Janet Jones as Judy Monroe. That one in the gray who’s, like, dumb. Whose big joke is, “my name is Judy Monroe. But it’s really Marilyn Monroe. No, no, no, it’s Judy Monroe.” She’s one who forgot her number at the beginning. And Larry was like, “well, then when I come to a number without a name, that’ll be you.”
ROB:
Yeah, she was there.
GILA:
She was there.
ROB:
She was the dumb blonde joke.
GILA:
Yep. Remember when I said that some of these actors probably have Wikipedia pages for reasons unrelated to their acting?
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
Dollars to doughnuts she’s probably one of them. And would you like to know why?
ROB:
Tell me why.
GILA:
Would you like to know who she’s married to?
ROB:
Sure.
GILA:
She’s married to Wayne Gretzky.
ROB:
Wayne Gretzky.
GILA:
Wayne Gretzky.
ROB:
Wayne Gretzky! Owner of the famous chain of pretzel stands, Gretzky’s Pretzkys.
GILA:
Yes.
ROB:
Shoutout to my pals at the Roleplay Retcon podcast who had that in a bit in one of their episodes, but, no – Wayne Gretzky, famous hockey player.
GILA:
Wayne Gretzky, famous… oh God, what was that cartoon?
ROB:
Oh, yes. One third of the superhero team ProStars.
GILA:
Yes. And you remember when everybody was trying to get their own Hard Rock Cafe? There was Planet Hollywood and there was the Models Cafe and I think they tried to do a sports one that Wayne Gretzky was part of and that didn’t work either.
ROB:
He should have stuck with the Pretzkys.
GILA:
He should have definitely stuck with the Pretzkys. Janet Jones – she’s there, she’s fine. Her character annoys me to shit.
ROB:
And she married a hockey player.
GILA:
She married a hockey player. Yeah, five kids.
Next we have Pam Klinger as Maggie Winslow, short, big eyes and was wearing like a stripy two-piece with a polo shirt over it, but like, a half polo shirt.
ROB:
Okay, yeah, she was the little one with… yeah, there’s really no other descriptor for her than big eyes and short.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
The little one with the big eyes.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
She almost looks like a grey alien with a wig on.
GILA:
(laughing) I’m still confused about the sports bra with shirt over it. Like midriff is okay, but no cleavage. I’m so confused.
ROB:
Yeah, ’80s active wear was really strange. If you remember The Goonies, Josh Brolin is, through that whole thing, wearing sweatpants with shorts over them and his little crop top thing… these things happened and the ’80s let them happen. And if it weren’t for the ’90s, it would have just kept on being the ’80s.
GILA:
Could you even imagine? Oh, God, could you even imagine?
Okay, next we have Charles McGowan as Mike Cass.
ROB:
Which sounds like it should be one of those prank call names that you ask for in a bar.
GILA:
Well, one of the fun things about this for me here is they’re all listed by their stage names if they have them, because again, we all had to give their birth names, their stage names if they’re different. So he said it’s Michael Cassaday O’Donoghue, Mike Cass.
ROB:
Right. And was he the one with the extreme combover?
GILA:
No, he was the one with the big floofy hair and a headband.
ROB:
Okay. Yes. Alright.
GILA:
We’ll get to extreme combover, fear not.
He was good. He was fun. He had the big comic number and made a lot of it.
ROB:
Yes, he did “I Can Do That.”
GILA:
He did “I Can Do That.”
ROB:
He did that.
GILA:
He could do that and did do that.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
Okay, next on the list is Justin Ross as Greg Gardner.
ROB:
He’s out in the garden growing more Greg.
GILA:
He introduces himself with his birth name, his Hebrew name, and his stage name.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
Now. He likes showing off his gutturals which is great except for the part that he gutturals a couple things that shouldn’t be gutteraled.
ROB:
In his Hebrew?
GILA:
(emphatically) Yeahhh.
ROB:
Okay.
GILA:
Yeah, this has pissed me off every time I’ve seen this movie. Like he’s trying to say “Yaakov,” but he says “Yuchuv.” No, no, that’s just wrong. I know what you’re trying to do, dude. And it’s wrong.
Sir Richard Attenborough. What are you doing? “Ruchmel Lev ben Yuchuv Meyer Beckenshtein.” No, fuck you. That’s wrong.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
No, he’s there. He’s the gay one with the flat-top. He’s the one who very just nonchalantly says, “yeah, that’s the moment I realized I was gay.” Which for a major motion picture release in 1985 – wow.
ROB:
Yeah, I mean, the whole gay representation, it’s fair for its time. It’s really not bad at all for its time.
GILA:
I mean, it’s toned down significantly from the stage show because obviously.
ROB:
Yeah, I’m sure it must be but still, you couldn’t really make a show about dancers in the theatre on Broadway and not address “gay” in any way even in 1985. But the way they did it, it was sensitively handled, I think, for its time.
GILA:
Absolutely. Next on the list we have Blane Savage, as Don… (reading the word “Kerr”) I don’t know if it’s “care” or “cur” or “car” and I don’t care.
ROB:
“Blane? His name is Blane?”
GILA:
“That’s a major appliance, not a name.”
I refer to him as blonde Kevin Nealon, which sometimes I think is unfair to Kevin Nealon.
ROB:
But he’s the one with the combover.
GILA:
He’s the one with the combover. And the one who is trying to get away to his day job because he’s a waiter. And the one when he finally gets a chance to speak cannot complete a sentence. “I mean, it’s, you know? It’s not a question of… it’s just… I mean… you know?” And I want to reach into the screen and throttle this poor man. I hope he’s a better waiter than he is a dancer.
ROB:
He was a little mixed up.
GILA:
He was a lot mixed up.
ROB:
But that was the character.
GILA:
It certainly was.
ROB:
I think 1985 was kind of the tail end of that thing from the ’70s, where you could stretch a really insane combover across your head, and people would pretend it was normal. And, sure your part is on, you know, the side of your head right above your ear. And that’s not weird at all.
GILA:
And we’ll close out the cast list with Matt West as Bobby Mills.
ROB:
Yes. The mill where they manufacture the Bobbys.
GILA:
Yes. Now he was the one who was wearing like a crew-neck sweater and stretch pants and I said, “crew-neck? He’s wearing… he’s dancing in a sweater?” Like this movie, they’re not afraid to let you see them sweat. And I cannot imagine how this man was wearing a sweater. A crew-neck, long-sleeve sweater.
But here’s another fun, fun fact. So Matt West played Bobby Mills in the show on Broadway in the movie, and then became primarily a choreographer. Now just to bring this full circle…
ROB:
Yes?
GILA:
He was the choreographer for the original Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. Now, who was in the original Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast?
ROB:
Terrence Mann!
GILA:
Terrence Mann. So you had Matt West in this movie getting choreography from Terrence Mann. And then in real life we did a floopty-floop, and Terrence Mann was the actor getting the choreography from Matt West.
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
And yes, I said “floopty-floop” and I meant it.
