Final Curtain for ‘A Chorus Line’

“A Chorus Line,” the longest-running show in Broadway history, will take its final Broadway curtain call on March 31, producer Joseph Papp announced Wednesday.

The musical will close after 6,104 performances before almost 6.6 million spectators during the last 15 years at New York’s Shubert Theater. The box-office gross there has passed $146.5 million.

However, attendance has declined recently. A spokesman for the show said it had lost $300,000 in the last six to eight weeks.

For most of its run, “A Chorus Line” has been a gold mine for its birthplace and chief beneficiary, the New York Shakespeare Festival. The Broadway and national touring companies, 22 authorized foreign productions, the 1985 film version and ancillary revenues netted $37.8 million for the festival. The show originally opened at the festival’s Off-Broadway Newman Theater on April 16, 1975, then moved to Broadway on July 25, 1975.

A company opened in Los Angeles in 1976 and played the Shubert in Century City for 18 months. Later touring productions played the Pantages and the Wilshire, and local civic light opera companies have staged their own productions.

A tribute to Broadway “gypsies,” “A Chorus Line” was directed by the late Michael Bennett and written by the late novelist James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, drawing on interviews with some of those “gypsies”--the singers and dancers who make up the choruses of musicals. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the score, and lyrics were by Edward Kleban.

BREAKING THE “RULE”: Last fall, Los Angeles Theatre Center announced the booking of “The Rule of Threes,” a trio of short plays about Western reaction to Eastern Bloc dissidents, in the March 30-May 27 slot.

Then the Berlin Wall fell.

Dated by events in Eastern Europe, “The Rule of Threes” has now been replaced by Corneille’s “The Illusion.”

The collapse of the LATC production wasn’t quite as sudden as the collapse of the wall. “Once the wall fell,” recalled playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, “we told ourselves, ‘There’s always Czechoslovakia.’ ” Then, after the Czech “velvet revolution,” “We told ourselves, ‘There’s always Romania.’ ” Then Romania changed governments.

“At the point where we were beginning to say ‘There’s always Albania,’ Bill Bushnell (LATC’s artistic director) said ‘We like the play, but. . . .” Or, as Bushnell added in an LATC statement, “To pursue the play at this time would not do justice either to the playwright or to the play itself.”

Actually, noted Hatcher, the centerpiece of the trio of plays, “Fellow Travelers,” is being produced in Manhattan right now. And he believes that his play “may get a little more action a year from now. It needs a little time to distance it. It’s too close to the period for us to make sense of it as a period piece.”

Meanwhile, LATC has commissioned a new play from Hatcher as a consolation prize.

Tony Kushner’s adaptation of “The Illusion,” which will replace “The Rule of Threes,” was initially announced as part of last year’s Taper, Too season--until it was replaced by “Stand-Up Tragedy.” The LATC production will be its West Coast premiere.

Written in 1636, “The Illusion” is set in a magical cave where a father, searching for his long-lost son, seeks help from a sorcerer. David Schweizer, best known at LATC for his stagings of new plays, will direct.

“THE THRILL” IS GONE: Last weekend’s storm threw a damper on the final performances of John Steppling’s “The Thrill” at Taper, Too.

A power surge attributed to the storm knocked out fuses and dimmers Friday at the John Anson Ford Theater in the Cahuenga Pass, and water leaked into the structure. About 75 theatergoers waited as long as 50 minutes after the scheduled curtain time before learning that the performance was definitely canceled. Most of them exchanged their tickets for one of the remaining four performances or for future Taper, Too productions.

New fuses and dimmers were installed on Saturday, though the matinee that day also was delayed slightly because of the power problem. A few fluorescent lights facing the wall, designed as “third-level ambiance” in director Robert Egan’s words, weren’t working during the rest of the run, but Egan said that he and Steppling probably were the only spectators who could tell the difference.

LADCC CHANGES: This year, for the first time in the 21-year history of Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, the group will announce its awards prior to the ceremony where they’re presented.

The announcement will occur in early March. The ceremony will follow on April 8, at Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City. Tickets to the awards luncheon, which is open to the public, cost $25, but recipients will be the circle’s guests. In earlier years, all nominees (or the theaters with which they were affiliated) had to pay their own way into the ceremony.

The circle does not designate “bests” or “winners,” so there can be multiple recipients (or none) in any given category. No more than 30 awards will be presented from the list of 59 nominees, announced earlier this week.

THE GLORY OF QUOTE ADS: Not even the Crystal Cathedral is meticulous about accuracy in theater advertising. When I reviewed the cathedral’s “Glory of Easter” pageant last year, the review began: “Eat your heart out, ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ ” But the line quoted in this year’s ads for the same pageant, and attributed to The Times, is “Move over, ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ ”

Perhaps eating another show’s heart out wasn’t considered to be in the spirit of turning the other cheek.