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    The Moves That Make ‘Chicago’ and ‘A Chorus Line’ So Special

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    Fifty years ago, when director-choreographer giants still walked the earth, two of the biggest — Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett — created highly influential shows that have attained legendary status and lasted: “Chicago” and “A Chorus Line.”These were musicals with dancing at the center. The showbiz-cynical attitude of “Chicago,” a tale of 1920s murderers who go into vaudeville, was inseparable from its choreographic style. “A Chorus Line” was about Broadway dancers, built from their real-life stories and framed as an audition.To celebrate the golden anniversaries of these shows, The New York Times invited Robyn Hurder, who has performed in productions of both over the past two decades (and recently received a Tony nomination for her performance in “Smash”), to demonstrate and discuss what makes the choreography so special. To coach her, direct-lineage experts were on hand.Robyn Hurder performs part of “One,” a signature song of “A Chorus Line.”For “A Chorus Line,” Hurder could turn to Baayork Lee, an original cast member who has been staging and directing the show ever since. (She’s directing an anniversary benefit performance on July 27.) For “Chicago,” Verdon Fosse Legacy — an organization dedicated to preserving and reconstructing the choreography of Fosse and his chief collaborator, Gwen Verdon — sent Dana Moore, who worked with Fosse in his 1978 “Dancin’” and his 1986 revival of “Sweet Charity.” She also danced in the 1996 “Chicago” revival and in revivals of “A Chorus Line,” too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Chorus Line’ and ‘Chicago’ at 50: Who Won?

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      Just two musicals open on Broadway during the summer of 1975. “Chicago,” in June, is received warily, like a stranger at the door. It’s “a very sleek show,” writes Walter Kerr in The New York Times. “It just seems to be the wrong one.” But “A Chorus Line,” in July, elicits unthrottled raves. “The conservative word” for it, writes Kerr’s colleague Clive Barnes, “might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific.”Yet the musicals have more in common than their initial reception reveals. Both shows are about performers: “Chicago” featuring 1920s vaudevillians with a sideline in murder; “A Chorus Line,” contemporary Broadway dancers. Both are masterminded by director-choreographers of acknowledged (and self-acknowledged) brilliance: “Chicago” by Bob Fosse; “A Chorus Line” by Michael Bennett. Both are seen, regardless of reviews, as exemplars of style-meets-content storytelling in a period of confusing change in musical theater. And both shows remain touchstones today, albeit of very different things.Donna McKechnie (center, in red) and the cast of the original Broadway production of “A Chorus Line.”Indeed, their differences now seem more salient than their similarities, and fate has been funny with their reputations. For 50 years, “A Chorus Line” and “Chicago” have tussled for primacy like Jacob and Esau, at least in the eyes and ears of Broadway fans. Which show is “the wrong one” now?To answer that, you might look uncharitably at their faults. “A Chorus Line” is shaggy and gooped up with psychobabble. “Chicago” is mechanical, a big hammer pounding one nail. But both are so well crafted for performance that those faults fade in any good production. For me, having seen each many times, the highlights are more telling.Jerry Orbach and the cast of the 1977-78 national tour of “Chicago.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robin Wagner, Set Designer Who Won Three Tony Awards, Dies at 89

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      He created sets for more than 50 of Broadway’s most celebrated productions, including “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “On the Twentieth Century” and “The Producers.”Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer of more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to be racing toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca strapped to the front of it, died on Monday at his home in New York City. He was 89.His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She did not say in what borough he lived.Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower that was raked upward to the back in a delicate curve.On Broadway, his work included the sets for the transcendent 1968 rock musical “Hair” (in The New York Times, Clive Barnes described a “beautiful junk-art setting”) as well as “The Great White Hope,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “42nd Street,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Dreamgirls” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.”Mr. Wagner’s stage designs could be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and what the director wanted. He viewed scenic design as problem solving.“When I’m reading the script, I can see it, how it fits together and how you get from one scene to another,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I guess that’s what makes designers designers — they visualize things a certain way.”For the musical “City of Angels,” which opened on Broadway in 1989, he created dual color schemes to match the interconnected stories that the show’s writer, Larry Gelbart, set in a world of mansions, sound stages and solariums in 1940s Los Angeles. In sequences involving an author who was turning his novel into a screenplay, everything was in color, while those involving a private eye movie character were in black and white, befitting the show’s homage to film noir.In his review in The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Mr. Wagner’s set design was “brilliant, with flats moving on and off in a rhythm that is nothing if not movie-ish and with a final pull back to a Hollywood sound stage that is Cecil B. De Mille breathtaking.”Mr. Wagner’s sets for the musical “City of Angels” after it opened in 1989.