ROB:
Floopty-floop.
GILA:
Floopty-floop. Scoopity-poop.
ROB:
Floopty-floop.
GILA:
Scoopity-whoop.
ROB:
Get your “Floopty-floop” t-shirt at modern.technology slash merchandise!
GILA:
(laughing)
ROB:
…Might have to make that.
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
Floopty-floop.
GILA:
Floopty-floop.
So that’s the cast list.
ROB:
That is a hell of a cast list. And, God, we’re out of time now, so thanks for listening, everyone!
So all 47 people in this movie…
GILA:
Eh, 21.
ROB:
The way the plot’s laid out here, it kind of skips over a lot. So in two separate windows, we have the Wikipedia article for A Chorus Line (film) open in both of them, one of them scrolled to the plot and the other one is scrolled to the “musical numbers” section.
GILA:
Yes, because we can’t talk about one without the other.
ROB:
So we can follow along on both this way.
GILA:
Absolutely. So we’re going to be jumping back and forth. Let’s have some fun.
ROB:
Okay.
GILA:
Okay. So the beginning isn’t really well described here at all. So it begins with, you hear the orchestra warming up. And then you begin with this iconic set piece of the auditions. And it’s really iconic because of the play. So you’re going through the auditions, and everyone is there. And Larry knows some of the dancers and is calling them by name.
ROB:
Well, before that we’ve got the typical sweeping shots of the New York skyline and the bridges and you see the taxi,
GILA:
There’s actually a helicopter pilot credit.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
I noticed that, I was entertained. So you hear the music. And we keep cutting back and forth between shots of the theatre and shots of the city. We notice a taxi and if you know enough about the city, you know that this is a taxi headed from the airport to Manhattan. Because you know what this famously authentic, set-in-a-theatre musical needed? Aerial shots of the cab coming in from LaGuardia.
ROB:
Sure.
GILA:
That is what was missing.
ROB:
Absolutely. Now, I was thinking while we were watching this, it is a bottle show. It takes place all in one spot and it takes place on an undisguised stage. So you’re not looking at sets and having to suspend disbelief that you’re looking at other places. And I was thinking, so if they’re doing this in a theatre, there can’t be all these other shots. There can’t be all these other circumstances and scenes and everything. And I guess the feeling might have been like, “oh, we’ve got a movie. Now we may as well go outside the theatre and add stuff…”
GILA:
…Which only kind-of sort-of happened. But we’ll get there.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
All right, so the auditions are happening. And just dancers everywhere. Some of them know each other. It’s great. They’re chatting, some of the people who are focused on wind up being our intrepid 16. And some… aren’t.
ROB:
Right. It’s totally what they would call a cattle-call audition.
GILA:
100%
ROB:
Just crowds of people stretching in a line out around the theatre. You see the savagery of it right from the beginning, you see entire crowds of people get told to go home, and one of them’s like, “I never get cut this early” and is all bitter about it, but it effectively puts across for people who aren’t familiar what might be going on at a thing like this.
GILA:
And you see them coming in, you see them signing up and getting their numbers for the beginning of the audition, because there’s no way they’re gonna know who everybody is. And the highest number we get from one of our dancers is four-hundred-ninety-something. There are 500 people who show up for this. So it’s an interesting look at that. Okay, so this is happening, you get all these people dancing on stage. It’s very cool. And having watched this movie countless times, I will freely admit, I was…
ROB:
You were doing the top half of the dancing.
GILA:
I certainly was.
ROB:
You were arm and shoulder dancing.
GILA:
We have downstairs neighbors.
ROB:
The dancing in this movie, by the way, we didn’t mention – the dancing is phenomenal. The dances are complex and spectacular. And you can see why they want the best of the best for this show. But also it’s really well-choreographed and well-done, and it’s a treat for people who like watching dancing.
GILA:
And also Audrey Landers is there!
ROB:
And also Audrey Landers is there. (laughs)
GILA:
Okay, so starting the plots section from the Wiki.
“In a Broadway theatre, from a darkened place in the audience, director Zach (Michael Douglas) judges dozens of dancers and their performances. After initial eliminations, sixteen hopefuls remain.”
Now, this is the part where we’re going to be jumping back and forth between the plot section and the song list. Because as the audition is happening, we have the song “I Hope I Get It,” which – it was so cute, honey, you started giggling every time they started singing it.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
Because it’s in-universe. Mostly, these are non-diegetic songs.
ROB:
Right.
GILA:
And all of a sudden, you see them standing there, and then they’re singing? And then they’re not. And then they’re singing. And then they’re not. Yes, it’s kind of great. And…
ROB:
But also the “I Hope I Get It” song – there are those occasions when you know the memes or the spoof version of something, and then you see the original thing. Back in the ’90s on the original Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central, the Joel Hodgson era, there was a short that they riffed called Hired! with an exclamation point. This was an educational short that they would show to employees of Chevrolet on how to sell cars to people, and in the short, it was like this whole little fictionalized thing, and there’s this character who’s bad at selling cars and gets the job, and he needs to learn how to be better. And it’s a standard black-and-white, 1950s-ish, goofy little thing. And one of the sketches that the Mystery Science crew did about this was they did Hired! the Musical, and one of the lines from their song was spoofing this, and I didn’t know that until I’d seen this. So in Mystery Science they’re singing, (singing to the tune of “I Hope I Get It”) “I got a job today / I’m selling Chevrolet!” And so every time they hit those notes in the original song, all I heard in my head was Joel Hodgson singing that from Mystery Science.
GILA:
I mean, it really has become a meme. And one of the iconic moments from the Broadway show, or just the show, is when they’ve each gone to get their resumes and headshots. They’re each standing on the line with the headshot in front of their faces. This is a thing. It exists in every production, except for this one when they’re all just kind of standing there in a semicircle and it’s stupid. But you see it constantly and consistently. So, like, when Alan Cumming hosted Saturday Night Live in February of 2000, they did this whole thing and the whole monologue wound up being about Broadway, right, and how Alan Cumming had been in so many musicals and won a Tony, and Ana Gasteyer comes out as Annie and Chris Parnell is the Phantom of the Opera. And Tracy Morgan comes out in a weird Cats costume, and it’s very funny. And then Will Ferrell shows up and Alan says, “I thought we were going to do comedy.” And he said, “Yeah, American sketch comedy.” And then he yoinks his headshot out of his back pocket and begins singing “Who Am I Anyway?” And then everybody shows up with their headshots, and it’s fantastic. This is a meme – hugely so. So the fact that Sir Richard Attenborough chose not to do it, I thought was very interesting.
ROB:
Yes. Richard Attenborough.
GILA:
Richard Attenborough. All right.
“Arriving late is former lead dancer Cassie who once had a tempestuous romantic relationship with Zach but left him for Hollywood.”
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
“Now she has not worked in over a year, and is desperate enough to be part of the chorus line.”
