In fact, there was a summit meeting almost every day in which Hal, Michael, Jim, and Steve would sequester themselves behind a closed door and discuss the status of the show. This often took place over lunch, but sometimes happened on the spur of the moment.
Of all the creators, the one who was least in evidence the first week was Jim Goldman. He was probably feeling more gun-shy than anyone, simply because as exciting as
Follies
was, it was a far cry from the show that he and Steve had begun. Changing gears to accommodate a new producer and a new directing team must have made him cautious, and this was the third try, although this time was for real. There had been six complete drafts of the script before Hal got involved, each of which had rough and final versions. (The first one he gave Steve had on its cover: Untitled musical, unpolished book by James Goldman, unfinished music by Stephen Sondheim.) When Hal wanted him in rehearsal, he was always there. And every time he came in, he brought new revisions, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes a new lead-in to a song, sometimes a shift of sequence, sometimes an entirely new scene. He was game, certainly, and appeared to be very laid-back, and very un-showbiz. I found this letter stuck in an earlier draft of the script in the stage managers’ office:
Dear Hal,
What you’ve got here is a first attempt at 1) clarifying and improving Ben and 2) tightening the first sag in the show, the area between “The Girls Upstairs” and “Who’s That Woman?”
It wasn’t that what Ben did was so wrong. The problem was that he didn’t do anything. Being unsure of him, I had taken the sure course of leaving him out, with the result that between his opening monologue and his scene with Sally after “The Girls Upstairs,” he had something like two lines of dialogue.
I’ve come across a way of formulating what the past means to our four people. I’ve found it enormously helpful and before you read this stuff, particularly with Ben in mind, I wanted to offer it to you.
It’s just that when the past stays alive in our lives in harmful or damaging ways, it means we have unfinished business with it. For Ben, Sally represents unfinished business. It’s not the lady herself who attracts him and evokes old feelings. It’s the past within himself that he has never faced or come to terms with.
This may be a highly personal way of putting it and of no help at all. But I’ve begun to feel so much clearer and more certain what this piece is all about by thinking that our people have unfinished business with the past and when the show is over, they have finished with it.
Anyway,
Jim
At one of the summit meetings during lunch (I brought in the food—gofer, remember?), Jim announced that he had found some answers the night before but had had no one to tell them to. This seemed like a slow-track comment delivered to a bunch of people on a fast track and brought the conversation to a bit of a standstill. But soon the conversation was focused on the Follies sequence. Steve was lying on his back on one of the stage units, Jim was puffing away on a pipe, Ruthie was seated, looking up at Hal, Michael and Bob were sitting quietly, and Hal was pacing. The discussion turned to how metaphorical the entire Follies sequence should be. Steve wasn’t sure exactly where he stood; he had mentioned to me a few days earlier that Hal was injecting a lot more obvious “meaning” into the show than had originally been intended. Ruthie said: “This is the first chance all evening for the audience to enjoy something without having to think every moment of the time, and I think it should be kept that way.”
A
digression. On Tuesday night, Mary Rodgers and her husband, Hank Guettel, came to our house for dinner with my parents. They were friends, and we had gone as a family to Hank and Mary’s on Christmas night for dinner. Steve Sondheim had been one of the other guests, and since I knew I would be working on
Follies,
I asked about it. He said his greatest fear was there would be no one boss; Hal was the logical boss, but because he knew Michael Bennett was going to be a real force this time, he was concerned there might be a tug of war between the two. So on this Tuesday night, four days into rehearsals, Hank and Mary brought gossip from Steve, whom they had spoken to earlier that day. Steve had helped Mary out of a crunch with
The Mad Show
a few years earlier, when, under the pseudonym Estaban Rio Nido, he wrote a funny set of lyrics to Mary’s music in “The Boy from . . . ,” a parody of the then-popular song “The Girl from Ipanema.” Their song told the story of a young woman’s frustration with her man who lives in places with unpronounceable names, and somehow seems unresponsive to any woman’s affection, which she just can’t understand. “Why are his trousers vermillion? . . . Why do his friends call him Lillian?” It was the hit of the show. Steve paid homage to them both with a line in
Company:
“Hank and Mary get into town tomorrow.” Listen—it’s still in the score.
