The Broadway musical “A Chorus Line” was a huge success in 1974 because of the personal stories of 19 dancers who bared their souls to choreographer Michael Bennett in a series of tape-recorded interviews. Bennett wove their stories into a beautiful, dazzling show that lasted 6,137 performances and earned worldwide revenues of more than $280 million before closing in 1990. Now the show is being revived on Broadway, and most of the dancers who originally inspired Bennett are raising questions about who is really the “author” of the show and how the show’s revenues should be allocated.
One of the dancers told Campbell Robertson of The New York Times (October 1), “We were the authors of the show, and we should have been paid accordingly.” Robertson writes: “There is no doubt that the dancers provided most of the stories, and in some cases large chunks of their words show up verbatim in the show. There is also no doubt that it was primarily Mr. Bennett who took 20 hours of interviews and had the vision to shape them into a groundbreaking musical.”
After the taped interviews and some workshops, dancers were asked to sign a contract giving away their rights to their stories for $1 — a move that many regretted. Still, Bennett was sensitive to their contributions. After the show moved to Broadway, he arranged for a new agreement that gave the original 19 dancers a half-percent of the production’s weekly box office gross revenues and a similar amount from subsidiary rights. He also gave a larger group of dancers about one-tenth of his own royalties and one-third of his rights income as the show’s conceiver, director and choreographer. For some dancers, royalties came to $10,000 a year.
The producer of the revival show claims that the new show is not covered by the previous royalty agreement with the dancers, and that the rights to the show belong to several heirs of Bennett’s estate. “The only way the arrangement could be changed is if all of the interest holders in the Bennett estate agreed to have the interviewees’ royalties taken out of their shares,” the producer claims. No doubt the lawyers will be scrapping about the legal and moral entitlements of the dancers for some time.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the stories that comprise “A Chorus Line” emerged from a particular social/professional community. They were heartfelt, highly personal stories elicited by a brilliant and revered choreographer in the context of a trusted social circle of dancers. They were mutual confessions to a group of peers. (The 19 dancers had convened in a loft space after performing their nightly show.) As a group, they were speaking from within the commons, a space of individual identity shaped by a shared history. They were not doing “story pitches” of the sort heard in Hollywood executive suites.
So did Bennett betray the trust of the commons by claiming the market rights for himself? Or did he richly deserve everything he got while doing the right thing for the dancers? After all, a series of taped interviews do not constitute a smash Broadway show. Bennett was generous in offering royalties that he legally could have pocketed for himself.
There’s a line in the song “What I Did For Love,” which celebrates and laments the dancer’s gift as something that is transient and only to be borrowed. The song hints at the bittersweet drama now unfolding. The market economy demands a regime of outright and clearly delineated ownership — necessary and proper things — but the real appeal of the musical is its portrayal of dancers who honor their gifts as “borrowed” and shared — something that ends up being beautiful, tragic and triumphant all at once.
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