Review of Every Little Step (2008) by Edith N — 02 Dec 2009

Step One to Oscarpalooza.

Yeah, okay. Nominees haven't been announced yet. There's still another month for films to be released and be considered eligible--at least one of the twenty possibles for Best Animated Feature will be a Christmas release. (At which point, honestly, I will consider myself to have seen all the nominees--you've got your Disney, your Pixar, your Miyazaki, your Nick Park, and either [i]Coraline[/i] or [i]9[/i].) However, for whatever reason, the short list for Best Documentary Feature is out already, and this is the first movie I'm seeing explicitly because it's a potential nominee. Just as Christmas comes earlier every year, so, too, does Oscarpalooza. There are ten movies on the short list, and the goal is to see all ten before nominations, or at least all five nominees before the ceremony. The erratic nature of DVD release, of course, makes this uncertain, but we're going to start trying, here. And, appropriately, we are starting with a movie about beginnings. About wishing to make it big. These people dreamed to be on Broadway; one guy talks about walking up a flight of stairs to collect an award.

In 1974, a group of dancers, called "Gypsies" in the industry, sat down with a tape player and started telling stories. In time and with work, this became the musical [i]A Chorus Line[/i]. (Which I haven't seen, and which we'll get to.) This is one of those hugely successful musicals, one of the ones everyone has heard of. Nine Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, one of the longest runs in musical theatre history. It's a big deal. And in 2006, there was a new revival. This film is about the auditions for the revival, which makes it kind of meta. In the film, we get to know the people trying out to play these roles to play people trying out for roles. These are real people, and they're going to be speaking the words of real people. Among the people leading auditions, too, is the originator of the role of Connie Wong, putting that much more pressure on the girls trying out for that role.

There is a difference between live and film. Most people, however, don't get the chance to find that out. Now, many, many people saw this live. Many, many people have had the chance to. But I'm not sure a lot of people get why the performers are using such different voices onstage than the do when you're just talking to them out there. When Angela Lansbury was Mrs. Lovett, she had to make sure that the people in the back row of the balcony could hear her, and that requires a different tone than Helena Bonham-Carter trying to make sure the boom mike hears her. But this film, perhaps problematically, assumes that you know that. There are a lot of in-built assumptions in the documentary. It assumes, I guess, that if you're bothering to watch a documentary about a musical, you have some sort of sense of the theatre. However, how many people out there live in places where their main option is high school drama club productions? Where they rely on Julie Andrews running up a meadow in the Austrian Alps? These are still, many of them, people who deeply love the genre, but they have never seen a Broadway show and may never have the chance.

What the film does capture, and why I think it attracted such notice, is the love of the show. Not this particular show, but the idea of the show. The idea of being onstage and singing and dancing. None of these people would be schlepping from audition to audition if they didn't really love what they were doing. One of the women auditioning for Cassie (I don't remember which one) tells us that she needs the job, because she has run out of unemployment. She can either get the job or get a Real Job, and she really wants to get the job. After all, she's there at the audition instead of searching the classifieds, right? Others talk of trying to do Real Jobs but not being able to stick to it because they just want to dance. Ballet and tap at an early age. Acting lessons. Singing lessons. Practicing alone in the privacy of the bedroom instead of going out with friends. Love of music, of dance. "It takes your guts. It takes your soul. But you're willing to give it.".

Most of us don't want it enough. It's one of the things, I think, which is beneficial about National Novel Writing Month. In [i]Strong Poison[/i], by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter says something about how it seems the only complication in writing a novel is just sitting down and doing it. He's kidding, but a lot of people aren't. NaNoWriMo shows that it's really hard work. (No, I didn't finish my book this year.) Growing up, not only did I write, I was a musician. By elementary school standards, I was excellent. By junior high standards, I was pretty good. By high school standards, I wasn't bad. And now, I almost never practice. My viola is still in my closet, and were I to take it out, I would know the feel of it under my hands and be able to play, including a piece I memorized some of nearly twenty years ago. But I didn't want it bad enough. These people did, and this musical, and by extension the documentary, captures that passion. And those who were cut will, doubtless, go out and find a new show and start all over again, standing in that long, long line while Manhattan goes on around them.