So she shows up and says to the guy at the door, “I want to get a note to the director.” His secretary shows up, they have that awkward interchange about “I was in high school.” Larry sees her, she comes in, Larry says, “hey, Cassie is here,” Zach freaks out, Zach asks Cassie to leave, it’s raining, Cassie falls down, she hurts herself.
ROB:
She leaves the theatre in her leotard, falls down in the rain, into a puddle, while trying to get a taxi. Then somebody else snipes the taxi out from under her.
GILA:
So Larry brings her in, sits her down and tells her to dry off, gives her ice for her elbow because Larry’s a good man and keeps hiding her in various locations in the theatre because Zach doesn’t want her there. He sent his secretary at one point to be like, “He asked me to ask you in a nice way if you wouldn’t mind…if you would please leave.” Anyway, she falls down in the rain. Larry keeps moving her from venue to venue. It’s kind of funny.
ROB:
So we very quickly understand that the theatre people like Cassie, but her presence there is making Zach uncomfortable and you very quickly get, “oh, they had a thing. And now he’s just grumpy and trying to avoid her.”
GILA:
So he hides her in the basement. He hides her in the prop room on the third floor. He keeps shuffling her around the building. And it’s kind of funny. Alright.
“Zach is looking for eight dancers (four men and four women) and has them introduce themselves.”
Now, as the 16 of them are standing there someone asks how many jobs there are. And Larry says “four and four” and dumb Judy Monroe says, “44?” Someone else says, “No, four and four.” Yes, four boys, four girls. So Zach tells them that he is going to be casting, you know, four and four, and there are small but pivotal roles to be played by the people in the chorus. He said, “I need you to be incredibly strong dancers. I don’t know if you’re going to be incredibly strong actors. So I just want you to talk. Tell me who you are.” So they each step forward, they share their names, their stage names, if they’re different, where they’re from, and how old they are. And obviously, some of them are lying their faces off.
ROB:
Yes. Yes. Someone obviously older going, “I’m almost 30!”
GILA:
But the whole idea of “I’m going to be 30 real soon” because 30 was like, you know, the top. And I saw that for the first time when I was in my early teens and I’m like, “oh God, 30 is just the end of your life.” You know, I could do a whole thing about movies that fucked me up when I was a kid.
ROB:
Oh, yeah, we all could.
GILA:
Movies that lied to me. Okay.
“As they each step forward, he interviews them and coaxes the dancers into talking about a variety of topics. This includes how they began dancing, first sexual experiences, their families, and hardships they have faced. Through their stories, the group reveals how being a performer is a difficult profession.”
Who’s the fucking moron who wrote this? Yeah, yeah. “Difficult profession.” Shut the fuck up.
ROB:
Wikipedia. But having been in actual audition situations, and other kinds of job interview, one thing they don’t ask you is, “tell me about your sexual history. Tell me about how you lost your virginity. Tell me about your parents.” Basically, the interview process for this musical that Zach is working on is an HR nightmare, and a hostile work environment if ever there was one.
GILA:
Wait, I have to see something, because now I’m curious. Speaking of HR nightmares…
ROB:
Okay…
GILA:
I was wondering if Scott Rudin by any chance that had anything to do with the Broadway revival, and he appears not to have, but speaking of HR nightmares. Get it?
ROB:
Yeah, I see what happened there. But now, it is completely unprofessional. And they established through the dancers chatting with each other, “oh, yeah, he’s an asshole, but he’s so brilliant.” And he’s the brilliant Zach, whatever. It was meant to be this genius director people are itching to work for. And you only at this point in the movie, and through much of it, you only see him as a shadowy figure sitting back in the middle of the theatre in the theatre seats, and a little desk lamp, and he’s talking to people over a microphone, although they have to project to talk back to him. So it’s Voice of God basically. And I’m guessing when you watch this in a theatrical production you’re not seeing Zach, you’re just hearing him from offstage.
GILA:
Okay, so we’re gonna step away from the plot for a second because this is where the songs – most of the songs – come in. All right, here we go. So the first is is Mike’s big song, “I Can Do That.” Now, you said you’d never seen A Chorus Line. You didn’t know A Chorus Line.
ROB:
Correct.
GILA:
You got the giggles during the first song. And then he sang three words of this song. You’re like, “wait, I know this song!”
ROB:
Yeah, and I started singing along with it: “knew every step right off the bat / Said, I can do that / I can do that!” And you looked at me incredulously, I think is the word.
GILA:
Yep. That is the word.
ROB:
You’re like, “how do you know this song?” And I told you, and I will say again, I knew this song from the TV series Fame. Now, not too long ago, when Irene Cara passed away, I think last month…?
GILA:
A couple of months ago now?
ROB:
A couple of months ago, when she passed, we watched the movie Fame, like you do, which she was in. And the movie Fame came out in 1980. And back in the ’80s, there was a long-running TV series based on that movie. And I used to watch it because as a kid, I loved theatre, I got brought to a lot of theatre, I was fascinated with how it all worked, and I also loved watching singing and dancing. I loved musicals, and I would watch the show Fame. And this is mid ’80s – 1985, I would have been seven, eight, and I would watch the show but I would be bored during all the drama parts because I just wanted the next singing and dancing part to happen. And so it’s mostly a blur for me, I don’t really remember the show, I just remember vaguely enjoying the singing and dancing parts. But I remember this one episode of Fame, because one of the characters – it took place in the School for the Performing Arts, and one of the kids was trying to get a job on television, and he ended up getting cast as the sidekick on a children’s show called Mr. Wacky’s World, which was also the title of this episode of Fame. And Fame used to use showtunes from everywhere, and they used one from this, which was “I Can Do That.” So he’s celebrating getting the job on this TV show, and he does that by launching into the number “I Can Do That.” And I remembered the song from Fame. I didn’t realize it was from this until we saw it.
GILA:
Until we saw it. So this is – Mike is – how did you start dancing? He said, “well, you know, it was my sister, she was a girl. So she got dancing lessons, but they would take me along. And one day, she didn’t want to go, but I did. And that was the end of it.” And it’s this big comic – he swings on things and jumps around.
ROB:
But then we miss part of it.
GILA:
We miss part of it because we cut away to fucking Cassie in the basement,
ROB:
We cut away to Cassie sitting in the basement. But this is where it goes weird, because there’s diegetic and non-diegetic music in in film and television. Diegetic music is when the characters in the world of the film are listening to music, like when they play a radio or they’re listening to a band play or something, the music exists in the show’s world, and there’s non-diegetic music, which is like the orchestral score, or the music that just happens when people launch into song in a musical. And in this particular case, because the characters on the stage are launching into their numbers and singing, and there’s no band around, there’s no recorded music playing, but the music is there somehow – it’s non-diegetic, except in “I Can Do That” when they cut away to Cassie sitting in the basement and you hear a muffled version of the song still playing. So this is happening on the stage and she’s far away from it but still kind of listening from a distance as this guy launches into this musical number, and it makes no sense. It totally blurs the line between diegetic and non-diegetic. And it’s a bit of a mind screw.
