Michael Bennett

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For the NFL player commonly referred to as "Mbenno," see Michael Bennett. For the boxer see Michael Bennett (boxer).

Michael Bennett (April 8, 1943 - July 2, 1987) was an American musical theater director, choreographer, and dancer.

He was born Michael DiFiglia on April 8, 1943 in Buffalo, New York to a Roman Catholic father and a Jewish mother. In his teens he studied dance and choreography and staged a number of shows in his local high school. When he moved to New York City after high school, he changed his name to honor his alma mater, Bennett High.

His first professional credit was the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story. His Broadway career as a dancer began in the 1961 Betty Comden-Adolph Green-Jule Styne musical Subways Are For Sleeping, after which he appeared in Meredith Willson's Here's Love (1963) and the short-lived Bajour. In the mid-60s he was a featured dancer on the NBC music series Hullabaloo, where he met fellow dancer Donna McKechnie.

Bennett made his choreographic debut with A Joyful Noise (1966), which lasted only twelve performances, followed in 1967 by another failure, Henry, Sweet Henry (based on the Peter Sellers film The World of Henry Orient). Success finally arrived in 1968 in the form of Promises, Promises, an adaptation of the film The Apartment, with a hip contemporary score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. For the next few years, he earned kudos for his work on Twigs with Sada Thompson, Coco with Katharine Hepburn, two Stephen Sondheim productions - Company and Follies (which he co-directed with Hal Prince), and the Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields' hit Seesaw, for which he was also the director and librettist.

In the early 1970s, Bennett began conducting a series of group therapy-style workshops to which he invited "gypsies" - chorus boys and girls - inviting them to share their feelings and frustrations about their careers. Hundreds of hours of audio tapes eventually led to the creation of his biggest and most personally felt triumph, A Chorus Line, which opened in July 1975 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. The reviews were ecstatic and the demand for tickets so huge that it transferred uptown to the Shubert Theater, where it remained a sell-out hit for fifteen years. It won nine Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

As its creator, choreographer and director, Bennett devoted the next several years of his life to the show, auditioning, rehearsing, and directing productions throughout the world. Realizing it was very much a theatrical piece intended to be played on a proscenium stage, he declined an offer to direct the screen version, although he agreed to join the project as a creative consultant, a position he left early on due to differences with the studio (Bennett believed the movie should be about the audition process for the filming of the stage play, rather than a movie version of the play itself). In director Richard Attenborough's hands it was an unmitigated disaster. The movie even declined to use Bennett's original choreography, instead opting to use inferior choreography by Jeffrey Hornaday.

Although A Chorus Line was very much an ensemble piece, the original cast's standout star was Bennett's old friend McKechnie. The two married in 1976, but separated a few months later and eventually divorced, but remained close friends.

A Chorus Line was a tough act to follow. Bennett's next musical was the unsuccessful Ballroom starring Dorothy Loudon, but he found himself at the top again in 1981 with Dreamgirls (music by Henry Krieger, book and lyrics by Tom Eyen).

In the early 1980s, Bennett worked on various projects, but none of them reached the stage. In 1985, he signed to direct the London production of the musical Chess, but he had to withdraw in January 1986 due to his increasingly failing health, leaving Trevor Nunn to complete the production using Bennett's already commissioned sets. He moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he remained until his tragically early death from complications of AIDS on July 2, 1987. The Broadway legend was 44 years old.