“I was shlepping her to dance class by the time she was 7,” recalls Walt Jacobs, Nixon’s father and a well-known Alameda real estate broker along with his wife, Judy. It was a life-changing moment, and from then on, she considered herself a dancer first and foremost. “When I was little, my parents took me to New York to see the original production of ‘A Chorus Line,'” says Nixon. The origins of her career go back to her childhood in Alameda. Also, I encounter so many Jewish people in theater. “We did all the holidays together and still do. “My Judaism is my sense of family,” she says. It’s a long way from chanting Torah to singing in a Broadway musical for Nixon, who grew up as a member of Alameda’s Temple Israel, where she and her three siblings became b’nai mitzvah.
Among the cast is Elisa Nixon, a nice Jewish girl from Alameda, co-starring in the very musical that inspired her to act in the first place. Their new production of “A Chorus Line” opened this week and runs through March 6. A New York revival is now in the works, but American Musical Theatre of San Jose has beaten the Great White Way to the punch. Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s groundbreaking 1975 musical about a group of Broadway “gypsies” hoping to make the big time proved an enduring hit. Before “American Idol,” there was “A Chorus Line.”
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