GILA:
It makes zero sense. And Cassie is, you know, sitting there in the basement wistfully looking through her address book. And she finds Zach’s phone number and flashes back to the first time she met him.
ROB:
(sarcastically) Yeah, and thank God they had that scene in there. Otherwise, you’d never know what was going on!
GILA:
Oh, come now, if you hadn’t seen that wig, would your life really be complete?
ROB:
That wig. She’s got this awful wig on when they flash back to young Cassie and Zach having this thing. And she’s got this frizzy nightmare of a mullet, poodle-looking hairdo. The back is all long and straight and frizzed out and the front is this little mop of curliness. And in the present day, she’s just got this short curly mom haircut.
GILA:
Yeah. But it’s like if Billy Ray Cyrus had red hair. If “Achy Breaky Heart” Billy Ray Cyrus had red hair, and it were twice as long in the back.
ROB:
It was like something out of Jem and the Holograms. It was terrible.
GILA:
Ugh. So bad.
So “I Can Do That.” It’s cute. It’s fun, very spirited.
ROB:
Very spirited, and by the time they cut back to him, he’s swinging back and forth on a rope from the gantries and…
GILA:
Screaming like Tarzan.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
But still very surface – like here’s what I can do, I’m a show off.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
So then Zack calls up Sheila, and she’s being very Sheila, and he says, “will you just talk? Just talk to me, talk to each other.” He, like, shouts, “let your hair down!” So she does. And then she begins to sing this song called “At the Ballet.”
The next song is “At the Ballet.” It’s a verse by Sheila, a verse by Bebe, and a verse by Maggie. And they’re each talking about how life was hard. Life was difficult. Sheila’s talking about how terrible her parents’ marriage was – but everyone was happy at the ballet. Bebe said her mother told her she was not pretty, but she’d be fine when she grew up, but everyone was beautiful at the ballet. And Maggie was talking about how her dad left when she was an infant, but she would dream about dancing with him at the ballet. And that is really the moment when these people begin… it shifts, and it goes from very surface-level to, like, they’re willing to go deep, for whatever reason.
ROB:
Yeah, the song is kind of drippy, I’m not really thrilled by it.
GILA:
You thought a lot of the songs were drippy, I think.
ROB:
Yeah. I mean, the songs in this movie – there are the ones that everyone knows, and we’ll get more into that. There was “I Can Do That,” which I remembered, which is a fun song and dance number, and I can picture that one being amazing to watch on a stage with the right dancer. But there are a couple of songs in this – the slower, more melancholy…
GILA:
The confessional-y songs?
ROB:
The confessional-y songs in this just kind of leave me a bit meh. But I can see what they’re doing there.
GILA:
Fair enough.
ROB:
Although anyone saying “everything is beautiful at the ballet” hasn’t seen one of them take their shoes off, because, (squicked-out, shuddery noise)
GILA:
No, but how do you get roped into it? You know, everybody’s talking about, “oh, I saw The Red Shoes.” If you want to be a dancer after you see The Red Shoes?
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
In which the main character goes insane?
ROB:
It is kind of like watching the movie Freaks and wanting to join the circus afterwards.
GILA:
Exactly! Yeah, but you get sucked in.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
After “At the Ballet” we have a song that was composed for this motion picture called “Surprise, Surprise,” which incorporates elements of a song from the show called “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love” in which a couple of characters sang teeny weeny pieces of that song because they’re talking about being teenagers and puberting…
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
And getting interested in sexy times.
ROB:
Puberting.
GILA:
Puberting!
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
Yeah. Everybody puberts.
ROB:
Most people.
GILA:
My God, we should write that children’s book, Everyone Puberts.
ROB:
Some more than once.
GILA:
Some more than once, yes. And it turns into a solo for Richie about the first time he and his girlfriend had sex.
ROB:
Yes. And this is where it kind of goes into oversharing.
GILA:
It goes into oversharing and then it turns into a dance piece.
ROB:
This is where the film takes a turn to The Breakfast Club with dancers, and everyone’s like, “hey, we’ve been thrown into this thing together, let’s bare our entire fucking souls to one another and bond over how sucky all our lives are.”
GILA:
Yeah. And they do… and during some of the dance parts, if you look, Audrey Landers is nowhere to be found.
ROB:
Yeah, this is where she starts noticeably disappearing from things.
GILA:
Just fucking right off. Hey, that’s funny to say about this number!
ROB:
(laughs) Nicely done.
GILA:
Thank you! Pretty proud of myself!
ROB:
Good job.
GILA:
Okay. There were a bunch of changes, obviously, between the stage show – this is one of the most predominant… preeminent… significant… this is one of the biggest ones. Yeah, this whole segment gets turned into basically a dance number with some singing as opposed to like five monologues.
Alright… after that, we have “Nothing,” which is Morales’s big song. It’s about a terrible teacher. It’s about Morales’s experiences at the High School for the Performing Arts and her terrible acting teacher. I like this song a lot. You don’t. You didn’t love it.
ROB:
I didn’t love it. I saw what it was doing, I saw what it was saying, but just as a song I didn’t love it.
GILA:
See, I sang it once for an audition, just trying out for some variety situation, I don’t know. I remember once singing “Nothing” for audition. And I remember once singing “Some People” from Gypsy for an audition…
ROB:
I like that. “What are you going to sing for this audition?” “Nothing!” (laughs)
GILA:
(laughs) “Alright, see you later!”
ROB:
“Well, I don’t know if our pianist knows Nothing.” (laughs)
GILA:
Things that I am not: I am not anyone who ever played Madame Rose, and I’m not Puerto Rican. So why I chose to sing either of those songs I do not know. I’m sure there’s a reason that the only show I ever got cast in at the Jewish Community Center involved no singing.
ROB:
It’s their loss.
GILA:
It’s fine. These were poor audition choices on my part, is what I’m saying.
ROB:
Just for reference, you do have a singing trophy or two on the shelf there over there. You objectively can sing.
GILA:
Thank you. So yes. Alright. “Nothing.” “We tried to be a table. Be a sports car. Ice cream cone.” That’s “Nothing.”
Alright. And the last song of this segment, I said to Rob, “well, honey, this one’s called “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three”, because you can’t call it the thing that people would assume it’s called, which is…
ROB:
“Tits and Ass!” The song is “Tits and Ass.”
GILA:
The song is “Tits and Ass.”
ROB:
And it’s a song about tits and ass.
GILA:
It’s about tits and ass. It’s about – the story is that this woman moved to New York to be a dancer, and she was a great dancer, but she’s never getting jobs. And she swiped her dance card, and they gave her for dance: ten, and for looks: three, so she got plastic surgery and her career turned around because she bought herself…
GILA & ROB:
Tits and ass.
ROB:
Now who is the performer who sings about her tits and ass?
GILA:
This would be Audrey Landers.
ROB:
Audrey Landers, as Val.
GILA:
Audrey Landers as Val. Who, number one, does not have the biggest boobs on that stage.
