Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (18 page)

There was quite a production meeting following the run-through. The clearest evidence of something that had been brewing came out right at the beginning of rehearsal the next day. Michael gathered the full company on the set and announced: “I am now going to begin version number three of the Prologue.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but Michael hadn’t worked on the Prologue in days; it had simply been part of the run-throughs. I also hadn’t noticed that there had been more than one version so far. “You will all please be patient. I am going to have people moving in different tempos, so everyone must be with me. Pay attention and be patient.” He then addressed the dancers and showgirls: “For those of you who have seen your costumes at fittings and know how big they are, please let me know if I am asking you to do something that you won’t be able to do—that will save us all a lot of time.” Although it was hard to see what had been considered wrong with the Prologue, one of the goals of the new version was to tie music more into each character. The first version had begun with eerie, atmospheric music composed by John Berkman that emphasized the ghostlike world of the Weismann Theater. Michael added some of the ghost figures to his second version, without necessarily driving the point home that they were actually the same characters who were inhabiting the theater.

Nothing seemed to faze Michael. There was no visible limit to his energy, his drive, or his choreographic imagination. He was of a different generation from the rest of the creative team, the youngest by far, and his career was on the rise. Hal, Steve, and Jim were all successful and in their forties. Michael was twenty-eight. He simply thought and behaved differently—he was obviously from the drug generation, while the others were from a drinking generation. To many of us, he was the discovery, and watching him work was eye-opening. I mentioned to a college friend at the time that I thought he would end up being the Jerome Robbins of our generation. Some of us sensed that this was the last time he would share the leadership position with anyone, and yet we all knew that the collaboration on this piece would result in something very special. In a weak moment he had confessed that he hated the idea of getting older, and here he was, working on a piece dealing with the confrontation of youth and age. He was pushing the cast to do things they might not be able to do, and he hated seeing his dances not at peak form. He saw Gene going through hell, longing to be able to do the kind of acrobatic and lengthy dances he used to perform in the movies with ease. Even though Michael had already made the change from dancer to choreographer and director, something about watching Gene work through the number in rehearsal piqued him to say in a quiet moment that no one should be surprised if on his forty-fifth birthday he were found with his wrists slashed, so real was his terror of getting old. Musical theater, he believed, was a place for the young. It’s haunting to reflect that Michael Bennett died when he was forty-four, of AIDS.

Finally, a decision was made about “Losing My Mind”: it would be sung by Dorothy. She had been a trouper, never asking about what was being considered for her. She was thrilled to hear the news, and when Hal took her aside to tell her, he remarked, “enough of the little flowery dress. You’ll get a long silken evening dress and sing the song in a big spotlight.” One had to wonder why it had taken three and a half weeks of rehearsal for everyone to realize that “Losing My Mind” made much more sense for Sally than for Phyllis. Hal Hastings took Dorothy upstairs to teach her the song. She then came back down, lyric sheet in one hand, the other hand behind her back, and wandered around the shop, memorizing. Petite and vulnerable, she walked among the half-finished Follies drops, carefully sculpted piles of Styrofoam rubble, and the few remaining bits and pieces of other shows, learning the song that would define her character. Soon Steve was working on a leggy dance number for Alexis. Turns out that following the rehearsal during which the drunken version of “Could I Leave You?” was performed, Alexis had gone over to Steve’s house to talk. She was worried about “Losing My Mind,” admitting that Dorothy had a superior singing voice, and could probably deliver it better than she. Why not give it to her? And since Alexis had good legs and could move well, she said, why didn’t Steve write her a dance number? Steve was intrigued, so that’s what was decided: “Losing My Mind” went to Dorothy, Hal got to stage “Could I Leave You?” and Steve would write Alexis a new number.

 

 

R
un-throughs were becoming almost a daily occurrence.
Follies
seemed to be kicking into a higher gear. Everyone felt it—as if the show were entering the home stretch. There was an increased level of energy and excitement.

