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In fairness to Burns, though his work here is busy and rather cheap sounding, anyone who watches the movie (but why would you?) can see that the director and producers were aiming for a hip, modern, ’80s look and sound, so it’s likely they imposed that vision on the Broadway-favorite orchestrator.
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The soundtrack recording provides numerous examples of the film’s wrongdoings, which include giving “What I Did For Love” to Cassie as a solo and replacing “The Music and the Mirror” and the “Hello Twelve…” montage with, respectively, the inferior “Let Me Dance For You” and “Surprise, Surprise.” Also unfortunate are Ralph Burns’ synthesizer-heavy orchestrations. But that hardly excuses Richard Attenborough’s bafflingly misguided interpretation. With its inherent theatricality and non-traditional story structure, A Chorus Line was always going to be a difficult property to adapt for the screen, even in the best of hands. Matt Koplikįilm Soundtrack, 1985 (Casablanca/Polygram) No stars not recommended. The fact that the work of these three men never feels disjointed and comes together as a beautiful whole is representative of the theme of A Chorus Line in general. Fun fact: Due to the small budgets for the workshops, Bennett was unable to afford a solo orchestrator to work on the entire show, so he instead hired three - masters Hershy Kay, Jonathan Tunick, and Bill Byers - to individually orchestrate various musical numbers. Though the grand montage “Hello Twelve, Hello, Thirteen, Hello Love” is only represented here in chunks, and the music-and-dialogue sequence “And…” wasn’t recorded at all, there are no serious complaints about this truly great cast album. The score remains a classic, with Kleban’s conversational lyrics seamlessly flowing in and out of dialogue as Hamlisch’s melodies display great variety in style and emotion, from pulsating anxiety (the opening “I Hope I Get It”) to classic show biz razzle-dazzle (the finale ,“One”). There’s also Priscilla Lopez as the bouncy Diana, Kelly Bishop as the cynical yet vulnerable Sheila, Sammy Williams as the conflicted Paul, and Pamela Blair as the brassy Val - but, truthfully one could keep going on and on about each cast member’s contribution. )Though we don’t get to see any of her beautiful dancing here, her vocals are the most impressive of any Cassie, and the sheer desperation in her delivery of “The Music and the Mirror” resonates deeply. (She won a Tony Award for her performance. As Cassie, a veteran dancer who’s hoping for a second chance at her career and who also has a complicated history with Zach, Donna Mckechnie is exceptional. The definitive cast performs with a gumption that’s palpable to the listener, expressing each character’s desire to dance and their need get the job. From beginning to end, this original Broadway cast recording feels like lightning in a bottle. Some of the dancers offer humorous anecdotes (“I Can Do That”), others share painful stories (the moving “At the Ballet”). The setting is an open audition of dancers for an unnamed Broadway musical, during which the show’s director, Zach, sets his final 16 hopefuls in a line and proceeds to inquire about their lives.
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Both achingly real and thrillingly theatrical, the show premiered there to ecstatic reviews and quickly moved to Broadway, where it became a massive hit.
#The chorus line movie cast series
From those tapes, Bennett along with librettists James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, composer Marvin Hamlisch, and lyricist Edward Kleban shaped the material through a series of workshops at The Public Theater. Bennett got together a bunch of these “gypsies,” many of whom would go on to be in the original company of A Chorus Line, and urged everyone to talk about their lives, all the while taping the conversations. The conception of the show began with Broadway wunderkind Michael Bennett’s idea that there might be a musical to be made from the stories of the lives of Broadway’s dancers, a group that was undervalued and overlooked at the time. Original Broadway Cast, 1975 (Columbia/Masterworks Broadway) (5 / 5) In 1975, A Chorus Line was a phenomenon.