‘Chorus Line’s’ Last Kick

It may have been the last night of Broadway’s longest-running show, but the atmosphere was far from funereal. As the sun went down, the Shubert Theater’s marquee for “A Chorus Line” went on turning the theater once again into the show business landmark it had been for the last 15 years.

This time there was a new feature, the lyrics to the musical’s most popular tune. “What I Did for Love” was flashing on a news ticker above the theater entrance and hundreds of fans were reading the lines of that ballad of the joys and frustrations of show business with tears in their eyes.

“It wasn’t my idea” said producer Joseph Papp, who introduced the show at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater in April 1975, and brought it to Broadway the following August. “It’s just too sentimental,” Papp said. “The show’s general manager put it up there and I guess I could fire him. But he’ll be unemployed anyway after tonight.”

As the capacity audience waited more than half an hour inside the theater for the show to start, a neon sign with the number 6,137 showed above the stage’s minimal set of a white line and a back wall of mirrors. Each dance number that featured the entire company was met with applause that sometimes drowned out the 17-piece orchestra, with even stronger applause at the number’s end that sometimes went on for several minutes. As the dancers stood on their white line waiting for that applause to die down, some were visibly fighting back tears.

The high point of Saturday night actually came after the musical’s rousing finale, when a huge photograph of the show’s creator, director/choreographer Michael Bennett descended from the ceiling, and the standing crowd screamed in approval. Bennett died of AIDS in 1987.

An uncharacteristically emotional Papp then took to the stage to introduce each cast member and understudy individually, and then introduced members of the original company that had opened the show on Broadway. All but two of those dancers from 1975 came to the Shubert Theater for the final show.

Half an hour before the curtain was scheduled to rise, Papp appeared at the entrance to the theater to greet the crowd that had gathered. As police on horseback struggled to push back hundreds of fans mourning the passing of their favorite Broadway play, Papp repeated his reasons for deciding to close “A Chorus Line.” “Not enough people were paying to fill the seats,” Papp explained, “and we couldn’t pay our weekly expenses.” Those expenses amounted to $160,000 a week, a minimal weekly cost for a Broadway musical.

“I didn’t want it to go down in a way a boxer goes down on the mat,” said Papp. “You want to go out with your head high, feeling good, like we’re going out tonight.”

Papp acknowledged that he was sad about the closing of the show, but said he had no special words for the cast before its final performance. “I’m not a coach. I just walked among the troops,” he said as he paused to autograph an original cast album for 20-year-old dancer Michael Spanelli, who was 5 when the show opened on Broadway.

Shubert Alley was thronged with well-wishers hoping for a glimpse of the performers as they made their way to the stage door. Most of those fans would not be at Saturday evening’s performance. Tickets for the final night’s benefit, at $300 for the support of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, were a bit high even for hard-core admirers of “A Chorus Line.” Still, they stood in uncommonly hot weather for late April in New York to bid goodby to the show.

Among them was Stan Bloomfield, a Brooklyn high school theater teacher who had seen the show six times. The first of those performances was a preview before “A Chorus Line” debuted at the Public Theater in 1975. Bloomfield was on his way to another show Saturday evening, and said he had stopped off at the Shubert Alley, the wide mid-block passageway that runs along the Shubert Theater, because the closing of “A Chorus Line” was a special night for him.

“It brings back nostalgia,” said Bloomfield, “and it’s one of the most humane, moving and funny shows that I’ve ever seen. I just wanted to be part of this whole experience of standing out here and hoping that I might see some of the original performers come home again.

“So many musicals have good numbers,” said Bloomfield, alluding to the show’s memorable tunes and “A Chorus Line’s” record 6,137 performances that brought 6,642,400 theatergoers to the Shubert over the show’s 15-year run, as well as $150 million. “But for me it’s the warmth and the realization of all these characters that come to life in a period of two hours that’s simply remarkable for a musical.”

Stage hand Frank Wauchope, who had worked on “A Chorus Line” for the show’s first five years, had taken the night off from his job as a security man for Peter Schaffer’s new play “Lettuce and Lovage” around the corner to see the final performance. “As stage hands, we can really understand the stories the dancers tell in the show,” said Wauchope, “because it’s often just as hard for us to get work as it is for those dancers.”

For some in the audience who had seen the show many times, Saturday night’s performance had a new intensity. “You could tell it was different tonight,” said 17-year-old Stephanie Friedman, from Easton, Pa., who was seeing “A Chorus Line” for the third time. “That made it great for us, because it was special for the actors and actresses as well.”

That special feeling also struck the many alumni of the show, who packed into a party at Mama Leone’s restaurant a few doors away after the performance. “I thought everybody was on their toes 3,000% more than on another night where they wouldn’t have that kind of tension associated with a closing night or with an audience of such big wigs,” said 35-year-old Justin Ross, who played the role of dancer Greg Gardner for two years in the 1970s.

“I’m sure the performers were all very, very nervous,” said Ross, now a director and producer, “and whenever performers in ‘A Chorus Line’ can have something to work their nerves, it adds to the performance, because the difficult thing about doing a show like this night after night is that, technically, it’s supposed to be happening for the first time. Of course, when you do a show every night, it’s easy to relax into the reality that you’ve done it hundreds of times. But it was thrilling, and I was thrilled to have been part of the show. It made me very proud. It brought back a lot of memories.”

Ross admitted that he had second thoughts about coming to the final performance. “My feelings were bittersweet,” he reflected. “ ‘A Chorus Line’ was the kind of show that you thought was going to run forever. The fact that it is closing is sad, but it also completes a circle. It’s time for a new ‘Chorus Line.’ It’s time for a show that will alter people’s lives in another way.”

Standing beside Ross was John Breglio, an entertainment lawyer who left his firm in 1974 to help Michael Bennett put “A Chorus Line” together. “The show was all Michael,” said Breglio, who echoed the feelings of many original cast members at the party, for whom the closing of the show was another occasion to mourn Bennett’s death three years ago. Breglio looked behind the bar at a life-size statue on which the number 6,137 had been placed. “I’m going to play that number in the lottery,” he said. “That’s the only way we’re ever going to have the same kind of success that we’re putting to rest tonight.”