Donna McKechnie: There’s nothing like it. Performing on Broadway is incredible, even eight times a Do they still do eight times week, I hope? It’s great. There’s Nothing like it, it is still, and opening nights are, it’s like dreams coming true every time. I never take it for granted. It makes all the downtime worth it, which it’s hard. It’s a business built on insecurity and times when you know it’s really hard. It’s like a miracle that anything gets mounted, especially now. And when you’re in a show with a company and you’re working together going to the same, you know, putting on something and putting all of your work and talent and years of studying into it, it’s when it comes together and you are performing together, there’s nothing like it. It’s the greatest, really.
Michael Kantor: So I was just thinking that it’s sort of, it’s permission to really show off something special, isn’t it? Sort of America, in a way, enjoys that kind of brash.
Donna McKechnie: Well, it is truly America’s art form, and it belongs to us. I really believe that. I get on my soapbox perhaps about it, but I work all over the world, in London and Asia. And it’s what we, in our short history, it’s what we’ve developed with our imagination and our creativity and our enthusiasm. And it really is something I teach and I’m very proud to be a part of. There’s nothing like it, really, when you put a story in such a musical way, using all of the elements, and it’s a humbling experience for everybody every time you begin. I don’t care who it is and how many shows you’ve done. It’s like taking baby steps again. And you bring it all to the fore, all your experience, all of your training, all your knowledge and your inspiration, and then you hope for the best.
Michael Kantor: Broadway can be the highest high, but what if it’s a bomb?
Donna McKechnie: Well, that’s why they have that Joe Allen wall, you know, in his restaurant. You know, the one hit, one night hits rather, or bombs. It’s horrible. It’s heartbreaking. I remember being out of town with several shows and we used to have this saying that if Hitler were alive, the worst punishment would be to put him in a Broadway show out of the town on a tryout.
Michael Kantor: How has Broadway changed the most since you started?
Donna McKechnie: Well, I get asked this question a lot. How has Broadway changed since I started it with how to succeed in business without really trying? And I think it comes down to, especially today, economics. I really believe that because in the old days, I could say we did this. Well, actually, we went out of town. Let’s start with rehearsals. Rehearsals were five, six weeks, sometimes seven weeks. It’s a matter of money. I don’t think rehearsals are that extended. Sometimes now they take tours out to make money back so that they can have a cushion to run on Broadway to open. Before, the best songs they used to say were written out of town, when you’d go to the Shubert in Philly or Boston or New Haven. And the composers, we’d be rehearsed, let’s say we’d rehearse for six weeks, and then we’d go out of town for maybe six or eight weeks, minimum four weeks. And that’s when the show started happening. That’s when the audience gave us all the clues. And the composers and lyric writer would get together and write the, you know, the famous song that came out of that run. And that was very exciting to see it all come together to experience that. And then the director could start doing his work, really. And then you come back, and the critics out of town were a great help. Elliot Norton was a really important person, as I remember, to… He was a gentleman, but they were gentleman producers. They were all theatrical people. They all knew their part that they had to play to bring this to fruition. It’s a different kind of business. And I think it’s money and time. And there’s some terrible things that are happening and some good things. I think the big companies coming in and Thank you very much. You know, producing the records and then creating and marketing the audience as opposed to doing PR, it’s marketing now. And then creating this excitement for, you know and it keeps a lot of people working. It’s just very different. Even agenting is different.
Michael Kantor: Tell us if you would, by the time you’d been in company, you’d have been in a bunch of different shows, but then this one was company, it was different. Tell us how.
