‘A Chorus Line' and ‘Chicago' at 50: Who Won?

New York Times

18-07-2025

Just two musicals open on Broadway during the summer of 1975. 'Chicago,' in June, is received warily, like a stranger at the door. It's 'a very sleek show,' writes Walter Kerr in The New York Times. 'It just seems to be the wrong one.' But 'A Chorus Line,' in July, elicits unthrottled raves. 'The conservative word' for it, writes Kerr's colleague Clive Barnes, 'might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific.'
Yet the musicals have more in common than their initial reception reveals. Both shows are about performers: 'Chicago' featuring 1920s vaudevillians with a sideline in murder; 'A Chorus Line,' contemporary Broadway dancers. Both are masterminded by director-choreographers of acknowledged (and self-acknowledged) brilliance: 'Chicago' by Bob Fosse; 'A Chorus Line' by Michael Bennett. Both are seen, regardless of reviews, as exemplars of style-meets-content storytelling in a period of confusing change in musical theater. And both shows remain touchstones today, albeit of very different things.
Indeed, their differences now seem more salient than their similarities, and fate has been funny with their reputations. For 50 years, 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago' have tussled for primacy like Jacob and Esau, at least in the eyes and ears of Broadway fans. Which show is 'the wrong one' now?
To answer that, you might look uncharitably at their faults. 'A Chorus Line' is shaggy and gooped up with psychobabble. 'Chicago' is mechanical, a big hammer pounding one nail. But both are so well crafted for performance that those faults fade in any good production. For me, having seen each many times, the highlights are more telling.
In 'A Chorus Line' my favorite moment comes near the end of the song 'At the Ballet,' in which three women auditioning for an ensemble role in a Broadway musical sing their hearts out about sad childhoods redeemed by dance. Up the 'steep and very narrow stairway' that led to ballet class, Sheila learned to be happy despite her unloving father. Bebe came to see herself as pretty despite her disdainful mother. And though Maggie lacks the words for how dancing allowed her to feel, she doesn't lack the music. At the climax of a number that has been troubling its way through various cloudy keys for five minutes, her salvation comes in the form of a high E cast over a horizon of sudden D Major sunlight.
It's gorgeous harmonically (the songs are by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban) but also emotionally (the book is by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante). Having learned to love the only home that loved them back, the women alchemize their personal despair into public joy and share it with us through bravura singing and dancing.
As for my favorite moment from 'Chicago' — actually, I can't even quote it. It's too vulgar.
Vulgarity is what you'd expect from 'Chicago,' in which the central figure, Roxie Hart, makes a bigger name for herself on Death Row than she could ever make on the stage. To her and the show's other 'merry murderesses,' the upshot of shooting a lover isn't justice but fame; indeed, justice is fame. 'She made a scandal and a start,' runs a typically biting lyric by Fred Ebb, to the catchiest possible melody by John Kander.
We are in two very different worlds. 'A Chorus Line' is psychological, wholesome, sincere; 'Chicago' is sociological, jagged, jaded. 'A Chorus Line' keens: When one of the dancers injures his knee rehearsing a tap routine, the others sing the wonderfully weepy 'What I Did for Love' as a kind of professional obituary. But in cold 'Chicago,' with songs like 'Razzle Dazzle' and 'We Both Reached for the Gun,' the tears are only for show. No one can sing her heart out because no one has a heart.
If we can't judge the shows by whose world is better — how to compare sweet apples and bitter oranges? — we can ask a bigger question about the birthright of the American musical theater. Which delivered our local art form into the future?
At first it seemed certain to be 'A Chorus Line,' and not just because it won nine Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, famously skunking 'Chicago.' Nor because the original Broadway production ran for more than 6,000 performances, its first national tour for six years. ('Chicago' did not quite crack 1,000 Broadway performances; its first national tour eked out a year.) Nor even because, within a year or two, 'What I Did for Love' had been recorded by pop stars as stylistically diverse as Aretha Franklin, Bing Crosby, Grace Jones, Petula Clark and Peggy Lee. The biggest number from 'Chicago,' 'All That Jazz,' was heard mostly on its cast album.
Something else favored 'A Chorus Line.' Its story of 24 performers auditioning for eight spots in the ensemble of a flashy new musical flattered the hopes as well as the gumption of theater people in a time of commercial collapse. During the early 1970s, Broadway attendance dropped precipitously, falling to half of what it had been in the late 1960s. By January 1974, 15 of the 38 Broadway theaters then extant were empty, with no bookings in the offing; six were for sale.
But thanks in part to the enormous success of 'A Chorus Line,' Broadway began to rebound, allowing the scope of adventurous taste to rebound with it. The Sondheim revolution that had begun in 1970 with 'Company' reached a climax with the flop 'Pacific Overtures' in 1976 and, three years later, the quasi-hit 'Sweeney Todd.' Now considered classics, both looked backward in time to look outward at the world, 'Pacific Overtures' considering America's 'opening' of Japan in the 19th century; 'Sweeney Todd,' the violence unleashed during the same period by the Industrial Revolution.