Mary said Steve had reported that the show was “terrible—if people thought
Company
was depressing, wait until this show opens. It really is very depressing.” She didn’t give much credence to his comment, explaining that songs are never sung the way you, the composer, imagine they would and should be, and it’s always a shock when you first hear them coming from the mouths of actors. Hank said that
Follies
was a labor of love: “If someone is able to come up with something as brilliant as
Company
when he said his heart wasn’t really in it, imagine what this score, which has indeed been a labor of love, is going to be like?” He also said to keep an eye open—in
Company
the whole score didn’t come together until Steve wrote “Being Alive” in Boston. He suspected something similar might happen on this show. They also both stressed that they had the utmost respect for Hal as a producer. “He is high above other New York producers in the way he handles his backers. He treats them well without pandering to them and prefers to have many people invest small amounts rather than a few big investors.”
B
ack at Nineteenth Street rehearsals were forging ahead. Hal Hastings took any actor who wasn’t otherwise occupied to teach and drill music. He would play the song for the actor first, then give the piano over to a rehearsal pianist so he could concentrate on coaching—phrasing, breathing, enunciation, and rhythm. He wanted to spend the most time with those who needed him the most, and Michael had made it known that he didn’t want to work with any of the solos until the actors knew their material cold.
Ethel Shutta was one of the first to learn her song and begin staging rehearsals. She was a delight. Of all the actors in the show, she became the embodiment of what the show was about. She had been a big star in the 1920s, appearing on Broadway in shows like
Whoopee!
and in several editions of the Follies. When married to bandleader George Olsen, she became a well-known vocalist, and even went to Hollywood, where she appeared in several films, including the film of
Whoopee!
Her career had stalled in the 1950s, and drink became something of a demon for her as she tried to return to the stage. Her most recent Broadway credit was an unsuccessful Mary Martin vehicle called
Jennie,
but she had been plugging away, looking for jobs wherever she could find them. She was grateful for the role in this show, and it would prove to be her last great hurrah. The song given to her character, Hattie Walker, “Broadway Baby,” was a pragmatic statement of a Broadway hopeful. She sang the words with such conviction, spirit, and determination that you couldn’t help but smile. “At!! My tiny flat!! There’s just my cat!!” She was easily a favorite among the company, and every time she rehearsed, people would laugh. In response to my compliments, she replied, “Well, you know, I was in six Ziegfeld shows starting with the Follies in 1925. Don’t expect a grand voice from an old girl like me. When you start singing after not having sung for so long—I am so bad about exercising—you have to get worked into it again.” She told me she thought I looked like Ryan O’Neal, and ripped an ad out of the newspaper for his movie
Love Story
to prove it. She was worried that she was going to have trouble remembering things, but she was a trouper. When she was passed on to Michael for staging, he began by just letting her do what she wanted. When something pleased him, he would tell her to keep it in. She would stop in her tracks and look at him whenever he spoke, affording him the courtesy traditionally given by a performer to her director. She was fighting to remember things, but that didn’t stop her from trying. At the end of each rehearsal she would thank him for taking the time to work with her. She was having trouble with her small part in the Prologue. Michael wanted her to enter, walk five steps in rhythm, stand still for four counts, and then walk downstage for sixteen more counts. When she finally got it right, Graciela ran over and threw her arms around her in a big bear hug. “Hey, I didn’t know acting could be so hard!” she exclaimed.
In the middle of the week, two dancers who could pass for an older ballroom couple were chosen from a last-minute audition. For some reason, signing them to a contract took a lot of doing, so they were on again one minute, off again the next. I suspected it was the budget. By the end of the week, Jayne Turner and Don Weismuller joined the company. Another woman was also hired as a swing dancer. She stood four feet ten inches tall in her fraying pink high-heeled dance shoes, cascades of obviously dyed red hair falling down over her character’s face, and had a name Michael couldn’t resist—Sonja Levkova. The next morning she was hard at work with Mary Jane Houdina, learning the tap steps to “Who’s That Woman?”