Donna McKechnie: Was it was very exciting to be in company from the get-go because first of all it was an ensemble piece and it was the first adult-themed musical about contemporary relationships in New York City and it with conceived by Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim and I was in awe of these men they were so revered and still are of course and it is the first time that I’d been in a company with adult actors. As opposed to the typical book musical with, they used to call us, now these are the dancing girls and the dancing boys and the singing girls and singing boys. We were all adults. And there was Elaine Stritch at the head of it, you know, the helm. And it was a fantastic, fantastic rehearsal period. The first day we sat around this enormous table and we got our music for the opening number. And Barbara Barry said something very funny, We opened, the pages just fell out, there were like 25 pages. That was just the opening number. All this difficult counterpoint and everything. And she made a joke and she said, can you imagine these companies coming together 20 years from now and doing this and seeing this opening number? And well I had that opportunity 20 years later to do it again, different role, but we laughed about that. This is one of the examples of going out of town, how important that was as part of the development and the success of this great achievement. Hal Prince is so smart, and as is Stephen Sondheim, and they were trying to make this ending like this positive ending. And it wasn’t working. Bobby, that central character, had a lot of ambivalence. He had all these married friends that he was trying to align himself with, and the women were always trying to fix him up, of course, because, you know, they kind of were in love with him a little bit. He was their pet. So at the end of the play in Boston, we had an ending for it, and Bobby was sitting on a park bench, and this girl came over and sat down, and they were saying, finally, he’s going to find his someone. Um, and they felt if they didn’t say that, that they would think he was really odd or maybe a gay man or whatever. And they were very confused about that. They had their own ambivalence. And then Hal, I remember hearing it from someone else that he said in a meeting, um, we can’t, um, presume to know what the answers to life are, anyone’s happiness, anyone’s personal happiness. So we have to really support this guy’s individualness and uniqueness. And that’s what they did. And it left him with a question, which is fantastic, because as adults, we’re constantly growing up and having the same questions put to us.
Michael Kantor: How did audiences react to the Sondheim Prince shows?
Donna McKechnie: There was ambivalence there, too. But we all know the audience. I think there was an audience for this show from the very beginning. People were thrilled by it, stimulated, excited, intellectually moved, and emotionally moved the same time. But Clive Barnes gave us not a great review. I heard he had a fight with his wife in the lobby that night, anyway. But we, uh, we… We’re very unhappy that it didn’t get all these raves. But then we were running. We were able to run. And we had great people behind us and a great producer. Then a year later, we had another review by Clive Barnes, and he gave it a rave. And I thought that was very kind. I had never heard of that happening before.
Michael Kantor: Great, let’s jump ahead just because I know we’re tight on time. Out of this relationship of well let’s go back to the first time you met Michael Bennett. Do you have any ways of introducing him as a guy who from day one wanted to somehow change the Broadway world?
Donna McKechnie: I met Michael on Hollow Blue, a TV variety show in 1964. And I remember one day, I mean, I always admired his dancing. He was incredible. We were all young and just loving what we did. We were happy to be working. And I talk about it in my own show, where we’re dancing side by side, and we’re bringing the jerk to new heights. And I say, Michael. What are you going to do when you grow up? You can’t keep tuning this the rest of your life. Did you ever think of that, huh? And he said, yes, I’m going to be a choreographer. And I went, oh, good luck. Don’t forget about me. And he didn’t.
Michael Kantor: How do you think you were Michael’s muse in a way? Do you think choreographers need a muse, and how did you work that way?
Donna McKechnie: I don’t know how it works, I just know that we were friends and we admired each other. When I found out how serious he was and then as I got to know him, right after Hullabaloo he went out and started choreographing in summer stock and he had a very good agent Jack Lenny and he was just coming up with all these wonderful ideas that he had inside himself all these years growing up in Buffalo. And I think we were very similar. Our dance styles were similar. We had very good training, ballet, jazz. He was a better tapper. And I think that he appreciated the way I could dance, but also the way interpreted from an acting standpoint, because that’s how he worked conceptually, with the psychology, without thinking about it. He just did it innately. And I think that he appreciated. The way that I took something beyond a technique or beyond the steps and was trying to say something as an actor.
Michael Kantor: What was radically new about a chorus line?
Donna McKechnie: Chorus line my goodness all things you could say about it it was so different well one way it was the first time a group of dancers got together and improvised with michaels uh… Vision uh… Put a show together together in a workshop uh… I think equity who forbids this from now on but at the time we put this show together with it with two separate workshops and one with music and one without music and with music, one Marvin, Hamlet, Sinead Kleban. And I think that was the unique thing of it. It was about the truth. It was the story of dancers coming from dancers speaking about their lives. And in the tape sessions, I’ll never forget it, he essentially asked the first three questions that are put to the characters in the play. Step forward, tell me your name, where you’re from. When you were born and why did you want to become a dancer? And that’s how we started the group and we started talking and blah blah blah and all of these things came out beyond facts. It was all of everybody’s secret passions and dreams and desires and we found great um… Delight and surprise that so many people felt the same way about so many things.
Michael Kantor: But you also found the common need for a job.
