TOEING THE LINE.

In the 1933 film "42nd Street," the theatre director Warner Baxter sends the understudy Ruby Keeler out onstage with the famous line "You're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star." The musical "A Chorus Line," which opened on Broadway in 1975 and closed in 1990, after more than six thousand performances, reversed the mythic path from anonymity to celebrity. One of its main characters, Cassie, is a dancer who has risen from the ranks and now wants to return to the ensemble. Uncomfortable standing out, she wants, literally and figuratively, to toe the line. In the current, thrilling revival, under the direction of Bob Avian (at the Gerald Schoenfeld)--Avian co-choreographed the original, with Michael Bennett, who also conceived and directed the show--that line is a white one, extending the width of the proscenium, where the twenty-four dancers auditioning for eight spots in a Broadway chorus stand like convicts in a lineup while the abrasive director, Zach (Michael Berresse), interrogates them, with godlike invisibility, from the stalls. "Why shouldn't you be the best you can be?" Zach asks Cassie (Charlotte d'Amboise), his former lover whom he first plucked from a chorus at the age of twenty-two. Cassie replies, "That's not a decision, that's a disease. God, good, better, best--I hate it!"

This is definitely not star talk, or even, really, Broadway talk. Back in 1975, "A Chorus Line" aspired to be part of Broadway's legend of good times, and also something completely different. Seeping into its cutthroat dance-off was not just a new look but a new sound--the post-Vietnam sound of retreat. Cassie's spiritual fatigue reflected the culture's nostalgia for a simpler, happier life, one undamaged by the nation's imperialism, one that would replace the destiny of me with the destiny of we. "A Chorus Line" 's sense of abdication spoke subliminally to its time; it is also what makes the musical so pertinent to the present, disillusioned generation. To win a place in the chorus, Cassie must give up her individuality. "You're distorting the combination," Zach barks at her as he runs the line through a routine. "Pull in. Cool it. Dance like everyone else." When, at the finale, the chorus struts its stuff in "One"--streamlined bodies moving in unison like a well-oiled machine--its victory is a triumph of anonymity. At first, the number in the song's title seems to refer to the ensemble's fabulous precision; in fact, it celebrates the star, whose entrance the chorus is setting up and for whom it is merely a backdrop. "One smile and suddenly nobody else will do," the performers sing. "You know you'll never be lonely with you know who." At the opening, as the hopefuls are put through their paces on Robin Wagner's brilliant, minimalist set, they stare at themselves, upstage, in dance mirrors. The image is a metaphor of their plight. To us, they are faceless; their glory, such as it is, is reflected glory. Still, although the dancers enter as numbers called out by Zach, over the course of the show we get to know their names and their stories, to understand their individual foibles, and to root for them. The members of the chorus are, for a moment, turned into principals; the ripples become the wave.

At the time of the original production, "A Chorus Line" was a departure not just in its content but in its method of creation. A product of the first musical "workshop"--long sessions in which the potential cast spoke to Michael Bennett about their real lives--it was "improvised into being," as Ethan Mordden puts it in "Broadway Babies." The genius of the show's construction is its ability to suggest a multitude of individual stories within its almost perpetual motion; at the same time, it makes piquantly clear that words are not the dancers' medium, in "Sing!," a clever stutter-song in which Al (Tony Yazbeck) finishes the sentences of his wife Kristine (Chryssie Whitehead):

KRISTINE: Oh, I know you're thinking what a crazy . . ., AL: . . . Dingaling . . ., KRISTINE: I could never really . . ...