A Chorus Line

Chosen to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of this classic first hitting Broadway, Free-Rain’s latest production A Chorus Line is bursting with enthusiasm and aching with pathos. Though it’s not by any measure perfect, it’s wonderful to see these young people’s love of performance. More importantly, they capture all the ambition, snark, disappointment, resilience, pragmatism and compromises of the characters. The second half in particular features moving and gutsy performances by Ylaria Rogers as Cassie, Michael Cooper as Zach and Alexander Matthews as Paul, all playing with striking emotional depth.

As Cassie, Ylaria Rogers owns the stage, dancing with a fluid, graceful flexibility. Rogers’ Cassie is desperate and humble. You see her throw everything she has into this audition. The added complication of unfinished business from her past romance with director Zach (Michael Cooper) flood her sequence with unspoken subtext which ramps up the stakes—the audience will be rooting for Cassie to be cast in spite of Zach’s patronising attitude. Rogers and Cooper nail that awful power disparity and all the complications that come with it. Immediately following Cassie’s triumphant solo, the play lurches into Zach’s private discussion with young Paul. Paul’s monologue is famously one of the toughest speeches ever to come out of Broadway, and Alexander Matthews absolutely nails it. The speech captures the trauma of growing up gay in the 1960s, and include descriptions of dreadful events like his early molestation, and serial rejections by his school and family. These set up in Paul a self-loathing, which carries through even when he finds his place in a drag show. Even though these are people who finally accept him, his internalised self-hate leads him to undervalue them. Matthews captures the emotional range of this incredibly raw role, showing Paul barely able to hold himself together and sometimes slipping into emotionless dissociation as a means of maintaining dignity. The final humiliating revelation of his gay, drag queen identity to his parents is somehow ambiguous. It was impossible to tell whether his parents’ response is acceptance or merely tolerance, but that scrap of humanity breaks the emotional dam, bringing tears both for the character and the audience. Matthews’ ability to pack all that into his performance was nothing short of extraordinary.

Other standout moments included the cool, joyful dance routine by Mike (Cameron Taylor), the trio of Sheila, Maggie and Bebe (Kay Liddiard, Laura Evans and Ashleigh Nguyen respectively) singing At the Ballet, and Diana’s (Ashleigh Maynard) beautiful rendition of What I Did for Love. With so many solos, there isn’t anywhere for the cast to blend in which lays bare any areas which were in need of a little further work. The duet by newlyweds Al and Kristine, for example, is exceptionally challenging and Ryland Howard and Imogen Baggoley haven’t quite got the timing right, but they were not helped by what seemed to be sound balance issues which at other times rendered some of the lyrics inaudible. Sound problems may also have affected Emma Sollis’s performance as Val. Sollis’s dance was good but when singing her pitch was slipping around, and I wondered whether she couldn’t hear herself or the orchestra? That said, the orchestra, conducted by Craig Johnson, was tight and cohesive throughout. The choreography was lovely and in many places (notably Cassie’s solo) quite close to the original. The ensemble never quite got the steps perfectly in time, but that was made up for in spades by the energy and athleticism of the dancers.

Altogether it was fabulous to see a troupe of young performers put their hearts and souls into this classic, with some performances nothing short of revelatory.

Cathy Bannister

Photographer: Janelle McMenamin