A Chorus Line No. 6 - Wayne Cilento
- Lauryn Johnson
- Jul 5
- 3 min read
"Wayne Cilento went to a Catholic grammar school in Westchester, New York. I always liked Open House dancing. I always danced with the black people. Just regular social dancing. He auditioned for the high school musical, choreographed by the female physical education teacher, who saw immediately that Wayne had a natural ability and started pushing him to start dance classes. So I said, 'Okay, fine, but I'm not wearing tights.'
"Wayne attended modern dance and jazz classes twice a week, wearing shorts and pretending to be an athlete. During the day he was a student at Westchester Community College. Then the teacher took him to see his first Broadway show. I couldn't believe it. I said, 'They're really doing that for a living?' She said, 'That's it.' I said, 'Okay, fine, that's it.' Searching through Dance magazine, he found that Brockport University had a dance curriculum, and transferred there. 'Okay, so here I am. I'm eighteen now and I knew I had a lot to catch up with. From a person who wasn't gonna wear tights and was never gonna take a ballet class in his whole life, I decided I was gonna be a dancer. So I went to Brockport and I do the same thing. I had an interview with the head of the department and I said, 'No tights. You want me to dance? No tights.' I think it was a week later, I had every get-up on my body that you could possibly think of. I had modern drag, ballet drag, jazz drag. I had outfits for days. I took two ballet classes a day, three modern classes, and a repertory class. I was dead. I just danced from morning to night.'"
--What They Did for Love by Denny Martin Flinn
Photos by Martha Swope, 1975
"There wasn't enough time for everyone to have a treasured 'big moment,' so each of the dancers did everything they could think of in order to ensure that their parts would survive the cut. Only a few were successful. [...]
"The cuts were particularly painful for performers like Wayne Cilento, who lost most of his 'through line.' In the final script he is the first dancer whose story rises from prose into song. He sings 'I Can Do That,' the first character song in the show, and a knockout song-and-dance number. But little is heard from his character again. That wasn't always the case. Cilento briefly had another song as well, 'Joanne,' a more personal number about his childhood friend by that name. 'Joanne was a girl that I grew up with in an apartment building in the Bronx,' he said. 'She went to dance school, and one day she took me with her. I got shy about it and never went back.'
"Cilento remembers the lyric went something like 'There was a girl on the second floor/I had a crazy crush on her since I was three or four/We would watch TV/It would be cookies, Mouseketeers, Joanne and me.'
He described it as 'a real Gene Kelly MGM number. I learned it one day. It was full-fledged during previews at the Newman right before we opened. But then Michael cut it. At that point it was another of those little minor nervous breakdowns. It was a great little number, very lyrical. It wasn't better than I Can Do That,' but it was my story.
"[...] I just felt cheated because I didn't have a through line. I just did my little I Can Do That thing and no one knew who I was. The only thing I had to hold on to through the whole thing and made sense for me was that I knew that somewhere along the line I was one of the best dancers on that stage. I knew Michael felt that about me and that's what I held on to."
"Whatever else they took from Cilento, they let him keep 'I Can Do That.' It is the only male solo in A Chorus Line."
—On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line by Robert Vargas, Baayork Lee, & Thommie Walsh
Comments