 

 

O
ne night when I drove Alexis and Yvonne home from rehearsal, Yvonne. asked me to go with her for a sandwich at the Copacabana. I said sure, and ended up feeling like a young hustler hanging on to a movie star. It was an interesting night. I had never been to the Copa. The maitre d’ recognized Yvonne instantly and led us to a ringside table. A couple of the other guys who ran the place came over and kissed her hand. A chorine came by and sat down next to me, complaining about some of the other girls in the show. Drink and food were plentiful; many hours passed and no check was ever presented. At one point, late on, I began to feel responsible for this cast member who was needed at rehearsal the next day and suggested that we go. Yvonne agreed and said a cheery goodbye to everyone seated around her. As I was getting her coat, one of the guys who had been particularly friendly asked if I would like my pin. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he seemed to mean business. He asked me to sign a paper. Fortunately, Yvonne hadn’t gotten my name right all evening, so I signed some mangled form of whatever she had called me. He handed me the pin, which I put in my pocket. Evidently Yvonne had observed this transaction, because as soon as we got into my car, she turned to me, laughing, and said, “So what does it feel like to join the Mafia?” I laughed, but nervously. The atmosphere of the place certainly felt underworld, but I had no idea what a pin meant. I didn’t look at it, or put it on. But I knew I didn’t want it, so after dropping her off at the apartment where she was staying on West End Avenue, I drove back to the Copa, parked the car up the street from the club, and walked in. The same guy was standing inside, near the entrance, and I handed him back the pin, saying that I just didn’t feel right about accepting it. He took it back without comment; I turned around, walked back into the street and got back into my Volkswagen. By this time snow was falling, so I drove home slowly. And it was very late. I found a parking place on the street. I got home, got into bed, and sat up for a few minutes playing over in my mind exactly what had happened that night. Is this show business?

FINISHING UP IN THE BRONX: THE FINAL WEEK
OF NEW YORK REHEARSALS, FEBRUARY 6-15

 

 

 

 

F
riday was the company’s day off. To the craftsmen at Feller’s, that meant a day without us, for which they were grateful. But a lot was going on back at the American Theater Lab. As I entered, I heard “Rain on the Roof.” Dortha Duckworth had been fired, and her replacement, Marcie Stringer, was being taught the song and choreography. Her stage husband, Charlie Welch, was there with her, day off though it was. It seems Hal and Michael had changed their minds about how they wanted Emily Whitman to be played. Instead of someone sweet, modest, and warm, they had decided they wanted a Nancy Walker kind of belter. To tell the truth, Dortha wasn’t ever really on top of what little she had to do in the show, and Michael complained that he had to cut back on the staging because she couldn’t handle very much. Even so, it seemed an unnecessary change to me, and I liked the gentle quality Dortha and Charlie Welch brought to the proceedings. They seemed like a sweet suburban couple who, in addition to performing their little number at local Rotary Club talent shows, had also actually once been in the theater. That struck me as the point of the Whitmans, to show that some just plain folk ended up in the Follies as well as the tortured characters around whom the show was based. Replacing Dortha seemed an odd use of what little time there was remaining. Marcie Stringer did have sharper edges, but at this rehearsal, she seemed to be having as much trouble learning her dance steps as Dortha had had.

On this day off, Hal was wearing his producing hat. There were problems with
Company:
the box office gross had dropped precipitously and was hovering around break-even for the first time in its nine-month run. It had grossed even less than
Fiddler on the Roof,
which was still hanging on, six years into its run. Hal was not happy. He had a commitment to play
Company
in the summer for Edwin Lester’s Civic Light Opera series on the West Coast—eight weeks in Los Angeles and seven weeks in San Francisco—and he had planned to mount a new company to play those dates and then go out on tour. Now he realized that if business in New York dropped off too much, he might be forced to close the show here and move that production west. He was on the phone: “I don’t care what I have to do, I want that fucking show playing at the Alvin all next year!” He was reminded that January and February are notoriously bad times for Broadway and that perhaps he should give the show a few weeks to see if business improved. Auditions would continue as if there would still be a second company. The leading role, originally played by Dean Jones, needed a star. From one of Joanna Merlin’s memos to Hal: “Richard Chamberlain adores
Company
but doesn’t want to follow anyone in it in any company.” Robert Morse—“any interest on your part?” George Hamilton—“wants to audition. Do you want to read him as well as sing?” George Chakiris—“Billy Cohen thinks he has no box office value.” There was a list of women for Hal to consider for Joanne, Elaine Stritch’s role in New York. They ranged from Kaye Ballard to Janet Blair to Eve Arden to Gisele MacKenzie. Next to some Hal wrote “NO!” while others got a “to read” or “can’t sing” or “too fat” or, in the case of Angie Dickinson, “won’t.” (Business did improve, and the tour did go out, headlined by George Chakiris. Elaine Stritch went out on the tour as well, replaced in New York by Jane Russell, who had come up to Boston during the run of
Follies
to audition for the role.)

