Watching Movies In A Feverish Haze

Lolling around in a state dulled by a cold, I managed to watch two musicals on VHS tape this weekend: "A Chorus Line," and the original "The Producers."

I watched "The Producers" again just for the sheer joy of the film. I realized, however, with my increasingly-successful efforts to fill the neighborhood trees with birds (using stratgeically-scattered bird seed), my life was taking an uncomfortable parallel to the life of Franz Liebkind, ostensible author of "Springtime For Hitler."

Concierge: Who d'ya want?
Leo Bloom: I beg your pardon?
Concierge: Who d'ya want? Nobody gets in the building unless I know who they want. I'm the "concierge". My husband used to be the "concierge", but he's dead. Now I'M the "concierge".
Max Bialystock: We are seeking Franz Liebkind.
Concierge: Oh... the Kraut! He's on the top floor, apartment 23.
Max Bialystock: Thank you...
Concierge: ...But you won't find him there... he's up on the roof with his boids. He keeps boids. Dirty... disgusting... filthy... lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit out on the stoop like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Boids!... You get my drift?
Leo Bloom: We... uh... get your "drift". Thank you, madam.
Concierge: I'm not a "madam"! I'm a "concierge"!

I wanted to watch "A Chorus Line" because I had never seen it (and had deliberately steered away from it when I was in DMTC's version in 2003). I figured it was now time to figure out why people tended to dislike it so.

Personally, I tended to view it as a noble experiment, whereby Richie got a new song in exchange for "Gimme The Ball," and where various other songs were cut and spliced, and where the meaning of "What I Did For Love" was subtly changed. In general, I like the idea of experiment, but here, the new song was not as good as what it replaced. So, traditionalists were bound to be offended, without winning many new converts. So, a noble failure.

Here is a portion of a comment on imdb that seems to sum it up reasonably well (with the caveat that Larry does indeed appear in the original musical, as the non-speaking dance captain):

First of all, director Richard Attenborough took so much focus off the dancers by beefing up the Cassie/Zach relationship and by casting Michael Douglas as Zach. In the play, you NEVER see Zach...he is just a voice in the back of the theater and his relationship with Cassie is barely touched upon. Cassie shown in the cab in traffic trying to get to the audition and upstairs talking to Larry (a character who is not even in the play) was all added for the movie and took so much focus off what the story is about. Major musical numbers were cut or rethought. The opening number in the play "I Hope I Get It" shows all of the dancers doing a jazz and ballet combination and then people get eliminated. In the movie they jam three hundred dancers onstage together and show them in closeup to disguise the fact that they have cast people in the film who can't dance (can you say "Audrey Landers"). "Goodbye 12, Goodbye 13, Hello Love", a brilliant vocal exploration of these dancers' childhood's jaundiced memories was reworked as "Surprise, Surprise" mainly a vehicle for the late Gregg Burge as Richie. The show's most famous song, "What I Did for Love" which in the show was a touching allegory sung by the entire cast about what they give up to dance, becomes just another standard love song in the film, performed tiredly by a miscast Allyson Reed as Cassie. Jeffrey Hornaday's choreography for the film is dull and unimaginative and doesn't hold a candle to Michael Bennett' original staging and when you're making a movie about dancers, the choreography has to be special. There are a couple of good dancers in the film, the previously mentioned Gregg Burge as Richie, Michelle Johnston as Bebe, and Janet Jones as Judy, but they are hardly given the opportunity to show what they can do, yet Audrey Landers, who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, is given one of the show's best numbers, "Dance 10, Looks 3." I will admit that the finale, "One" is dazzling, but you have to wait almost two hours for that. I would say that if you never saw A CHORUS LINE onstage, this film might be worth a look, but if you are a devotee of the original Broadway musical...be afraid...be very afraid.