The Musical as Drama

moments of book dialogue. In the book, Cassie is talking with
Zach about their previous relationship, but she is thinking of
herself as a dancer too, and the number breaks in upon the book
scene with changes of lighting and a shift of attention to the
dancer’s mirror. She can see herself dance in the mirror, the
projection of herself which the number is drawing forth. This
matters more to her than her old affair with Zach. Each time
the lighting returns to book mode, Zach has a flat line which
shows that he does not understand Cassie’s intensity, or is
backing away from it (“So you’re going through a slow period,
it happens to everyone”). The business about their old affair is
boring, but Cassie’s passion for dancing has tremendous power.
She sees herself, as we do, reflected in the mirrors at the back
of the stage, and her involvement in the mirror image of her
dance leaves Zach trailing in the heterosexual dust. (She is say-
ing that dance should have been the basis of her relationship
with Zach, as if they could have had both, but he doesn’t get it.
His recuperation will come soon, in his sympathy for the in-
jured dancer Paul.)
I have said in earlier chapters that the move into a number
enlarges the book characters into new versions of themselves,
song-and-dance versions. Cassie’s mirror increases that effect
and makes it visible. She sees herself as we see her, a dancer
now and no longer only the woman who used to sleep with
Zach, and she is drawn to her multiplied image in the same
way we are, as though the multiplied image gives us something
beyond our ordinary Zach-bound selves.
This effect of mirrors is called on in the final number of the
show, the ensemble performance of “One” that we examined in
chapter 5. How many dancers perform this final number? One
would think it should be the winners of the audition, eight in
number, Cassie included. But because this is also the curtain
call for A Chorus Lineitself, the eight losers also come out, and
so does a seventeenth dancer, Paul, who was injured in the au-
ditions. They are all wearing gold costumes. Zach should be
there too, shouldn’t he? and the dance captain? Some produc-
tions (but not the original Broadway staging) bring out the ex-
tra dancers from the opening number, who were cut early in

184 CHAPTER EIGHT