"And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going..."

Even before its highly anticipated opening, the glitz-and-glam celluloid fest known as Dreamgirls was already blasting headlines left, right, and center. Feverish reports escalated daily: Is there a catfight between Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson? Will the Oscar buzz for Eddie Murphy last? Is Dreamgirls really based on Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, and the Supremes?

But with all this whirl of Motown costume and camp, let us not forget who created this project—a dancer-choreographer-director born in 1943 in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of a Russian-Jewish mother and a Sicilian-Catholic father—Michael "Mickey" Difiglia, a.k.a. Michael Bennett.

He was dancing by the age of 2. Young Michael worked on his choreographic skills by plotting out stage patterns for dancers using his brother Frank's marbles. By 18, he was a dancer on Broadway; five years later he was a fully credited choreographer. In 1971, with Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince and James Goldman, he cocreated Follies. In 1975, he gave us the legendary A Chorus Line, followed by the 1981 groundbreaking hit Dreamgirls.

He learned his craft firsthand from the theatrical gods, from dancer and choreographer legends Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Marge and Gower Champion, Agnes DeMille, and Bob Fosse. He worked with Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim. But unlike his idols who reigned over the Broadway theater for decades, with plenty of time to create their lasting legacies, Bennett died of AIDS-related cancer at 44.

In 1983, Bennett said, "The Actors Fund wanted to give me their award for lifetime achievement, and I said don't give it to me—I don't want it. I'm only 40! This isn't my life's work yet."

Given his constant exploration of mortality—the death of a career equaling death itself—perhaps he heard the whispering of his own ghosts; perhaps he saw something else in his mirror other than a youthful twin waving back at him. That mirror was a recurring theme in Bennett's work. Not merely a theatrical device that he frequently incorporated into his stagings, Bennett's mirror reflected memory, longing, denial, and distortion, particularly in his three seminal works of Follies, A Chorus Line, and Dreamgirls.

Set on a mirrored, multi-angled raked stage, the legendary number of "Who's That Woman" from Follies became a high point in Bennett's then-rising career: Older women sing the tangled duet with younger counterparts, who wear mirrors embedded in their costumes. From a plain opening solo, the song escalates into a nightmarish whirl of discordance as age and realization come bearing down on the elderly actress who was once a "somebody."