A Chorus Line Reviews – London

"Theatrical magic turns hoofers into stars"

"Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s audition musical looks behind the scenes at Broadway’s hard-knock life"

"Zach the director (Adam Cooper, magisterial and tender) is looking for more than just slickness. He wants to strip away the artifice of performance and peer into each dancer’s soul. His sidekick, Larry, prowls the line-up with a camera blowing up each face — apprehensive, sassy, flirtatious, insecure — on a huge screen. The filming is a modern touch in a production otherwise faithful to its original era, complete with references to Doris Day, The Ed Sullivan Show and Jill St John."

"Camaraderie is movingly conveyed: director Nikolai Foster has the troupe, beginning as stiff strangers, bonding under duress, showing care and commiseration with tiny glances and touches. Choreographer Ellen Kane crafts routines and vignettes that bring each character into focus."

"A last bit of theatrical magic has the troupe, even the rejects, transform for the glitziest of top-hatted closing numbers, but now we can see every one of them as a star."

"This big budget revival of the classic 1975 musical understands its pleasures and its strangeness"

"There’s not really any story, and songs flit in and out, interwoven with dialogue and dance. Each of the dancers tells us a bit about themselves. Essentially, a strange product of its age, the original anti-musical."

"Nikolai Foster’s production, which started life at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2021, is a long way from all that. The original production was surprising for its lack of set, costumes and its frankness around sex and sexuality. But the show’s been made glitzy and glossy over the years, and especially so here. There’s a colossal amount of set and lighting gone in to make it look like there’s none at all. Seriously, the lighting by Howard Hudson is phenomenal."

"The original choreography by director Michael Bennett and Bob Avian is kind of legendary now, and was untouched for a long time, so it’s a big act to follow, but Kane excels"

"... Marvin Hamlisch’s score still sounds so amazing (especially with David Shrubsole’s orchestrations). That final number – which sticks in the head for days – has the high-kicking bombast of a great finale, but has this weird, slightly haunted quality too."

"Punchy performances"

"Nikolai Foster’s revival is warmer, less brutal than before"

"... if some names (and, neatly, Edd Lindley’s costumes) in Nikolai Foster’s revival are resolutely in period, the show’s knockout determination and drive remain intact and exciting."

"Aided by Howard Hudson’s atmospheric washes of purple glow and curtains of light on rising and falling lighting bars, Foster’s design team create a warmer, more naturalistic, more spacious stage space."

"Zach’s questioning of everyone for their life stories now feels less brutal than before: more intense questioning than fear-inducing, make-or-break interrogation. Coupled with the starry casting of Adam Cooper in the role, this warms the show. But the original’s cold savagery provided more vivid contrast. The joyous moments here, and there are plenty, lose something for not arising out of stark darkness."

"The joy comes via punchy performances. Everyone seizes their opportunities with both hands and, indeed, their entire hardworking bodies."

"A glorious parade of scintillating songs and snappy dance numbers"

"This quintessential Broadway musical offers a glorious parade of scintillating songs and snappy dance numbers"

"Legwarmers ahoy! The quintessential 1970s Broadway musical returns to London in all its gutsy, schmaltzy glory."

"Director Nikolai Foster and choreographer Ellen Kane faithfully serve the democratic ideals of the writers, and lightly update the original vision of Michael Bennett, who conceived and directed the 1975 production with Bob Avian as his co-choreographer. It’s a glorious parade of scintillating songs and snappy dance numbers."

"Two numbers, Nothing and What I Did For Love, sew the two strands together, thanks in large part to the pristine voice of Jocasta Almgill as Diana."

"There’s fine comic work from Chloe Saunders as Val, Toby Seddon as Bobby and Bradley Delarosbel as Gregory. But really, this is about the collective rather than the individuals"

"A bustling and thrilling revival of a classic"

"A superb stage for a fitting revival of a classic which first shone on Broadway almost 50 years ago"

"The energy, commitment and sheer skill of the performers in Nikolai Foster’s production, which premiered at Curve Leicester in 2021, is consummate and we are glad that, unlike Zach, we are not forced to choose between them."

"Ellen Kane’s choreography is all high-octane high skill as the wannabes are put through their unrelenting paces. "

"I saw A Chorus Line in New York when I was 11 and can still recall the adrenaline rush of this finale. Foster and his team provide that thrill all over again for today’s audience."

