Every Little Step

This fascinating documentary by directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo chronicles the origins of Broadway's 1970s megahit A Chorus Line, as well as auditions for a 21st-century revival of the play. Besides offering vintage and recent interviews with many of the show's creators, the film includes behind-the-scenes casting highlights distilled from more than 400 hours of footage shot in 2005 and 2006.

A Chorus Line got its start in January 1974, when director/choreographer Michael Bennett invited 22 dancers to discuss their lives and careers in an all-night bull session that he recorded. Clips from those tapes are heard throughout Every Little Step, revealing how the dancers' anecdotes, confessions, biographies, and bravado became parts of the play.

Open call auditions in 2005 for the Broadway revival attracted hordes of hopefuls. A lucky 3,000 auditioned for revival director Robert Avian, Bennett's former partner. (Tony-winner Bennett died in 1987.) Revival choreographer Baayork Lee played Connie in the original show, a character based on herself. "Do I get a chance to say who I want to play my life?" she jokingly asks.

Footage of the dancing and singing tryouts is alternately entertaining and emotionally wrenching. That's because we get to know several of the earnestly desperate hopefuls before seeing their ecstatic triumphs or crushing rejections—and at least one of the cuts comes as a genuine shock.

Among the most likeable and talented of the wannabes: The adorably sweet Chryssie Whitehead, trying out for the role of Kristine, manages to bump a microphone twice and clumsily drop a folder of papers on camera. Jason Tam's audition as Paul, the character who breaks down in shame over his parents seeing him in drag, makes Avila himself weep. ("Sign him up!" Avila says through tears afterward.) And Yuka Takara is so exuberantly enthusiastic about playing the petite spitfire Connie that you'll be crossing your fingers hoping she gets the role.

We also see glimpses of the hopefuls' home lives. The most moving is a visit with Charlotte D'Amboise's crippled father Jacques, who was a Balanchine dancer before needing to have both knees replaced. "The hardest thing is when you can't dance," he says, but his enduring pride and lack of bitterness is inspiring.

The filmmakers cleverly montage many of the auditions, splicing lyrics sung by different singers into a cohesive whole. Special attention is paid to the big crescendo of "At the Ballet," as successive singers try to hit and hold the song's soaringly long last note.

Seeing the fortunate few who finally make the grade performing "One" in gold top hats and tails onstage is the perfect finale for the film. It's the thrilling culmination of what we know everyone in that high-kicking chorus line did for love.

—James Dawson
04.16.09

The central premise of the Kirkwood-Dante-Kleban-Hamlisch Broadway musical +A Chorus Line is by now overly familiar, examining as it does the 17 actors auditioning for spots in a chorus line on the Great White Way. Recalling Donn Pennebaker's Moon Over Broadway and other similar efforts, documentarians Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern's film Every Little Step travels behind the scenes of the auditions for 2006 revival of +A Chorus Line to investigate the goings-on and the interplay among the hopefuls. The film thus establishes a neat corollary between the events of the play itself and the offstage experiences of the aspiring tryouts. On top of this, Stern and Del Deo work in a layer that pertains to the original genesis of the show, and its evolution from an idea by Michael Bennett, who recorded an ensemble of dancers speaking confessionally and used that as the basis for everything else. Here, the filmmakers play those original tapes back, on-camera, thus resurrecting old ghosts; score composer Marvin Hamlisch also turns up and revokes the past, courtesy of a revealing and racy little nugget about the history of the tune "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three." Above all else, the film works in extensive footage of the auditions themselves, on songs such as "At the Ballet" and "I Can Do That" -- thus interweaving an aura of suspense throughout the narrative over who will eventually wind up in the production itself. The title of the documentary, of course, is a reference to the lyric of the seminal tune "One" ("One singular sensation, every little step she takes"). ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi