New York Times columnist Michael Powell explains the contract dispute to a reporter.

At 3:35 this afternoon, an estimated 400 rank and file members of the New York Times union left their desks for a walk-out that began on 40th Street, headed up Eighth Avenue and turned right on 41st. As the crowd reassembled outside the north entrance to Times headquarters, union organizers such as columnists Jim Dwyer and Michael Powell gave interviews to camera crews and reporters from other organizations that had descended on the scene, hoping for something dramatic like rock-throwing or a chant.

Instead the mood was calm and collegial. The protesters wore white stickers with the words “Believe Us” printed on them. At one point after they reassembled, they applauded themselves for a rousing show of solidarity. A similar walk-out of about 23 union members took place at the company's Washington, D.C. bureau today.

The union is in a heated contract dispute with Times management, which wants a new contract hammered out and approved by the union by the end of the year. Sticking points include compensation, health benefits and overtime pay, all of which the union feels should increase, rather than decrease, over time. But the union feels that management has taken only baby steps to toward meeting its demands.

There has been no threat of punishing the protesters, Times Assistant to the Editor Walt Baranger told The Observer outside headquarters today. “News management gets it,” Mr. Baranger said. “We’re really talking to the boardroom -- the people who don’t understand that journalists are not interchangeable.”

Union members feel that they’ve already sacrificed enough -- they took a 5 percent pay cut in 2009 and their overtime pay has fallen by half since 2008. In the meantime, editors, reporters and web producers have been scrambling to create digital content--“doing more, but making less,” according to an online protest letter addressed to Times management.

Newspaper analysts argue that newspaper companies have suffered such a steep decline in revenues of late that they must cut back on benefits such as pension plans to maintain profitability. On the contrary, the Times union organizers believe that the only way to continue producing top-quality journalism is to compensate the content producers fairly.

“Most of the people who walked out have shares in the company,” Mr. Baranger noted, aligning union members with other shareholders. “We’re motivated to get the shares back up and save the paper.”

On his early career:

"I did the usual gypsy route from Burlington, Vermont, to The Bergen Record, to New York Newsday where I spent eight years, and then, when New York Newsday folded, killed by the Times Mirror Company, after a brief interregnum at the New York Observer I went down to Washington D.C. I covered Marion Barry there for The Washington Post."

On living in New York City:

"There are aspects of the city where you see in it things you don’t like in yourself. You get crazed, and Type A, and all this sort of thing."

On covering Mayor Giuliani:

"If you did your job covering Giuliani you were going to have a contentious relationship with him. His dislike of reporters was bred in the bone and intense."

On his most cherished Giuliani quote:

“Fuck Michael Powell.”

On how much time he had with Mr. Giuliani:

"[H]e talked to me all of three minutes over the course of eight months."

On flying with the press on Air Force One:

"It’s suffocating."

On competing with other reporters:

"[T]hough it’s perfectly collegial and many of the people from the other papers became friends of mine, you’re in this sort of sweaty competition at the same time."

On covering the president:

"Obama’s a very challenging cat to cover."

On what President Obama told him about finding time to read during the campaign:

"I basically floss my teeth and watch Sports Center."

"The usually unavoidable-for-comment, if-it’s-Sunday-here-is-my-press-release senior senator from New York is being a little tetchy about going on the record," writes Michael Powell in his lead.

His detractors are even more reticent. The harshest criticism of the man with a $19 million dollar war chest, who just might be the next Senate majority leader, comes—not surprisingly, and, as it often does—on background, at least for now.

And the background noise doesn't seem to bother Mr. Schumer. “There was another poll this same week that had much different numbers, so you can’t rely on polls,” he told The Times.

A better measure of Mr. Schumer's vulnerability might be when more people start saying—on the record—things like this.

David Chen took note of the problem in his piece today.

It's true that Thompson didn't have the kind of control over schools that Bloomberg has had, but the defense that Thompson offers (as Andrea Bernstein of WNYC radio noted) can be a hard to sell to an audience. Particularly when said audience is inundated with ads repeating the original criticism.