Don Weismuller, who had been fired early in the week, appeared at the rehearsal studio. He refused to be bought out of his contract. When an actor is let go, he is usually either paid for the balance of his contract or paid a negotiated settlement amount. It’s generally considered bad form for an actor to stand up to a producer and say that he has the right to play the role for which he was hired, but Don had decided to do just that. Hal chose not to fight it, so a character named Vincent would have to remain in the show. The solution? Change the name of the dance specialist to Vernon and his partner to Laverne; Vincent would become a partygoer and an understudy. (In the end, they went back to Vincent and Vanessa and changed the name of Don’s character to Vernon, and everyone seemed happy.) A replacement had been hired, Victor Griffin, who was, according to the stage managers, “just like Don only thinner.” So once again the dancers in “Bolero d’Amour” were in the big rehearsal room, this time working Victor into the dance. Graciela had been looking forward to spending her day off working with a Spanish-language production of Federico García Lorca’s
Yerma,
grateful for the opportunity to get her mind off
Follies
for a few hours. No such luck.

 

 

B
ack in the Bronx on Saturday, Marcie Stringer was introduced to a slightly disbelieving company. Nothing makes a company more nervous than to have one of their fellow actors fired, especially when it takes everyone by surprise, as this replacement did. It becomes a game of “Who’ll be next?” The two people feeling this most directly were Peter Walker, who had just had his role as Major-Domo in the Prologue taken away, and Ethel Barrymore Colt, who was keenly aware that she was barely keeping her head above water, especially in the mirror number. These two shared another problem: they had been hired to understudy Ben and Sally and must have been afraid that they couldn’t pull off those roles. Hal had become aware of Peter’s inability to remember lines and blocking during the work on the Prologue, and had quietly asked Dick Latessa, who was already understudying Buddy, to take an unofficial look at Ben. He also confided that if Dorothy were ever out, he would be tempted to cancel the performance rather than have Ethel play the role. Some of these uncertainties must have made their way to the two actors. They often sat together, off in a corner. Added to the anxiety about the firings was the appearance of Dortha, who showed up at the studio in the Bronx, hoping to remain a part of the company. It had worked for Don Weismuller, but it wasn’t going to work again. Hal took Dortha aside and spoke with her quietly, thanking her for her talent and saying that he would be happy to work with her again if the opportunity arose. That got translated back to the company as Hal’s having promised her a role in his next show.

The entire Feller studio was now taken over by
Follies.
The set had been painted black, and the floors on the two smaller platforms looked like the gray planking in the model. In one large corner of the shop a black-and-white photograph of a city street scene was being transferred to a large drop laid out on the floor. A scene painter was standing, holding a paintbrush attached to a four-foot handle in one hand, the actual photograph in the other. He would look at the photograph, dip the brush into one of the several paint cans on the floor containing blacks, whites, and grays and re-create the image on the much larger canvas, guided by a faint chalk-line grid on the drop that corresponded to a grid drawn on the photograph itself. This drop would be used in the final image of the show, the morning after, as daylight peeks through a portion of the rear wall of the theater, revealing the street. The vacuum-form machines were commandeered to create silver fountains that would end up behind Alexis and the dancers in their bright-red costumes in her Follies song—whatever that would be, since it was still not written. Piles of debris and crumbling proscenium pieces were at various stages of construction and painting in any available vacant spot. On the downstage floor of the set itself, the cross-sectional outline of the proscenium arches of the Colonial and the Winter Garden theaters had been painted. Everyone could see how the set would fit in the two theaters and appreciate what the eight-feet difference in proscenium opening would mean. Anything taking place on the extreme downstage towers wasn’t going to be seen by a lot of the audience in Boston, and no one was happy about this.

Hal took the set first because he wanted to try reversing the order of “The Road You Didn’t Take” and “In Buddy’s Eyes.” The section of the show following the Montage, which included these two songs and “Bolero d’Amour,” had been tinkered with since the beginning of rehearsals. It is the first time we see the four principals paired with their “other” partners—Ben with Sally, Phyllis with Buddy—in the present, while simultaneously we see scenes of them in the past with their eventual spouses. It was a tricky mosaic to get right, and instinct more than anything guided the shaping of the sequence. Originally, “In Buddy’s Eyes” came first, but Hal felt it might tip the hand too soon. The song is, in essence, a lie: try though she may, Sally can’t convince herself that she really is “young and beautiful in Buddy’s eyes.” She is, after all, standing with Ben, the true love of her life, the man she didn’t end up with. Ben’s song, “The Road You Didn’t Take,” is an honest statement of regret and is at least truthful—“The Ben I’ll never be, Who remembers him?” “Bolero d’Amour,” a sumptuous dance of passion, would come between the two songs, but Hal was sensing that it would be stronger if Ben’s song came first. The switch would also allow him to cut a few extraneous lines, and that would help get the show moving a little faster. After he made the shift, he wanted to run it with “Bolero d’Amour,” but Michael had the dancers rehearsing upstairs, so Ruthie and George Martin danced the lead roles—or attempted to, much to everyone’s amusement. George knew the moves; Ruthie had only a vague notion of where to go. Hal ordered the party people populating the sides not to look and act bored, explaining that the party hubbub would be important to the feel of the show and asking that they all try to maintain a level of animated interest, even if they were, for all intents and purposes, the background. Of course some were ready to act up a storm, like Sonja Levkova, who performed every scene as if it were the last she would ever be in, and somehow always found her way into a position of focus, dead center. When he was finished, Hal confessed to all that he wasn’t used to rehearsing directly on a set and that he found it unnerving.