In that company, 'A Chorus Line' began to seem provincial and era bound, looking not outward but inward, at the theater of the 1970s itself. The invasion of the British mega-musicals, starting with 'Cats' in 1982, pummeled 'A Chorus Line' from another direction, knocking the wind out of its touching soliloquies. Richard Attenborough's overblown 1985 movie, earning just $14 million on a budget of twice that, seemed to slam another door on the original stage show, which closed in 1990. An 'archivally and anatomically correct reproduction' in 2006 did little to suggest it had more to offer.
By then, the underdog fortunes of 'Chicago' had begun to grow. A minimalist staging for the Encores! series in 1996 led to a Broadway transfer, which won six Tony Awards and turned the previously provisional critical acclaim into wholehearted hosannas. Now the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, the revival long ago surpassed both versions of 'A Chorus Line' put together, with more than 11,000 performances earning $800 million to date. Rubbing salt in the wound, Rob Marshall's sleekly kinetic movie was a triumph, grossing $300 million and winning six Academy Awards (including best picture) in 2003.
To understand why 'Chicago' swamped 'A Chorus Line' in the public imagination, you must also look at how the two musicals work. 'A Chorus Line,' based on the taped reminiscences of Broadway dancers, is a lot like a yearbook: You get the class picture (buff, bluff, proud) and then the dig-deeper individual portraits (I'm tone-deaf, I'm flat-chested, I'm gay).
But after each revelation, the dancers return to the anonymity of the line, because their destiny, at best, is to support and never upstage a real star. In that way, the show, however perfect, is self-sealing. You close the yearbook and put it away.
But if the theater is the whole world in 'A Chorus Line' — the stage is literally all you see on the stage — in 'Chicago' the opposite is true: The whole world is theater. The book, by Ebb and Fosse, based on a 1926 play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, seeks to literalize the showbizification of American justice by performing it as a series of variety acts.
Each song repurposes a familiar genre and personality from the period as commentary on the courts. Roxie essentially auditions for acquittal. Another showgirl, Velma Kelly, tries to ride her legal coattails, suggesting a sister act. Their lawyer, Billy Flynn, does a ventriloquist bit, with the defendant as his dummy.
We are not supposed to care about any of them, only about the world that would turn 'two scintillating sinners' into stars. And because we still live in that world — celebrity remaining the best get-out-of-jail-free card — it seems inevitable that the show has proved eternal. Clever, merciless stunt casting by the producers has underlined and monetized that theme, dredging up C-list names to play roles they are qualified for only by virtue of being unqualified.
What's eternal in 'A Chorus Line' is something else entirely. Its dancers, despite their disappointments, universally accept their fate as a fair trade. 'Love is never gone,' they sing in the 11 o'clock number.
Because both directors, Fosse and Bennett, understood how to tell a story congruently, the visual and choreographic styles of the two shows are as different as their perspectives. Bennett's staging — Bob Avian was the co-choreographer — is poetic and minimal: When the dancers cover their faces with their résumé photos, we see how individuality is obscured even in the act of self-presentation. And when, in the finale, the black wall at the back of the stage revolves to create a palace of glittering mirrors, we see how the multiplication of the self does the same thing. The mirrors anonymize perfection.
In 'Chicago' we are forced into complicity with imperfection. The dancing, however brilliantly performed, is sweaty and scuzzy; the characters are not meant to be talented. Nor is Fosse's visual poetry pretty. Bangles, fans and fedoras are just props and strategies, the way a gun is. In the original production, when Gwen Verdon, who played Roxie, inhaled a piece of confetti, it got caught in her vocal cords, necessitating surgery. You know your show is cold and cutting when it makes sense that a shred of celebratory paper would become a weapon.
Cold and cutting turned out to be the ticket to the future. If 'A Chorus Line' is a culminating expression of one strain of musical theater — the Rodgers and Hammerstein strain, in which individuals must come to grips with society — 'Chicago' is a foundational expression of a new one, in which, society be damned, individuals are out for themselves. 'Now, every son of a bitch is a snake in the grass,' goes a lyric from the ironically titled 'Class.' And: 'Ain't there no decency left?'
Fifty years have taught us to leave decency to 'A Chorus Line.' In an indecent age, 'Chicago' is inevitable, the treacherous confetti in our throats.
Animations by Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library. 'Chicago' images by Friedman-Abeles/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; 'A Chorus Line' images by Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.