He began making the rounds as a Broadway “gypsy,” the name for chorus kids who float from show to show. “I got on a bus to New York and said, ‘I am not coming back.’ ” Theater Producer Joe Papp in 1978. Getty ImagesĪ few years later, at 16, Bennett heard that Jerome Robbins was auditioning dancers for a European company of “West Side Story.” They dealt in gambling, prostitution, racketeering, and extortion - not sissy boys who knew every step to the dream ballet from “Oklahoma!” Michael Bennett in 1966. He said his kid was going to make serious money as a dancer one day, and offered them a percentage of his future income. He invited two mobsters to the house and ordered Michael to dance.
Salvatore, heavily in debt, had a plan: He would sell his son’s talent to the Mafia. The searing event of Bennett’s childhood - one that haunted him throughout his life - took place one day in their kitchen. He pocketed most of it, losing it at the track and the card tables. Though Salvatore derided his son’s pirouetting, he liked the extra income. When he wasn’t dancing, he was choreographing, using his brother Frank’s marbles as dancers and creating patterns for routines. He began “to dance around the living room,” as a line from “A Chorus Line” goes, to the music on the radio.īy 10, he began earning money dancing at bar mitzvahs, weddings, even street corners. The Bennett household was an unhappy one, strapped for cash due to Salvatore’s gambling debts. His mother, Helen, was a secretary for Sears his father, Salvatore, a machinist at a Chevrolet plant, and a gambler often in hock to low-level members of the Magaddino crime family. He was born Michael “Mickey” Bennett DiFiglia on Apin Buffalo, New York.
That last one went to Michael Bennett, who had the idea to create a show about show folk - a musical that would make him Broadway’s top director. The show opened in 1975 and went on to become one of the longest-running productions on the Great White Way, winning nine Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Direction of a Musical. Here, in an excerpt from his new book, “ Razzle Dazzle,” he explains how “A Chorus Line” changed the world. The Post’s theater columnist, Michael Riedel, knows all the juiciest stories about the backstage shenanigans that make up Broadway’s history.
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