Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (12 page)

My tasks were mainly to ferry different pieces of this score-in-progress around the city. Steve would usually bring the new song down to rehearsal, and he would tend to give his manuscript directly to Mathilde. But sometimes he would be working at home and word would come that a song was finished, so I would be sent over to his house in Turtle Bay to pick it up and take it to Mathilde. When she was finished with the piano/vocal, I would bring copies down to rehearsal, and once everyone had decided on the key, I would take a copy to Jonathan Tunick’s apartment on the Upper West Side. When he was finished with a score, I would pick it up and take it to Mathilde for the extraction of instrumental parts. Every day included some element of this circuit.

By Thursday, the end of the first week of full rehearsal, the logistics were changing subtly. More and more of what Michael was doing needed the large rehearsal room, as numbers were being put together with the full company. That put a squeeze on Hal, who was eager to put pieces together and have a run-through to see what they had. Michael, in addition to overseeing the ladies learning “Who’s That Woman?” was working his way through the Prologue and starting “Beautiful Girls,” both of which depended on the set for much of the movement. In addition, although solos would be worked on in the smaller room, it became more important to bring them into the large room to get a sense of the space. On Thursday, Hal was able to run scenes from the beginning up to and beyond “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” At the end of the day, Ethel Shutta came into the large room and ran through “Broadway Baby” for the first time “in public.” It was great. “That girl is precious,” said Hal Hastings.

Friday was the day off.

REHEARSALS CONTINUE AT THE REHEARSAL STUDIO,
JANUARY 16–29

 

 

 

 

H
al came bounding in late on Saturday morning and announced: “One hour is all I’m allotted today, so I want to do the scene following ‘Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,’ and I’ve got a new idea.” The idea was to change two of the waiters to photographers. “I had the idea in bed last night. I began thinking that I hated what I had done, and there was no one from the production to talk to.” He began by telling the photographers to shoot indiscriminately. He then found places where some characters could be posed, and he put several of the older women on one side of the stage against one of the units. Ethel Barrymore Colt posed perfectly, her hand held at a discreet position away from her body, middle finger ever so slightly lowered. “I want everyone to examine that hand,” Hal noted. Mary McCarty laughed heartily, and he said, “Try not to knock it, Mary. Achieve it.” He realized he could use the photographers to help sweep focus from one part of the party to another, like a cinematic cross-fade. So he had both photographers stand in front of the Whitmans, take one shot, then part to the sides, revealing the couple for “Rain on the Roof.” It looked like a nice way to get into the song.

He was longing to see sequences put together. He wanted to run the beginning of the show and continue through Ben and Sally’s song “Don’t Look at Me” and Ben’s song “The Road You Didn’t Take.” On Sunday he was able to muster the opening monologues, and then the book scenes, including “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” He also integrated Sally’s “In Buddy’s Eyes” and Ben’s “The Road You Didn’t Take” for the first time. Dorothy did fine, John muffed several lyrics, but they both got a nice round of applause from everyone in attendance.

Monday brought the first attempt at staging “Beautiful Girls.” The music had been learned, sort of, but this was the first go at getting it on its feet. Although Roscoe had the solo part of the song, it involved all the old gals. Hal Hastings assembled everyone in the middle of the room to sing through the song once. Michael Bartlett was very nervous, having to perform in front of everyone, sang in half-voice, missed most of his lyrics, and didn’t attempt the high note at the end. But it sounded pretty good. The room was turned over to Michael Bennett, who began with Roscoe. In an early script he was described as “an aged tenor in white tie and tails [who] appears high on a stairway, strikes a magnificent pose, opens his mouth and, in a glorious tenor voice, sings.” It didn’t look as if Michael Bartlett was going to strike a magnificent pose high up anywhere; just getting him onstage and in a downstage position looked as if it was going to take a lot of hard work. The women could strike their poses just fine, but getting them to where they were supposed to be,
when
they were supposed to be there, was a challenge. Michael began to stage a true Miss America-style entrance for each woman: presentation, walk down the stage left stairs, and promenade. It was slow going, especially since there were more steps on the actual set than there were on the mock-ups in the studio, and that took some explaining. But he was patient. Later in the day, the rest of the party guests and waiters, who had spent the morning learning the song, came in. After one musical pass-through, Hal Hastings stopped and said, “Kids, you’ve forgotten everything we were doing in the other room. I am trying to get every note. It can’t be slop time, it’s got to be crisp. If you will attack each note, it will sound full of energy. Please don’t get jazzy on me and don’t hoax it up. Don’t do me any favors. Don’t let it get marshmallowy.” He asked for a chord at the very end: “You can sing any note you want on the final beat as long it’s either a C, an E, or a G, because I want the major triad, and ladies who can hit the high C, please do.” The day was getting late, but everyone stumbled through it one last time. “Maybe it was real, what was beginning to happen, but it was also getting to be boring,” Michael said. He realized that he had to make certain the transition into the next scene was correct and that all the actors finished the song in the positions Hal had assigned them for the party scene that followed. His solution was to have a brief encore, with Roscoe turning around like a majordomo, taking charge so everybody could move gracefully to where he needed to be.

