ONE SINGULAR SENSATION The Michael Bennett Story <i> by Kevin Kelly (Doubleday: $21.95; 327 pp.) </i>

The extraordinary success of Michael Bennett’s Broadway show, “A Chorus Line,” made him a theatrical legend of a different sort from Peter Brook. The choreographer/director died in July of 1987, a victim of AIDS at age 44, but his show went on with a 15-year Broadway run that is scheduled to end only with its 6,014th performance on March 31.

Based on a series of interviews Boston Globe theater critic Kevin Kelly conducted with Bennett and his friends, family and associates, this biography fits in with the current tendency to favor tawdry personal detail. Although there are some good anecdotes in these pages, we learn much more of Bennett’s bisexuality, manipulative manner and general unreliability than of the world in which he excelled. A sample paragraph discusses Bennett’s reliance on “surrogate brother” Bob Avian:

“What (Bennett) saw in Avian’s level friendship was complete faith, trust, understanding and a total lack of moral judgment. Even when his actions were bizarre, like his relentless attacks on young dancers he was supposed to love and whom he referred to as ‘my family, my world’; even when he overdosed on cocaine and was secretly rushed to a New York doctor; or when he rationalized his seduction of the wife of one of his best friends, and the bitter, name-calling destruction of that friend’s marriage in a Paris courtroom--he would look to Avian for support. It was given unquestioningly.”

The reader often is left wondering why biographers expend such energy on subjects they clearly disdain. There is nothing of the joy of the theater in this account; Bennett’s dedication to his work appears as nothing more than clutching at a position where he could exercise control over his surroundings. Kelly’s endless catalogue of Bennett’s insecurities inevitably diminishes Bennett’s interest for the reader who picks up the book hoping simply to learn something about the creativity of the man who devised, happily or unhappily, whether with uncredited help or not, such entertainments as “Dream Girls” and “A Chorus Line.”