cover image One Singular Sensation

One Singular Sensation

Kevin Kelly. Doubleday Books, $21.95 (327pp) ISBN 978-0-385-26125-8

Basing his biography on tape-recorded interviews with Bennett, his friends, lovers, associates and family members, and often preserving their own words, Kelly, theater critic for the Boston Globe , traces the career of the brilliant young choreographer-director of A Chorus Line , Ballroom , Dreamgirls and other important musicals. Bennett emerges as a complex and driven personality, enormously ambitious, single-minded about show business, ruled by the need to control, addicted to drugs, obsessed by fear of the Mafia and unable to establish lasting relationships. In the end, all of these disturbing characteristics seem insignificant compared to his remarkable accomplishments and the loss occasioned by his death from AIDS at the age of 44. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)