‘A Chorus Line’ is back, and you’ll enjoy the new spring in its step.
They got to me — at the precise moment “A Chorus Line” is meant to. It was at the end of the adrenaline-drenched opening number, “I Hope I Get It,” after the 17 finalists for the eight dancing jobs take their places on that emblematic line across the stage. Poised for the audition ordeal to come, they pose in place and, to Marvin Hamlisch’s brassy staccato notes, snap their black-and-white head shots in front of their faces.
Where else in musical theater is the desperate optimism of youth frozen so ecstatically, so movingly? Which is another way of saying that fully 44 years since its birth, “A Chorus Line” will still get to you, too.
