Donna McKechnie Keeps Trouping

NEW YORK, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- Donna McKechnie, Broadway's greatest chorus dancer, is planning a comeback on Broadway, that great street that hasn't given her much to do in recent years.

She's put together a one-woman show, "Inside the Music," with playwright Christopher Durang, and has been trying it out in an abridged cabaret version performed earlier this month at Arci's Place, a popular supper club venue with a stage the size of a postage stamp. Judging from the critical and audience response she received, her return to Broadway next season should be an event worth waiting for.

McKechnie makes no bones about her age. She's 56, although she looks a quick 35. But she is still a supple dancer, kept that way by taking ballet lessons every week. She has kept her plump kewpie doll looks, her eyes heavily outlined by ebony lashes, a figure verging on the voluptuous, and a pair of gams any girl would die to have.

Her voice, an instrument in the Ethel Merman, mold, has grown richer with the years, and she is the ideal singing actress, interpreting the music to the hilt both vocally and physically. She told a visitor backstage at Arci's that she is amazed to find herself still trouping long after many of her contemporaries in the musical theater have retired.

"I thought if I didn't write my own show, I'll rust," she said in an interview. "Being in the theater is a brutal career choice, maybe third to boxing and prostitution. But it has always been important to me to be a creative artist, not to be a star, not to be rich, not to be famous. I needed meaning. It completes me."

McKechnie did become a star, however, and Marvin Hamlisch's musical about wanting to be a star, "A Chorus Line," directed by choreographer Michael Bennett, was responsible. She wowed audiences by making the gypsy dancer character of Cassie so pert, so lovable, and so vulnerable that they couldn't get enough of her. The role won her the Tony Award for best actress in a musical in 1976.

McKechnie and Bennett were married briefly. Before his death from AIDS in 1987 they were reconciled, and the dancer inherited Bennett's legacy of musical theater almost as though she were his widow. She describes this legacy as "limitless, with musical numbers that move seamlessly from drama to music and back again."

"I have sort of attached myself to that dream," she said. "It was one of the things that we believed together as young dancers in New York."

Unfortunately, it is a dream no longer shared by most of the people who produce Broadway musicals today, both the new shows of Disney derivation or revivals of the classics of the 1940s and 1950s. Their idea of a star is not someone who has grown up in the theater but inexperienced TV and film stars who will attract publicity and sell tickets.

"Producers today hire people for musicals who've never done musicals and think they'll just be able to act it," she said, making no attempt to hide her bitterness. "I say to them: 'Good luck.' Great musical theater producers once knew how to involve themselves in the creative process. The people in charge now are all about dollars. They've disturbed the balance. There's no one in charge now."

McKechnie fled her dysfunctional family in Pontiac, Mich., to go to New York when she was 15. She made her Broadway debut in the chorus of the original production of Frank Loesser's "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" in 1960. Soon after her triumph as a singular sensation in "A Chorus Line" and its subsequent productions in Paris and Tokyo, she contracted rheumatoid arthritis and was told she'd never dance, let alone walk again.

She overcame and survived this setback as she did two marriages and divorces and virtual exile from Broadway after the failure of the Theater Guild's production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "State Fair" several seasons ago. Prior to that she had played a secondary role in "Annie Warbucks," the ill-fated sequel to "Annie."

Her last big hit was in New Jersey in the 1998 revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" at the Paper Mill Playhouse, but she didn't get the role of Sally, which was perfect for her talents, when the show was revived on Broadway last season. More recently she has appeared with the "Reprise" series of Broadway musicals in California.

She starred in her choreographer friend Bob Fosse's last production, an American tour of "Sweet Charity" and has recreated her Broadway roles in "Promises, Promises" and "Company" in London. She also starred in an English production of "Can Can" and "No Way To Treat a Lady," which she choreographed.

In her autobiographic show at Arci's Place, "An Evening With Donna McKechnie," she recreated recreates numbers she helped to make famous, including the show-stopping "The Music and the Mirror" from "A Chorus Line," "Turkey Lurkey Time" from "Promises, Promises," and "If My Friends Could See Me Now" from "Sweet Charity."

She tells anecdotes about Bennett, Fosse, Loesser, Hamlisch, Gwen Verdon, and Fred Astaire (with whom she once had a backstage pickup date), being careful, she says, "not to hurt anyone." The most memorable anecdote is one she tells on herself. She read an ad in Backstage, a theater publication, for an audition for "a Donna McKechnie type." She answered the call but didn't get the role.

McKechnie can laugh about that incident now, but maybe there is only one role left for her to play on the Great White Way -- herself. She is determined to do just that.

"It takes a lifetime of devotion to build your craft, your confidence, and the ability to sing and dance and act believably," she said. "Doing a musical is not just acting. It's total theater. When you have to justify the enormous projection of energy it takes to just go into song and dance, you realized why it's such a humbling experience every time you go into a show. And I'm still learning."