'Chorus Line' star embraces all life's stages

Ask Donna McKechnie, one of Broadway's first "triple threat" dancer-singer-actresses and the original Cassie in "A Chorus Line," to summon up a particular moment in her storied hoofer's life, and she'll first apologize if she drones on too long. But why would anyone want to stop her once she launches into another riveting anecdote populated with such dance and musical-theater gods as Bob Fosse, Fred Astaire and Stephen Sondheim?

On perfect cue, these monumental artists enter and exit the sprawling stage of McKechnie's new autobiography, "Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life." Part rags-to-riches-to-back-from-the-brink memoir, part self-help book, "Time Steps" is McKechnie's gaze back at a life with all the acclaim-filled highs, as well as lows, one might expect from a soap-operatic Broadway musical.

"Time Steps' " publication is timed perfectly to the recent New York revival of "A Chorus Line" -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning show that ran for 15 years on Broadway and gave birth to the musical-as-juggernaut-blockbuster. The day after "A Chorus Line's" splashy reopening -- the glitter of which was tarnished a bit by a controversy kicked up by some of the show's original 1975 cast members, whose life stories are the subject of the musical -- McKechnie was basking in the spotlight yet again at a book signing at Lincoln Center. In addition, she reunited with some of her former co-stars to rekindle the magic from such legendary Broadway musicals as "Follies," "Company" and, natch, "A Chorus Line."

"Frankly, the reason I wrote the book was for me to be able to keep alive all of those people I worked with," says McKechnie, whose most historic stage moment was delivering "A Chorus Line's" greatest showstopper, "The Music and the Mirror." "The book is also there so that people can read about my life as a dancer and treat parts of it as a cautionary tale."

"Time Steps" recounts McKechnie's nomadic pursuit of a career on the musical stage, starting with a dance-crazed and rebellious 15-year-old who flees her Calvinist-strict home in Detroit for the Big Apple.

"I wouldn't wish running away from home on anyone," says McKechnie, 63. "At the time, I didn't feel like I had a choice, but it was very upsetting to my family."

Once she hit New York, it didn't take long for McKechnie to appear in many things, from television variety programs to the Broadway smash "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

But it was during an otherwise forgettable stint on the '60s variety show, "Hullabaloo," that McKechnie met a fellow dancer who would change her life forever: Michael Bennett.

"When we first met, we had this special bond based on tremendous mutual respect," McKechnie says. "I think he really liked that I had more ballet training and that I just had a more lyrical and feminine quality."

Soon enough, Bennett was choreographing elaborate dance numbers for McKechnie in such stand-out shows as "Company" and "Promises, Promises." She became Bennett's initial sounding board and key muse for what would become "A Chorus Line."

"Michael knew that he could handpick dancers and get them to sit around in a circle and talk about what it means to live the dancer's life in show business," she says. "It was very experimental."

McKechnie and Bennett's most crucial collaboration was in his creating "A Chorus Line's" central role, Cassie. That role, which earned McKechnie a 1976 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, would mark a career zenith for her. Soon after, McKechnie and Bennett married, and "Time Steps" tells how that union foundered because of the dancer's nagging insecurities and Bennett's mildly tyrannical behavior.

In July 1987, Bennett -- the choreographer of McKechnie's greatest stage triumphs -- succumbed to AIDS.

In its self-help moments, "Time Steps" offers a heartbreakingly honest retelling of McKechnie's sudden bout with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis in 1979, only four years after she was Broadway's biggest star. Two doctors told her to give up dancing and adopt a diet of about 18 Bufferin per day.

"But I knew intuitively that if I started taking drugs for this, I would be dead," she says.

And then McKechnie found religion or, more precisely, a regimen involving a strict diet, vitamin therapies and other more holistic remedies.

"In exactly three weeks, the pain subsided," she recalls proudly. "In six weeks, I was walking while standing up straight.

In six months I was able to exercise. And in one year I was dancing."

In 1986, McKechnie came all the way back, becoming that "singular sensation" again by joining a new national tour of "A Chorus Line."

Close to 30 years after McKechnie departed Broadway's "A Chorus Line," she is reluctant to weigh in too heavily on the dispute raging over royalty compensation to the original cast members -- many of whom sold their story to the show's producers for, literally, $1. Her strongest feelings revolve around how much she and her fellow dancers were willing to give up, just to be part of that exceptional show.

"I know that it was never Michael's (BEGIN BRACKET)Bennett(END BRACKET) intention for us not to be paid royalties," McKechnie says. "But I can tell you this: that whatever arrangement -- signing your rights away for a dollar -- we had back then, we did all agree to it and we all soon realized how many doors 'A Chorus Line' would eventually open."

Thinking back to those spry, salad days of the mid-1970s, McKechnie conjures up the kind of fizzy enthusiasm she would have, under any circumstances, for such an exceptional project.

"My attitude growing up was, if I can be in a Michael Bennett show where (BEGIN BRACKET)composer(END BRACKET) Marvin Hamlisch and (BEGIN BRACKET)lyricist(END BRACKET) Ed Kleban are also involved, and where there's going to be a big number for me, honestly, you don't have to pay me. My feeling was, 'Where do I sign?' "

(Andrew Marton, amartonstar-telegram.com. Visit the Star-Telegram's online service at www.star-telegram.com.)

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