The Casting Story That Carries a Famous Broadway Musical Is Also Part of Its Actor-Turned-Director's Life

Revival director Baayork Lee told QDaily what she remembers.

Nearly every musical theater actor goes through the same routine at an audition: hand over a résumé with a no-makeup headshot stapled to it, sing 16 bars, and then hear one word — "Thank you."

That is more or less where the famous Broadway musical A Chorus Line begins.

A Chorus Line premiered on Broadway on July 25, 1975. It follows 17 dancers auditioning against one another for eight spots in a chorus line. The next year it won nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical and Best Choreography, while its rival that year, Chicago, went home with nothing.

By the time it closed in 1990, it had taken in $149.9 million over 6,137 performances, making it the seventh-longest-running show in Broadway history — above other shows audiences know well, such as Mamma Mia! and Rent.

In January 2019, the show had just wrapped its Shanghai run. At the invitation of Hongyang International, director Baayork Lee came to Shanghai as well and taught two masterclasses. Lee was in the original cast of A Chorus Line, and she has since directed more than 35 productions of it. She has also directed touring and regional-theater productions of other musicals.

Baayork Lee, now 73, was born in New York's Chinatown; her father came from China, her mother from India. In the original production she played "Connie Wong."

"My name is Connie Wong, and I'm from New York, the Lower East Side" — that is how Connie introduces herself in A Chorus Line. Pressed about her age, she dodges: "Born on the fifth day of the twelfth lunar month, year 4642 — the Year of the Rooster." The song "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love" is mostly about the changes of adolescence; Connie's part is about the trouble her height gave her — everyone else kept growing, only she didn't. "I used to hang from the bars for a whole hour, hoping I'd stretch at least an inch."

Her dreams of becoming a ballerina and a head cheerleader were both wrecked by her height — that is Connie's story, and it is Baayork's real life.

At five, Baayork was cast in the musical The King and I and stepped onto a Broadway stage for the first time, as the original Princess Ying Yaowalak. New York's Chinatown sits in the Lower East Side, and many people there never left the neighborhood; Baayork was no exception. "The first time I came to Broadway, the gilded theater, the red velvet seats, the chandeliers — they made me feel this was my stage, my world. That was when I made up my mind to take this road."

But her height settled at 147 cm, and her acting career did not go smoothly. Even at 18 she could only act alongside eight- and nine-year-olds, many of whom were taller than she was. Becoming a chorus dancer was no easier: for the sake of the picture onstage, a chorus line demanded dancers of "roughly the same height," with "male dancers slightly taller than female dancers."

Her Asian face was another obstacle. On Broadway in the 1960s, Asian actors were considered only when a musical had Asian roles in it. If a script spelled out how a character looked — "blond, blue-eyed, white," say — then only a white actor could play the part. For Asian actors, The King and I and Miss Saigon were the well-known and very rare musicals with Asian subject matter: the first had more than 30 Asian roles, the second more than ten. Both later drew criticism for "repeating stereotypes about Asians."

It is not much of a stretch to call the choreographer Michael Bennett the man who discovered Baayork. Bennett was famous in the field; from the age of 24 he was nominated for the Tony for Best Choreography five years running. As his craft matured he went on to take the award four more times, including for Dreamgirls. His choreographic style was not one thing — he built each piece out of the form of the music and the traits of the characters.

Bennett and Baayork had known each other since childhood; every summer Bennett studied at Baayork's dance school, and later the two performed together and became friends. "You grow up with someone, but back then they weren't a giant, they weren't a genius."

In 1974, at Bennett's invitation, Baayork joined the A Chorus Line workshop, at first only as an assistant, though Bennett later decided to make her one of the performers. In the workshop the creative team talked with a group of performers and listened to each person's story; over several sessions they collected more than 30 hours of recordings. The tapes were then typed up and shaped into the first script.

"During the workshop I told them a story from when I was little. All the girls around me were wearing bras, and I was the only one who wasn't. I told my mother I wanted a bra. Then we went to the supermarket one time and she had forgotten. I said, I want a bra — my figure was like a pancake back then — and she said: you don't need one." Baayork told QDaily. "I remember that when I got to that part, I just started crying. Thank goodness Bennett didn't use it in the end."

A Chorus Line's success caught everyone off guard. It won nine of its 12 Tony nominations, and that same year it took the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which tends to reward work with social value. Baayork recalled in one interview: "When did I feel it was a hit? When I saw Jackie Kennedy sitting in the audience with her two children, and Diana Ross and her kids couldn't get tickets. Then I started thinking, what is going on?"

The show used the audition as its hook and paid attention to Broadway chorus dancers, whom no one had ever bothered with, and it let audiences see the hidden side of that glittering stage. Across two hours, A Chorus Line takes growing up as its through-line, telling each dancer's childhood, adolescence and the road to becoming a dancer. It was the first time chorus performers had a chance to tell their own stories onstage.

