Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett, born Michael DiFiglia on April 8, 1943, in Buffalo, New York, was an American musical theatre director, choreographer, writer, and dancer who became one of Broadway's most significant creative forces. His father, Salvatore Joseph DiFiglia, was an Italian American factory worker, and his mother, Helen, née Ternoff, was a Jewish secretary. Bennett studied dance and choreography as a teenager and staged productions at Bennett High School in Buffalo — the institution that would later inspire his adopted surname — before leaving school to join the US and European tours of West Side Story, where he performed the role of Baby John.

His Broadway performing career began in 1961 with Subways Are for Sleeping, the Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne musical, followed by appearances in Meredith Willson's Here's Love and the short-lived Bajour. During the mid-1960s, Bennett was also a featured dancer on the NBC pop music series Hullabaloo, where he first encountered dancer Donna McKechnie. In 1973, producers Joseph Kipness and Larry Kasha recruited him to rescue the struggling Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields musical Seesaw, replacing both the director and choreographer. Bennett accepted only on the condition of absolute creative control, ultimately receiving credit for having written, directed, and choreographed the production.

Bennett's choreographic debut came with A Joyful Noise in 1966, which closed after twelve performances, and a second early effort, Henry, Sweet Henry, also failed in 1967. His first major choreographic success arrived in 1968 with Promises, Promises, featuring a score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and a book by Neil Simon. The production ran for 1,281 performances, with Bennett's staging of numbers including "Turkey Lurkey Time" drawing particular notice. He subsequently contributed choreography to the straight play Twigs with Sada Thompson and the musical Coco with Katharine Hepburn, then worked on two Stephen Sondheim productions — Company and Follies — both co-directed with Hal Prince.

The centerpiece of Bennett's career was A Chorus Line. The musical grew out of twenty hours of recorded sessions with Broadway dancers; Bennett initially attended as an observer before assuming creative leadership of the project. Developed under producer Joseph Papp through a workshop process Bennett pioneered, the production debuted off-Broadway in July 1975. It won nine Tony Awards and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That same year, Bennett received the Tony Award for Best Choreography as well as the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the show. He co-choreographed the production with Bob Avian, a lifelong collaborator and assistant. Bennett later served as a creative consultant on the 1985 film adaptation but departed due to disagreements over creative control. The 2008 documentary Every Little Step revisited the original production through archival footage and interviews with collaborators including Avian, composer Marvin Hamlisch, Baayork Lee, and McKechnie while chronicling the casting of the 2006 revival.

Following A Chorus Line, Bennett directed and choreographed Ballroom, a musical about late-life romance. Though the show was not a commercial success, it earned seven Tony Award nominations and brought Bennett the 1979 Tony Award for Best Choreography. His next major production, Dreamgirls in 1981, was a backstage story centered on a girl group modeled on The Supremes and the appropriation of Black music by a white recording industry. Bennett co-choreographed the show with Michael Peters. Critics noted that rather than staging discrete dance numbers, Bennett choreographed the production's moving set of plexiglass towers as an integrated element of the action, creating what was described as a mesmerizing continuity of movement throughout the show. The production earned Bennett the 1982 Tony Award for Best Choreography.

In 1978, Bennett purchased the building at 890 Broadway and converted it into a rehearsal complex for dance and theatre. Financial losses and stress-induced angina forced him to sell the property in 1986 for fifteen million dollars; it continues to operate as a rehearsal facility for organizations including American Ballet Theatre, Eliot Feld's Ballet Tech, and Gibney Dance Company. In the early 1980s, Bennett developed several projects that did not reach the stage, among them a work titled The Children's Crusade. In 1985, he abandoned the nearly completed musical Scandal, written by Treva Silverman with songs by Jimmy Webb, after nearly five years of workshop development, citing the conservative commercial climate and the growing AIDS crisis. He was subsequently engaged to direct the West End production of Chess but withdrew in January 1986 due to deteriorating health, leaving Trevor Nunn to complete the production using sets Bennett had already commissioned.

Unlike his contemporary Bob Fosse, Bennett was not associated with a single identifiable choreographic style. His approach was shaped instead by the specific form of each musical and the characters within it. In Company, he deliberately stripped the polish from a standard production number, having the cast stumble through a hat-and-cane routine to expose the characters' limitations rather than showcase technical skill. In A Chorus Line, by contrast, the song "One" builds through visible stages of rehearsal to a fully realized Broadway production number, with the finished gloss serving to underscore the personal cost borne by the dancers behind it. In Dreamgirls, movement was woven into the entire fabric of the staging rather than confined to set-piece routines. Bennett acknowledged the influence of Jerome Robbins, particularly Robbins's commitment to a unified theatrical whole in which every element of a production serves a single integrated purpose.

Over the course of his career, Bennett accumulated seven Tony Awards for choreography and direction and received eleven additional nominations. He died on July 2, 1987, at the age of forty-four.