Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life
From teachers, families, mirrors, and self, the dancer's life is tainted with constant criticism. Some learn to live with it while others learn to live in spite of it. In Donna McKechnie's new autobiography Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life, she explores her life from the central point of how difficult it has always been for her take rejection, abandonment, and criticism. These repetitive themes expand and contract at various times in the full-length picture McKechnie writes about her struggles for approval and love in life and on the stage. Writing with Greg Lawrence, who also co-wrote Dancing On My Grave with Gelsey Kirkland, McKechnie tries to tell a story about how her choices and her guardian angels enabled her to become one of musical comedy's most intriguing, yet unsung performers.
The singular thing McKechnie's life has been about is dancing so it follows that her book is a chronological account of her performances. When such a steady and lengthy list could risk being redundant (how many different ways can you say, "I did this show in this town with this director"?) McKechnie manages to write smoothly and move swiftly through the history of Broadway theatre from her personal vantage point. As an academic point, every chapter is closed with a clever, sometimes mystifying device making the book a page-turner. The information is well organized and easy to follow. The number of times she describes her dressing room furnishings is wearisome, however. The information never seems to add to the ambiance of the book.
From chorus member to Tony award-winning actress, she relies on the discipline she learned from dancing to support her and keep her moving forward regardless of the setbacks. And the setbacks have been numerous. Money, relationships, work, emotional stability, and health have all caved in on McKechnie at one time or another. But like all dancers, she gets up and goes back to the basics: the dancing. In this sense, experienced dancers will feel a sense of camaraderie with McKechnie. We all take our problems to the studio and expect them to be fixed by the dancing. While movement helped her recover from the debilitating effects of rheumatoid arthritis, McKechnie honestly acknowledges (with the help of an army of therapists) that she has repeatedly ignored her feelings and shoved them down with every plie hoping it would all just go away.
McKechnie endeavors to get at hidden motives in one particular case, but when it doesn't pan out and the answers never emerge, she dives deeper into depression. Her relationship with choreographer Michael Bennett could have been given more depth. As two of the most prominent figures involved with each other and the fabulous hit musical "A Chorus Line," McKechnie doesn't excavate far enough to satisfy the reader's curiosity. She claims that Bennett told her he couldn't love her because she was flawed, and that flaw was that she loved him. An obvious paradox spoken by a master manipulator, but McKechnie basically drops the story of their tumultuous relationship and catapult to fame right there. More "psychic digging," as she calls the making of "A Chorus Line," would have added zest to the account of the McKechnie-Bennett connection. It's the one place she doesn't describe how therapy did or didn't help her cope with the split from Bennett.
McKechnie must have kept tons of journals and boxes of programs and notes because she is tidy and copious with the lists of whom she did shows with, when, and where. For the depth of research and names in the book, it should serve well as a Broadway history document worthy of stocking in the library stacks. The book includes 28 pages of black and white photos, many from McKechnie's private collection.
Dancers will recognize their own struggles in McKechnie's trials just like they can identify with the characters that make up the wonderful story of the chorus dancer's life, "A Chorus Line." With the show in revival on Broadway this fall, McKechnie's book will definitely add positive and worthwhile notes to the literature that is sure to accompany the show's rebirth.
Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life
Donna McKechnie with Greg Lawrence
Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0-7432-5520-8 Price: $25.00
Available September 2006
www.simonsays.com
www.donnamckechnie.com.