pop cultural maelstrom: A Chorus Line, Donahue, Gilmore Girls

This weekend I saw the documentary Every Little Step. It's a newish movie about the casting of a 2004 revival of A Chorus Line. It's a good movie version of the current "audition" reality TV craze. The film makers follow a few dancers through the audition process for a Broadway show. Somewhere, I read a review that said it works because Broadway dancers and actors bring an intensity, a desire to be watched, that makes the process more raw than the usual fare on TV (American Idol et. al.) Maybe. I know that I cried like a little kid watching some actor named Jason Tam audition for the role of Paul. And I liked watching Tyce Dioro not get the part.

A Chorus Line hit at an important moment in my pop culture/personal development. I was 10 or 11 when I first saw a road show version of it at the National Theater in Washington DC. It seemed so racy and raw, lithe dancers spinning around the stage singing about being teenagers, about "Tits and Ass," about escaping homes "At the Ballet." And then there was the gay stuff. I hadn't yet accepted that identity, but I sure knew something was going on when I heard characters give their monologues about being gay. Heady stuff for a musical theater fan who had been weaned on shows like Oklahoma or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This was not my parents' musical theater. It had a beat, and sex, and good looking dancers!

So after watching the documentary Saturday, I ran home to Google, to see what I could find. Attached is the best, a 1990 video of a Phil Donahue show. That year, the Broadway run of A Chorus Line was set to close, and he invited the original cast on to his show. They performed a few songs, told rude stories about how Michael Bennet, the show's "creator," took their life stories for the show and never really paid them all enough for it (they sold him the rights to their stories for one dollar each).

Then Kelly Bishop got up to sing "At the Ballet." She's ok, and the others she sings with are as good as they were on the cast album I got as an Xmas gift when I was 12 or so. But what kills me is that Kelly Bishop years later would play Emily Gilmore on the Gilmore Girls, a show I became a little too obsessed with in the last decade (I am personally responsible for getting several friends and family members addicted to that show. I plead guilty).

30 years of pop culture blur together in this video: my early tween/teen fascination with A Chorus Line from the late 70's, my college Halloween costume of Phil Donahue that I wore to an infamous party at the House Pathetique on Latham Street in Williamstown in the late 80's, and my Gilmore Obsession of the 00's. So rarely do such formative elements in one's life come together so seamlessly. I needed to recognize the serendipity (that's for you Charles, even though you de-friended me)

So I salute them all- Michael Bennet, Kelly Bishop, Phil Donahue, Maggie at the Ballet, Marlo Thomas, Lorelai and Rory and Emily Gilmore, Amy-Sherman Palladino, that guy who sang "I can do that." Everything was beautiful . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cPBWzsQ5zo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cPBWzsQ5zo