“You’re all terrific,” Zach (Keith Pinto) tells the 17 dancers waiting in a lineup in front of him. “I sincerely wish I could hire all of you, but I can’t.”

Not long before, the aspirants at this grueling, probing audition were lamenting the state of their profession.

“There’s no work anymore,” says Richie (Chachi Delgado).

“I don’t want to hear about how Broadway’s dying,” says Bebe (Jillian A. Smith), “’cause I just got here.”

詹姆斯•柯克伍德Jr . Nicholas但丁,马文Hamlisch and Edward Kleban wrote “A Chorus Line” in 1975. But in Bill English’s hands at San Francisco Playhouse, the musical reads as a chronicle of our own time. In 2023, with most Bay Area theater companies producing at least one to two fewer shows per year than they used to, there really is significantly less work for local actors.

然而,我看到周三,7月5日是否定的hand-wringing, dead-end complaint. When Zach makes his merciless last cuts, after not just evaluating the dancers’ moves but making them answer, in front of everyone, invasive questions about their life stories, families and bodies, the show’s finale doesn’t separate the haves from the have-nots. Famously, in staging the glitzy, old-school reprise of “One,” with its gold-bedecked top hats and tails, everyone who’s auditioned for the play-within-a-play gets to perform. It’s as if for one dreamy moment, the musical makes Zach the director’s wish to cast everyone come true.

And if you’re looking for hope for a pandemic-battered industry, this number in San Francisco Playhouse’s production supplies it, suggesting that we can build an art form with a place for everyone who wants to be a part.

But as the show opens, the prevailing feeling is awe. In most musicals, the chorus dancers get short shrift. We audience members expect easy perfection from them: bodies as machines producing seamless feats, all realized with a silent smile that never droops or strains. But in calling out step upon step at his audition, like a drill sergeant crossed with a metronome that’s clicking too fast, Pinto’s Zach creates a paean to the unique intelligence of the dancer as artist. These performers can translate command to spontaneous physical grace as if they’re reciting words. Not only could clods like you and me never, ever do what they do, it’s as if the rest of us are members of a less-evolved species.

“A Chorus Line” doesn’t convincingly justify why Zach starts peppering the hopefuls one by one with manipulative, armchair-psychology questions. His desire to expose their Freudian humiliations and reopen ancient wounds, dismissing insufficiently vulnerable answers as phony or boring, just comes off as unnecessary and cruel. The move registers as especially cringey now, when a real-life Zach would merit a slew of “toxic workplace” headlines. His own supposedly revelatory moments, about a past love and his bulldozing artistic ambition, are what’s phony, much as Pinto convincingly mines their aftermath. There he is, group after group of dancers trying to impress him, and he can’t even look at them. He’s been knocked off his director’s chair, and he can’t remount it.

But the result of all this prying means we get to see performers strip their defenses and reveal something pure, glinting and true.

Alison Ewing’s Sheila physically battles herself to try to hold on to her sarcastic veneer, less out of shame than because she doesn’t think Zach or the rest of them can handle what she has to say.

In the number “Nothing,” Samantha Rose Cárdenas keeps wrenching harder and harder on a single emotional nerve till all that’s left is the thinnest, most threadbare fiber, pulsating with tension.

Meanwhile, Delgado’s Richie is the joy of dance embodied, his electric moves erasing the divide between self and surroundings. (Nicole Helfer choreographed the show and most nights plays Cassie, though Adria Swan subbed for her the night I attended.)

“A Chorus Line” is an open-ended capacious vehicle, able to hold and work with different audience members’ idiosyncratic projections about theater: the terror of auditions and being put on the spot, the glamour of the spotlight and the post-show stage door, the way the performer’s self-perception crumbles then reassembles with the minutest shift in tone or look from the director. “A Chorus Line” believes that theater means something, and that you’re a co-author of its import.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com