Now She’ll Star in Show That Gave Her a Start in ’76 : Theater: A dancer moves here from the East and comes home again to the musical ‘Chorus Line,’ in which she was an understudy as a teen-ager.

For Wanda Richert-Preston, being back in Los Angeles is, well, one singular sensation.

She was a teen-age understudy when “A Chorus Line” first opened in Los Angeles in 1976. When the venerable musical returns to the Shubert Theatre on Feb. 4, Richert-Preston will play the plum part of Cassie, the dancer who never quite became a star and is dancing her heart out for a place in the chorus.

Lunch with Richert-Preston recently was a veritable “Chorus Line” reunion. The actress was bussed by owner Michael Austin when she arrived at his Hollywood restaurant, Off Vine.

“I made her a star, but we won’t talk about that,” joked the restaurateur, who was a memorable Bobby in the longest-running show in Broadway history.

Also on hand was Donna McKechnie, who originated the role of Cassie. McKechnie was one of the 22 dancers who gave birth to “A Chorus Line” in an all-night marathon of self-revelation that Michael Bennett taped and eventually shaped into the musical about the hopes and dreams of Broadway “gypsies.”

Richert-Preston has just moved to Los Angeles after years on the East Coast. (McKechnie, too, is a Westside resident). The Broadway that Richert-Preston had fallen in love with, the one she fantasized about when she was taking dance classes in Chicago, doesn’t exist anymore, she said. Her enthusiasm for the West Coast is undiminished by the fact that a SWAT team was in place much of the day recently, responding to a hostage situation near her Westwood condo.

“Broadway is dead, as far as I’m concerned,” Richert-Preston said. She points to the tragically premature deaths of so many Broadway greats in recent years, including “Chorus Line” creator Bennett, who died of the complications of AIDS in 1987, and the musical’s “rabbi,” producer Joseph Papp. “The geniuses are gone and there’s no one to replace them.”

She also thinks Broadway has priced itself out of existence, as evidenced by the recent mega-flop, “Nick and Nora.” “It’s $8 million to put on a musical now, and sometimes it closes on Sunday after opening on Tuesday.”

Richert-Preston’s story is the stuff Broadway musicals are made of. “I started dancing in my playpen,” she said. “And I got my Equity card a month before I turned 15.” A sensible Midwesterner, she hoped for good but planned for ill, following her mother to beautician’s school just in case she couldn’t beat the odds and break into show business.

“Mom and I saw ‘A Chorus Line’ in New York when I was 18,” she said. “We saw Donna do it, and I was just mesmerized. I said then, I have to have that role.”

The life-changing call that made her an understudy in “A Chorus Line” came while she was washing a customer’s hair. “The lady was left in the shampoo bowl.”

Bennett was “my acting teacher,” she recalled fondly. He always gave her the same advice. “Don’t act, dahling,” he counseled. Instead, he advised the young performer “to listen and react.”

Her other major mentor was the late Gower Champion. He chose her to play Peggy Sawyer, the girl who soars overnight from chorus to stardom in his “42nd Street.” Champion, who died hours before the show opened to raves in 1980, gave her the part even though it was already promised to someone else. Bennett, who had fired her at one point, ran backstage to congratulate her, wearing his signature baseball cap. “I always told you you would be a star!” he gushed.

In fact, despite the extraordinary success of “Chorus Line,” none of its immensely talented performers has achieved major stardom. Only Bennett became famous as a result of the play, which won a Pulitzer, nine Tony awards and numerous other prizes.

A classic example of meta-theater, or theater about theater, the play is cast as an audition in which 17 aspiring dancers, or “gypsies,” try out for eight openings in an upcoming musical. In such a situation, the director is God. And Bennett shrewdly structured the play so that the audience also becomes the judge, shamelessly rooting for its favorites and ruthlessly dismissing those it loves less.

Richert-Preston thinks the play’s magic is that “everyone can relate to it.” McKechnie agrees. “It’s not about dancing,” she said. Instead, the show is about “growing up and having dreams and being discriminated against and having compassion.”

McKechnie noted that in 1992, the once-groundbreaking musical has become a period piece. The rehearsal clothes worn by the dancers now have the faint whiff of the museum about them. When she first played Cassie, she pointed out, there was no such thing as a thong leotard.

The chance to play Cassie again comes at a good time in Richert-Preston’s life. She is still in the starry-eyed phase of her recent marriage to singer Mark Preston, and the pain of an acrimonious divorce is clearly on the wane. She takes great pride in 5-year-old daughter, Candace, whom she plans to teach at home. Candace is a good dancer, her mother says, but the child sees a stethoscope in her future, not tap shoes.

“I think she’s got the gift. She loves to bury dead frogs.”

Preston, who was formerly with the Lettermen, says: “I’m from the old school of entertainment. I’m Wayne Newton’s biggest fan.” The couple, who met while they were performing on a cruise ship, have put together an act in which “we sing, dance, jump around and tell some jokes.” His wife is “a triple threat,” Preston says. He is only a double threat. “I’m a singer who can act. I don’t dance. I move.”

In “A Chorus Line,” Cassie is at a time in her life when she must come to terms with the prospect of not always being able to do the thing she loves. Richert-Preston is old enough to realize that making it on someone else’s terms is less important than being true to her talent as she sees it.

“If you fail doing what everybody else wants you to do and not what you want to do, that haunts you for the rest of your life.”