ROB:
No, she is one of the more petite of the cast. And you know, this is not body shaming, I am not saying one is better than the other, but…
GILA:
If you’re gonna sing about your gigantic boobs, your gigantic purchased boobs and your gigantic purchased butt you should have tits and ass.
ROB:
She is an objectively small-breasted, small-butted woman singing about how much better her life is now that she has tits and ass while she is visibly not possessed of same. It was strange to watch. And there were things they could have done if this was the part. They could have cast someone who fit the role, or they could have used her but padded her.
GILA:
There are any number of things that they could have done.
ROB:
We watch a lot of Drag Race. We know how to put tits and ass on a body that doesn’t have any. And the fact that they just rolled her out there…
GILA:
Also, this is not a “dance ten” person.
ROB:
No, no.
GILA:
She can’t dance. She was walking up and down the stage, and even that was a little hard.
ROB:
So it all just came off a bit hapless. And I have no way of knowing what Sir Richard Attenborough was thinking, other than, (Richard Attenborough impression) “we have a T-Rex!”
Okay, so Audrey Landers was on Dallas.
GILA:
Oh, Audrey Landers was on all of Dallas. Oh my God. She was probably… people were like, “oh!”
ROB:
So she was star power. She was a name to get in on this.
GILA:
She had been in Playboy. Okay, yeah, she was a name.
ROB:
84 episodes of Dallas, and bit parts in a bunch of stuff. And so yeah, I can see how she would have been a big name to get in. Especially in 1985… The Huggabug Club?
GILA:
The Huggabug Club.
ROB:
What’s The Huggabug Club? Is that like Happy Smile Patrol, or…?
GILA:
Kinda, yeah.
ROB:
Wow. They wheeled her out there to sing this song that did not fit, and it drew it into comedy that probably was not there in the bones of the show.
GILA:
I mean, it is on the one hand, you know, but on the other hand it’s unintentionally funny when you cast someone with not the correct physical attributes and no noticeable dancing skills to sing this particular song.
So that ends that segment. The soul baring segment concludes with that. And everybody heads down to learn the music for the routine they’re about to learn.
ROB:
And Cassie comes back out on stage.
GILA:
“As Cassie enters the stage, Zach tells Larry to take all the dancers to a rehearsal room. Cassie pleads to continue the audition,”
Which she does by singing a song created for this movie. In the stage show, Cassie sings a song called “The Music and the Mirror.” It is heartfelt and it includes a seven minute dance break that invariably stops the show. In the movie, she sings a song called “Let Me Dance For You” which also includes an extended dance break, but in the dance break it also has weird flashbacks, which are meant to imply that Cassie learned the steps that she’s now dancing from Zach when they were living together. So basically this song is, “look, I’m a dancer and also we used to fuck. I’m a dancer! Give me some steps. Point me toward a mirror. I got this. I got this! Give me something.” It’s bad. It’s very bad. Like… (sighs)
ROB:
And the attitude that she’s putting into the song doesn’t quite match what’s going on?
GILA:
Not even close. You know? Does she want a job? Does she want a dancing job or does she want Zach back? I can’t really tell.
ROB:
Either, both, and/or… it’s very confusing. And it’s also the first time that they really have any direct two-way communication in the show. It gets him out from the shadows, he’s coming up the aisle and actually communicating with her, but yeah, it kind of feels awkward and doesn’t quite fit. And I learned after the movie that this is not what happened in the original theatrical version.
GILA:
I mean, the romantic subplot is really hardcore shoehorned into this in a way that it doesn’t need to be, I think.
ROB:
Yeah. There’s always been this kind of tendency when adapting anything to a film, where Hollywood’s been like, “okay, but where’s the romantic plot, no matter how much one does or doesn’t fit into this?”
GILA:
Yeah, it’s very true.
ROB:
And it was even worse in 1985.
GILA:
So Cassie comes in and, “let me dance for you / Let me try.” So he’s like, “fine, whatever, I don’t give a shit. Go down and learn the song.” On the way down, Cassie passes Paul, who’s on the way up because he earlier had been asked a couple of questions. And he said, “I don’t wanna talk about it.” “Do you have any siblings?” Zach says. He says “I have two sisters. One died when I was 14. I don’t want to talk about it.” So Paul doesn’t wanna talk about it. And so Paul comes up to talk to Zach. He says, “If I don’t want to talk, I’m out?” Zach says, “well, I think you’re a hell of a dancer. How did you get started?” And Paul explains that when he was a kid, his family used to go watch movies on 42nd Street, and Zach says “42nd Street?” Paul says, “yeah, my dad didn’t know. It was cheap.”
“Paul re-enters the stage and tells Zach about how he was sexually molested as a child while watching musicals on 42nd Street. Paul describes his first job at a drag cabaret. When his parents found out that he was gay and performing in drag, they could not look him in the eye. Zach embraces Paul, showing compassion for the first time in the audition.”
ROB:
Yeah, and it’s weird how that happens in the film, because he comes upstairs and he’s talking about like, “I don’t want to get cut just because I can’t talk about my life.” And within two sentences, he was like, “okay, here’s everything about my life, including molestation, including my family abandoned me when they found out what I was doing for a living.” It seems to go from 0 to 60 without any provocation.
GILA:
Yeah, and this was one of the monologues that made it verbatim from the tapes to the show to the movie. It’s a significant moment. There are parts of it that don’t entirely feel earned, I think?
ROB:
Yeah, it’s significant. But it’s just weird to get there instantly from “I don’t want to talk about it.”
GILA:
Absolutely.
“Larry brings the dancers back onstage to perform the newly learned routine.”
Now, at this part, I said to Rob, “these are really good actors.” He said, “what do you mean?” I said, “this was ten years after the show opened. All these actors have to pretend they don’t know the words to ‘One.'”
ROB:
As in, “one singular sensation / every little step,” etc. It’s one of those songs that, like… I’ve never seen this show, I’ve never seen this movie, I knew that song. People know that song. It’s ingrained in the culture. It’s one of those songs. And I’m sure ten years after the show happened and the show was a big hit, yeah, people knew that song.
GILA:
And several of them had been in it already. A bunch of these folks had performed in the show on Broadway.
ROB:
Yeah. So seeing them try and like – half of them are stumbling through the lyrics of the song and the other half are narrating their own steps to the dance, and that kind of blends together in a nice back-and-forth. It’s well choreographed, and it’s a fun bit to watch.
GILA:
So, one of the things I was telling Rob is that there is something really fun about being in community around these songs. To wit, there is a piano bar in the West Village in New York City, and it’s called Marie’s Crisis. It is a teeny tiny room with a low ceiling, and a piano, and a bar in the back, and you crowd into that room, and the piano player plays, and everybody sings along. And every so often it stops and one of the staff usually will sing a solo, and then everybody sings together. And there’s nothing quite as much fun as being in a room full of mostly drunk, mostly gay, mostly male people, singing… well, the music from this show. “Dance, Ten; Looks, Three” with a bunch of drunk male-bodied people? Super fun. But this? Being drunk and being able to get through the words “peripatetic, poetic and chic?” It’s a lot of fun. It’s fun but, yes, to have to pretend that you don’t know the words for this song? Seriously?
