for Bobby might be taken to mean that the ensemble possibil-
ity drains away, but Companycannot end with Bobby singing
alone. Everyone feels the pressure that calls the ensemble
together at the end for a reprise of the opening song. That
is how the musical really ends, with ensemble performance,
Bobby singing with everyone else. It is a convention, of course,
for this reprise sets up the curtain calls (it is Number 22 in the
vocal score, entitled “Bows”), but conventions have meanings
and reveal the principles at work in the form. Try ending Com-
panywith Bobby alone, without the company. The audience
would feel it had been short-changed, to say nothing of the
company.
A Chorus Line: The Thing Itself
A Chorus Line(1975) tests the convention of ensemble perfor-
mance in another way, by turning the ensemble itself into the
subject of the musical. The book concerns the audition process
for more than seventeen young dancers who are trying to make
it on Broadway. Only eight are to be selected. The seventeen
hopefuls who survive the first cut have to tell stories about
themselves in answer to the director Zach’s request to learn
more about them while they are trying out. Some of these vi-
gnettes become musical numbers. Mike remembers watching
his sister at ballet lessons and knowing “I Can Do That.” Di-
ana tells of her ordeal studying method acting at the High
School of the Performing Arts and feeling “Nothing.” There
are also duet and trio recollections. Three of the girls recall the
importance of ballet training in their childhoods and combine
into a trio-and-dance, “At the Ballet.” Just about everyone
joins in the rousing number about adolescence and sex, “Hello
Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.”
These spots of personal recollection can lead to the impres-
sion that the show is about individualism in the traditional
American grain. For Frank Rich, “A Chorus Linestands for the
supremacy of the individual, for the right of even the lowliest