Every Little Step
Directed by Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern
C
For a while it seemed that the popularity of reality television had been a boon for the documentary film industry—removing that old oat-bran stigma associated with nonfiction filmmaking by introducing folks who normally wouldn’t be caught dead at a doc to the radical notion that real-life people can be just as interesting (if not more so) than movie stars.
But now reality TV’s worst tendencies are creeping into movie theaters. It started with last year’s odious American Teen, a film so dishonestly edited, over-dubbed and brazenly manipulative that it played like an episode of The Hills guest-starring ugly kids.
Now comes Every Little Step, which purports to part the curtains and take us backstage for the recent Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, and yet the movie trivializes the entire process—treating a series of complicated artistic decisions like the season finale of Dancing With the Stars.
After a bit of early interesting archival footage chronicling the late-night improvisation sessions from which the late Michael Bennett culled the original 1975 production, Every Little Step pirouettes straight into the revival’s casting process. Veteran choreographer Bob Avian serves as a toothless Simon Cowell, overseeing an open casting call for which more than 3,000 aspiring young talents danced their hearts out, but also found time to preen for co-directors Adam Del Deo and James Stern’s camera with maximum disingenuousness.
Why A Chorus Line? Why now? When staging a revival, must one aim to replicate the earlier production or approach the material a new angle? Depressingly enough, these questions don’t just go unanswered, they aren’t even asked. Instead, Every Little Step focuses on shallow puff-piece “profiles” of our various contestants—whoops, I meant aspiring young professionals—most of whom mug and telegraph every emotion as if playing to the back row of the Merriam. Elimination rounds ensue.
The first five minutes of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz captured the anxiety, cruelty and camaraderie of the audition process with more grit and vigor than Every Little Step can muster at 20 times the length. Halfway through the film you’ll be scanning the screen for phone numbers and instructions on how to vote for your favorites.
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