"Pure jazz-hands joy serves a dazzling celebration of the ensemble"

"Watching this troupe soar together in Michael Bennett’s classic musical about the travails of jobbing dancers on Broadway is mesmerising"

"There’s an element of in-jokey homage in having Cooper, such a sublime dancer who starred in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake and played the grown-up Billy in Billy Elliot, play a straight acting role where he only has to perform for about 30 seconds. The trouble is that Zach is a dangerously one-note figure to cast so experimentally, and the fit is just not very satisfying."

"In cahoots with the singers, Matthew Spalding’s band wring every ounce of jazz-hands joy from Marvin Hamlisch’s score. Strictly speaking, they can’t save Sing!, the one duff (and most dated) number about a tone-deaf chorine. We’re on safer ground with full-throated Carly Mercedes Dyer as Zach’s ex, Cassie (The Music and the Mirror) and a lovely Jocasta Almgill, who sings and acts delicately through both her numbers."

"The wisps of story are never a real deficit, with these characters flaunting their talents, then holding their breaths – and then coming together gloriously for One, a rousing closing number that you can hardly imagine dazzling more incandescently than it does here."

"A singular sensation returns to London"

"Though aspects of A Chorus Line have glaringly dated nearly 50 years since it first blazed a trail down Broadway, it’s a show that retains an innate understanding of theatricality and spectacle, aspects which are brought to the fore in Nikolai Foster’s fine revival, which was first seen at Leicester Curve in 2021."

"A few of Edward Kleban’s lyrics don’t quite land in the way they might have in the 1970s; notably when Mark (Archie Durrant) sings about his pubescent younger self mistaking ejaculation with gonorrhea, or when Chloe Saunders’ Val hymns to the importance of enhancing your “t*ts and ass”. But at the same time, it’s commendable that Foster has elected to retain these rather than attempt a clumsy updating, perhaps explaining his decision to nod heavily to the show’s 70s roots (in his silky shirt and brown flares, Cooper looks like he’s stepped off the set of Boogie Nights)."

"But perhaps the best way to watch it is to park the politics and sit back to enjoy the spectacle. The broad Sadler’s stage is the ideal place to see it, including a particularly arresting moment when former Swan Lake (and Billy Elliot) star Cooper echoes his formative years in the spotlight, while the golden finale is nothing short of breathtaking."

"If some of the vocals become strident when raised to be heard above the band and parts of the dialogue indecipherable, it delivers on grit, guts and - in the gilded finale - glamour."

"Broadway classic remains a singular sensation"

"A Chorus Line swapped glitz for grit. Sequins for leg-warmers. Romance for struggle."

"A Chorus Line, in which a host of tiny biographies are danced and sung in less than two hours, puts its fingers on several pulses. It offers greasepaint glamour and backstage frenzy. It neatly musicalises the urge to stand out, the urge to fit in, the clenched-teeth hard work; the compulsion to confess."

"Nikolai Foster’s production zips along on the tramlines of the Bennett’s ingenious idea of using the audition process to unpack performers’ lives while presenting their talents."

"... this is a show that generates talent. Such as that of Redmand Rance as the boy who kicks off the solo turns, remembering a childhood of dancing in his sister’s borrowed shoes. Finely choreographed by Ellen Kane, Rance makes each turn and stretch and bend look utterly easy, involuntary. As if he were gum being chewed by the stage."

"Hot pants and high kicks in a Broadway classic"

"The 1975 musical depicting the pressures of auditioning is staged with wit and exhilarating dancing at Sadler’s Wells, but it lacks plot"

"There are neon coloured hotpants galore and high kicks worthy of Olympic gymnasts in Sadler’s Wells’s summer blockbuster."

"It’s an ensemble piece, but certain performers stand out. Redmond Rance, who plays New Jersey boy Mike and performs I Can Do That, effortlessly leaps across the stage singing about stealing his sister’s dance lessons. Chloe Saunders has perfect comic timing as Val in Dance: Ten; Looks: Three, about how “tits and ass can change your life”; and Manuel Pacific plays Paul with sensitivity, confiding about coming out (three characters discuss this — an element which was cut from the film)."

"But halfway through, I felt the lack of plot. It’s more like a series of vignettes and by the fifth number, I craved a twist and some pace."

"... One, raised my spirits and showed how at their best, musicals can transform struggles into joyful defiance."