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryMr. Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second for scenic design following one in 1978 for “On the Twentieth Century.” He won a third in 2001, for “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’s hit about a scheming pair who try to make a financial killing by purposely staging a Broadway flop.One of his most enduring designs, which did not receive a Tony nomination, was his simplest. For “A Chorus Line,” the producer Joseph Papp’s ultimately long-running musical about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical, Mr. Wagner’s design consisted only of mirrored walls, black velour drapes and a white line on the floor.“That was the result of two years’ work of Michael Bennett and I trying to distill things,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill in 2007, referring to the director and co-choreographer of the show, which opened on Broadway in 1975. “We started with big things for visualizing scenes, and as we went through the show’s workshop period, they got smaller and smaller.”He added, “And then we knew we needed a black box, which represents theater, and that we needed the mirrors, because they represent the dance studio.”Robin Samuel Anton Wagner was born on Aug. 31, 1933, in San Francisco to Jens and Phyllis (Smith-Spurgeon) Wagner. His father, who had immigrated from Denmark, was a maritime engineer and, for a time, the keeper of two lighthouses where the Wagners lived until Robin was 10. His mother had been a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States, where she was a homemaker.One of Mr. Wagner’s simplest sets was for the musical “A Chorus Line.” The scene, in 1990, was the finale of the last performance of the show in its original Broadway run.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs a boy, Robin was enamored of Disney films like “Fantasia” and hoped to be an animator, creating the backgrounds of cartoons, not the characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio, trying to find my way into some kind of real life, which I still think I sometimes am,” he said in an oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.He created comic books in junior high school and, after high school, attended the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953 to 1954. While there, and after, he worked on set design with theater and opera groups, like the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco; built window displays for a clothing store; and got a paying design job in summer stock with the Sacramento Music Circus.Mr. Wagner moved in 1958 to New York, where he became an assistant to one Broadway designer, Ben Edwards, and then another, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to 1967, he was the set designer for Arena Stage, the renowned regional theater in Washington.Returning to New York, he designed the sets for “Hair,” which Clive Barnes, in The Times, described as “masterly.”A scene from “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” in 1992. Mr. Wagner designed the sets for it and its sequel, “Angels in America: Perestroika.”John Haynes/Bridgeman ImagesGeorge Wolfe, the director who worked with him on several shows, including the “Angels in America” productions, said that Mr. Wagner had a talent for finding the essence of a story. He recalled one of Mr. Wagner’s small, but effective, touches on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.“Jelly was dying in L.A., and Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like the graphic of an earthquake,” Mr. Wolfe said in a telephone interview. “It was so breathtakingly simple; it was along the lower part of the back wall.”He added, “Just those three lines, you knew it was L.A.”But there was also a complex engineer’s side to Mr. Wagner, which was on view with “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Bennett’s 1981 musical based loosely on the career of the Supremes. Mr. Wagner designed five aluminum, spotlight-studded towers that moved in various configurations to create — with minimal use of props — the illusion that the setting was changing from a nightclub to a recording studio to a Las Vegas show palace.“And all the lighting bars were basically platforms,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill, “so the actors could climb up on those things and fly out, which they did.”Mr. Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design earned him a Tony nomination and one of his six Drama Desk Awards.His final Broadway credit was for “Leap of Faith,” a musical about a fraudulent evangelist, in 2012.In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Kowal; another daughter, Leslie Wagner; a son, Kurt; and a granddaughter. His marriages to Joyce Workman and Paula Kauffman ended in divorce. The train that Mr. Wagner designed for “On the Twentieth Century” was one of his great creations, with its long, elegant, streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments that were open on one side to let the characters be seen. Train exteriors that slid in front of the compartments let the audience look at the actors from the outside, after they had peered inside at them.“This gesture,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times, “aside from notably enhancing the cinematic quality of the show — nothing is more movie-like than quick cuts from inside to outside — is also a gentle and pleasing play on the traditional description of the stage set as a room in which the fourth wall has been removed.” More

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      What Makes ‘Follies’ a Classic? 7 Answers and 1 Big Problem.