Before breaking for the day, Michael brought in all the dancers to go through as much of the Prologue as he had finished. It looked quite marvelous.

 

 

H
al Hastings, as administrative head of the music department, was kept busy on all levels. Aside from teaching and coaching the songs, he had to find players for the onstage band. Because the players would be both visible and audible, he needed musicians who would also be believable as a band hired for a party. He was having a harder time than he thought he would, having auditioned and interviewed several candidates, all of whom had been found wanting. He had found a trumpeter in Taft Jordan, whose playing was deemed acceptable. There was a logistical problem with the onstage band since Boris, when he designed the platform, hadn’t taken into consideration the proper size of a piano. The space was large enough for a small spinet, which is the size of piano used in
Cabaret.
But this time the piano needed to be full-size upright, so someone made a paper template and the stage managers moved it around the mock-up platform to see if a solution could be found. Since the set was already in the shop, no one wanted any structural changes. As it happens, a slight adjustment could be made relatively easily. Also, in the script Carlotta’s escort was supposed to be a piano virtuoso, so they tried to find a position that allowed an actor to take over the piano. Unfortunately, that proved to be unworkable, so before too long, Randy, the escort, became just an escort. The actor didn’t know how to play the piano, anyway.

 

 

T
he
Follies
family was starting to find its character. The social ones lingered in the common hall chatting with anyone who wandered by. Dorothy Collins was warm and chatty—at one point so chatty that Ruthie said, “Save your voice!” Gene Nelson was in perpetual motion, always interested in any conversation about Hollywood. Alexis Smith never lingered long, but sometimes paused for a quip. Seeing an article about the show pinned to a bulletin board in which she was referred to as “tall and striking,” she remarked: “I wish I could someday play someone short and fat.” Yvonne enjoyed talking and giggling—anything but going over her tap steps or working on her solo song “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Justine Johnston rarely took her eyes off the clock—either the one on the wall or the one hanging around her neck. She was a one-woman union police force.

A new observer joined the ranks. His name was Larry Cohen, and he seemed to be very chatty with Hal, Steve, and Michael. He was the legitimate theater critic for the
Hollywood Reporter
who was following the rehearsals of
Follies
with the idea of writing a book about the process of putting on a musical. There had been a comparable person following
The Rothschilds,
the last show for which I had gofered, and since I had never spoken with him, I decided to sit tight and ignore this guy, too. (That book did come out:
The Producer,
by Christopher Davis, all about Hillard Elkins.) But Larry was involved in some interesting conversations, and he seemed bright and well informed, so I started talking with him. We had very similar points of view about the state of the theater and the movies, we were both fans of the musical theater, and we had both figured that if anything in the musical theater was going to be exciting this season, it was
Follies.

Michael took over the large room to continue his painstaking way through the Prologue. Each time he worked on it, he added more people, having begun with the dancers as ghost figures, then added party guests, and, finally, the principals. The aim was to integrate the monologues Hal had been working on and segue neatly into “Beautiful Girls.” When he got to Justine Johnston’s Heidi Schiller, after spending some time trying to figure out how to maneuver her wheelchair on, he remarked, “Heidi, I think you’re going to be on a cane very shortly.” On Sunday Michael attempted to put all the elements together for the first time. He gathered the whole company and sat them down. “We must get across to the audience what this evening means to each and every character we see enter. We must realize that as each person enters, he or she has had some business with this place in the past which has really ended. That is partly what this show is about. We must also establish the fact that time as we know it has no relationship to this evening. The show is really about time and what it does to people, so we must establish that we are going to stop it at will, turn it back and twist it around whenever we so desire. I realize that crossing on a count of eight can be tricky, but I want everyone to become so well drilled that it never looks like anyone is counting. In order to make sense of the whole show, I need everyone to pay close attention to their counts and where they are supposed to be going.” Then, slowly, he began to put it all together.

