On the Line

Call them dancers. When they arrived at a taping session led by Michael Bennett in January of 1974, all they had to do was answer a few questions about their lives. Truthfully. Some felt scared. Others felt free. Everyone realized it was the first time in their careers they had ever been asked to put their life stories on the line. And however aone they might have felt, suddenly they found an unknown community of artists, like themselves, who shared the same hopes, dreams, aspirations ... On the Line is an in-depth look behind the process of creating what has been - and continues to be - one of the hottest tickets wherever, whenever it plays: A Chorus Line. Stepping forward for the first time, the original cast members now tel the stories that they didn't tell onstage - or to the press - about their commitment to and collaborative effect on the longest-running show in Broadway history. A Chorus Line changed their lives forever. And it changed an era. Originating in the minds of two Broadway dancers named Tony Stevens and Michon Peacock, the cumulative and communal effort of A Chorus Line became a phenomenon that won the Tony, Drama Critics Circle, Obie, and Drama Desk awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Adapted from the details of many years spent in the theater, A Chorus Line fused dance and performance, music, and searing emotional insight into a show that was determinedly contemporary in its outlook, concerns, and form. And because the actors offered themselves to and for the amalgam, what emerged was the best of fiction fueled by the hardest of truths. But beyond the artistic triumph were countless manipulations by the show's director and producer; cast in-fighting and competition; and the continual reinforcement of the transitory nature of their chosen profession as stardom became imminent and ephemeral. Clive Wilson. Ron Kuhlman. Kay Cole. Wayne Cilento. Baayork Lee. Michel Stuart. Donna McKechnie. Kelly Bishop. Thommie Walsh. Nancy Lane. Patricia Garland. Ronald Dennis. Don Percassi. Renee Baughman. Rick Mason. Pamela Blair. Sammy Williams. Priscilla Lopez. Robert LuPone. Eight performances a week they stunned a nation in America's singular sensation. Now, from the strutting cadences of Marvin Hamlisch's score to the lights up on Broadway's Shubert Alley, On the Line goes way beyond anything you've ever heard before about a group of "kids" who showed up for a taping, and changed the history of American theater forever. On the Line is the real story of a seminal theater work and its creation. And like the night these dancers were brought together, it finally hits the truth. -- from back cover.