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      Fifty years ago, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman exploded the Broadway “concept” musical by conjuring the bittersweet reunion of aging showgirls.It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely: a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment — yet survived.Not only is “Follies,” which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50 years later, trailing a string of revivals, revisals and gala concerts, but it is also now recognized as the high-water mark of the serious “concept” musical, that genre in which form and function are brought into the tightest possible alignment. The score, by Stephen Sondheim, is a marvel and a minefield of layered meanings. The sets make comments. And in the original staging, by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, even frivolity had to serve a purpose.Not that there was much frivolity in James Goldman’s script; the gun disappeared but the two couples were still floridly dysfunctional. Both wives had been showgirls in the Weismann (think Ziegfeld) Follies at the end of its run of annual extravaganzas in the years between the World Wars. Both had been in love with Ben, a Stage Door Johnny with big ambitions. But Phyllis was smart enough to nab him; they are now wealthy, unhappy sophisticates. Sally — romantic, conventional — got Ben’s feckless pal Buddy; never for one moment in the 30 ensuing years has she been happy with the trade-off.Ghostly showgirls wander through the ruins of a theater in the 2017 London revival.Johan PerssonDuring a Follies reunion at the decrepit Weismann Theater, on the night before it will be razed to make room for a parking lot, the two couples meet up and promptly disintegrate. As they do, their past selves appear alongside them as living characters. At the same time, former stars of the Follies relive memories and stumble through old numbers, magically ventriloquized from Broadway’s past in the Sondheim songs.As the ghosts crowd in, the couples’ tangled history is unearthed, bringing them to the point of a group nervous breakdown in the form of a 30-minute mini-“Follies” of their own. To see them collapse, dissolving into a fantasy world accompanied by a Golden Age score, is to see American optimism collapse along with them.But its big canvas is not the only reason “Follies” remains important. (See seven more reasons, and a caveat, below.) In its seriousness and cleverness, in its matching of style to substance, in its use of a medium to comment on itself, it has hardly ever been bettered. In any case, ambitious musical theater would never be the same; we would not have “Fun Home” or “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” without “Follies” hovering behind them, the most beautiful ghost of all.1. A requiem for nostalgiaThe ensemble of older actors with their younger counterparts hovering above in the 2001 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “Follies” is about two lousy marriages. Mucking around among their mind games and betrayals, it more readily recalls midcentury drama than anything in the musical canon. (Imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by Busby Berkeley.) But it’s also about the lousy marriage of American ideals and American reality, a union of near opposites polished and preserved by the shellac of nostalgia.The brilliant concept was to use the two stories to inform each other, letting the Faulknerian past that is “not even past” intrude upon the present. So Sally’s ghost makes love to Ben while his makes love to her; later, she sings a torch song that sounds as if it’s from 1941. The reunion, if it reunifies one couple, destroys another. Even the songs we love are dangerous. That paradox is crystallized in “One More Kiss,” warbled by an ancient Viennese soprano while her younger self casually tosses off its coloratura. “Never look back,” the lyric warns. “Follies” is what happens if you do.2. In praise of older womenThe ghosts of Follies past that live in the theater had to be both ethereal and imposing. Casting was done among Las Vegas showgirls who were already six feet tall before their enormous headdresses turned them into giants. Even so, a Who Was Who of middle-aged and older women stole the show: Dorothy Collins, 44; Mary McCarty, 47; Yvonne De Carlo, 48; Alexis Smith, 49; Fifi D’Orsay, 66; and Ethel Shutta, 74, among them. Though cast for the kick of nostalgia their names elicited, they made survival itself seem vital and sexy, as Smith’s high-stepping Time magazine cover demonstrated.3. Copies that improved on the originalsBernadette Peters performing the now-standard “Losing My Mind” in the 2011 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of the performative songs in “Follies” — the ones sung as if they were real numbers from the past — are pastiches, sampling Harold Arlen (“I’m Still Here”), George Gershwin (“Losing My Mind”), Irving Berlin (“Beautiful Girls”), Sigmund Romberg (“One More Kiss”) and many others. With