 

 

S
teve Sondheim came by rehearsals on Sunday in a relaxed mood. He asked me how I thought things were going. It was a tough one to answer, because I didn’t know. The atmosphere was so charged—personalities emerging, work at such varying stages of development—that I couldn’t figure out how things were in relation to the whole. I told him I really couldn’t tell this early, but that some of what I had seen looked pretty good. We talked about the company; he was worried that there might be friction between the generations. From my vantage point, I told him, it looked like the opposite, that there seemed to be friendly and collegial support between the two groups, along with respect. He said he preferred to stay away for another week or so before coming to rehearsals with any regularity.

This was Sunday, a week and a day since we had begun. As far as any of us knew, Sondheim still had at least five songs to write: one song for the Young Four in Loveland (“Love Will See Us Through”), Buddy’s character song (“The Right Girl”) and Follies song (“The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues”), Ben’s Follies song (“Live, Laugh, Love”), and a bolero for Vincent and Vanessa. It was unclear what Phyllis and Sally would sing in the Follies sequence, since both “Losing My Mind” and “The World’s Full of Boys” were still being discussed. Despite not knowing where he was in the creation of those songs, he did seem to be in an expansive mood.

Sondheim is a complex character. To those in the business, he has always been acknowledged as brilliant—“as close to a genius as anyone working today,” some have said. He could be charming, and he could be intimidating. He was thoroughly professional with everyone connected with the show, and quite gracious and giving when he wanted to be. But when he didn’t, he could certainly make you feel small. My first encounter was indicative. I had written to him during my freshman year of college asking if he knew where I could buy a copy of the even-then rare hardcover version of the script of
Anyone Can Whistle
for a friend who was desperate to get a copy. He sent me a copy, inscribed to the person for whom I was asking, with a cordial letter. “Any time you and/or your friend would like to meet with me in the city, I would be delighted.” Then, the last paragraph: “One piece of advice: learn how to spell ‘inconvenience.’ I promise not to tell your father.”

His work is complex, too. “He’s a lot simpler now than he was,” Hal said, “and we really have to keep him simple. Richard Rodgers, who now likes Steve very much, used to say that as soon as you’re with him and all is going well, he’ll go and get complicated on you.” Alexis described what his songs are like to learn: “When you hear him play the songs they sound so easy, then you start to learn them and after two bars you stop, exasperated.” Michael described
Anyone Can Whistle
as being “pure complicated, intellectual Sondheim left to his own devices.”

It is precisely his intellect at work in a field not known for its intellectuality that makes him unique. It’s also what makes him controversial, since the Broadway musical-theater industry relies more on the popular success of the
Hello, Dolly!s
than on the prestige of shows like
Company.
He had his coterie of fans who felt he was breaking through into new territory, but he was still considered primarily a lyricist; his music was not getting the recognition it deserved. To him, lyric writing was a puzzle, and he loved puzzles. He was good at them, but they took a lot of work. Composing wasn’t a puzzle; it was more emotional, and perhaps it was because of his awesome skill with words that people were reluctant to accept him as a composer. But he thought of himself as a composer.
Company
had begun the process of educating the larger world to just how extraordinary he was.
Follies
would be the catalyst that made the skeptics aware of his full talents. Fully appreciating him was still not such an easy thing. When I first encountered
Anyone Can Whistle,
I had no idea what to make of it. On second and repeated hearings, however, I began to realize just how extraordinary a piece of work it was, with melodies that at first seemed to go by without making much of an impression but which became more and more intriguing. A fifteen-minute piece in which a fake doctor separates a stageful of people into two groups—Group A and Group I—called “Simple”? I had never encountered anything like that. My mind was as engaged as my feelings. That’s what he demanded of an audience, and that was new. His work took some getting used to, but it was worth the effort. Yet at this point in the process of
Follies,
I was concerned. There were two distinct styles of songs—the “book” songs, sung in the present, and the songs that echoed the past, which were more accessible. Sondheim referred to these songs as “pastiche.” I feared audiences would prefer one style over the other, and I feared that the “book” songs would lose out. Perhaps the key will be “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,” I thought, which combines both past and present—and has a catchy tune.