Donna McKechnie: Yes, that’s the main thing. Well, as you know, it’s a short-lived career, being a dancer. And it’s extraordinary. I mean, you’re asked when you first study to do something unnatural. It hurts all the time, even in training. And the life of a dancer is so difficult. And it takes such discipline that you have to really love it with an undying passion, because it’s ridiculous otherwise. You can’t. You can’t do it, it’s too heartbreaking. And it’s, I thought it was very, all of the things that he touched on in that show were so concise and distilled from so much material he had. And when Paul fell down and injured himself, all the things came to bear and all the other characters, that terrible threat. He did that. He faked that one day in rehearsal with us so that We would remember our reactions to him. Breaking his leg or breaking his ankle. And I thought it wasn’t a very mean thing to do to us, but he got the desired effect. And we remembered that feeling, because dancers don’t want to know about what do you do if they can’t deal with it.
Michael Kantor: Speak to, if you would, the mid-70s. Broadway’s a dangerous place. I mean, how did it feel coming to work on Broadway, but also how did Chorus Line kind of lift, all of a sudden, people are leg warmers? The whole culture kind of responded, didn’t it?
Donna McKechnie: Broadway in the 70s was a very thrilling, exciting time. There was still a little danger in the city, not like now. The city was alive with a lot of things. Yes, 42nd Street was not cleaned up. There were drugs everywhere. And even in the seventies, I remember a line that I had in the workshop, don’t tell me Broadway is dying because I just got here. They were saying that when I got to New York in 61, that Broadway’s dying. It always is dying, you know? And I just love the point that he was making with that. The way that the audience took to the Everyman, you know, there was something in that show for everybody. And yes, I think it did lead a style in fashion, in a way, with the dance clothes. I’ve been wearing, dancers wear dance clothes on the street, you Always, since the 30s, I’m sure. But they became really high fashion and still are, I think. Michael had a great idea in the beginning. This is why it’s wonderful to, Joe Papp was the great champion of this show, of course. He gave Michael carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to in this little theater, the public theater. And And he gave him the luxury of making all these mistakes first, because you can’t succeed unless you go down the wrong road sometimes. But I remember one interesting thing. Michael was trying to put a finale on the show. And Marvin Hamlisch came in with this one singular sensation. Now, if you listen to the words, we’re a group of 16, and we’re singing one singular sensation, every little step she takes. He had an idea in rehearsal, too. Pull a different person up every night from the audience and have that be the Anne Margaret where the boys and girls were around, just leading her this way or a man. And so that everyone was a star in the centerpiece, but we were still the background. And I think he decided against that because it would be too, you never know what was going to happen, who you were pulling up. But that, so it became, then we became the… That bittersweet ending, which I love, which is kind of, is that all there is? There is no star. We are the chorus. So in that brief moment, he says something really wonderful about, look a little closer next time you see a Broadway show.
Michael Kantor: Um Did your role in the show mirror your relationship with Michael Bennett?
Donna McKechnie: Any time you publicize that this is based on the truth, it’s really hard to say which is fiction, which is fact. So I gave up years ago trying to explain that relationship with the director, Zach, as my life. Of course, a lot of the characters were fictionalized. All of my childhood memories went into six different characters. But Cassie was the hardest character to write. And to experience and to compose a song for because it was the most fictionalized because it had to do with that particular relationship with the choreographer. And no, there wasn’t any comparison. We used different things in our own lives. But then after the fact, of course, when we got married, it looked that way. I mean, it look like, so, see, you get tongue-tied when you try to explain it, So I just say, yes, that was me.
Michael Kantor: I think Michael Bennet changed Broadway, or what’s his legacy to Broadway, apart from just the work itself.
Donna McKechnie: Oh gosh, well he was a total, I mean he did everything, he started as a choreographer, he became a wonderful director and producer. He could juggle that difficult, he could do that juggling act of being producer, having a lot of strength and conviction and he was such an artist. He had the courage to put it up there and to fight for things. It’s very hard to… Win people over on something that’s new when you’re dealing with millions of dollars. And he had an incredible way, I think this is a key to him, he pulled, he had a team of players that he worked with all the time, you know, Robin Wagner, there’s a, the list goes on, Bob Avian, Bobby Thomas, Bayork Lee, I worked at several shows, but the who created the show with him. Evolved together and he built an incredible relationship with Bernie Jacobs and Jerry Schoenfeld and Joe Pat. So it was a it was away that gave him a a seat of power in a way so that he could bring in these new ideas and even being Michael Bennett he had a struggle sometimes but he had all of this incredible he had his people there with him I don’t think anyone knew that when we started how successful and how far reaching this show could be. I mean, I think some of us knew that it would be an artistic hit, because it was just so beautifully done. And we were performing it, and people were seeing it downtown. And we got a hint of what a big hit it could be when we moved and started performing. I think I started realizing, because of the letters I received, I was a symbol. That character represented… A second chance. So men who are just retired would write me letters and say, your character made me go out and start a new business. Football players would say the line. They would talk about the line, being on the line and then I started realizing week after week that the metaphor, there was something for everyone, but it was everyone has dreams and hopes and everyone gets disappointed and discouraged. And the show was kind of a… A prayer for starting over again, or at least my character-wise.
