Curtain to Fall on ‘Chorus Line’ After 15 Years

“A Chorus Line” will close March 31 after 15 years at the Shubert Theater and a total box office gross of more than $146.5 million, producer Joseph Papp announced today.

Calling the decision to close the longest-running musical in Broadway history “a significant moment in the history of the Broadway theater,” Papp said, “A Chorus Line” will live on in amateur productions, rights for which have been available since 1986.

The show has already been performed professionally in 22 countries abroad, beginning in Toronto in 1976. When it closes, it will have been seen by almost 6.6 million people at the Shubert Theater alone.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning show, its foreign productions and the 1985 film version have netted $37.8 million for Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, its chief beneficiary.

It has made possible the festival’s summer Shakespeare productions in Central Park and financed hundreds of productions at the festival’s five-hall Public Theater housed in the historic Astor Library building. Papp is producing Shakespeare’s entire canon of 36 plays.

“A Chorus Line” resulted from the late choreographer Michael Bennett’s workshop interviews with a group of Broadway “gypsies,” the faceless dancers and singers who make up the chorus of musicals. It opened at Papp’s off-Broadway Newman Theater on April 16, 1975.

The show was impelled onto Broadway the following July 25 and will have had 6,104 performances when the final curtain falls at the Shubert Theater. It won a record of nine Tony Awards in the 1976 edition of the Tonys and garnered a Special Tony Award in 1984 as the longest-running show on Broadway. It had passed “Grease” with its 3,389th performance Sept. 29, 1983.

The musical was unique for being performed without intermission and without any real scenery except for mirrored back wall screens. The book was written by the late novelist, James Kirkwood, and Nicholas Dante. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music and Edward Kleban the words.