"At the Ballet," for instance, is sung by three of them, and each story is different — one carries the pressure of finishing her mother's dream, one has no confidence in her looks, one finds freedom in ballet — but they share a theme: what women run into while growing up.

The whole two-hour show is one audition, and every performer seems to face a brutal interrogation, with the casting director, Zach, pushing them to recount childhood memories they would rather skip and careers full of setbacks — which pulls an audience in easily. Talking about where the idea came from, Bennett once said it was hard to believe: "It came from how I felt watching the Watergate hearings. It was my reaction to the falseness and the indifference that seemed to have gripped the whole country then, and I hated it. I wanted to do something onstage that showed people being honest with each other."

"In the workshop, my character, Connie, was supposed to do a song called 'Confidence' with another character, Richie — it was about me and an African American actor going after the one minority role — but it was cut in the end. We couldn't quite understand it at the time; we all thought it mattered. But Bennett believed there would be musicals about Asian Americans and musicals about Black Americans, while the most important things right now were being gay, doing drag, facing yourself, becoming yourself — things nobody was talking about, and the most urgent questions there were," Baayork recalled.

That gave A Chorus Line a different kind of reputation. Broadway in the 1970s was caught in New York's decline. As the middle class moved to the suburbs, crime in the city climbed, and strikes and marches reached Broadway and hurt musicals at the box office. Broadway was also being battered by hippie culture; in the view of Michael Riedel, the theater columnist for the New York Post: "The rock revolution of the '60s changed everything. New Broadway musicals were mediocre, or lasted no time at all."

It was also from the 1970s on that Baayork's interest moved from acting alone to choreography and directing. Besides performing, her jobs on A Chorus Line included assistant choreographer and dance captain, and that experience brought her more opportunities later in her Broadway career. Over the years she has directed international touring productions of The King and I, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella and Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, among others.

But Baayork has put most of her energy into A Chorus Line all the same. "When the machine starts running, someone has to look after it" — that is what Bennett said to her back then.

Bennett himself was a choreographer of enormous appetite for new work, and he once complained that A Chorus Line's fame brought him a great deal of trouble, because he had to pour all his energy into productions for other regional theaters and touring versions in other countries. From the 1980s on, Baayork took over that load, and she has since worked on more than 35 productions of the show. The story is the same one; what changes is the cast, the country on tour, or a new-language version.

What makes this musical unusual is that it is a play within a play, about actors. Holding on to the dance style and the steps while still respecting the original performers and characters — that is the promise Baayork made to Bennett and to the other performers who worked on the show.

"I get to work with a lot of different performers, and that is fresh every time. When it's for another regional theater or another country, the job often includes developing and training people — not everywhere has Broadway's caliber of performers who can sing, dance and act. Performers need to learn and grow until they are able to do A Chorus Line."

In 2006, A Chorus Line was revived on Broadway with Baayork as choreographer, and the new Connie was played by Yuka Takara, an actress of Japanese descent. This is how she described Baayork: "At 10 every morning she led our warm-up, and before that she already had her headband on and the drummer in place. She never ran low on energy."

To this day, A Chorus Line is still one of the most important musicals in critics' eyes. On November 15, 2018, for New York City Center's 75th anniversary, A Chorus Line played a short run at that off-Broadway house, and The New York Times wrote this about the newest revival: "I am always thrilled to see A Chorus Line. In any revival made with care, the show is just as exhilarating."

Perhaps that is because Broadway has not changed much. A Chorus Line's story has never gone out of date; it reminds every performer that competition on Broadway is exactly this cruel, even when all you want is a chorus part behind the leads. Baayork also believes audiences have not changed in 30 years — "they laugh in the same places, and they cry in the same places."

In Every Little Step, a documentary about how A Chorus Line was made, footage from 1975 plays against real audition scenes from 2005. More than 3,000 performers auditioned for the 2006 Broadway revival, and they were seen in a set order: professional actors and union members first, then non-union performers trying to get onto Broadway for the first time, and non-professionals last. Performers came to New York from all over the country, and the whole audition ran more than eight months. Some who made it to the end were close to breaking down: "Just tell me, was I cast or not."

Baayork's closing words were blunt: "What I often say to Asian and Asian American actors is, 'Always be ready.' Be ready for every call that comes. Otherwise, if you go to an audition and don't do well, the reaction is, 'See, I told you, Asians are nothing special.' We need to be a little better, a little more excellent, and then more excellent still."

The cover image is a rehearsal photo from A Chorus Line, photographed by Dong Tianye; the production photos in the article were provided by SAIC · Shanghai Culture Square; the masterclass photos were provided by Hongyang International, photographed by Wu Qingyun and Li Kai.