Playwright Arlene Hutton crams six chorus girls from a fictional long-running Broadway musical into a cramped basement quick-change room. But they are not central to According to the Chorus; it’s the three dressers from the wardrobe department who contribute the wit, wisdom, and drama to the 90-minute evening.
Is the play written so that everything perks up when attention is placed on Audrey, the middle-in-age of the three wardrobe workers? Or is this simply because Karen Ziemba, long one of Broadway’s top dancers, has transformed herself into a comedic darling of a character actor?
Certainly, Ziemba (of Contact, Steel Pier, The World Goes ‘Round and more) takes the stage at the start and holds it throughout. Which is enough to make According to the Chorus not a must-see but a fairly diverting trifle recommended for those who enjoy backstage talk circa 1985. (That said, one of the plot points is tied to the 1988 opening and closing of the musical Carrie. Hutton places this, oddly, at the August Wilson Theatre—although the Virginia, where all that blood was spilled, was not renamed to honor Wilson until 2005.)
The play’s title is off track, too, albeit catchier than what might more accurately be called “According to the Dressers.” Hutton centers her story around a mismatched trio. Brenda (Judith Hiller) is an ancient relic—a former dancer who, we are told, was in the original 1943 production of Oklahoma!—who complains about everything (including the use of Velcro) but is no longer quite able to do the job. All those stairs! Audrey, too, has been around but remains in full control of her trade, with a no-nonsense front cloaking a warmly caring inner core. KJ (Dana Brooke) is the newcomer, with a better attitude and better ideas, which make her the favorite of the assorted chorines and the foe, naturally, of Brenda.
That last plot strand throws the play off, with the playwright wresting attention from the other 11 characters in favor of the (apparently) autobiographical KJ. This youngest dresser turns out to be a budding playwright, who it transpires is writing a play about wardrobe women in a cramped basement quick-change room at a long-running Broadway musical. (Hutton, under a different name, spent a decade or so as a dresser on Broadway and at Saturday Night Live.) During the course of the play, KJ’s ex-husband-turned-gay-dancer joins the show; offers his ex-wife career guidance and take-out quiche from Joe Allen’s (Broadway color, that); and confesses that his housemate has come down with the disease that was decimating a significant number of theater workers in those dark times.
All of this takes us away from the Broadway world “according to the chorus.” Or I should say, adds to what turns out to be a mélange of story lines, unresolvable in that there are so many of them. (A jaded dancer sleeping with a musician; a vulnerable dancer being battered by her boyfriend; another worried about her mortgage—who, inevitably, is injured and forced out of the cast like that dancer in A Chorus Line.) The biggest concern of all, being that this is a backstage tale: will the show close?
It would be nice to be able to single out some of the lesser known players in this production from New Light Theater Project. None of them, alas, is up to the accomplished Tony-winner in their midst. Hiller is properly shrill, and able to launch the occasional laugh line, as the elder dresser who can no longer do the steps; Brooke, as the budding playwright, is okay until overtaken by that excessive plotting. (By the end of the evening, she is directed to sit in an upstage corner surreptitiously copying down what the others are saying.)
Brandon Jones does well as the ex-husband/dancer; this is countered by Will Sarratt as the stage manager, whose performance is underpowered. Even so, his final entrance gets a gasp from audience members who lived through that time. None of the rest have much chance to stand out, clustered as they are within the cluttered set and by the perfunctory staging of Chris Goutman. We can single out among the others Kelly McCarty (as Stacie) and Tabatha Gayle (as Monica). There is also a prominent animal performance by a dog named Lola.
All of which aside, the backstage bickering at According to the Chorus should serve as catnip—and yes, Hutton gives us a dead cat called “Ethel Purrman”—to the likely audience during the play’s limited run. I can add that as someone who spent considerable time backstage at Broadway musicals of that era, the milieu rings true. And while we’re at it, let’s hear it for Ziemba.
According to the Chorus opened March 28, 2023, at 59E59 and runs through April 15. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
