By Michael Kuchwara
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - In April 1975, a production opened downtown at the Public Theater that was to electrify the American musical theater.

“A Chorus Line” told the story of a group of dancers auditioning for a big Broadway show.

Not only did audiences get to watch these performers try out for eight spots in “the line,” they got to know them as real people, learning about their hopes, fears, egos, insecurities and why they wanted to dance.

Now “A Chorus Line” is back on Broadway the show's first New York revival after its then record-breaking 15-year run. But don't look for a radical reinterpretation of the landmark musical. Except for a few minor tweaks, it preserves the vision of creator Michael Bennett say the two people who have been the keepers of his flame for the last three decades.

Bob Avian and Baayork Lee have lived with “A Chorus Line” since its birth Avian as the show's co-choreographer and Lee as a cast member of the original 1975 production. Both are at the center of the legendary show's return to Broadway, with Avian directing and Lee remounting the choreography created by Avian and Bennett, who died of an AIDs-related illness in 1987. It's an emotional homecoming not only for them, but for many theatergoers as well.

Why this visceral response to a show that initially closed in 1990, at the time, the longest-running show in Broadway history?

“A Chorus Line” “... speaks the truth,” Avian said in an interview a week before the revival's opening this past Thursday at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. “I think everybody in the audience, at some point or another, identifies with the dancers on the stage. They have all gone through having ... their young wishes and aspirations. I think they see themselves up on the stage.”