A Chorus Line

Ah the Seventies. Already bored of perfectly polished Golden Age musicals, the mad geniuses of the decade decided that they’d invent the ‘concept musical’, based around a particular theme rather than a nice story.

Cue ‘A Chorus Line’. Based on interviews with a bunch of Broadway chorines, their fretful experiences of being ensemble members – the vexed question of wanting to be an individual but having to be identical to the next chorus member along – as well as their stories of growing up (abuse, rejection, escape through dance etc) were turned into this: a strange, bitty piece set on a bare Broadway stage, showing a group of 24 dancers audition for a part in the chorus of a new show.

There’s not really any story, and songs flit in and out, interwoven with dialogue and dance. Each of the dancers tells us a bit about themselves. Essentially, a strange product of its age, the original anti-musical.

Nikolai Foster’s production, which started life at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2021, is a long way from all that. The original production was surprising for its lack of set, costumes and its frankness around sex and sexuality. But the show’s been made glitzy and glossy over the years, and especially so here. There’s a colossal amount of set and lighting gone in to make it look like there’s none at all. Seriously, the lighting by Howard Hudson is phenomenal. It flashes between harsh house lights and beautiful sculpted stage lighting, with huge rigs that rise and fall above the stage.

Foster treats it mostly like a period piece, which is a good call as a lot of it does feel a little naff now. Edd Lindley’s costumes summon the period brilliantly, with lots of browns and oranges and, oh god, velour. But Foster also adds a roving camera, live images shown on a big screen hanging upstage, which doesn’t really work. The idea is sound: the camera picks out the individual, while we in the audience see the whole - that’s the thrust of the show - but just on a practical level it’s a distraction, too juddery and unfocused, showing up the flaws in Ellen Kane’s careful precise choreography.

The original choreography by director Michael Bennett and Bob Avian is kind of legendary now, and was untouched for a long time, so it’s a big act to follow, but Kane excels, especially in the bit we’re all waiting for, the finale number ‘One’, which sees the individual hoofers come together and unify with top hats and spangly costumes.

It’s a great ensemble, led by Adam Cooper’s bastard of a domineering director Zach, mining the dancers’ traumas for his own gratification. Foster handles the comic scenes just as deftly as the more serious ones, and Marvin Hamlisch’s score still sounds so amazing (especially with David Shrubsole’s orchestrations). That final number – which sticks in the head for days – has the high-kicking bombast of a great finale, but has this weird, slightly haunted quality too.

As does the whole production: yes, this is a big fun enjoyable show, but there’s a hair-trigger quality hidden just under the surface, the slightly edgy feeling that comes from too many big personalities in one room together, and the threat that an argument might break out at any moment.

Foster really gets at the paradox of the piece: that tension between the individual and the big picture, between grit and gloss. It’s a spectacular production of a musical that really doesn’t want to be spectacular.