She walks into a room and you know
She’s uncommonly rare, very unique,
Peripatetic, poetic, and chic—In fact, this sensational “one” never appears. The dancing en-
semble rehearses their backup routine to the point where it
suddenly clicks into focus as the foreground, all the ones who
have told their stories now becoming the many who can do
this number in perfect unison. (The ballet film The Red Shoes,
which the girls of the chorus line remember fondly from their
childhoods, should be recalled at this point, for there is a dance
without the star dancer at the end of the film too. The Red Shoes
threads its way through A Chorus Lineat a number of points.^17 )
The climax of the show is actually the curtain call, where all
the dancers—the seventeen hopefuls and the dancers who were
cut at the very beginning—sing and dance “One” in their bril-
liant costumes and top hats. Cassie must be one of them, en-
joying just what she wanted, belonging to the line, but we can-
not see her apart from the others. The shaping of the ensemble
is so much the subject of the musical that the curtain call is re-
ally the final number and the conclusion of the drama. Where
is the book when a number takes over the play?
A Chorus Lineis one of the pathbreaking musicals, and we
will study it in greater detail in subsequent chapters. For the
moment, the point is that A Chorus Linedoes declare for the
power of ensemble performance, but it does so by dramatizing
a convention of ensemble itself. The expansion of a number
into a chorus used to represent some other sort of social
cohesion—a Long Island party in the shows of the 1920s and
1930s, Seabees larking about in the South Pacific in Rodgers
and Hammerstein—but now nothing else is being represented.
This is the convention itself—it is about the chorus line. Such
100 CHAPTER FOUR
(^17) Zach’s cruel device of having the losers in the final audition step forward
as though they had won also occurs in the film. In an early script, the absence
of the star from the performance of “One” was to be indicated by a spotlight
moving about the stage in front of the chorus line, but this was abandoned. In-
formation of this sort is abundant in Mandelbaum, A Chorus Line and the Mu-
sicals of Michael Bennett.