‘Chorus Line’s’ Michael Bennett, 44, Dies

Michael Bennett, who took the common thread of rejection and wove it into a unifying cloak he placed around 17 anxious dancers auditioning for “A Chorus Line,” Broadway’s longest-running show, died early today.

The Tony and Pulitzer award-winning director, dancer and choreographer whose influence in the world of musical theater was unparalleled in the last two decades was 44 and died in his home in Tucson, where he had moved last December after being told he had AIDS.

Illness had forced him in late 1986 to sell the building at 890 Broadway in New York City where he based his theatrical operations, but not before he had given the world “A Chorus Line,” “Coco,” “Promises, Promises,” “A Joyful Noise,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Seesaw” and “Dreamgirls.”

“Chorus Line,” which in September, 1983 became at 3,389 performances the longest-running show in Broadway history, is probably the best-known of his dancing legacies. It was inspired by the unguarded and spontaneous comments of some of Bennett’s dancing friends who talked informally into a tape recorder one evening in 1974 about their desperate craving for work and their heartbreaking fears of not getting it.

Out of that evening he crafted Paul, the frustrated homosexual, Cassie, the washed-up actress, and 15 other agitated hoofers seeking the eight available openings the formidable director known only as “Zach” has for his show. Their plaintive chant--”God, let me get this job”--came to be a leitmotif for aspiring thespians everywhere.

Michael Bennett Di Figlia was born in Buffalo, N.Y., to a machinist father and secretary mother who wanted a more cultured life for their son and enrolled him in a dancing school when he was 3. He grew up studying dance during summers in New York City but said that as early as age 12 he knew that “what I (really) wanted to do was putting on big shows.”

His first solo choreographic effort was in 1966 with “A Joyful Noise” and it also marked the first of 11 Tony nominations (he also won seven for direction and choreography and shared the 1976 Pulitzer for drama for “A Chorus Line,” a highly unusual accolade for a musical.)