So they start working on the new routine. They’re doing it toward the mirrors. We need to talk about the mirrors.
ROB:
But also, now Cassie is doing it with them. Zach is in the seats going (Michael Douglas impression) “Cassie. Cassie. Cassie.”
GILA:
Because as they’re doing it in groups …
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
…Zach starts shouting at Cassie…
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
…That she’s not doing it right.
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
She can’t blend in…
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
…She’s popping the head…
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
…She’s dropping the hip…
ROB:
(Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
Because the point here is to blend in. And he pulls her off stage and says, “you are special. You can’t do this.” And she says, “everyone up there is special.” And he said, “you’re different.” And she said, “no, I’m not. This is who I am. Let me have a chance.”
ROB:
(Melanie Griffith impression) But Ariel, you’re different!
GILA:
Exactly. He said, “is this what you want?” And he turns her back toward the stage. And they’re all up there. They’re doing the routine. They’re doing the combination. And trust me, everyone knows the combination.
ROB:
And it’s in perfect unison.
GILA:
It’s in perfect unison. They’re lit from below. Their faces are, like, rictus grin. And then there’s one point where they’re all lined up and doing a kick line, but it’s filmed from below to look like a goose step. Very clearly so. The music is getting a little weird, it’s supposed to sound kind of creepy, and he’s like, “is this what you want?” She’s like, “yes.” So they briefly are arguing about how he didn’t want her back. Or, she knew he wanted her back because he didn’t ask for her to come back.
ROB:
Yeah, it got weird.
GILA:
It got weird. So Larry says, “okay, you’re ready to make the cut.” And Zach says, “no, I want to see the tap combination one more time.” So as everybody’s doing the tap combination, Cassie goes up and climbs up toward the flies and begins singing “What I Did For Love,” which has been recast in this production as a romantic ballad. And that’s not what it’s supposed to do, and we’ll get there in a second. But she’s singing “What I Did For Love,” which is a beautiful song. Objectively, it’s a beautiful song.
Sidenote.
ROB:
Sidenote.
GILA:
Marvin Hamlisch, who wrote the music for this show – among, like, everything else in the whole entire world, he wrote the music for The Sting. When Marvin Hamlisch passed away, his funeral was held at the synagogue where I work. And a poster of the lyrics of “What I Did For Love” was used as the guestbook at this particular event. And the day I went to interview my boss was touring me around the building, and I saw this and I said, “this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” I’m not gonna say it’s why I took the job, but it didn’t hurt.
ROB:
Understandable.
GILA:
Yeah. So they’re doing the tap combination. Val Clark is nowhere to be seen. Larry starts breaking them down into small groups. And as four of them are tapping their little hearts out, Paul hurts his knee and he falls. We had seen at the very beginning of the show that he was taping it up with Saran wrap and masking tape.
ROB:
And we didn’t mention everyone else is dressed in dance clothes, and he’s dressed in jeans.
GILA:
Jeans, because that was what he had to hand.
ROB:
Yeah, he was in his street clothes. He didn’t have dance clothes.
GILA:
Right. And also, we can just talk about the clothes in general for a second. All the women are dressed very revealingly, except for Connie, who talks at one point about how she’s always played a kid her entire career because she’s four foot eleven. She never gets to grow up. She just turned 23, I think, and she played a 14-year-old in her last show, she says.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
But everybody else is wearing leotards.
ROB:
Yeah, with the super high 1980s cuts.
GILA:
Two-piece outfits. And Connie is wearing sweatpants.
ROB:
Yeah, there’s crop tops and cleavage, and she’s in demure dance clothes.
GILA:
She’s in very demure dance clothes. Even Kristine is wearing a long sleeve leotard, but a leotard nonetheless.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
And conversely, all of the boys – for that is how they refer to them – are wearing general dance clothes, and Al is wearing like an unbuttoned white shirt because he is beefcake, hear him roar.
ROB:
And he’s got the chest hair out on display.
GILA:
That he does. That he does. So I thought that was a very interesting reflection on who they are. Everybody’s trading on their sexuality except for Connie, and also Bobby’s wearing a full on crew-neck sweater, and Paul is jumping and kicking and doing the splits in a pair of jeans. Good on him.
So they’re doing the routine. Paul falls and hurts himself, which we knew was coming, let’s be real.
ROB:
Paul falls and lands on his knees.
GILA:
Chekhov’s knee wrap…
ROB:
Yeah, Chekhov’s knee wrap.
GILA:
…Came back in the third act. And all of a sudden everybody’s up on stage. They’ve got his dance bag. They’re giving him medication.
ROB:
Yeah, right off the bat. Zach on the microphone is like, “call this doctor at this phone number.” And then he runs up to the stage to see what he can handle and he’s there with them, among them for the first time.
GILA:
Yes. “Don’t move him. Somebody get his dance bag.” Sheila gives him a Darvon…
ROB:
Or a Valium.
GILA:
Mark says, “should we be giving him that? We don’t know what’s wrong.” And Sheila says, “oh, come on. I’ve had three since lunch.”
ROB:
Which was interesting because I initially took that as just a “oh, she’s the snarky lady on drugs,” but you reminded me that, no, if you’re a dancer you have to go on hurt, or you don’t go on.
GILA:
Right? If you don’t dance hurt, you don’t work.
ROB:
So it’s part of that whole culture and that whole thing, especially in the 80s.
GILA:
The show must go on.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
Come rain, come shine, come snow, come sleet, the show must go on.
ROB:
Yeah, so they send Paul off to the doctor, they get him dragged out and they’re like, “don’t worry, you’re going to the best knee doctor in town…”
GILA:
“The best knee guy in town, keep us posted.” And then they all realize that this could be over in a second.
ROB:
It’s a very effective scene when, right after they get him off the stage and he’s on his way, and Zach is there standing on the stage, watching him go and then he turns around and all the dancers are just standing and staring at him. And he’s staring back at them.
GILA:
Everyone’s a little shell shocked.
ROB:
Everyone’s a little shell shocked. It’s the first time any of them have been that close to Zach. Except for (Michael Douglas impression) Cassie!
GILA:
Well, and Sheila, it turns out.
ROB:
But this is when that divide of him being off in the shadows, and barking out orders, and getting fed up when they can’t talk, and like, “Jesus. Can anyone here talk?”
GILA:
(as Jean Hagen in “Singin’ in the Rain”) Of course we can talk.
GILA and ROB:
(as Hagen) Don’t everybody? (laughing)
ROB:
But this is the first human moment they all have together.
GILA:
And speaking of things coming out of nowhere, he says, “hell of a day, huh?” And Bebe is like, “yeah, I had a breakdown a few months ago, I just got out of the hospital. My doctor thought it was too soon, but surprise!” And they’re all just like… okay!
