a chorus line

A Chorus line

Early in his career James D. Stern got a job assisting the writer of a small — really small — off-Broadway musical. When a few hundred people showed up to audition, Stern recalled recently, he was shocked. "I kept saying, 'They're not all here for this, are they?' "

It taught Stern, who went on to produce plays, musicals and movies, just how steeply the supply of stage performers outstrips the demand. So when he and Adam Del Deo, with whom he has shared the producing and directing of two documentaries, agreed to do one about the casting of the 2006 Broadway revival of "A Chorus Line," they had a pretty good idea of how many auditioners they would face.

And next Friday, long after the initial 3,000 became several dozen, after 26 were hired, after they played 759 performances and closed, the movie "Every Little Step" will open in the South Bay — 400-plus hours whittled down to the essential 95 minutes that capture, even more accurately than the musical does, what Broadway gypsies endure to get onstage.

Del Deo and Stern began their documentary partnership in 2002, tagging along as the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming adjusted to the Houston Rockets in "The Year of the Yao." Their second effort, " "... So Goes the Nation," was more ambitious, following some Democratic and Republican campaign workers in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election. But in "Every Little Step" there are more stories in a longer time frame, not to mention musical numbers. And the cameras seem to be everywhere at once.

To the insistent thrum of "I Hope I Get It," the filmmakers show us aspirants lined up in the rain for the chance to do two — two! — pirouettes. They eavesdrop as the arbiters behind the table render their verdicts: yes, no, no, no. They are there when performers battle nerves before and melt down after their auditions and, in between, struggle to follow Baayork Lee as she teaches them the dance steps.

The filmmakers follow dewy newcomers like Jessica Lee Goldyn and savvy troupers like Rachelle Rak, a 21-year veteran of the professional stage. Charlotte d'Amboise goes full-out after the central role of Cassie as her father, the ballet star Jacques d'Amboise, reflects on the toll dance has taken on his body. And we are there as Deirdre Goodwin screams and weeps when she learns she will play Sheila — and as Rak finds out she will not.

It's "A Chorus Line" squared — the 1975 musical was itself a kind of documentary, extrapolated by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante from the tape-recorded musings and recollections at a series of storied late-night gatherings of Broadway dancers, some of whom later appeared in the show. Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban added songs, and Michael Bennett, the brilliant director and choreographer who'd had the idea in the first place, fashioned it into a powerhouse that won the Tony and the Pulitzer, ran for nearly 15 years and spawned touring companies, foreign productions and countless amateur versions.

What never quite happened was a successful transfer to the screen; Bennett backed out of a planned film, and Richard Attenborough's 1985 attempt is generally judged a failure. In 2004 John Breglio, Bennett's lawyer, friend, heir and executor, and co-owner of those audiotapes, thought the time had come to revive "A Chorus Line" on Broadway. He hired Bob Avian, Bennett's original co-choreographer, and also friend and heir, to stage it.

"When I decided to bring the show back," Breglio says, "I thought a little bit about how Michael had talked about doing the movie — as a reflection of how in reality actors tried to get into a show. He never thought you should just put the musical on the screen." A documentary, he reasoned, could "put a mirror up to the play and the real process."

Del Deo says that was exactly what intrigued him and Stern about the project. "We talked at length," he says, "about Federico Fellini's '8½,' which is about a director trying to figure out his next movie, constantly playing on what is happening in his life. We knew we could multilayer it in that '8½' way."

Their movie's account of the competition for five of the meatier parts in "A Chorus Line" is also interwoven with a history of the original production. Bennett, who died in 1987, is a presence throughout, and not just in interviews with the surviving "Chorus Line" collaborators (who, Hamlisch reveals, included the actress Marsha Mason, after she saw an early performance and made a crucial observation). There are video clips of Bennett dancing and audio excerpts from the famous all-night conversations that gave rise to the show.

Like his colleagues on the stage revival and the documentary about it, Breglio stressed how little the actual casting of the musical resembled the simulacra offered by television programs like "American Idol."

"It's not about being a star," he says. "It's about getting a job." And if "A Chorus Line" deconstructed the romantic backstage legend of spunky chorus kids making it to the top after subbing for indisposed divas, it added its own sentimental gloss — "What I Did for Love" — to what can be a grueling, bruising way of life.

Just ask Rak, who danced out of Pittsburgh with a touring company of "Cats" as a teenager, made it to Broadway as a replacement seven years later and worked her way through the ranks despite injury and a harrowing fall from the stage. In a recent interview she said she thought she was a perfect fit for the tough-talking Sheila. After her first audition, Avian says, he thought so too.

But in heartbreaking detail, "Every Little Step" records how she lost the role to Goodwin over the next eight months. She's philosophical about it now, but at the time, she says, "it almost destroyed me."

Avian says he was not exactly thrilled when he learned that such life-altering decisions would be documented for posterity. "But they were very controlled," he notes. "You would have one day when someone would shoot, and then you'd go do an interview."

Stern and Del Deo were shooting every audition, and at first, says Avian, he was self-conscious.

"But by the second month," he adds, "I didn't have time to think about the crew. I'd walk in, they'd clip on the microphone, the cameras went on — it didn't matter."