Every Little Step, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo’s uber crowd-pleasing expose of the casting process for the recent Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, is both candy for confirmed theater nerds, and functioning propaganda for the uninitiated. Like the infinite repeating effect created by the show’s on-stage mirror, Stern and De Deo allow the structure of their film to take after the self-reflexive structure of the play. It’s a film about struggling dancers auditioning for a play about struggling dancers auditioning for a play which was initially based on the real experiences of the struggling dancers who played themselves, and the filmmakers play off this hall of mirrors beautifully.
Today, the very premise of A Chorus Line as a work of theater––within the structuring parameters of an audition, each dancer takes the stage one by one and essentially sings and dances their life story.––seems awfully … for lack of a better word, theatric. But the film cuts through the potential cheese by constantly tying the current incarnation back to the versimilitude of its roots. The doc is shot through with audio recordings from the initial brainstorming session, held over the course of one long jug wine-filled night and led in 1974 by choreographer Michael Bennett, that formed the foundation of the show. When the original dancers’ long, rambly unofficial monologues are juxtaposed with the face-out speeches and songs that made it into the show (in some cases, full lyrical passages are lifted wholesale from the Bennett tapes) and with talking head testimony from a couple of the original dancers, the recordings become key to establishing a link between A Chorus Line the spectacle, and A Chorus Line the personal statement.
Another talking head is Marvin Hamlisch, the composer who went from winning three Oscars in 1973 alone to jumping at a call from Bennett to come help turn the true confessions of his dancers into songs. As Hamlisch explains, early on in the process they grappled with the challenge of condensing 12 hours of audio taped testimony into 2 hours worth of songs. Hamlisch and friends realized that by interweaving various stories from different characters into the same song, all of a sudden “something that could have taken hours took just 15 minutes” — and this is exactly how Stern and Del Deo approach the challenge of editing all of their captured auditions. Though each round of auditions, from open call to final callbacks, are given their own segment of the film, within segments we’ll see a single number performed by anywhere from two to twenty hopefuls. Footage of several actresses stitched together carry Maggie’s crescendo note in “At The Ballet” seamlessly (if not always prettily).
Even as each performance is glimpsed as a short burst within a montage, certain stars begin to pop out. The auditioner given the most screen time is Jessica, a curvaceous Jersey girl, a newbie who deserves to be there not because she’s put in her dues, but because she’s really, really good. Her story is undeniably compelling, but it does occasionally feel as though the filmmakers skimp on the back story of certain players in order to concentrate on their favorites––certainly, the male dancers seem to get a bit of a short shrift. This is one point where Every Little Step drifts from the Chorus Line model: the play ends with all of its cast members dressed in identical costumes, performing a line dance as a unit, each high kick given equal spotlight as all the others. The documentary ends with a handful of stars made, and a dozen remaining actors barely known.
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