On Broadway: singular sensation Donna McKechnie found the sequel to A Chorus Line on the road.

When the teenaged Donna McKechnie came to New York to become a dancer in 1959, she believed "all that silly stuff" that everyone in the chorus believes: "I've gotta get out of the chorus. I've gotta be a star by the time I'm 21."

Then, she says, "You're 21, and you say, 'I'll give it another year.'"

McKechnie gave it more than a dozen, in the process working with Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, and becoming the dance muse for an up-and-coming choreographer named Michael Bennett. A strikingly crisp, yet fluid dancer, she moved first into dance solos, then into featured parts. And in 1975, it happened. She was handed the career-making role of Cassie, the not-quite star who wants to return to the ensemble, in Bennett's musical phenomenon, A Chorus Line. In her 30s, McKechnie was a luminary at last, with a Tony to prove it.

But what happened next is not exactly the expected fairytale ending to the story. She followed her great success with a brief and troubled marriage to Bennett (who died of AIDS-related illness in 1987), a bout of crippling, stress-related arthritis, and career choices that took her further and further away from Broadway. "I've devoted my life to the Broadway book musical," she says. "That's my greatest passion." But much of that passion has been lavished on audiences in Cleveland and Tokyo and London, away from the Broadway spotlight--even though after A Chorus Line, it looked as though she could write her own ticket.

"That was delusional," she says. "Nobody writes their own ticket on Broadway." Instead of going back to the chorus, she took to the road, playing the lead roles in classic musicals like Can-Can, Gypsy, and Follies. She's done several of the roles in that last one, and when she steps onstage this summer in the Massachusetts mountain town of Sheffield to sing "I'm Still Here," Stephen Sondheim's great anthem of survival, in the Barrington Stage production, she won't have to reach very far for the song's affirmative spirit.

"I certainly have earned the right to say, 'I'm still here,'" she conceded, as she prepared to head out for rehearsals. "I've been here through several generations of theatergoers. It's wonderful to do the song with a sense of victory."

That victory is indeed hard-won. She beat the arthritis which plagues so many dancers on sheer willpower. She says: "When you're sick, you go into a child-like state. I had to go to the doctor and say, 'Tell me what to do.' And he said, 'Take 18 Bufferin a day; you're going to have a 24-hour nurse soon, because you won't be able to get out of bed.' But the dancer in me said, 'No!' That willfullness that dancers need to do the impossible--the unnatural--made me say, 'I am not going to accept this.'"

That was only the first step, of course. It also took vitamin therapy, dietary changes, psychological counseling, and yoga. She's working on an autobiography, My Musical Comedy Life, to share the insights she gained from her battle with the disease. "As a dancer growing up and going to class every day, you keep the blinders on," she says. "You are in this insular world. You have to be that way, to do what dancers do. But I left that world behind me. I wasn't worried about show business. I was worried about surviving this."

When she was well enough to go back to work, she found that the world of musical theater had less and less to offer a seasoned singing, dancing actress. Partly, that was the theme of A Chorus Line: "It was born out of that frustration we were feeling, that we were never going to get to express ourselves," she says. "I have nothing against 42nd Street or Hello, Dolly. But Michael and I believed there's more depth to the human condition that can be put in a musical."

Her partnership with Bennett, she knows, was one of those lucky, once-in-a-lifetime gifts. "That age of the consummate choreographer-director is over. We lost so many important people--Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett dying in the same year! Every generation has a bridge that goes to the next generation. We missed that bridge a generation ago, and it's very telling. That was the tragedy. Personally, I really feel the loss, because Michael was my champion."

McKechnie knows that in show business, "a phone call changes your life." But a Broadway musical career without a champion leaves you waiting for that phone to ring for great stretches of time. McKechnie decided to become her own champion. She began creating her own vehicles: two one-woman shows that can be adapted to full-scale theaters or intimate nightclubs. Her dramatically polished singing and engaging personality are at the forefront in Inside the Music and Gypsy in My Soul. But the reason she created them, she says, "was to keep dancing." And then she quotes the woman she calls her "heroine," Gwen Verdon (who was herself quoting an old African proverb): "If you can talk you can sing; if you can walk you can dance."

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.