Donna McKechnie
(Photo by Sergio Villarini for Broadway.com)
Earlier this month, the Wicked company filmed a tribute to Donna McKechnie, their resident Madame Morrible. They recreated dance numbers from A Chorus Line, Promises, Promises (“Turkey Lurkey Time,” of course) and Sweet Charity—an homage to three of her greatest performances.
Call McKechnie a “legend,” a “star,” an “icon” or any of the glowing titles that she’s rightly earned. But first and foremost, she’s a chorus dancer’s queen—and the love is reciprocated. Watch McKechnie watch her castmates celebrate her and you’ll see a display of mutual admiration: She’s awed by their beauty, thrilled by their talent and utterly tickled by the sight of friends slaying original Bob Fosse choreography.
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
As for the “legend” part, she’s still sorting that out. “I sort of get it,” she tells Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show. “It’s enough years later that I kind of can step back a little bit. But I don’t see myself that way. I’m working. And that, to me, is fantastic.”
She much prefers seeing herself as part of an ensemble, and has treated her time at Wicked just that way. “It’s a big, wonderful family and I just feel very blessed to be there,” she says. “Everyone’s a triple threat. Everybody works so hard all the time.” And, about the show’s reigning Elphaba and Glinda, she adds, “When I meet young, brilliant, talented people like Mary-Kate Morrissey and Alexandra Socha, I go, ‘There is hope for us.’”
Meanwhile, one of the side effects of being a staple of the Broadway community is you find a familiar face everywhere you go. “I had a wonderful reunion with Alyce Gilbert,” she says, referring to Wicked’s wardrobe supervisor. She met Gilbert as the wardrobe mistress for A Chorus Line, beginning with its 1975 off-Broadway premiere at the Public Theater—the place where McKechnie created her ineffable Cassie. “I knew I was going to be well taken care of with her,” McKechnie says.
Her A Chorus Line days are the ones her fans are most intrigued by, with so much lore surrounding its creation and the spirit of its creator, choreographer Michael Bennett, hovering over every production—of which there are many. “It’s still playing everywhere, all around the world,” says McKechnie. And she hopes no auteur ever lays a hand on it. “I think his work is so perfect,” she says of Bennett while sitting in a rehearsal room at 890 Broadway, a building Bennett owned and worked out of for years and where she’s spent plenty of hours in rehearsal herself. “I saw all the things he was trying to do and he didn’t quite do. And then he found the right way to do it.”
Yes, it’s also the production that also won her a Tony Award, but, “I didn’t come to New York to win awards,” she says, fearful of sounding like a cliché. “I came because I wanted to do a Broadway show. I wanted to dance.” Still, when the question about her “legend status” comes her way, she allows her answer to encompass all the work she’s made with all the great artists she’s come to know and love in her six decades in the theater. She’s content to say, “I’m proud of it.”
Watch the Broadway Show segment below.