this catch: In almost every case, they are better crafted and richer than their templates. Which makes their salute to the past a wonderfully complicated, and sometimes cruel, gesture.4. A number for the agesTerri White, center, as Stella Deems leading “Who’s That Woman” in 2011 with (from left) Elaine Paige, Florence Lacey, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Jan Maxwell, Peters and Susan Watson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStella Deems, an old-school belter, had a specialty “mirror” number in the Follies. Now, at the reunion, she and six alumnae of the chorus line, including Phyllis and Sally, try to perform it, even though the dance (as one of them puts it) “winded me when I was 19.” Soon you see why, as the choreography, which at first involves simple poses and mirroring gestures, turns into an exhausting tap extravaganza, courtesy of Bennett. But the mindblower comes halfway through, when strange shards of spinning light emerge from the dark behind the panting, middle-aged women. These are the ghosts of their former selves: glamazons in mirror-encrusted costumes performing the number tirelessly and perfectly.By the time the real and the remembered choruses merge in a thrilling finale, the idea of mirroring has taken on a larger meaning. “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!” Stella sings in wonder and horror at the person she sees in her looking glass. “That woman is me!”5. ‘I’m Still Here’De Carlo — a movie star of the ’40s and ’50s but Lily Munster to everyone thereafter — had the biggest name in the cast yet one of the smallest roles. She needed a showstopper; the one Sondheim originally wrote wasn’t working. During tryouts in Boston, he replaced it with “I’m Still Here,” a five-minute number that catalogs with tart good spirits a showbiz life (based on Joan Crawford’s) in which you “career from career to career.” It could not have been staged more simply: De Carlo basically just stood downstage and let it rip. Still, it was (and remains, in the many interpretations since) a knockout, driving home the point that long-term professional survival, and maybe emotional survival as well, is often a matter of inoculating oneself with failure.6. The fabulousnessAt $800,000, “Follies” was a very expensive show for its time, but you saw where the money went. Boris Aronson’s set, which exploded into lace and froufrou for the final sequence, was technically complex; Florence Klotz’s costumes were among the most sumptuous seen on a Broadway stage since Ziegfeld himself. And with all the major roles doubled by “ghosts,” the cast was huge: 47 performers, not including understudies and standbys.“Nearly everything that could cause a Broadway musical to go over budget did,” says Ted Chapin, now the president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization but then Prince’s apprentice — and the author of “Everything Was Possible,” a memoir of that experience. “If it were produced today, I would imagine it would log in at close to $30 million.” Alas, that’s a sum no one would spend on such a chancy show, which means we’ll never see its like again.7. That posterDavid Edward Byrd designed the poster for the original production.PhotofestIn 1971, the graphic artist David Edward Byrd was best known for his rock posters, including one for the original Woodstock and one for Jimi Hendrix. But he’d started designing for theatrical productions as well, and when an “aesthetic argument” led Prince to ditch one of his Art Deco-inspired sketches, Byrd came up with the now-famous face of “Follies”: an impassive beauty with flowing Technicolor hair and a branching crack from chin to brow. (The face was based on Marlene Dietrich’s, in a photo from “Shanghai Express.”) To Byrd, it represented the end of an era, but it also conveyed, with powerful concision, the crackup of an American fantasy of endless tranquillity. And, not incidentally, made a Broadway show seem as cool as Woodstock.8. Then again …“Follies” is brilliant and “Follies” is a mess. It bowls me over perhaps more than any other musical, yet I have never been fully satisfied with it intellectually. Look beneath the unparalleled packaging — the score, costumes, casting, staging — and you find a lot that doesn’t add up. As Frank Rich noted in his 1971 Harvard Crimson review, it’s “a musical about the death of the musical” — a wonderful paradox but one that undermines the experience. If musicals are dead … is this one too?Sometimes — even when Carlotta sings “I’m Still Here” — the vaunted concept seems a bit opaque. (If it’s about her own life, how could it also be her Follies number?) And don’t look too closely at the main characters, either; spouters of self-conscious dialogue, they are only fully believable when they sing. For that, Goldman usually gets the blame — but if so, he should also get credit for providing the armature for everyone else’s epochal achievement. It may be about the death of musicals, but “Follies” pointed the way to bringing them back to life. More