Powell and Confessore write that reporters at the paper were reviewing a fairly run-of-the mill federal case against four people involved with a prostitution ring presented by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney last Thursday when they "learned of the unusual presence of three lawyers from the corruption unit, including the boss of that division and an F.B.I. agent from one of the bureau’s public corruption squads. The public corruption units often look at the conduct of elected officials." Sources told the Observer that it was courts reporter William Rashbaum who secured the early tip--in this case, it appears information about the lawyers who were working the case--and was the lead in the earliest part of the paper's investigation.

By the end of the day Friday, as the Observer reported yesterday, the Times was confident that the elected official was Eliot Spitzer. By Saturday, the paper had a reporter camped outside Mr. Spitzer's home to see if he was meeting with senior aides. By Sunday, the paper emailed the governor's spokeswoman asking for "the governor’s travel records for the week of Feb. 11, 2008, specifically Feb. 11 through Feb. 15. The message also requested the names of all the hotels he stayed at, where he traveled, flight records and any available records of receipts billed to the state."

The spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, presumed it was a story about the governor's on-going entanglement with Joe Bruno. It was that night that Spitzer--who was informed on Friday by investigators that he was wiretapped--fessed up. Powell and Confessore write:

The entire article also provides some lively anecdotes about Spitzer--including a run-down of what he did over the weekend, like taking jogs around Central Park--that make it a must read.

Right! Let’s do the whole combination, facing away from the mirror.

From the top,

A five, six, seven, eight!

I have only to hear that “a five, six, seven, eight!” heralding the scintillating first number of A Chorus Line, and I’m happy; I’m exactly where I want to be. In some way that I can’t explain, I’m home.

Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line (1975), now happily back with us on Broadway in a loving revival directed by Bob Avian (Bennett’s original co-choreographer), was the formative musical of my theatergoing life. When I saw the original production in London, I thought then—and still do—that it was the most innovative modern American musical I’d ever seen.

The seven-minute opener is one of the greatest ever choreographed. For one singular sensation, it introduces us to every character and the world of a dance audition—“God, I hope I get it / I hope I get it”—in the same masterly way that the wordless overture to Carousel conveys an entire world in music.

The surprise for me about the revival is that A Chorus Line still moved me after all this time. Perhaps I was nostalgic for my younger self, for what was once contemporary and has now become a period piece. Yet that isn’t quite it. A Chorus Line is still smashing and very much alive because it remains a great, irreplaceable, timeless show.

It continues America’s long love affair with backstage stories and showbiz as a metaphor, from Gypsy to 42nd Street to Follies. (Bob Fosse’s Chicago, which also premiered in 1975, is A Chorus Line’s cynical showbiz underbelly). The book of A Chorus Line, by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, rings truer than most because it’s largely based on the life stories of the original cast members. To be sure, the show has a dollop of honest sentimentality, as backstage musicals must (“What I Did for Love”). In that sense, A Chorus Line is the showbiz heir to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948).

Marvin Hamlisch’s richly evocative score—the best that Mr. Hamlisch has written—and particularly Edward Kleban’s edgy lyrics are a perfect expression of a dancer’s hard, short-lived life (“Play me the music / Give me the chance to come through”), with bodies that are possibly fixable (“Tits and ass / Bought myself a fancy pair”) and an inescapable fate. “I’m a dancer,” protests Cassie, the show’s nearly star, begging to return to the chorus line. “A dancer dances.”

Has there ever been a major musical sequence that can top the sustained brilliance of A Chorus Line’s “At the Ballet”? The excellent Baayork Lee (who played Connie in the original A Chorus Line) has restaged Bennett’s choreography wonderfully. “At the Ballet” touches greatness in a sublime synthesis of dance and music and light, as mirrors turn in space. We want to cry out at the wonder of it all: “How beautiful! How beautiful life can be.”

