When the Fifth Avenue Theatre announced they were kicking off their 2026-27 season with a revival of A Chorus Line earlier this year, I thought it was an extremely ambitious choice. Having caught the opening night performance last Friday night, it is clear the high risk/high reward gambit paid off in spades.

When it debuted on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in 1975, it didn’t close until after another 6,136 performances (or about fifteen years), then the longest-running Broadway show of all time. In 1976, it also won nine of the twelve Tony Awards it was nominated for, including Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Book (Musical), Best Director, Best Choreography, Best Lead Actress (Donna McKechnie, as Cassie), Best Featured Actress (Kelly Bishop as Sheila), and Best Featured Actor (Sammy Williams as Paul).

A Chorus Line is clearly one of the most beloved musicals there ever was but staging a production sounds like a near impossibility to a Philistine like myself. Without any need for elaborate sets, the play still demands a cast of seventeen where being a good actor and/or dancer is insufficient but at least sixteen must be triple threats (pity to Kristine). Mathematically, finding sixteen people who can act, dance, and sing is sixteen times harder than it is to find fifteen. Moreover, there is no real “lead” role here and there’s some level of parity between all of the actors on stage.

The play centers around a dance audition in a chorus for a Broadway production helmed by director Zach and his assistant choreographer Larry. Only four men and four women will ultimately be chosen, from a pool that began with twenty-four (and was cut to seventeen after initial cuts in the first few minutes). It proves to be an unconventional audition and when Zach asks for personal details of each candidate, they mostly balk before ultimately opening up after accepting that some invasiveness is part of the cost to being chosen. We slowly learn that each character found dance through a lot of adversity and no shortage of tragedy.

Tony-nominated director and choreographer Denis Jones does a remarkable job leading the Fifth Avenue Theatre’s production. Each performance was memorable in its own way, and there were none I found wanting or lacking.

Kayden Oliver’s performance as Paul was one of the emotional anchors of the play, bringing out a deep, visceral ache whenever he spoke, without ever descending into bathos. I was also deeply moved by Sara Esty’s portrayal of Cassie, a former romantic and creative partner of Zach’s who is auditioning for the chorus line after attempting to launch a career on stage and screen that ultimately went nowhere. She delivered the show’s most potent line that still makes me tear up while writing this.

There are a lot of other highlights, too. Kees Hoekendijk had the funniest moment of the play. As the youngest dancer at the audition, his Mark Anthony described to Zach his attempt at diagnosing his nocturnal emissions to hilarious, but unfortunate, results. This is made all the funnier that it preceded WebMd by like thirty years.

I also really liked “Sing!,” where Al (Gill Vaughan-Spencer) and and his wife Kristine (Annalisa Brinchman) sang a duet where he had to finish her lines because of her tone-deafness. Last year, I wrote of Tori Gresham’s performance in Elf, “For my money, she’s the most gifted stage actor in Seattle right now” and that remains true after her excellent performance as Sheila, the part Gilmore grandmother Kelly Bishop won a Tony for fifty years ago. And even among this cast, Brandon LaVar stands out as an electrifying dancer.

My favorite number was almost certainly “Dance Ten; Looks: Three” from Val (Susanna Cathryn Ballenski), though that was my favorite track while listening to the soundtrack to study for this review. I found the character’s backstory calamitous and Ballenski’s performance riveting.

What makes the Fifth Avenue Theatre’s A Chorus Line work so well is that it never treats the musical as a museum piece, or something needing to be updated for modern sensibilities. Yes, the show is fifty years old, and yes, its reputation precedes it so thoroughly that even people who have never seen it before (like myself) know something of its silhouette. It understands that beneath the precision and razzle-dazzle is a story about rejection, longing, humiliation, endurance, and the strange, irrational need to do the thing you were born to do (or think you were born to do), even when it keeps breaking your heart.

The Fifth Avenue Theatre took a big swing by opening its season with a show this demanding. The result is not just a successful revival, but a reminder of why A Chorus Line became canonical in the first place. The production succeeds because it trusts the material, trusts the cast, and gives the audience every reason to do the same.

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A Chorus Line runs through Sunday, September 27. Tickets and more info can be found here.

Photo credit: Michael B. Maine, courtesy of the Fifth Avenue Theatre.