Michael Kantor: That’s great. The same year of the chorus line, Chicago Open. Speak, if you would, to Bob Fosse’s vision in Chicago and whether he was ahead of his time and how different he was from Michael Bennett, because you worked closely with him.
Donna McKechnie: Yes, yeah.
Michael Kantor: Let’s start with the same year, take it from the same.
Donna McKechnie: The same year, the same year chorus line opened in Chicago. And I never felt any competition. Because when you work that hard, we were like Insular, like Hothouse Plans, we felt. You’re doing eight shows a week. You just have to keep up. But I was very aware, because I worked with them my first show, Bob and Gwen, and I’d always been such a fan of Cheetahs. Anyway, I just. I just thought it was exciting that we had these dance shows. I think that there was a great disappointment when Chorus Line had a sweep of Tonys. And Chicago was left out in the cold a little bit. It didn’t deserve it. And I don’t know if Fosse, I think he was ahead of his time. I think, he was non-compromising. They were very similar in many ways. You could technically say that their dancing was different. I mean, Michael’s. Sense was, I always envisioned him going breastbone forward, up and out, like throwing himself, you know, flying. And Fosse took all that intense sexual energy and the energy went down into the floor. And everything had a move and everything had look and a style. Michael had a style too, but he was more interested in choreographing for the psychology of the character or the piece. And so they both got the end, the result, right. And I think it was a difficult time when Fosse invited me to do charity years later. I think that it showed the measure of him to come into that theater, because I was back on Broadway again 10 years later doing Chorus Line. He saw me six times and then called me and said I had the job. And I it took a lot for him. He respected Michael, Michael respected him, but there was always this kind of little competitive, two different camps. So when Bob Fosse invited Michael’s dancer, protege, whatever, I think that was a big step. And even though I started with Fosse, he was primarily an integrity person, and I think, well, they both were.
Michael Kantor: Speak to that moment in the mid to late 80s when you’re in Vossi’s last show and within a period of very short time, Broadway was just too, you know, huge talent.
Donna McKechnie: 1987 was the most terrible year. I was in Toronto with Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, and it was our tech, our dress rehearsal night. Michael died that day. They came into my dressing room, and they said, you don’t have to go on tonight. And I said, I have to. And I think they knew that I needed to, because I didn’t know else to cope. And that’s what Gwen would have done, and that’s what she did when she lost her mother, when she was doing charity. She went on that night. It’s crazy. But you don’t know how else to cope with it. Three months later, I had no idea, three months later that Bob Fosse would be gone as well. The day he left us, he must have known something because he got us all down in the orchestra, sat the whole company down, and started telling us how to be better on stage, and to never compete with anybody else, and be a better person, and save your money, and this fatherly talk. I was going, what is he telling us all this stuff right now? Five minutes later, he was gone. I think he couldn’t give enough direction. The last day with him was, when I look back, it was incredible. And I think things were very hard for him then. I think, he started feeling the business going this way. He had just had a major disappointment with this last musical that he tried to get up. And it’s, again, it was money and… It was horrible. It was a big headache for him. And I think he put everything into this road company because he was so frustrated, I think, with not having things happen in an easier way.
Michael Kantor: Speak, if you would, to AIDS, the effect of AIDS on the Broadway community at this exact time. I mean, Michael, Ron, I guess Ron, so many different people are affected, but speak both from your own perspective but how you think it changed Broadway’s history.
