A Chorus Line Festival Theatre Edinburgh 25th September 2024 Review
A Chorus Line is at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh this week (Tue 24 to Sat 28 September) and despite being 50 years old next year (original Broadway opening in 1975), this show has lost none of its power and few have ever matched its unexpected commercial success.
Who would be interested in hearing the personal stories of chorus line dancers and their endless pursuit of work? That question was asked more than once before this show took to the stage and the answer was obviously millions of people across the world for generations to come.
Perhaps part of this success is due to the fact that, in this show, we all get to see the very unglamorous life that many performers lead away from the stage whilst also hearing their stories of what took them to this nomadic and gypsy life style with often little or no financial security. I think there is a little bit of the voyeur in all of us, we all like the chance to get a glimpse into other people’s lives, and contemporary reality television shows thrive on that facet of our psyche.
Another part of this show’s seemingly endless success is the simple fact that the individual performers’ stories of “A Chorus Line” (which are based upon real people telling their own personal stories) is an endless one. Every dancer, every performer who has ever taken to any stage has their own story to tell and these stories are always being retold by someone in an infinitely endless variety of ways.
Curiously, “A Chorus Line” is filled with stories of people who are often destined to forever be part of a chorus line while the stars-to-be step out of it and move onto bigger and better things. Sometimes this is due to a lack of talent in areas other than dancing, sometimes it is down to just the luck of the draw, but here, in this production, everyone on stage has to have a far wider range of performance skills than just dancing. Here each of the seventeen hopefuls for a chorus line-up of only the selected eight dancers has to have the dramatic ability to make us, the audience, believe that they are the character that they are portraying on stage and to be able to convince us of the often difficult personal backgrounds that they come from. Sometimes the chorus line for them is a chance to escape who they really are and become someone new on-stage.
Leading this production’s line up of talent are Adam Cooper as producer Zach and Carly Mercedes Dyer as Cassie, a dancer who some people think failed to reach her star potential. Cassie, however, has no doubt what she wants to do and where she really belongs on stage. There is a complex back-history to her story which, as this narrative evolves, illustrates just how clearly dreams can be broken for any one of these dancers. Both Adam Cooper and Carly Mercedes Dyer have dream performance CVs to date and their individual talents are very much the cornerstone of this production.
A Chorus Line is a true collaborative work on stage which broke all the rules in 1975 of what a stage musical should be. This boldness not only re-wrote the rule-book for stage musicals, but defined the style of so much that was to come after it. Here everybody’s story, everybody’s dance routine, is a star and it is unfair to pick any one performance out in this review. Like a real chorus line, this show works because everyone in it works by being exactly where they should be, doing exactly what they should do at any moment in the production. Taking the still unusual format of a performance time of nearly two hours without an interval means that we as an audience are always engaged in these stories without any interruptions.
Rejection is simply a part of any performer’s life and the opening song “I Hope I Get It” must resonate with anyone who has ever been in this situation. Those opening lines from “One” – “One singular sensation, every little step he takes” are now perhaps amongst the most famous ones in stage musical history, but all too often overlooked is the song that nearly never made it into the production – “What I Did For Love” and this for me is the song from this show.
A Chorus Line has everything that an audience could want, classic songs, classic dance routines, and personal stories that can really touch your heart.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Who would be interested in hearing the personal stories of chorus line dancers and their endless pursuit of work? That question was asked more than once before this show took to the stage and the answer was obviously millions of people across the world for generations to come.
Perhaps part of this success is due to the fact that, in this show, we all get to see the very unglamorous life that many performers lead away from the stage whilst also hearing their stories of what took them to this nomadic and gypsy life style with often little or no financial security. I think there is a little bit of the voyeur in all of us, we all like the chance to get a glimpse into other people’s lives, and contemporary reality television shows thrive on that facet of our psyche.
Another part of this show’s seemingly endless success is the simple fact that the individual performers’ stories of “A Chorus Line” (which are based upon real people telling their own personal stories) is an endless one. Every dancer, every performer who has ever taken to any stage has their own story to tell and these stories are always being retold by someone in an infinitely endless variety of ways.
Curiously, “A Chorus Line” is filled with stories of people who are often destined to forever be part of a chorus line while the stars-to-be step out of it and move onto bigger and better things. Sometimes this is due to a lack of talent in areas other than dancing, sometimes it is down to just the luck of the draw, but here, in this production, everyone on stage has to have a far wider range of performance skills than just dancing. Here each of the seventeen hopefuls for a chorus line-up of only the selected eight dancers has to have the dramatic ability to make us, the audience, believe that they are the character that they are portraying on stage and to be able to convince us of the often difficult personal backgrounds that they come from. Sometimes the chorus line for them is a chance to escape who they really are and become someone new on-stage.
Leading this production’s line up of talent are Adam Cooper as producer Zach and Carly Mercedes Dyer as Cassie, a dancer who some people think failed to reach her star potential. Cassie, however, has no doubt what she wants to do and where she really belongs on stage. There is a complex back-history to her story which, as this narrative evolves, illustrates just how clearly dreams can be broken for any one of these dancers. Both Adam Cooper and Carly Mercedes Dyer have dream performance CVs to date and their individual talents are very much the cornerstone of this production.
A Chorus Line is a true collaborative work on stage which broke all the rules in 1975 of what a stage musical should be. This boldness not only re-wrote the rule-book for stage musicals, but defined the style of so much that was to come after it. Here everybody’s story, everybody’s dance routine, is a star and it is unfair to pick any one performance out in this review. Like a real chorus line, this show works because everyone in it works by being exactly where they should be, doing exactly what they should do at any moment in the production. Taking the still unusual format of a performance time of nearly two hours without an interval means that we as an audience are always engaged in these stories without any interruptions.
Rejection is simply a part of any performer’s life and the opening song “I Hope I Get It” must resonate with anyone who has ever been in this situation. Those opening lines from “One” – “One singular sensation, every little step he takes” are now perhaps amongst the most famous ones in stage musical history, but all too often overlooked is the song that nearly never made it into the production – “What I Did For Love” and this for me is the song from this show.
A Chorus Line has everything that an audience could want, classic songs, classic dance routines, and personal stories that can really touch your heart.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com