Those First in ‘Chorus Line’ Gain a Continuing Stake

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: February 2, 2008

The dancers and actors who participated in the 1974 recordings and workshops that were the foundation of “A Chorus Line” have been granted a financial interest in the current Broadway revival, according to a joint statement released on Friday by those artists and the beneficiaries of the estate of Michael Bennett, the musical’s creator and original director.

The arrangement brings to a close 16 months of negotiations between the artists and the estate, during which both sides debated the intentions behind a 33-year-old contract drawn up by Mr. Bennett.

Neither side is commenting on the terms of the arrangement.

In 1974 Mr. Bennett gathered a few dozen mostly unknown actors and dancers for two all-night talks, recording their memories and life stories. Using the recordings as raw material and over an extended workshop process at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Mr. Bennett fashioned “A Chorus Line,” one of the most successful musicals of all time. Many of the dancers played versions of themselves in the original production, which opened on Broadway in 1975.

At one point during the musical’s development, the dancers were asked to sign a document that gave Mr. Bennett the rights to the interviews in exchange for $1. After the show moved to Broadway, Mr. Bennett created another arrangement, which divided roughly a tenth of his own royalties and around a third of the rights income he was entitled to as the show’s conceiver, director and choreographer, among the 37 actors and dancers involved with the show’s development.

This kind of arrangement has now become standard, though with less generous terms, for people involved in workshops that lead to Broadway productions.

That 1975 agreement applied to the original production, which ran for 15 years, and the show’s subsidiary rights. But it did not apply to what are called first-class productions, which can include major-market tours or Broadway revivals. The current revival, which opened in 2006 and is being produced by John Breglio, Mr. Bennett’s former lawyer and the executor of the Bennett estate, is in this first-class category.

For the last year and half, several of the original dancers have been engaged in extensive discussions with the beneficiaries of the Bennett estate. Among the artists are Kelly Bishop, who originally played the role of Sheila, based heavily on her own experiences; Priscilla Lopez, whose portrayal of Diana mirrored her own life; Donna McKechnie, the original Cassie; Robert LuPone, the original Zach; and Tony Stevens and Michon Peacock, two dancers involved with those early interviews who did not go on to act in the original production.

The arrangement, an amendment to the 1975 agreement, gives the original artists an undisclosed share in the current production, which applies retroactively, and in all future first-class productions of “A Chorus Line.”