What We Do For Love: A Chorus Line at 50

Happy Friday 👋🏼

Fifty years ago, what started as a series of late-night sessions—dancers sharing stories about their backgrounds, dreams, heartbreaks, and the brutal realities of life in the chorus—became something unprecedented. Those conversations, recorded over months of vulnerable confessions, would become the foundation for A Chorus Line.

This week, as the theater community marked the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking musical, I've been reflecting on Marvin Hamlisch's lyrics in "What I Did For Love." For me, it's the embodiment of the show's central question. In the context of the story, it's Diana's answer to "How would you feel if you couldn't do this anymore?"—but it speaks to something bigger that's at the heart of A Chorus Line: that a life in the arts is quite often a life of sacrifice.

And I've been wondering: What would my answer be?

This weekend, we'll close BEAU Off-Broadway. A show that, in so many ways, is a dream come true. The kind of project you hope for when you're just starting out: a new musical, an original story, a role that's been built with your fingerprints on it. But with that dream has come the inevitable fine print. Long hours. Low wages. The quiet, persistent ache of knowing that, despite how much love you're pouring into the work, sustainability is still a distant luxury.

I've found myself thinking back to Company, too. The national tour that took me across the country for a year. A milestone, a career highlight, and yet—a year away from my husband and my dog. Or the summer production of Hair that kept me from attending my best friend's wedding. Or watching my grandfather’s funeral on FaceTime in a rehearsal studio.

I know these experiences aren't unique to me. I think they're baked into the DNA of this industry. It's a strange duality: to love something that can't love you back in the same way. To willingly barter pieces of your life for the chance to feel fully alive for a few hours each night.

This isn't a complaint. It's not even a critique. It's just an observation. A noticing.

Because I don't resent the work. I love the work. I love the way a story can crack you open in the middle of a matinee. I love the quiet moments backstage. I love the strange, beautiful alchemy of a live audience breathing with you in real time, all of you suspended together in the same fragile moment.

And I think we—artists, audiences, anyone who cares about this art form—can talk about the parts of the dream that don't fit into an Instagram caption. We can be honest about what it means to dedicate your life to something that is, by design, ephemeral. You build it, you share it, and then it disappears. Eight shows a week until it doesn't exist anymore.

These are the things I'm sitting with. Not in a bitter way. Not in a defeated way. Just in an honest, open-hearted way.

Because the truth is, I don't have answers. I don't know what the "right" amount of sacrifice is. I don't know how to measure when the cost becomes too high. And maybe there isn't a clean metric for that. Maybe it's a negotiation that changes with every chapter, every project, every season of life.

Maybe that's what I'm trying to understand right now: how to hold all of it. The pride and the sadness. The gratitude and the grief. The way a role can feel like a once-in-a-lifetime gift—and still leave you wondering how you'll pay next month's rent. The way a standing ovation can coexist with a quiet longing for something more stable, more predictable, more kind to the people who love you.

I don't think those contradictions cancel each other out. I think they're part of the shape of this thing we've chosen.

That's the part A Chorus Line gets so right. It doesn't offer resolution. No one gets a perfect ending. Not everyone gets the job. No one gets a happily-ever-after. But they all get to be seen. To stand on that white line, say their name, share their story, and be witnessed.

That kind of honesty still feels radical. Especially now, when so much of what we share is curated, compressed, and optimized for an Instagram caption. Even in our industry, where storytelling is supposed to be the currency, we're not always encouraged to tell the truth about what this life costs. About how lonely it can be. About how much uncertainty we carry in our bodies. About the quiet negotiations we make with ourselves every time we say yes to another project that we love more than it will ever love us back.

And yet, we stay. We keep showing up. We stay because there are moments that make it feel worth it—moments when the work transcends everything else, when you remember why you started, when the communion between performer and audience feels like the most important thing in the world. We stay because we still believe in the possibility that the next thing might offer something the last one didn't. Because somewhere inside the heartbreak, there's still joy. Still connection. Still the electric crackle of presence when the lights go down and something new begins.

So no—I don't have a clean answer to the show’s central question. I don't know what comes next, or what the sustainable version of this life looks like, or how long I can keep choosing love over logic. I'm not even sure what I'm hoping to figure out.

I just know I'm asking different questions now. Questions I might not have had the courage to ask a few years ago. Questions that feel more honest than the ones I used to ask—the ones that assumed there was a right way to do this, a perfect balance to strike, a moment when it would all make sense.

Maybe the real legacy of A Chorus Line isn't just that it told the stories of chorus dancers, but that it gave us permission to ask harder questions about what we're willing to give up for the thing we can't live without. What we're willing to risk. What we're willing to lose.

Maybe that's what we did for love. We chose the ephemeral over the permanent. The uncertain over the secure. The beautiful over the practical.

And maybe, fifty years later, we're still working on our answers.

See you next week ♥️