A Chorus Line No. 10 - Kelly Bishop
- Lauryn Johnson
- Jul 8
- 7 min read
Kelly recalls her vocal audition for the role of Sheila: "'I don't want to waste your time, Marvin,' I announced, 'but as much as I want this role—and I want it very much—I don't even have a song prepared.' God bless Michael. He jumped right in and told Marvin about my just having played Anita on the West Side Story dinner-theater circuit. Then he turned to me and said, 'Don't worry about not having a song prepared, why not just sing a few bars of Anita's song 'America'?'
"'America' was hardly written to be an a cappella solo, but Marvin was fine with it, so, surprised and a little self-conscious, I took a deep breath, and gave it all I had.
"I like to be in America
Okay by me in America
"That's about as far as I got before Marvin held up his hand and stopped me. 'Okay, I've heard enough,' he said, and my heart sank. 'That's fine. We're good,' Michael added. I think I said, 'Thank you.' I'm not sure. I just remember leaving the room in a state of devastated shock and getting to the door leading into the lobby, where Michael came up behind me. 'Don't tell anyone,' he whispered, 'but you've got the job.'
"'I was so relieved and so ecstatic that I couldn't even be bothered to watch my mouth. 'Oh, good, I get to play myself!' I blurted out. Michael apparently expected nothing less--he just smiled, shook his head, and disappeared back into the audition room."
--The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir by Kelly Bishop
"For as long as I could remember, it had been my routine to come home from a day of classes or rehearsals, handwash the leotard and tights I'd worn, wring them out with a towel, and hang them over the shower rod so they'd be clean and ready for the next day. But when we were in the full swing of rehearsals for A Chorus Line, I'd be so exhausted when I got home that I'd just throw the damned things in a bag to be dealt with some other time. Day by day I was depleting my leotard wardrobe until I finally got down to one I'd bought years earlier and hadn't worn in ages, because I hated it. For one thing, it was flesh-colored, the exact color of my skin. For another thing, like most dancers at the time, I'd cut it up a bit as I did with all my other leo-tards, lowering the neckline and the back a little, and making the leg line a little higher.
Unfortunately, I'd cut this one farther than I meant to, almost but not quite cleavage-low.
It was the only clean leotard I had left one morning, though, and I had no choice but to put it on, with a promise to myself that if I still hated it as much as I had the last time I'd worn it, I'd throw it in the trash where it belonged the minute I got home.
Photos by Martha Swope, 1975-6
"That leotard was in the trash that night before my head hit the pillow. Wouldn't you know, a couple of weeks later, Michael called me in for a meeting with him and Theoni to discuss my costume. They seemed excited and very pleased with them-selves, and Michael broke the news as if he couldn't wait to see the look on my face.
'Okay,' he announced, 'you know your kind of low-cut, flesh-colored leotard?'
'Uh-huh,' I mumbled hesitantly.
'That's what I want Sheila to wear.'
The glare he got back from me was definitely not what he was expecting. I climbed right up on my high horse and blasted him.
'Well, first of all, Michael, no. Second of all, I hate that thing so much that I tossed it down the garbage chute. Why on earth would you want me to wear that old rag?' As I took a breath, a thought suddenly hit me, and I added, in my most withering, mocking tone,
'Because it's so blatantly sexy?'
'Sure, that's part of it-'
I cut him off. 'And what's the other part of it? Because I'm onstage a lot next to Donna McKechnie, and she's wearing red, and a flesh-colored leotard will make me pretty much disappear when I'm beside her?'
"He remained remarkably calm and replied with strained patience. 'No, because when you go into 'At the Ballet' and drop your hands the way you do, and the lighting changes, that leotard makes you look like a naked, vulnerable little girl.' Oh.
I thought about it for a few seconds before I sheepishly climbed down off my high horse.
'Okay,' was all I said, but it was a stroke of genius on his part, and Theoni's, something I would never have come up with in a million years. They were right; I was wrong.
And that's how Sheila's costume was born.
--The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir by Kelly Bishop
"The first song fully to reflect the content and structure of the tapes was 'At the Ballet,' which grew directly out of the taped monologues, particularly Kelly Bishop's story of her parents and Donna McKechnie's fantasy about her absent daddy.
