Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (10 page)

It was ambitious. It was also clear from the get-go that it was going to be a lot of work for everyone, since for it to work properly the older gals would have to get their steps down. Michael wasn’t interested in having them forget their old routine.

Word had gotten around before rehearsals began that the principal ladies would do well to take some tap lessons. Some did, others did not. Yvonne didn’t, and she was having a hard time. “Once I learn them I’m okay, since I am a dancer, but I just can’t get the steps.” So Dorothy Collins went to Fritz Holt to see if Bob Avian couldn’t do some extra work with Yvonne on the side, quietly, so she wouldn’t feel bad. “Why don’t you say something about the other girls having had some tap lessons—but don’t make it sound like that is what you’re saying.” Bob, who had worked with Michael on every one of his shows, was a model of tact and diplomacy. He invited Yvonne to come with him off in a corner, where he took her through the steps patiently and slowly. Monday night she appeared on the
Tonight Show
and told Johnny Carson that things were going well with the show, “but I’m having a lot of trouble with tap.” In truth, all the women were having trouble learning the number, but most of them suffered silently.

Hal was responsible for the book scenes. The show was episodic, so what he had to rehearse was either scenes among the principals or short bits and pieces involving party scenes with one or two people drifting through clumps of other partygoers. He wanted to stage the show in chronological order, so he began with the opening monologues. Only Phyllis, Ben, Sally, and Buddy had monologues, but other characters had specific entrances that would be coordinated with music. “Make your entrances as if you’ve been having a conversation with the person you’re arriving with. Your speech should be sort of a continuation,” he told the room. He had a distinctive way of working: he took small sections of scenes, went over them repeatedly, blocked out some staging, and often gave the actors line readings if they didn’t get one instinctively right off. “I’m not good at talking or verbalizing the printed page. I am not the kind of director who can talk, talk, talk about a scene. I have to see it.” Since the party scenes continued throughout the whole show, he spoke about the need to “orchestrate the party.” He kept a careful eye out for focus, so the emphasis would always be on the right place and on the right characters. “You take a drink from this waiter here, and come down this way, wave hello to those people over there, and come dancing over here and stop.” He kept on rehearsing party vignettes all week, devising almost cinematic cross-fades as a waiter, a guest, or one of the black-and-white showgirl ghosts wandered in front of a scene as it ended. Some of this looked stagey and clumsy, but without everything else going on around, it was clearly too early to make a judgment. Sometimes Hal would jump up, grab an actor by the arms and pull him through to where he wanted him. Sometimes he seemed oddly preoccupied, and would talk to Ruthie or whoever was sitting next to him while scenes were being run. Perhaps he was discussing new ideas, but it didn’t look as if he was paying attention to the actors. Since everyone in the scenes he was staging was also needed by Michael and the music department, he would grab anyone available to stand in. On a couple of occasions, I stood in for a waiter. It felt odd—sort of fun, but I felt as if I really didn’t belong. I was much more comfortable at any of my other tasks, which were beginning to become more numerous and varied.

Hal Hastings started to teach the opening number, “Beautiful Girls,” to everyone in the company. He also worked with individual actors on their solos. Often this was done so quietly that no one was aware of songs’ being rehearsed until they were ready to be presented in the big rehearsal room. He chose to start with the older actors, since they had already expressed concerns about learning everything they had to learn in the time available and he knew they would need a lot of hand-holding.

A full-page ad for the show ran on Sunday, the second day of rehearsal. This is a tradition that Hal Prince had adhered to for years; he felt that seeing a full-page advance advertisement in the Arts & Leisure Section of the Sunday
New York Times,
with everyone’s name in place, always gave the company a boost. It was also another subtle reminder that soon there would have to be a complete show to put in front of an audience.

