They should be on the stock exchange, these numbers: 6137 performances. Four hundred and fifty-seven actors, in eight companies. A gazillion and a half (I’m rounding here) people in the audience. Something over $40 million in profits. One movie (also rounding).

It’s 22 years since A Chorus Line danced into our lives, seven since it finally said goodbye. Another musical (some animal thing) has just supplanted it as the longest running show in Broadway history. Nothing will ever supplant it in the hearts of a great many theatergoers. Walk through the Broadway district today – stopping particularly outside Rent – and you’ll hear the echoes still. Roam around the popular culture (if you dare), from Saturday Night Fever (et seq.) to Flashdance to Madonna, and you’ll find A Chorus Line at every turn.

Every kid who ever came to New York to work in and around the theater has first been hooked by one show or another. At this fin de siecle moment, it seems fair to propose that there is almost no one who has come to New York in the past two decades to dance for a living who has not been hooked by A Chorus Line. And looked up at Diana or Paul or whoever and said, “That’s me”.

Which may explain why this is such an emotional show for so many people. A Chorus Line may not stand as the greatest musical in Broadway history, but it is hard to think of another (all right, West Side Story) that seemed to stir up such feelings on such a scale. Symptoms of this conditions include having seen the show a dozen or more times, knowing the names of every Cassie, and having replaced your original Columbia LP because the jacket fell apart.

Within the theater community, A Chorus Line will endure as the career pinnacle of director/choreographer Michael Bennett. The promise of his work on Company and Follies flowered here, the subsequent disappointment of Ballroom would not have seen so harsh without this towering behind it. Then came Dreamgirls, which was an interesting hit, but not on this level of achievement. And then, what seemed an instant later, Bennett was gone. He wrote neither book nor score for A Chorus Line, but this is his monument, as personal a statement of “this is who I am” as any Broadway musical creator has put on stage.

The world knows that on 1974 Bennett tape-recorded the reminiscences of a group of “gypsies” – Broadway chorus dancers, eight of whom would be part of the original cast – bought the rights to these stories, and convinced Joseph Papp of the non-profit Public Theater to bankroll a workshop that would develop tem into a stage musical.

What emerged was a show with no stars, no set and almost no plot. This struck people as daring in 1975; given what’s been on the Broadway stage in the intervening two decades, “astounding” seems more like it. So much has been written about Papp’s contributions to the theater, but this is all you really need to know: with a non-profit company that was a million and a half dollars in the red, he put up a half a million more for no stars, no set, etc., and a creative team which, aside from Bennett, had virtually no track record in the theater. And it worked, and the profits funded the Public’s other work for 15 years. It just about restores your faith in miracles; when you realize that nothing like it has happened since, you see how miraculous it was.

Bennett began pulling together his irregulars at that first taping, offering them a dazzling hundred dollars a week to do the workshop. Nicholas Dante, the original author, was one of those dancers; his recollections form the basis of Paul, the gypsy who debuted in a drag show. James Kirkwood, a novelist and playwright who had been an actor, was brought in to condense, edit and dramatize.

Lyricist Ed Kleban (a former Columbia records executive) made his Broadway debut here. But Marvin Hamlisch was already such a name that it’s easy to forget this was also his first Broadway score. Hamlisch had been one of those teen phenomenons of the Brill Building School, writing the not-bad-at-all "Sunshine", "Lollipops and Rainbows" for Lesley Gore when he was 16. He made the most of some movie connections and began writing film scores, including, memorably Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run and Bananas, before striking it rich with the theme song (and Barbra Streisand standard) from "The Way We Were". That won him his first Oscar; the second came for his adaptation of Scott Joplin’s "The Entertainer" in The Sting.

They never left town to try out, but those workshops down on Lafayette St., served the same purpose, and not incidentally started a word-of-mouth groundswell like nothing since. A nanosecond after their Broadway opening, April 15, 1975, before any critics had even a chance to weigh in, all the tickets disappeared (believe me, I tried).

Two months later – it could have been two minutes – they transferred uptown to the Shubert and the critics fell all over themselves. “The conservative word…. might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific,” wrote Clive Barnes of the New York Times. “Possibly the most effective Broadway musical since Gypsy,” said Michael Feingold in the Village Voice.

Douglas Watt, in the Daily News: “I’ve seen it four times now, and each time I’ve left the theater exhilarated after two hours of almost total absorption capped by the most inventive and satisfying finale ever devised for a musical.” And Martin Gottfried in The New York Post: A dazzling show: driving, compassionate and finally thrilling. It is a major event in the development of the American musical theater.

They won everything, the Pulitzer prize, the New York Drama Critics Award, and nine Tonys, including Best Musical, two for Bennett (choreography and direction), score, book and cast members Donna McKechnie, Sammy Williams and Carole (Kelly) Bishop. For once the nobodies – the people in the back, behind the star – triumphed.

And if anyone wants more emotional resonance: of the principal creators ofA Chorus Line, Bennett, Kirkwood, Kleban and Goddard Lieberson – who produced this recording for Columbia Records, the last in his distinguished series of Broadway cast albums – died before the show closed, and Dante and Papp died shortly after, none at a ripe old age. None of these wonderful actors has gone on to anything like major stardom. Play this CD, and grab those moments.