This essay documents the experiences of union stagehands in New York who worked on Broadway productions of A Chorus Line (1975, 2006), positioning their backstage labor as a choreographic mirror to the onstage labor of performers. Through a historiographic reconstruction of stagehands’ live production labor, particularly that of electricians, the essay argues for a reconsideration of the iconic musical’s materialist critique, including its scrutiny of the commercial theatre industry’s impersonal supply-and-demand hiring practices and the loss of individual identity that accompanies the practice of professional skills in unison. Through a combination of oral histories, archival research, and secondary sources, the reconstruction focuses on the intricate, rehearsed movements of followspot operators illuminating and isolating dancers as they reveal their interior lives. It then juxtaposes the spot ops’ physically demanding labor with the more visually engaged, technologically advanced skills of the head electrician, who operated Tharon Musser’s innovative, Tony Award–winning lighting design from Broadway’s first computer-controlled light board. As a materialist production history, the essay aligns A Chorus Line ’s stagehands with the musical’s fictional (and actual) dancers, using the production’s materialist critique as an impetus to recuperate the regularly unseen and often undervalued labor of individuals whose physical, mental, and intuitive skills fuel the Broadway machine.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.