Hal and Boris had a blowup early in the week. Although Hal liked the rehearsal platforms that approximated the side units of the set, he also wanted to have the set model in the rehearsal room with him so he could make reference to the real thing while he was roughing out his staging. Boris said it was needed at the shop as reference during the construction. Since it was painted in fine detail, it was also vital to the shop’s painting staff. Hal had a heated phone conversation with Boris, but because he was needed back in the rehearsal room, he turned the phone over to Ruthie. She shut the door while Hal walked back to rehearsal, muttering, “I don’t want to be in there.” Ruthie’s piercing voice, now rising in volume, could be heard through the door. Then the receiver slammed down and she emerged, heading for Hal, fuming: “Why do you do that to me?” Later on, Hal conceded that Boris was absolutely right, that as producer he understood completely the need for the model at the shop. But as director he wanted it in the rehearsal room.

If Hal had a conflict at this point in the process, it was that he was both sole producer and codirector. He had started his life as a producer, in partnership with a fellow stage manager, Robert E. Griffith. Together they had produced shows that were directed by the A-team of musical theater artists of the 1950s: George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. Hal was the eager-beaver youngster of the lot, and was even parodied in a book called
Say, Darling,
written by Richard Bissell, the author of the novel 7½
Cents,
on which
The Pajama Game
was based.
Say, Darling
told the story of how a book was turned into a musical. Then it, in turn, was made into a musical, with Robert Morse portraying the Hal Prince character in a not altogether flattering portrait. Nothing fazed Hal, though, and he kept right on producing. By the early 1960s, after the death of his partner, he had struck out on his own as one of the very few producers on Broadway to earn a solo credit (“Harold Prince presents . . .”). He still knew how to produce better than almost anyone else, and had assembled a solid staff. Included was Carl Fisher, an elegant elderly gentleman, nephew of George Abbott, who had declined to be a partner with Griffith and Prince in the early days, but who stayed on as their general manager. Fisher also headed a syndicate that invested in shows in his name and in the case of
Follies
was one of the largest investors. Hal was leaning more and more on Carl and the staff, and Ruthie in the rehearsal room, to take care of business, even to the point of arguing with them over expenditures that he as director thought were needed. The overall producing scheme and policy was clearly Hal’s, but the more he could remove himself from the daily nuts and bolts, the happier he was. One day I brought down a sheet of expenses from Carl for him to okay. It totaled over $200,000. He glanced at it, handed it back to me, and said, “Give this to Ruthie. I don’t have the strength to look at it and get mad.”

Hal was still the sole producer of
Follies,
although he gave Ruthie “in association with” billing, as he had since
Cabaret.
He had his usual large group of investors: for
Follies
there were somewhere between 170 and 207, each of whom put up between $875 and $52,500 for a total of $700,000. A limited partnership, imaginatively named the Follies Company, was formed as the business entity through which the show was produced; the investors were the “limited” partners who provide the capitalization, and the producer was the “general” partner who finds the property, hires the talent, and does the actual producing. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the limited partnerships formed to produce shows in New York, and because of the high rate of failure, the offering papers must indicate the track record of the producer raising money to present the show. The legal partnership documents include a lot of detail about the show, the personnel involved, how much they will be paid, and so on. Each investor and the amount of investment has to be listed and filed. The documents often allowed a producer the right to an overcall of a set percentage from each investor should the show go over budget. If there is no such provision (and there was none in the case of
Follies
), the producer is allowed to arrange for a loan to the partnership that would then occupy a first-payback position. Since the final reported budget for
Follies
was close to $800,000, a loan did have to be made. (Rumor had it that Hal put up the money himself, and in an article in
Forbes
it was reported that one of the obligations when the show made a first distribution to investors was “paying off $78,000 it had borrowed.”)

It was easy to sense Hal’s producer-versus-director conflict on a daily basis. One day when Ingram Ash, the head of the show’s advertising agency, brought down a series of photographs and layouts for Hal’s approval, he tried to talk Hal into leasing the large half-block billboard above the marquee of the Winter Garden Theater, where the show would play in New York. Ash had a rendering of how it might look, but Hal rejected it as an extravagant expense. Everyone on the support team thought he should take the plunge, but he saw it through the prudent producer’s eyes and didn’t want to take it on. (He was eventually talked into it.)

