A Chorus Line at Sadler’s Wells 

Mark Shenton in North London
5 August 2024 

“Who am I anyway? / Am I my résumé? / That is a picture of a person I don’t know”, sings one of the 17 dancers auditioning in front of director/choreographer Zach (former Royal Ballet dancer Adam Cooper, now a choreographer in his own right, who has graduated into a silver fox of an actor) for one of eight roles available in the chorus of his latest Broadway show.

The ensemble.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner 

Defining ourselves by our jobs – and searching for professional validation – isn’t just confined to those working in the theatre, of course, so the opening song of A Chorus Line just quoted has a universal resonance. But the enduring glory of the show is that it is also a celebration of Broadway itself and arguably its greatest contribution to American theatre, musical theatre – the two greatest words in the English language, as another “insider” backstage musical 42nd Street famously puts it. 

A Chorus Line is now an indelible – and incredible – part of the history of Broadway too, and is just a year shy of the 50th anniversary of its original New York premiere at the downtown Public Theater, before transferring to Broadway where it became the longest-running musical yet. It was first seen in London in a transfer of the original Broadway staging to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1976; I saw it on the last day of its run there in 1979, as the first show I saw in the West End after my family emigrated to the UK when I was just 16. It was last seen in London in a meticulous and moving re-creation of that original staging in 2013 at the London Palladium, which I revisited on repeat.

Now it is back in the capital for an all-too-brief summer return at Sadler’s Wells, appropriately London’s premiere address for modern, contemporary dance theatre. The legendary original choreography of Michael Bennett and co-choreographer Bob Avian has now been replaced by sizzlingly athletic but more generic choreography by Ellen Kane that is plucked from the school of Fame and pop videos with lots of leaps but less emotion.

Nevertheless, the emotional core of James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante’s book – inspired by the personal stories of its original cast – is preserved in Nikolai Foster’s production by some alternately tough and tender acting performances in both the scenes and the songs (with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban). Standing out is the show’s most extended and heartbreaking monologue, as Gregory Gardner (the thoughtfully restrained Bradley Delarosbel) tells of his parents discovering him working in a drag show. 

There’s also punchy work from Carly Mercedes Dyer as a star dancer (and former lover of Zach) seeking a return to the chorus line after a failed attempt to crack Hollywood. However, her big number “The Music and the Mirror” (one of the greatest uses of narrative dance in all of musical theatre in Donna McKechnie’s original Tony-winning performance) perhaps inevitably can’t match the impact it had originally.

And while the original production also benefitted enormously from the stripped-back aesthetic of Robin Wagner’s frugal, bare-bones design – which held back everything until its spectacular mirrored finale – this version, designed by Grace Smart and first seen at Leicester’s Curve in 2021, regularly intervenes. There are spectacular reveals of its giant lighting rig (Howard Hudson), an onstage bandstand that revolves into view at one point to display Matthew Spalding’s excellent musicians, and even pyrotechnic explosions in the finale that feel entirely too much.

So, too, is the frequent use of a roving human-operated onstage camera, with images of the dancers projected onto an onstage screen, which undermines the fact that this is a show about the theatre. (In contrast, the similar use of video in the recent London revival of Sunset Boulevard, soon to be Broadway bound, underlined the story’s cinematic origins.)

I love this musical despite some of this production’s missteps, though, and am delighted to see it so lovingly revived and cast.