"Audition" is that opening moment, it's a very famous moment when the curtain goes up and you see all those kids' feet, 40 kids tapping onstage; it sets the whole tone of '30s "hoofing." We definitely hang onto that.
I think film dancing creates some of the most powerful images that we have. You could do retakes and reshoots and all of that, so you got to reach for perfection. I have tried to push the envelope of technique onstage, so that maybe we could do the kind of things they did in film. I think that's what makes an audience go crazy; you see that level of dance but they're doing it live eight times a week, not just for the cameras.
Mark and I made a choice to return the show to the actual period of 1933. In 1980, because of what was going on in show business, we made the show a little more pristine; we didn't show so much skin. Now we're in an era when you can do anything you want, so the challenge was to still be a good family show but to be a little truer to the period. Up until, like, 1933, the 1930 Production Code regulating decency in the movies was loosely enforced, so there was a lot of skin in these movies, so we made the choice to be a little more revealing in some of the production numbers than we ever had been before.
We wanted slender '30s girls who had the kind of bodies to wear the kinds of clothes that we needed them to wear. A lot of the shows today are calling for the more athletic, worked-out look. And the men -- because of the period clothes, it's kind of nice to have tall, slender guys onstage. The period pants are all pleated, and all of those clothes hang better on slender people. There's that audition scene in the early part of the show where the girls come in and hike up the skirts to show the legs; that's part of what goes along with show biz. The heartbreaking thing is when you see people who are terrific dancers but physically just might not be able to fit the image of the show.
When you look at the movie, it's really an odd little musical -- it's really a drama with three full-scale production numbers in it, all concentrated at the end. A lot of those Depression-era musicals were like that.
Originally, when Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble wrote the book, they had to augment the score. So they got the rights to those four Harry Warren and Al Dubin songs, and then went to their catalog to get other songs to make this a much bigger evening, a full-scale musical.
