If you've been to see a Broadway musical in the past few years, you've probably experienced this:
There's a big musical number, featuring the entire chorus, which means anywhere from 15 to 40 bodies are suddenly on stage. They're all singing at the top of their lungs. The sound is glorious. But, wait! What's this? They're not really moving. They're just... standing. That's right. Standing. In rows, facing either the audience or each other as they sing.
Huh?
I recently tried to count the number of Broadway musicals I'd seen in the past few years in which the chorus had been arranged in rows and simply told to stand and sing. Or sometimes, march in formation and sing. What's up with this? Is it directorial laziness? Or just a total lack of imagination?
Hal Prince and Kathleen Marshall are two notable exceptions. They wouldn't be caught dead letting their entire tapestry of humanity go... well... dead. Anyone who saw Marshall's revivals of Kiss Me Kate or Wonderful Town will remember the vivid assortment of exacting detail found in the business and choreography of every last member of those choruses. That's what breathes life into those big musical numbers.
So why do so many working musical directors seem to be asleep at the wheel? One answer may lie in one of the most successful musical franchises in the history of the business: Les Miserables.
In the staging of one pivotal musical number of Les Mis, the chorus was arranged in marching formation and few can forget the rotating stage and the circular marching that made use of it. But, in the case of Les Mis, a marching chorus made thematic sense. They were depicting a social movement, a revolution. They were the common people transforming before our eyes into an army. So marching in lock step felt organic.
Unfortunately, the success of that show seems to have taught some lesser-minded directors a bad lesson: that marching on stage equals choreography for your chorus. Not so. I'd encourage them to search for bootleg recordings of Evita, Kiss Me Kate, or Sweeney Todd and, please, try to stretch their imaginations a bit further.
A musical comes alive when every person on-stage is believably alive in an authentic and entertaining way. When the chorus becomes a movable set, we're all in for what Peter Brook called "deadly theatre."
