I enjoyed the documentary “Every Little Step” when it opened in theaters last spring, but I was very disappointed by the film’s account of the creation of the original landmark production of “A Chorus Line” in 1975.
The movie was subtitled “The Journey of ‘A Chorus Line’” but it devoted more of its 93 minute running time to the audition process for the mediocre 2006 Broadway revival than it did to the creation of the original.
Producer-directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo dug up tons of archival material on the original show — including the long informal dancer rap sessions that inspired Michael Bennett (below, with Marvin Hamlisch) to want to do a show on Broadway chorus dancers — but it was brutally trimmed to make way for reality TV-style stuff on the young dancers who hoped to be cast in the revival.
Some of the audition footage is interesting — the producers were very lucky to get a first-ever waiver from Actors Equity allowing cameras into auditions — but too much of it is the standard self-dramatizing of people who know they are being filmed.
Fortunately, the extras on the just-released DVD version of “Every Little Step” serve as a corrective to the theatrical cut by including nearly an hour of material on Bennett and the original show.
There’s a wonderful 20-minute mini-documentary on Donna McKechnie (above, with Robert LuPone) who won a Tony for playing Cassie in the original production (and who came up from the chorus line with Bennett in the shows he did before becoming a behind-the-scenes talent).
McKechnie is honest about the complex and troubled relationship she had with Bennett after “A Chorus Line” became a blockbuster.
Although Bennett was gay, he decided to marry his star and the result was a disaster for both parties — they weren’t speaking when the director-choreographer died from complications of AIDS in 1987.
The extras also include long excerpts from the original dancer interview tapes that Bennett used to create the show.
One of my disappointments with “Every Little Step” was the absence of any interview footage with Kelly Bishop who won a Tony for playing Sheila (the extras don’t include new interview footage with Bishop but there is a long and fascinating segment from the interview tape she made before the show went into production).
The historic importance of “A Chorus Line” is also explained on the extras in an expanded interview from former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich who went to an early preview of the show when he was still a young aspiring critic in New York (he joined the Times five years later).
DVD extras are often not worth watching — let alone talking about — but in this case they make “Every Little Step” into a major documentary about Broadway history, as well as an account of the casting of the 2006 revival.