On the second day, Michael began work on staging the Prologue. Hal would sit in whenever he could, since what they were creating was a kind of mosaic—people arriving at this ghost-filled theater for the party, greeting each other, sensing the ghosts, hearing bits and pieces of shows from the past. The Prologue was to change three times before the New York opening, each version fascinating in its own right. It had been decided that there would be no overture. The house curtain would be down as the audience filed in. Once the house lights dimmed, the curtain was to rise on the half-lit set of the crumbling Weismann Theater after some flashes of lightning. The Prologue set the ambiance of the scene before anyone arrived for the party. We would discover—in some way yet to be determined—the ghosts of showgirls haunting the theater, lurking in the shadows, ready to do the show, only the show wasn’t happening anymore. It was to include specific memories from the days of the Follies, although what memories those were or how they would be manifested had yet to be decided. Slowly, the reality of the present would become apparent and the ghost figures would recede into the background, only to appear again when conjured up by the events of the play. The characters would begin to arrive, and each would react differently to the surroundings, as usually happens at reunions, only this time, the feelings would be verbalized and, in some instances, physicalized. When Solange LaFitte (Fifi D’Orsay) arrives, for example, she hears her old applause echoing in the past, and she brightens to its sound. Hattie Walker (Ethel Shutta), ever the pragmatist, enters directly with her black-and-white ghost figure shadowing her every move. The wheelchair-bound Heidi Schiller (Justine Johnston) is greeted by the swirling movement of her “waltz.” We could get glimpses into the people they were today before we learned about who they had been in the days of the Follies. When Stella Deems (Mary McCarty) is announced by the Major-Domo of the party by her maiden name, she has no reaction; her husband reaches out to remind her of her previous life. John Berkman, the arranger of the dance music, sat at the piano and created the arrangement as Michael worked, basing everything on elements and variations of the songs in the show. It was moody, atmospheric, and eerie. Each day more characters were introduced, the staging got more specific, and the music related more to the characters. Sometimes the ghost figures would take over and influence the music with specific references to the past. On the day when Michael finally got to the end of the Prologue, Hal said, “Oh, well, good. It’s an opening.” And Michael replied, “And what do you know? I don’t have a clutch in my stomach.”

Another focus early in the week was “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” In some ways this song was the key to the whole show. Not only had it been one of the first songs written, but its evolution paralleled the evolution of
The Girls Upstairs
into
Follies.
Steve felt it; of all the songs, this was the one he seemed most anxious about. By Monday afternoon it was in presentable enough shape to be run for Hal, Steve, and Jim Goldman. Halfway through, Hal leaned over to Michael and said: “Terrific—it’s going to be terrific.” Steve was pleased. “It’s going to be great, really, you all keep the emotion very well, and it’s the emotion that carries the song through.” It is the first moment when the lead characters deal specifically with themselves as a foursome—then, and now. The emotions are, necessarily, complex, and since the song comes early in the show, it opens the Pandora’s box of emotional turmoil to come. The song begins on stage level with the men singing their verse. Without being quite conscious of what they’re doing, Phyllis and Sally climb a staircase on one of the side units, as if going back up to their dressing rooms. When they begin their verse, they are “upstairs,” singing about the “boys downstairs.” It was a nice moment, and it cleared the lower level for the young counterparts, who take over for the first time in the show. They enter filled with youthful anticipation of an evening on the town, discuss their plans, and then run off, leaving behind the four principals, who are somewhat dazed by the memory. Once the song was run, Michael went into the stage managers’ office, took a swig of Hal’s Fernet-Branca, and said, “I really like ‘The Girls Upstairs’ from when the young kids start until the end. I just don’t like the beginning. But . . . I’ve got too much to do to worry about it now.” Then there was a brief summit meeting.