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The gypsy in them: with A Chorus Line's return to Broadway, a singular sensation gets a second look.

Article Excerpt
The studio door opened, releasing a wall of sound--a choir lustily singing the praises of "one singular sensation." Then 17 performers in leotards and practice pants came into view, tipping their ill-assorted hats and moving forward in the precise, kick-happy unison of a Broadway production number. In those few seconds, the stormy summer's day outside disappeared, and three decades seemed to fall away. Suddenly it was 1975 all over again, the year I--and absolutely everyone else--spent the summer desperately wanting tickets to A Chorus Line.

Little did we know that it would take 15 years to exhaust that zeal, as this plain little show about chorus kids auditioning for a musical moved from off-Broadway to Broadway and then into legend: how it had been born, in all-night bull sessions about dancing in musicals; how it had been nurtured, over two years of workshops financed by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival; and how it had succeeded, garnering nine Tonys, the Pulitzer, and, ultimately, a record-setting 6,137 performances and $38.4 million in profits.

It sounds like hype now, but anyone who was around back then will know that it isn't. A Chorus Line was much more than a hit, it was a phenomenon. In giving audiences a glimpse into the thoughts and emotions of hitherto anonymous gypsies--a term that was then unknown to the general public--as they auditioned for an emphatically non-phenomenonal Broadway musical, this celebration of the dance life altered not just the way...

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