Michael took the set back and worked through the new Prologue. He was clear, animated, and uncompromising, demanding attention from everyone. His directions were precise: “Don’t enter in rhythm. Just come in as if you were arriving and getting out of the rain, but get to your designated spot on the right count of the music.” Sometimes he would sit on his stool, deep in thought, tuning out whatever else was going on around him and tapping his finger in the air in rhythm. He would mutter, “Please start doing something, because my finger is getting tired.” He worked the beginning through to Ethel Shutta’s entrance over and over until he was satisfied. “I like it, which means there probably won’t be another version of this.” (There would be, but it wouldn’t happen until Boston.) Having shown a great deal of patience with the older women, he now had to find a new source of patience for the showgirls. “Do not walk in the same tempo as the party guests. You are in a different reality. You must walk to your own rhythm, slower.” Their method of working wasn’t really the same as that of the Broadway dancers. One of them remarked, “In Vegas all we do is walk. We really should just come out in those gorgeous costumes and parade around for everyone to look at.” Getting them to move to different rhythms was proving tricky. But Michael kept plowing ahead, ever focused.

Some members of the company were starting to get sick. Mary McCarty felt rotten and Ethel Shutta had stayed home. Others started to complain about various ailments. Hal had little sympathy: “Even if people don’t realize it, this is the most important thing going on in the world!”

 

 

O
n Sunday, I picked up Steve and Jonathan Tunick, who were coming to see “The Right Girl” performed for the first time. In the car Steve talked about how Jim Goldman was struggling with the character of Sally and the problem of how to have her go crazy at the end of the show without making it seem like a soap opera. Jim had come up with an idea that he hadn’t yet told Steve and which he said was probably the most pretentious idea he had ever had. Steve said that
Follies
was now fulfilling two of his dreams: to have a character crack up onstage and to begin a show with an orchestra tuning up, which was being contemplated for the Prologue.

Fritz Holt took the whole company up to the second-floor studio to run through sections of the show so Gene could go through “The Right Girl” for the higher-ups only—Hal, Michael, Steve, Jim, and Jonathan. Screens were pulled around to discourage anyone else from watching, since Gene was still nervous and uncomfortable about performing it publicly. I remained discreetly in the background and watched. It was amazing. The song was built around an agitated nervous vamp, with each verse punctuated by tough, rhythmic, edgy dance sections. This is Buddy expressing his frustrations at the mess he has made of his life, realizing, as the song ends, that he’d chosen the wrong girl. Michael’s staging utilized the entire set, which would be completely empty for one of the very few times all evening. He had Buddy dancing from platform to platform, jumping about, swinging around pipes, and even, at one point, leaping from one raised platform to another, landing solidly on both feet, ten feet above the stage floor. He even tried having Gene in tap shoes to increase the percussive quality of the dance, but thought better of the idea. At the end he did a twist with his whole body, ending up in a crouch downstage, facing out. “I don’t love the right girl,” he sang, then concluded with a simply spoken “Oh, shit.” It was angry, strong, tough, and arresting. A tour de force, obviously hard to execute, and dramatically compelling. In fact, it proved to be too hard to execute and was softened considerably as the weeks went by, yet it still held on to the dynamism of one of those tough Gene Kelly concept dances from 1950s musical movies. It also clearly added another layer to the score; up until this point it was only the pastiche memory songs that were choreographed, not the book songs. Here was a book song, a soliloquy, sung by a stage-door Johnny, not even an old Follies performer, heavily choreographed but entirely in a fantasy moment within the present. It was another example of how the creative forces behind this show were twisting and manipulating the levels on which their songs and dances operated.