Donna McKechnie: AIDS, well, I don’t even know how to comprehend the effect that AIDS had on the Broadway community. It’s the greatest tragedy I will ever experience in my lifetime. Even though there’s a great loss with family and friends, I mean, that in itself, for all of us, took the greatest talent before their prime. I can’t help but think sometimes about what would Michael have, his best years were ahead of him. And I think Fossey would have, you know, would have come up with something just brilliant and he was creating a ballet. He was working on a ballet that summer. And just scores of young choreographers, nobody knows their name, but they had dreams and they had ideas and… It’s a terrible tragedy, and we don’t even know the effect because we have lost our future in a way, really. So I believe in people, though. People will find a way. We will find away, but it’s a great loss. What makes Broadway special? Well, New York still is the mecca. I teach musical theater when I’m in town, when I am able I’ve learned with my own work all over the world that you create a theater wherever you You can. You can create the demand. The audience is, you know, that’s the wonderful thing about our musical theater. You know, they’re there to be taken on that trip. But there is nothing like Broadway. It still is that place. And it’s, that the barometer. And it will always be in a way. It’s a very special place. And it’s a, and I think when people finally… Make it, they appreciate it. I certainly do. I never take it for granted. Because in the 70s, I used to think, oh, I get a hit a year. It doesn’t happen like that.
Michael Kantor: What do you think was the best part of the 70s? What part of that work? You know, whoever says the golden age was the 50s with Wes Edsture and whatever. What made the 70’s a golden age?
Donna McKechnie: Um…
Michael Kantor: You still had Gower Champion, right? You had all of them. Yeah.
Donna McKechnie: Yeah, it was still wide open. It was still wide open for, it, I don’t know, I guess that each age brings its own complications, but it seemed like, you know, it was feverish with ideas and excitement and everybody, you know, and I think Chorus Line did affect a lot of people in the business too, about, oh you can get, you can really speak from your heart, you can talk about such personal things. This happened right after Watergate. And it really was set in Michael that he, it really got him that people have to start being honest about everything. And that’s why it was so potent to have some of the, you know, the characters in Chorus Line reveal themselves in that way. It brought everything and presented in this wonderful entertainment. It brought every thing of those very difficult things to mention, not only in musical, but in a play. About homosexuality. I think we had boys in a band. But that really wasn’t about the gay life. It was more about intimacy. So all of these things were, the world was opening up. People were starting to feel like they could believe in dreams again and make them happen.
Michael Kantor: You mentioned, you know, gay life. We’ve been struggling with a way to point out how important gay performers have been in the Broadway history. Can you do that in terms of, you know, your own experiences and just maybe just help take it back to the AIDS thing? I don’t know.
Donna McKechnie: I feel very fortunate, because I don’t have any in my mind. As I go back when I was a kid, I started working when I was 15, I always felt that I found a place where I could be comfortable with being me, and I found a way to be an artist. And for most artists you talk to, that’s their world, and I don’t remember making a distinction about these Okay, as portrayed in film and stage, it was like the eccentric person, the person that had that extra flair or more a silk scarf or something. I mean, very funny things. Artists, I mean you go back in time, literary, you know, the literary world, you now, had, well, I means, this is a long answer I’m going getting into, but there were. It was all kind of, it’s like the Midwest in the 50s. Everything was not talked about. It was kind of like repressed. It was like the silent, let’s don’t talk about it. It’s there, but let’s not talk about. And that’s, I think chorus line helped bring all these things out a little more so that each person, in their own way, can pave the way for the next step. And I think that just helped. Move things along a little bit, you know, politically as well as artistically.
Michael Kantor: Let me just get, for the sound and camera, homosexuality and other issues whenever, you know, just if you could just say that as a…
Donna McKechnie: What am I saying?
Michael Kantor: Homosexuality and other sensitive issues were never talked about, just as a topic, because you had that.
Donna McKechnie: Right, right. Homosexuality and other issues were never talked about in theater and artistically it was never presented as a question to be discussed in an honorable way with integrity. It was always a joke or an eccentric point of view or cute or funny or tragic or whatever, but not a normal every day and day out occurrence.
Michael Kantor: Gwen Verdon as Bob Fosse’s muse and then we can let you go. What was Gwen Verden, what did she mean to Bob? Bob started as a dancer, you know, and take him from there, but he found this person who he could channel his.
Donna McKechnie: I think Gwen Verdon found Bob Fosse. That’s what I think. I don’t know the facts, and I don’t know a lot about how they began together really. I just know that when I started working with them, she was already a big star, and she was our dance captain in How to Succeed when he was the choreographer. They would go home every night and bounce on the bed and do all the choreography, come in the next day and teach us the choreography. And I thought, my God, Gwen Verdon. Is a dance captain, but you know, she was, I don’t think she ever wanted to be her own choreographer. I think she grew up as a, she was Jack Cole’s assistant, and in fact, he was her guardian. She loved being a dance Captain for him, and she continued to be, and it was all the workings. She loved, you know making it all happen, and she really needs someone to. To direct her and to work with her and bring out all of her incredible gifts. And he was that person, but I think she was there first.