ROB:
Alright.
GILA:
So he said, “what do you want to do when you can’t dance anymore?” and they all start talking for a bit. And this, in the stage show, this is where “What I Did For Love” comes in. The dancers all sing it together.
ROB:
That seems like it would make a lot more sense than what they did with it in this movie.
GILA:
Right. Because they’re singing about doing what you love. Leave it all on the floor, because you’re doing what you love. And you’re doing it because you love it. And that’s why. And that makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to recast it as a romantic ballad about are you yearning for your ex or not? Or, I don’t know, why do we do this? Because we love it. The toll it takes on our families, on our lives, on our bodies, every single thing, but we do it because we love it… works much better.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
So this moment is when the final cut happens.
ROB:
Final Cut Pro.
GILA:
And it’s a bit abrupt. But so it is. So:
“Zach chooses Val, Cassie, Bebe, Diana, Mike, Mark, Richie, and Bobby to be in his line.”
ROB:
And they do that little fake out where he goes back to the microphone and starts calling people up. And he’s like, okay, so and so when I call your name come to the front of the stage. And he’s calling people and they each, as he calls them, look happy and relieved, like, “yeah, I got it,” and triumphant. He calls Diana at first but then says no, no, wait, stay back. And she looks like she just got everything taken away from her and she looks a little destroyed. And then the front line is filled in. He goes, “okay, everyone in the front. Thank you very much. You all get off the stage.” And the people remaining are the cast.
GILA:
So you start hearing him giving instructions, he fades out so you can hear him say things like “standard six month contract,” “we’re gonna have an out-of-town tryout,” “don’t change your hair.” And I’m like, “oh, Bebe can’t get a haircut. That’s unfortunate.”
ROB:
Yes, give them all the standard rich and famous contract.
GILA:
So we see this. Everybody leaves. And at the end, you see Cassie coming out into the house. So is the assumption that she and Zack are leaving together? I don’t know. Sure. Whatever.
And then comes the finale. So you start hearing the beginning vamp from “One.” (vocalizing the song’s tune) “Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo. Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo.” Anyway, they start performing the number and they’re wearing the gold lamé tuxedos, top hats, the whole nine.
ROB:
Yeah, the women in the leotard version of a gold lamé tux and tails, and they’ve all got the top hats, they’ve all got the canes.
GILA:
And you start seeing the people who got cast. And then all of a sudden we have the people who got cut. And they’re all back in their line of 17. And then Paul shows up and it’s like the moment when Angel comes out during “Seasons of Love” at the end of Rent. And, oh my God.
ROB:
Yeah, it’s really fun the way they do it, because there are these mirrors lined up on the back of the stage, which we didn’t really talk about.
GILA:
But we will! So they start with the dancers who got cast. And then we see the dancers who didn’t get cast and all 17 of them are there together again, in one line. Then that line heads to the back of the stage toward the mirrors. And you can see them walking toward themselves. All of a sudden, they get to the mirrors and they’re met by another line of 17 dancers, who follow them up to the front of the stage.
ROB:
So they go up to the mirrors, and then other dancers dressed like them come through the mirrors and join them.
GILA:
Correct.
ROB:
And they keep doubling the group like this.
GILA:
So by the end of it, there are eight lines of 17 dancers all kicking in perfect formation.
ROB:
Shoulder to shoulder now on this little stage, and so it’s all just this wall of gold.
GILA:
So it’s fascinating when you think that the whole idea of the show has been to give a voice to the members of the chorus, to hear from the people we don’t hear from, to see them as individuals. And by the end, they’re all kicking, you can’t tell one from the other. In fact, some of them are covering their faces at various points. Maybe it’s so we don’t know that Audrey Landers isn’t there, I don’t know.
ROB:
But the camera’s looking at them from above, too. So you see the stage get filled.
GILA:
It’s a very cool moment, and a very cool effect. But yeah, just nameless, faceless dancers. Just fascinating.
“As the song progresses, the cut dancers also appear on stage and it becomes harder to identify each dancer. The dancers’ reflections from the mirror join them. And soon the stage is filled with hundreds of dancers. As the credits roll the song’s tag vamps, as the dancers continue dancing in a giant kick line.”
ROB:
That’s the end of the plot on Wiki.
GILA:
That’s the end of the plot.
ROB:
And yeah, then they go straight from while everyone’s dancing, and as everything shrinks off into the distance, you see photos of the characters pop up, and their credits pop up next to them.
GILA:
And everybody’s there, alphabetically,
ROB:
Four by four. And yeah, it’s interesting, especially if like me, you didn’t quite get everyone’s name. And so you can see, “oh, yeah, blonde floofy hair lady, that’s you.”
GILA:
Yes, exactly. So one thing we should probably step back and talk about for a second is the mirrors.
ROB:
The mirrors.
GILA:
The mirrors. Because you’re set up for an audition, the whole idea here is that we’re learning dances, so the mirrors are there, because eventually you do something in the mirror, and then you turn away from the mirror.
ROB:
Yeah, like, if you’ve ever watched a dance class or been to a dance studio, there’s always that wall that’s all mirror with the barres up on it and everything and it’s so you can see what you look like when you’re doing the dance, so you can get everything in the right spot and learn the dance. So they have these mirrors, which are seven, eight foot tall…
GILA:
They would be floor to ceiling mirrors in a regular room. But since they’re on a stage, it’s just there –
ROB:
But they’re these standing mirrors, and they’re all on wheels. So they’re free-floating, they’re moving around, the sort of thing you can put wherever you want, but they’re all lined up along the back of the stage. And they’re there for like half this movie. And I was looking at this thinking, it’s like when you’re inside the spaceship in Flight of the Navigator, which we talked about in our previous episode, and everything is chrome and mirror finished. And I’m thinking this must have been such a pain in the ass to not get the cameras and the crew in these mirrors. They did a good job with that, because I was looking for that and I didn’t see it.
GILA:
So this movie, as we discussed, did not do well at the box office. Because people thought that Richard Attenborough changed it too much, people thought that Richard Attenborough didn’t change it enough. And I don’t know that I disagree with that. Because if you’re going to do flashbacks, and you’re going to take it out of the theatre, then do that for everybody and not just the Cassie and Zach subplot. You know, you could show us flashbacks during “At the Ballet.” There are any number of things that we could have done that we didn’t do.
ROB:
Yeah, this movie was forcing main character status on these characters in a show which, by design, wasn’t really a main-character show, it was about the ensemble.
GILA:
Exactly. And Kelly Bishop, who was in the original company,
“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!'”
ROB:
That’s attributed to Kelly Bishop later in the Wikipedia article for A Chorus Line here.
GILA:
Yes. Also, I just want to share what Vincent Canby had to say because I think it’s also very funny. He said,
“Though it was generally agreed that Hair would not work as a film, Miloš Forman transformed it into one of the most original pieces of musical cinema of the last 20 years.”
