While hard work and a little bit of luck is the bedrock on which a theatre career is made, heaven sent natural talent certainly doesn’t hurt. For Tony Award winner Donna McKechnie, now back on Broadway playing Madame Morrible in Wicked at the Gershwin Theatre, it was a perfect storm of all three.

A dancer since the age of 5, McKechnie spent her adolescence preparing for a classical dance career. Inspired by the 1948 film The Red Shoes, she first auditioned in New York for American Ballet Theatre before finding a temporary home in the corps at Radio City Music Hall. She left that gig when she discovered the collaborative joys of musical theatre dance. 

Watch her go through her Broadway credits, including creating a A Chorus Line with Michael Bennett and understudying Chita Rivera in The Visit, in the video above.

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was my first Broadway show,” McKechnie recalls, misty eyed. “I was a little ballet girl. I had no idea what I was in for!” McKechnie had not even seen a Broadway show before being cast in the Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser musical, but she quickly caught on to the level of genius at her fingertips behind the rehearsal door.

“I remember rehearsals very clearly,” McKechnie states. “Bob Fosse was the choreographer, and Gwen Verdon was our dance captain. Can you believe that?! She was between jobs, and she was helping him out. They were there practically every day, and I realized what a unique thing it was—all these people coming together in the room, and telling a story with song and text and movement. I was just a ballet dancer at that point in time, just struggling in New York trying to get work. This opened a whole world for me. And I remember clearly thinking, ‘If I save my money, and learn how to sing and act, then maybe I can have a career here that's longer than a dancer's life.’”

McKechnie put in the work, training extensively at the HB Studio as well as in private lessons. While she worked with a wide range of mentors and collaborators, she found her artistic equal in one pivotal figure, who would change her life and career.

“Michael Bennett, Michael Bennett, Michael Bennett.” McKechnie smiles. While the pair first met working on NBC music series Hullabaloo, Bennett would go on to become McKechnie’s career lighthouse for more than a decade, serving as her director, choreographer, and, for a time, her husband. “Working with him was always exciting. My job was always saved, thanks to Michael.”

While working with Bennett on Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company, McKechnie came within an inch of losing the pivotal moment that would launch her from chorus dancer to Broadway principle.

“My number was almost cut,” McKechnie states bluntly, referring to her narrative dance number “Tick-Tock.” That three-minute dance solo established her character, Kathy, as “the one that got away” in the mind of the show’s protagonist Bobby. It also established McKechnie as a certified triple threat.

With the sequence on the chopping block, McKechnie and director Harold Prince engaged in a fiery confrontation. “It was like life and death for me at that point. I started arguing with both [Prince and Sondheim], pleading my case, and I just said something horrific.” McKechnie shivers, though she declines to state what exactly she said. But she succeeded. 

“Michael completely redid the dance number, they called David Shire to come back four days into his honeymoon to redo the arrangement, and we were there from noon to midnight to reconstruct the whole number again.”

While Company helped McKechnie break out of the chorus, it was playing Cassie in the megahit A Chorus Line that truly launched her into stardom. The show, which positioned the backstage life of a Broadway dancer center stage, was crafted by Bennett and inspired by the lives of his friends and colleagues, McKechnie included.

“It was one of the greatest times in my life,” McKechnie recalls. “I was already 30, which is up there for a dancer. And look, everybody has written books about it. But truly, it was incredible. To be there, to see the courage that Michael had to develop this piece…And then, the moment I left the show, there was what I call a litany of loss in my life. I developed a very serious case of rheumatoid arthritis, where I could barely walk, let alone dance. I was living in Los Angeles, Michael and I had gotten divorced, and I didn't know what to do.”

For a time, McKechnie turned her attention to behind-the-scenes work, letting go of a part of the lifelong dream that had been inspired by her early work with Fosse and Verdon. In time, however, a series of innovative doctors and support from her A Chorus Line costar Baayork Lee slowly eased McKechnie back into performance shape, leading to her triumphant return to Broadway in 1996. The experience inspired her to write her own memoir, Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life.

“It was such a personal victory to be dancing again,” McKechnie recalls, her emotions apparent. “I had to tell people that they never have to lose their hope. They shouldn't let anyone tell them their destiny. So many doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to even walk anymore. It's much bigger than me, the story. And now that I'm in Wicked, all these young dancers are coming to me and saying, ‘Oh, would you sign my book?’ And I'm happy to sign it, but I always say ‘I'm warning you. It's a cautionary tale. It's a wonderful thing, but you have to fight for it.’ And I always will.”