A lot of Bishop's monologue was about the enchanted world that ballet represented to her when she was a child. 'I was particularly thinking of Danilova,' Bishop said. 'I went to see Danilova when I was a child. Danilova is not a beautiful woman. Actually, she's much more glorious-looking now in her old age than she was. There are a lot of funny-looking ballerinas. But they get onstage and they're gorgeous. And the prince does fall in love with them and they do go off into the sunset. And that's what appealed to me about the ballet. I thought I was very ugly. But in Swan Lake or some other ballet, it didn't matter what your face looked like, it mattered how you acted, how you danced, how you pro-jected. It created the illusion of beauty.'
"'A lot of people were dying to have a song,' Bishop said. 'But it was my terror. I wanted to be the actress of the company. But one day Michael pulled me out of rehearsal and said, 'Go down to the Green Room, Ed wants to talk to you. 'Ed and I just sat and talked about my childhood. I told him about my father's philandering and about his drinking. I talked to him for about two hours. He was so overwhelmed.'
"Not long afterward, Bishop was again pulled from rehearsal and sent into a separate room, where Hamlisch and Kleban were waiting with a piano. Shortly after she arrived, she remembers, they began to sing the first draft of 'At the Ballet,' which is substantially the way it is still sung. 'I was just overwhelmed,' Bishop said. 'I thought it was the most beautiful piece of music I had ever heard. I heard the story, I heard the words, and I looked at Ed and I thought I can't believe this man. . . from that hour and a half or two hours I talked to him, he had plucked those things.
"'I was, I think, in tears when I heard it. It's got three full melodic lines: 'Daddy always thought he had married beneath him...--that one. Then there's Everyone was beautiful at the ballet'— the pretty one. Then 'Up a steep and very narrow...' So you had three where most songs only have two. It was wonderful!
"'The song starts out with my story,' Bishop said. 'The Indian chief is Donna. That was left over from her spoken monologue. She was a war baby. Her parents were married young and quickly and her father went off to war. She used to see his picture and she used to kiss his picture every night. She used to have this whole fantasy about what a father was. Her fantasy father was an Indian chief and he would say, 'Donna, do you want to dance?' and she'd say, 'Daddy, I would love to? And every time she told that monologue we all wept and she'd weep, too. It was the most incredible moment.
"The whole thing about 'I don't know what they were for or against, really except each other,' was a verbatim quote from Donna. When he came to the hospital and said, I thought this was going to help but I guess it's not, that was all Donna. So the song is mostly me and Donna.'"
"In the early spring of 1976, nominations for the Tony Awards were starting to arrive, and one day after a matinee, Priscilla found her Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical waiting in her mailbox. Rather than screaming with joy when she read the an-nouncement, she casually asked me if l'a gotten anything interesting in my mailbox. Nope. Which made her almost apologetic when she told me why she was asking. I stopped just short of scolding her for worrying about my feelings instead of being as thrilled for herself as she deserved to be, and by the way, I was thrilled for her too, so let's celebrate, for God's sake!
[Later that evening], in my mailbox, was my Tony nomination. Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.
"Disbelief" is not too strong a word. I honestly hadn't given more than a passing thought to whether I'd be nominated, probably trying to protect myself from being disappointed. But holding that nomination announcement was another one of those moments I wasn't about to risk by pinching myself and waking up.
Priscilla and I were and are very much alike in a lot of ways. One of the ways we were very different, though, was that I was always, always early to the theater, while Priscilla could be counted on to come flying in with only seconds to spare. So there I was at the mirror in our dressing room, halfway through putting on my makeup, when Priscilla raced through the door and started getting dressed and ready to go onstage, in too big a hurry to say much more than hi. I didn't say much ei-ther, for a minute or two, but then...
"Oh, Priscilla, by the way?"
"Yes?"
"I got a nomination."
She shrieked, "OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmy-God!!!" and we hugged and giggled and jumped around in a circle like a couple of giddy little schoolgirls on a playground. It didn't occur to either one of us, nor did we care, that since we were both nominated in the same category, we were competing against each other for a Tony Award. A few petty people, particularly a couple of understudies who shall remain nameless, kept their eyes on us, eagerly anticipating the drama of our friendship disintegrating into jealous, catty backstage sniping, but no such luck. We were each other's biggest fans, and no one was prouder of her than I was."
--The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir by Kelly Bishop
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