A Chorus Line No. 23 - Donald Pippin
- Lauryn Johnson
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
Donald Pippin was the Music Director, Vocal Arranger:
"Michael called me and said, 'We're doing this little workshop thing. It's only paying $100 a week, but come down, a lot of people think it's interest-ing.' So I went and there were all these people rehearsing to a drum beat. There seemed to be no score; no songs; it was like they were improvising everything. Michael saw me at the door and motioned me over — he was standing up on a little riser. I sat by him watching the dancers do this routine. And I said to Michael, 'I thought you were choreographing this? Are you just directing it?" I saw Barry Bostwick [acting as Zach] on the floor, but I didn't recognize him as Bostwick, or I would have known he was a character in the play. But I thought he was the choreographer. I was taken in by what eventually would become the opening number. It was so real l felt it was being created for the first time and just being learned by them at that moment. Of course, Michael was so excited that I thought this was real that he wanted to keep that feeling. Out of that impulse would come all the changes and the structural organization of Kleban and Hamlisch under Michael's guidance. It was interesting how he guided and molded them. Michael didn't write the music but the mold was set. The tempo was there; they were already working to a drumbeat with an improv going on. That whole tempo of the opening number never changed. There was the waltz and the 6/4 jazz combination; and they were improvising about "I hope I get this job."
"Watching bits and pieces I remember thinking there's something there. I couldn't claim what it was, but I felt we were inside the guts of show business. It was something I had never experienced before, and I had done a lot of work at that point. So I said, 'Okay Michael, I'm aboard.'"
--The Longest Line by Gary Stevens and Alan George
"He was the musical director for over fifteen years. He didn't do the show for fifteen years, but he was in charge, and he would check it out. Michael Bennett would send him out to check the road companies and the European companies. Don would come back from time to time to the New York company and make sure it was in fine shape."
"What turned out to be the famous bows, the Finale, was only temporary. It was never to be the end of the show. It was just thrown together to end the show until we could get the Finale done - which we never did. There was to be a very Las Vegas finale, for which I did all the vocal arrangements. They were going to have the spotlight, the 'star,' and do this whole 'Red Shoes' routine with the light on the stage and the company around it. They learned the whole vocal arrangement in a very Kay Thompson sort of style. But it never got staged; there was never time to develop the idea. We had to open and Michael literally threw the Finale together. That became the end of the show. The rest is history."
--The Longest Line by Gary Stevens and Alan George
"A Chorus Line never followed a conductor; there was no television monitor for the cast. I took great pride in the fact that the show was rehearsed and drilled. It's what I call muscle memory. You drill it until it's in their muscles, everything about breathing, phrasing, crescendos. Dancers, because of their technique, tend to be able to do that more than singers, because it becomes an overall body experience. The only time we ever had a visual performance of A CHORUS LINE was on the cast album."
--The Longest Line by Gary Stevens and Alan George
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