Which he did.
ROB:
He did. Hair was a hell of a film. He used the environments well, it was – everything was really well done.
GILA:
It doesn’t bear a huge resemblance to the stage show.
ROB:
No, but by design – it can’t.
GILA:
I think he even changed the ending. Yeah.
“Then they said that A Chorus Line couldn’t be done – and this time they were right… Mr. Attenborough has elected to make a more or less straightforward film version that is fatally halfhearted.”
I don’t know that I disagree. It’s good for what it is. But in comparison? No. But sometimes you have to take the film adaptation as its own animal.
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
Like, there’s a book I love. Love. And it was adapted into a film. And they have the same title, and the characters have the same names, and that’s it. And if I can look at it on its own merits, that’s fine.
ROB:
Yeah, one of the classic examples of that, for me and for a lot of people, is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Though it has the veneers of the same thing, but Kubrick did so much to change the story, to change the circumstances, to change everything, King disowned it himself. And it’s widely seen now as, even among Stephen King fans, or Stanley Kubrick fans, it’s a good Stanley Kubrick film, it’s a bad Stephen King adaptation.
GILA:
Okay, so just fun fact here, eight of the cast members were in A Chorus Line before or after the movie. Some both, even. Three songs were cut, two were added. We knew that.
So, ultimately: not sorry you put this in your eye holes and ear holes?
ROB:
I am not! It was a fun watch. It was still – as a theatre kid and a theatre adult, it’s always nice to see those self referential shows about theatre. I usually like those. There are so many shows like that, there are things like, you know, It’s Only a Play, Noises Off, all these theatre shows about theatre that are obviously written by theatre people, for an audience full of theatre people between shows themselves, and it works. You can make that work as a film if you are really good at it. This, as I’ve come to learn, isn’t such a great adaptation of the source material in some ways, but just taking this as a movie that I’ve just seen, it wasn’t a bad movie. I didn’t regret watching it.
GILA:
All right, hang on one second.
ROB:
You’re now going to the video shelf, like… are we doing another episode now, or…?
GILA:
(faintly, off-mic) Yeah! I figured since this one’s going so well…
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Hi, I’m Gila from Modern Technology Watches. If you want to learn more about A Chorus Line, or anything else we discussed on today’s show, you can go to your local library and look for a documentary called Every Little Step, which is based around the casting of the 2006 Broadway revival, but also talks a lot about the creation of the show itself.
ROB:
That seems of interest. You had mentioned this, and that’s something that I definitely want to watch. And it might make up for the complete lack of any extra features on the Blu-ray disc.
GILA:
There are even extra features on here.
ROB:
That’s something. Yeah, I definitely want to see this.
GILA:
There also, by the way, are recordings to be found. There’s like an… I almost said an “otoscope…” there’s like a kinescope recording of the original production somewhere on the internet that you can find.
ROB:
I’ll have to look for that. This is definitely one of those things that I want to look into further and learn more about. And if this gets revived again somewhere, I might want to go see it.
GILA:
Oh, also, one fun fact I learned, speaking of “this is music that everyone knows,” like there are songs from the show that you just know, because they’re in the zeitgeist. And we talked about this. You grew up in this area.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
You grew up seeing ads for Broadway shows.
ROB:
Yeah, part of growing up in the New York metropolitan area is some of the commercials you get on TV are for shows happening on Broadway.
GILA:
It’s still… I’m not entirely accustomed to it. I’ve been living in New York for over a decade, and I’m still not used to it. It’s great. I love it. In 1990, there was a national tour of A Chorus Line. The exclusive presenting sponsor of the tour was Visa. Right? “It’s everywhere you want to be.”
ROB:
Sure.
GILA:
The only credit card you could use to buy a ticket to this tour was Visa. Visa spent half a million dollars on this. So yeah, this music again, was everywhere in 1990 as part of the ad campaign for this tour. Def.
ROB:
Hm.
GILA:
Yeah. “One singular sensation.” You know it. Even if you don’t know the show, you know it. “Peripatetic, poetic, and chic.”
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
It’s great. Also… highly recommend Marie’s Crisis.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
So I think that that brings us to the end of our little adventure in space and time.
ROB:
I think so. So revisiting this as a grownup, where’s your firefly?
GILA:
Oh, it’s so emphatically up. It is up. It is learning the combination.
So we’ve been talking a lot and we would love to have you listeners joining the conversation with us. So if you would like to get in touch with us, there are so many ways in which you can do so. You can send us an email at watches at modern dot technology. Watches at modern dot technology, friendly reminder that dot technology is, in fact, a top-level domain, dot technology, that will get you to us.
ROB:
Or if you don’t want to write such things out, you could go straight to modern.technology on the web, there’s a Contact Us page, which has all this contact info for us, but also has a little box that you can just type an email into if you don’t want to use your email client, and it’ll go straight to us.
GILA:
Additionally, if you don’t want to type anything down, you can call us at United States telephone number 1-929-399-8414. That’s 1-929-399-8414. You can leave us a message. Now, if you call that number, you won’t get either of us on the phone. But you can leave us a voicemail and we have not gotten voicemail from a human being yet, have we?
ROB:
No. We’ve gotten plenty of spam. I’ve gotten so much pleading and begging about my car’s extended warranty, but no messages about this here show here that we do or anything. So if you would like to speak with us about this episode, about previous episodes, about any movie that we’ve spoken about on this program in its history,
GILA:
If you’re a time traveler and want to tell us about the next movie we’re doing because you’ve heard the episode already,
ROB:
Yes, you can get in touch with us there. We are currently still on Twitter, although that social network is quickly swirling straight down the bog. You can find us there @MTPodcastNet. You can also find Gila and I, our individual accounts, on Mastodon. They’re listed right on our main page at modern.technology and anything that pops up in the future that we may join in on, we’ll list it there. So yes, get in touch. We love hearing from you. And we know you’re out there because we can see download numbers.
GILA:
Thank you for joining us on this particular cattle call.
ROB:
And for Modern Technology Watches, this has been Rob Vincent,
GILA:
And Gila Drazen,
ROB:
And we will catch you on the flip side.
GILA:
We will see you at the movies.
(Ending theme music fades in)
GILA:
You’ve been listening to episode 306 of Modern Technology Watches with Gila Drazen and Rob Vincent. Go to modern.technology on the web for more info on this show, our other work, and our social media headshots. Our music is “The Promise” by Torley Wong, released Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Find more from Torley at torley.com. Thank you, Torley!
Content from wikipedia.org is used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0. This podcast is released under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0, and is a production of Joyful Firefly, LLC.
Email us at watches at modern dot technology, and if you like us, tell a friend or two!
(Ending theme music concludes)
GILA:
Being drunk and being able to get through the words “peripatetic, foe…” Fuck!
ROB:
(laughs) You don’t say!
GILA:
Yeah, I know. And all I’ve had to drink is water.
ROB:
How many of those have you had?
GILA:
Not enough, apparently.