Not all the movies I enjoy watching are good movies.
In fact, there are some bad ones I have watched over and over again, sometimes because they’re fun and sometimes because they bring back memories of when I saw them or who I saw them with.
I’ll always associate seeing “M*A*S*H” — not a bad movie at all — with Shelley Marcus and an icy winter night in 1970. And I saw “Starting Over” in September 1979, the last movie I ever saw with my first wife Leslie.
I was watching a movie this afternoon that I have seen three or four times before but never in a theatre. “A Chorus Line” was not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but more than any other show I have ever seen, the stage play meant Broadway to me.
In fact, I have seen it on stage four times in four different cities with two different wives. I saw it at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1975, in the West End in London Christmas Week 1977, and on Broadway in August 1979. All those were with Leslie, the third one in our last summer together.
The last time I saw it on stage was about 20 years later in Glendale, California, with Nicole and the children. It was a national tour nearing the end on the West Coast. I’m pretty sure it was the last professional stage play I saw, although I saw local amateur productions of “Damn Yankees” and “Oklahoma” a couple of years later.
There really is something wonderful about well-done stage productions.
The movie version is a disappointment in one respect. Since movies tend to run shorter than stage plays, several wonderful movie numbers were omitted and a couple of others were cut down.
Thankfully, there’s the original cast recording from the Broadway show.
Still, it’s fun to watch the movie.