Tony, Pulitzer Winner : Michael Bennett, the Genius Behind ‘Chorus Line,’ Dies

Michael Bennett, who took the common thread of rejection and wove it into a unifying cloak he placed around 18 anxious dancers auditioning for “A Chorus Line,” died early Thursday of AIDS-related lymphoma.

The Tony and Pulitzer award-winning director, dancer and choreographer whose influence in the world of musical theater was unparalleled in the last two decades was 44 when he died in his Tucson home, where he had moved after learning that he had acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

His illness forced him late last year to sell the building at 890 Broadway in New York City, where he based his theatrical operations, but not before he had helped give the world “A Chorus Line,” Broadway’s longest-running musical, “Coco,” “Promises, Promises,” “A Joyful Noise,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Seesaw” and “Dreamgirls.”

He averaged more than a show a season since his choreographic debut in 1966 in “A Joyful Noise,” and most of that prodigious effort proved successful.

Experienced Some Failure

“Chess” and “Ballroom” were commercial failures and “Scandal,” a bawdy tale of sexual excesses that was to prove one of his final works, never made it to Broadway. And it was the public’s growing concern over the AIDS that claimed Bennett’s life that moved him to cancel a planned Broadway production of “Scandal” and its sexually explicit production numbers.

But “Chorus Line,” which in September, 1983, became at 3,389 performances the country’s most enduring musical epic, is the best-known of his dancing legacies. It was inspired by the unguarded and spontaneous comments of some of Bennett’s dancing friends, who talked informally into a tape recorder one evening in 1974 about their desperate craving for work and their heartbreaking fears of not getting it.

Out of that evening he crafted Paul, the pathetic drag queen, Cassie, the washed-up actress, and 16 other agitated hoofers seeking the eight openings that the formidable director, known only as “Zach,” has for his show. Their plaintive chant--”Oh, God, I need this job, please let me get this job”--came to be a leitmotif for aspiring thespians everywhere.

Times theater critic Dan Sullivan called Bennett “one of the creators of the modern Broadway musical” who “had no patience with shows that kept stopping and starting.”

“His goal was a musical that was, in effect, one long number, with every image feeding the next and with every beat in place,” Sullivan said.

“But unlike some choreographer-directors, Bennett knew the value of the word. For all the propulsiveness of ‘A Chorus Line,’ its climax is a young man’s memory of how his father discovered him dancing in a drag show--a moment of utter stillness.

“Bennett knew how to make audiences watch; but he also knew how to make them listen.”

In his memory, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights at 8 p.m. Thursday and a memorial was announced for July 27 at the Shubert Theater on Broadway, where “A Chorus Line” had its 4,957th performance Thursday night.

Started at Age 3

Michael Bennett DiFiglia was born in Buffalo, N.Y., to a machinist father and secretary mother who wanted a more cultured life for their son and enrolled him in a dancing school when he was 3. He grew up studying dance during summers in New York City but said that as early as age 12 he knew that “what I (really) wanted to do was putting on big shows.” While in high school he began to choreograph and direct school and community theater productions, and when he was 16 was offered the role of Baby John in a European company of “West Side Story.”

He left high school a few months short of graduation and spent a year abroad before returning to New York and the chorus lines he was to memorialize years later.

Bennett was seen in “Subways Are for Sleeping,” “Here’s Love” and “Bajour,” and he got his first taste of professional choreography in “How Now, Dow Jones.” His first solo choreographic effort was in 1966 with “A Joyful Noise” and it also marked the first of 11 Tony nominations. He also won seven for direction and choreography and shared the 1976 Pulitzer for drama for “A Chorus Line,” a highly unusual accolade for a musical.

Television Work

By the late 1960s he also was choreographing for television (“The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Dean Martin Show,” “Hollywood Palace”), and in 1967 he staged the dances for “Henry, Sweet Henry” on Broadway, and “A Joyful Noise,” a brief-lived production in which Bennett’s dances were among the few bright spots.

Clive Barnes of The New York Times found “The briskly modern dances the most original aspect of the show.” Bennett, himself, Barnes added, was “the most hopeful new name around Broadway dance.” Bennett was nominated for his second Tony.

The following year, 1968, Bennett found a vehicle worthy of his growing talents. It was “Promises, Promises,” adapted from the Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment,” and it ran on Broadway for 2 1/2 years. Its frenetic “Turkey-Lurkey Time,” a paean to an inebriated secretary at an office party, was danced by Donna McKechnie, who eight years later would be Cassie in “A Chorus Line.” She also would become briefly, at the end of 1976, Mrs. Michael Bennett.

And “Promises” produced a third Tony nomination.

Coco Chanel’s Life

Next he staged the dances for “Coco,” the musical biographical of Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel as interpreted by Katharine Hepburn, and followed that with “Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s radical play about a bachelor’s friendship with several married couples.

They brought him his fourth and fifth nominations.

Bennett quit being a bridesmaid and became a bride with another Sondheim vehicle, “Follies,” in which some aged Florenz Zeigfeld beauties recount their old routines on a stage that is barren and about to fall to the wrecker’s ball. That was in 1972, and as if to reward him for his long wait, the American Theatre Wing awarded him not one but two of the awards named for Antoinette Perry--one for co-directing “Follies” (with Harold Prince) and the second for choreographing it.

He would win five more of the coveted trophies: in 1974 for “Seesaw,” which Bennett took over in mid-production, overhauling cast, scenery and dancing; in 1976, when for the second time he was given two Tonys, this time as director and choreographer of his signature show, “A Chorus Line”; in 1979 for “Ballroom,” a commercial failure still praised for its dance arrangements, and in 1981 for “Dreamgirls,” the last of his major triumphs. It was just revived on Broadway.

Back to Broadway

“Ballroom” was Bennett’s return to the Broadway arena after his triumphant “A Chorus Line.” He viewed the show’s demise as a mixed blessing, telling one interviewer: “I went out of my way to be sure I didn’t do ‘Chorus Line II.’ So now I’ve done this and my halo is knocked off a bit. But now I’m free. People know I’m liable to do anything. . . .”

He sold the movie rights to “A Chorus Line” for $5.5 million but backed away from being involved in what proved to be a disappointing film. “If I did the movie it means for sure three more years (of involvement). Then that’s my whole career and I don’t want my whole career to be that.”

In 1981 Bennett had scored big again with “Dreamgirls,” loosely based on the phenomenal rise to stardom of the Diana Ross-led Supremes and the subsequent tragedies that touched some of that group. That show ran for 1,500 performances in New York and thousands more in repertoire companies across the country. In those days his talent and health were at their peak and his studios, offices and workshop at 890 Broadway, between 19th and 20th streets, formed the heart of the American musical theater.

But then came the disaster of “Scandal,” Bennett’s battle with AIDS and the sale of the Broadway building, after which the slight, ascetic former dancer abandoned the city that was laid triumphantly at his feet and moved West to die.

Only those closest to him knew how much he kept in touch with the theater in his final months. But it probably occupied most of his waking hours.

“I don’t do anything else (but theater work)” he told Newsday in 1979. “I know how to go out and have a nice time for an evening and stuff like that . . . but there’s always something more important to do.”

Added the man who earned $90,000 a week when “Chorus Line” was in its ascendant years:

“I’m lucky. . . . I work at something I love to do so it’s never really been work. I would do all of this for nothing. And I would have my whole life.”