At an audition for an upcoming Broadway production, a director and a choreographer assistant put the gypsies through their paces. Every dancer is desperate for work, and in "I Hope I Get It" they try to do their best. After the first selection, 17 dancers remain: Al, Bobby, Bebe, Connie, Diana, Don, Greg, Judy, Kristine, Maggie, Mark, Mike, Paul, Richie, Sheila, Val and Cassie (the only dancer without a number). Zach, the director, tells them he is looking for a strong dancing chorus of four boys and four girls. He wants to learn more about them, so he tells them to introduce themselves.

With great reluctance they reveal their pasts. In order to get this job, they must put themselves on the line. While the show uses different characters to move through the audition, the overall pattern of stories progresses chronologically from early life experiences through adulthood to the end of a career.

The first candidate is Mike, who explains he is the youngest of twelve children. In "I Can Do That", Mike recalls his first experience with dance, watching his sister's dance class when he was a pre-schooler. Certain he could do it too, he took her place one day when she refused to go to class � and he stayed the rest of his life. As Bobby, who tries to hide the unhappiness of his childhood by making jokes, speaks, the 17 dancers have misgivings about this strange audition process and debate what they should reveal to Zach ("And..."), but since they all need the job, the session continues.

Zach starts to question the streetwise Sheila and becomes angry, since he thinks that she is not taking the audition seriously. She starts to open up and reveals that her mother married at a young age and her father neither loved nor cared for them. When she was six, she realized that ballet was a relief from her family life. Bebe adds that she likes ballet as she was not beautiful as a child and everything in ballet seems beautiful. Maggie admits another connection to the Ballet: she loves ballet because in the ballet someone is always there, unlike the father she has never had. They sing "At The Ballet," which is a poignant tribute to the escape Sheila, Bebe, and Maggie found in the beauty of ballet.

Kristine is up next, supported by her husband Al. The scatter-brained Kristine is tone-deaf, and her lament that she could never "Sing!" is perpetually interrupted by Al finishing her phrases. Zach moves on to Mark, the youngest of the dancers who is more than eager to be on Broadway. His story about his first experiences with pictures of the female anatomy and his first wet dream lead into "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love," a montage sequence in which all of the dancers share memories of adolescence. Gregory speaks about his discovery of his homosexuality, and Diana recollects her horrible high school acting class ("Nothing"). Don remembers his first job at a nightclub, Richie recounts how he nearly became a kindergarten teacher, Judy reflects on her problematic childhood, and the 4'10" tall Connie rants on the problems of being short.

"Dance: Ten; Looks: Three" follows, with the newly-buxom Val's explanation that talent doesn't count for everything with casting directors and silicone can really help.

The dancers go downstairs to learn a song for the next section of the audition, but Cassie stays onstage. She is a terrific veteran "gypsy" who has had some notable successes as a soloist. It emerges they have a history together; he cast her in a featured part in a former show and they had lived together for several years before breaking up. Zach tells Cassie that she is too good for the chorus and shouldn't be there at the audition - she should be out dancing solos. But she hasn't been able to find work and is attempting to "come home" to the chorus and start again. "The Music and the Mirror" tells of Cassie's passion for dance.

After Cassie's plea, Zach agrees to allow her to go downstairs and learn the combination with the rest of "the kids." Zach calls Paul back on stage and what follows is a monologue in which the emotionally vulnerable Paul comes to terms with his early career in a drag act, manhood, homosexuality and sense of self.

Cassie and Zach's complex relationship resurfaces in the first rendition of "One." Cassie, due to her talent, is standing out. When she starts "dancing down" Zach runs up on stage and confronts her, and the argument develops to delving into what went wrong in their relationship and her career. Zach points to the good-but-not-great dancing of the rest of the cast, the gypsies who will probably never get out of the line. Cassie replies, "I'll take chorus, if you'll take me!"

Suddenly, during a tap sequence, Paul, the best dancer in the group, falls injured and is carried off to the hospital: his career is over. Zach asks the remaining dancers what they will do when they can no longer dance. "What I Did For Love" expresses the emotional drive that keeps these dancers focused, ever hopeful and free of regrets. This number fades into the final elimination process as the final eight dancers are selected.


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