M
y gofer errands multiplied. For script and lyric changes and revisions, I would type pages on a red IBM electric typewriter set up on an old desk in the front hall of the Lab. I would use carbon sets and keep copy number four (of ten) for a running and up-to-date copy of the script, which I would hold on to in case I had to make subsequent copies. If I was going up to the Rockefeller Center office, I would bring new pages to Xerox. But I wouldn’t always have access to the machine, since the office’s world was more than just
Follies.
The touring production of
Company,
for example, was being cast, which meant that notes from Joanna Merlin to Hal had to be brought down to rehearsal for his responses, which I would then communicate uptown. Bills would be brought down for Ruthie’s okay. Petty cash was needed at rehearsal, and contracts signed downtown needed to be brought to the office for the files. I would be sent on occasional shopping excursions, like buying five umbrellas for the Prologue when the decision was made that the show would take place on a rainy night. And, yes, I made endless runs for coffee, tea, sandwiches, and oddball food requests—say, for Hal’s lunch, two hard-boiled eggs, a pickle, and soup. The music department also kept me pretty busy, fetching and delivering.
When Steve Sondheim finished writing a song, he would play it for Hal, Michael, and Jim. If everyone approved, he would then turn in his manuscript. This would consist of a vocal line, lyrics under, and two accompaniment lines playable on piano. While some Broadway composers’ manuscripts are sketchy, Steve’s are clean, precise, and full, with musician’s shorthand used to save time. The next person to get it would be Mathilde Pincus, the music copyist, whose task was to write out a clean copy of the song in a legible and reproducible fashion. She used a flat pen with black ink and wrote on 11” × 14” sheets of opaque paper called deschon, which had the musical staff lines printed in reverse on one side. Writing with ink on the other side allowed for errors to be erased without affecting the staff lines. This sheet was then placed on top of a piece of specially treated paper and run through an elaborate machine that reeked of ammonia. The treated paper could accommodate four pages of deschon at a time, and out would come a perfectly clear and readable copy of the song that looked almost like printed music, with the notes and staff lines equal in value, although done by hand. The three pages would then be folded, accordion-style, and taped together so the song was ready for the rehearsal room. These were the copies that were distributed to the rehearsal pianists and cast on the first day of rehearsal.
Once the keys were set (depending mostly on the actor’s vocal range) and the routining established (dance arrangements, how many times through, etc.), the song was then handed over to Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator. His task was to apportion the music among the specific instruments chosen for the orchestra to give the musical impression desired by the composer. The size and makeup of the orchestra is a group decision, influenced primarily by the composer and the producer, the composer with artistic concerns and the producer with budgetary ones. (Theaters on Broadway also have union-determined minimum numbers of players that vary with the seating capacity of the theater.) The orchestrator also has to take the dance arrangements and blend them with the songs and any underscoring to create a score that flows together as one piece. He then creates the full orchestral score on a long piece of paper with a musical staff line for each instrument, starting with the woodwinds at the top, going through the brass, percussion, and ending with the strings on the bottom. Each page of full score usually contains only four bars of music, so one song can take up to twenty pages or so, and a long dance routine can fill many more. Once the score is completed, it goes to the copyist, whose next job is to extract parts for each instrument—the flute part, for example, is created by taking the line at the top of each page. When that job is finished, each player in the orchestra will have only his part, although the conductor will have the full score in front of him so he can see what everyone is playing. And this process goes for every piece of music in a show. In the case of
Follies
, there would end up being twenty-three songs and a Prologue. And, of course, every new song had to be taken through the entire process; there is no way to circumvent any of the steps if a musical is to be accompanied by an orchestra of any size. The
Follies
orchestra would have twenty-eight players. Each step takes time, a lot of effort, and money.