A Chorus Line Opens at the Shubert

On July 25, 1975, A Chorus Line transferred from a sold-out run at the Public Theater to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. Choreographer Michael Bennett had built the show from the ground up, starting in January 1974 by gathering Broadway's chorus dancers, the "gypsies" who fill out every musical's ensemble, and taping them talking for hours about their training, their insecurities, and what it actually costs to make a living dancing in a chorus line. Those tapes, shaped into a book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante with songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, became a musical staged on a bare floor in front of a wall of mirrors, with the anonymous dancers as its only subject. It ran 6,137 performances and took the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a prize almost no musical ever wins.