9 August 2007
10:00 pm Eastern Time
W Hotel, Union Square, New York
Have just been to see A Chorus Line on Broadway, a show that
for years was the longest running show on Broadway, a record it broke
on 29 September 1983 after 3,389 performances (and on that night, to
celebrate, the producers organized the world's longest chorus line,
with an incredible 332 top-hatted dancers on stage at once!).
The show premiered on 25 July 1975 at the Shubert Theater in New York
and eventually ran for 6,137 performances until 28 April 1990. And if
the production I've just seen is anything like the original, I can see
why it lasted so long. (Incidentally, in a previous job as a theatre
drummer, I had the pleasure of playing percussion in a touring version
of the show in Scotland; it was years ago, but I had such fun, the
memories remain vivid.)
It's an incredible piece – a string of desperate, competitive dancers
striving to secure work in a chorus line bare their souls – and often
more – at a tense audition. And how these actors and dancers can move
they way they do while singing and acting so well is beyond me. Go see
it if you can!
The current record for the longest running musical on Broadway is
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, which opened on
26 January 1988 and had its 7,486th performance, at the Majestic
Theatre, on 9 January 2006, beating Webber's own Cats.
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