It’s quite an irony that “One,” the show’s now-famous finale, when everyone in the cast comes out to take their bow in their gold top hats and identical costumes, inevitably compels us to cheer them for surviving. But, in truth, it’s no victory. Every individual has been reduced to characterless anonymity, a Rockette in a chorus line.

Theoni V. Aldredge has recreated her original costumes (thankfully resisting the temptation to update); Natasha Katz has adapted Tharon Musser’s lighting; and set designer Robin Wagner has exactly recreated his empty space to represent the rehearsal studio. (There are only two props: a stool and the dancers’ bags). Peter Brook built an entire aesthetic, and a renowned book, around theories of theater as an empty space. In its apparent simplicity, Mr. Wagner’s set for A Chorus Line conjures up a miracle with mirrors.

The set is the reverse of a Broadway musical dominated and swamped by too much design and too many special effects. The mirrors have since been widely imitated, down to Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly currently at the Met. But in a musical where the dancer and the mirror are inseparable, I have yet to see mirrors used so well—or more naturally.

Bennett would go on to direct and choreograph Dreamgirls, but he topped A Chorus Line only once: On one of the most amazing nights in showbiz history (Sept. 29, 1983), Bennett celebrated A Chorus Line’s record-breaking 3,389th performance by staging a gala production with a cast of 332 alumnae performers. As a concept director, he was never small. The Booth Theater, next-door to A Chorus Line’s former home in the Shubert on Broadway, served as a dressing room.

Bennett staged the gala after just four days of marathon rehearsal. The one-night-only performance, with wave after wave of chorus liners from different companies over the years joining each scene, literally brought the audience to the point of delirium. I knew then, of course, that the performance would belong to memory and storytelling and that it could never be repeated onstage. Nor could the first time I saw the original cast of A Chorus Line all those years ago be captured again with wide eyes.

It’s bound to be so, as time passes. The good old days never were as good as the good old days…. It was inevitable that in the current revival, two or three of the performances can’t quite match up to the legendary originals. But not where it counts most, in their hearts. What more could the wonderful Charlotte d’Amboise do as Cassie (the role that Donna McKechnie made famous)? Ms. d’Amboise all but leaves her blood on the stage in the exceptionally demanding dance sequence, “The Music and the Mirror”—and she triumphs.

But yes, the world has changed a great deal in the three decades since the premiere of A Chorus Line. In 1987, Bennett himself, like so many gifted children of Broadway, died tragically of AIDS. (He was 44.) What the revival confirms marvelously for us is that A Chorus Line is now as much a classic piece of musical theater as Gypsy or West Side Story.

The young, unknown Bennett was coincidentally in the chorus of a touring production of West Side Story, and his god of dance was its director, Jerome Robbins. Bennett was born in Buffalo, N.Y. (“To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant”), and he secretly studied all of Robbins’ dances and ballets. He would become Robbins’ heir on Broadway, and that’s why Bennett’s work—unlike Bob Fosse’s—cannot be pastiched. Bennett took his choreography beyond the traps of a personal style into the higher realms of an artless art.

The chance to see his masterpiece again, or for the first time, shouldn’t be missed. Bennett did not seek—as Mr. Brantley at The Times insists—“to paint in kinetic strokes a group portrait ... like the inhabitants of densely peopled canvases by Velazquez or Rembrandt.” Oh, my. If Michael Bennett had been as pretentious as that, we’d never have heard of him or A Chorus Line. In fact, he borrowed and adapted film technique—dissolves, fast cuts and close-ups. He was an instinctive street kid, not an intellectual—a gypsy-genius of Broadway who loved dance and dancers and lived for the American musical.

When I first saw A Chorus Line, I thought I was seeing the future. And now, seeing it again so lovingly restored, I feel the bittersweet sense of both loss and possibility. Loss, because the American musical has for a generation lost all confidence in itself; possibility, because A Chorus Line is not cynical, nor a pseudo-opera, a special effect, a puppet show, an infantile spelling bee or a jukebox.

Stop and look around you! Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Avenue Q and the rest. For my money, A Chorus Line is still the best musical in town.