Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (19 page)

I drove Hal, Steve, and Jim back to town. They had noticed, they said, that Yvonne seemed to be taking quite a shine to me. I told them about the night at the Copa and added that I had escorted her to a preview of John Guare’s
The House of Blue Leaves
the night before, and that she had taken me to Asti’s restaurant, a hangout of the Italian opera singing crowd where the waiters are apt to burst into song at any moment. They were aghast. I thought it was fun to pal around with Yvonne—she was a movie star, after all, and someone who liked attention paid to her. I didn’t mind having a glamorous lady in a white fur hanging on my arm, but I didn’t take it seriously and wondered why they seemed almost parentally concerned. I wasn’t interested in pursuing her, and I couldn’t tell if she was pursuing me. But months later I found out that once when Yvonne had mentioned to Dorothy that she thought I was cute, Dorothy had warned her to “Keep your hands off that nice young man.” I did escort her to many a dinner in Boston, drove her back to New York, and visited with her from time to time after the show opened. And there the story ends. Probably a good idea: as Steve reminded me later, she did have a gun collection, and a husband.

On Monday Steve was hard at work on Ben’s Follies number, “Live, Laugh, Love.” He had figured out a way to construct a debonair Fred Astaire-like song that would include a moment for Ben to catch himself off-guard, leading to the Pirandello moment when he would forget the lyrics and stumble. I was sent to Mathilde’s to pick it up, but she had been given only the music and some of the lyrics; Steve was still phoning them in, line by line. Everyone at rehearsal was anxious to get the song, so after running some other errands, I arrived back at Mathilde’s as her newly inked piano/vocal copy, in an unfinished state, was literally emerging from the ozalid machine. Each new lyric phoned in would be written down on her reference copy in red ink. Steve promised everyone he would have the song finished by that evening.

When I got to rehearsal Ruthie was standing at the desk in front of the set, on the phone with Steve, taking down more lyrics for the song. With the rehearsal proceeding noisily, inches away from her ear, she dictated them to me as she was getting them. I went upstairs to type them out, then decided I had better check them with Steve directly, since they had arrived in piecemeal fashion. He made a couple of changes to what I thought I had heard, then asked if I could put Hal Hastings on the phone. He sang the song to him, explaining that it should be done “in a nice, easy, Fred Astaire tempo.” Now that this song was done, he was about to begin Alexis’s Follies number. “Remind me of her range, which I know is about three notes.” Hal Hastings obliged.

At nine there was a run-through incorporating a large chunk of the new Prologue. Everyone was in residence for this one, including lighting designer Tharon Musser, press agent Mary Bryant, Hal’s secretary Annette Meyers, the guys from
Look,
and two photographers. Hal asked me to sit next to him and take his notes. Ethel Shutta was still sick, so Mary Jane Houdina, who played Young Hattie, played present-day Hattie as well. Her performance of “Broadway Baby” was simple and precise. Here was a young woman singing the song as it might well have been performed back then, in the place in the show where it was to be performed by an older person now. Hearing Mary Jane sing about “making rounds all afternoon,” and wanting to be “on some marquee, all twinkling lights,” seemed perfectly appropriate, innocent and youthfully hopeful. Mary McCarty was also sick, but her memory figure couldn’t jump into her role in the mirror number because the two of them danced together, so Michael jumped in and danced her role, poker-faced, performing it to the hilt and clearly relishing the moment. Everyone loved it—maybe it was an insider’s delight, but it certainly made for an accurate run of the number. Stage managers filled in during the dialogue scenes.

“The Right Girl” was performed for the first time in sequence. It had picked up the nickname “The Mystery Number” around the company, so everyone was eager to see what it looked like. Gene was extremely nervous and muffed several of the lyrics, but he was greeted with sustained cheers from his fellow performers. He looked relieved, but totally wiped out. Yvonne now had “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” pretty much under her belt, including the elongated middle section, so it was performed in full. She missed a fair number of lyrics but got through it in high style. (Truth: Gene and Yvonne rarely sang all their lyrics correctly throughout the entire life of the show.) “Beautiful Girls” looked good, and each pass strengthened the women’s confidence, although Michael Bartlett still had trouble mastering the words, often singing lines like “Nothing detectable half so inspectable” instead of “Nothing respectable half so delectable.” “Rain on the Roof ” was tentative, as Marcie had been rehearsing only for one day. The book songs went well, as did what was ready of the new Prologue; indeed, it did look cleaner and more focused than the previous version, incorporating more pieces of memory music linked directly to the present-day characters. The five lead performers were given clear entrances, all linked to music they would be associated with later on in the evening. “Loveland” was fine, but the Follies sequence following still only consisted of the two songs sung by the Young Four. Dorothy was learning “Losing My Mind”; Gene Nelson had been focusing on “The Right Girl” and hadn’t gotten to rehearse “Buddy’s Blues” much; John McMartin was waiting for Michael to stage “Live, Laugh, Love”; and Alexis simply said, “Just think, if I get my number on Wednesday, I’ll have ten days to learn it before the first preview.”

 

 

W
hat didn’t feel up to the musical numbers were the book scenes.

 

 

T
he book of a musical is its most vulnerable component. It must provide the framework for the score, and is often “cannibalized” in order to create new songs. It’s said that a good score can make a successful musical, but a good book can’t do it alone. The truth is that it takes both a good score and a good book to make a first-rate musical. Part of the job of a book is to get from musical moment to musical moment without anyone’s really realizing that’s what’s going on. It’s a tricky task, especially on a conceptual show like
Follies
that doesn’t provide opportunities for standard storytelling devices. And so the pressure on the book of
Follies
was enormous.

It’s dangerous to assess how well dialogue is working during rehearsals of a musical; listening to actors repeating lines over and over is a lot less interesting than listening to them singing songs over and over. Both Jim Goldman and Steve Sondheim understood that this particular play had a decidedly dark side, and both were interested in writing about characters in various states of crisis. But in choosing a party as the framework for their show, they established the need for small talk. How clever, pointed, and witty that small talk was could well be the key to the success of the book. There were areas of the book that were still being discussed, like the very ending of the show, about which everyone involved seemed to have a strong opinion. But what this run-through made clear was that the dialogue had too little in the way of wit and humor—or if it had them, they weren’t coming through. The characters came across as humorless, and that was worrisome; if they didn’t express themselves somewhere with humor, their individual plights were going to be awfully hard to sit through. But the numbers were coming together, and there were enough good and witty moments to justify confidence.

There was discussion among the company about whether the two different styles of song—the “book” songs like “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,” “The Road You Didn’t Take,” “Don’t Look at Me,” “In Buddy’s Eyes,” and “Could I Leave You?” and the “pastiche” songs like “Broadway Baby,” “Who’s That Woman?” and “Beautiful Girls”—would work together and feel like a unified score. Of course Steve was composing very consciously and was very aware of mixing up the styles. But the more the show began to come together, the more the differences among the songs became apparent, and the more I began to wonder whether pastiche might not win out over the book songs. After all, the pastiche songs were simply more fun.

A production meeting followed the run-through. The lines among the creative staff were starting to be drawn, and as time was ticking away, opinions were starting to get heated. Jim started off by saying how happy he was with the progress of the show. Michael was angry, wound up, and frustrated; that was the last thing he wanted to hear. He said he felt the audience would have a hard time getting to know the people in the play and as a result he was worried that they wouldn’t be interested in staying with them for an entire evening. He complained about a lot of the book, starting with the monologues used in the Prologue; he pointed out that the ones written for Ben and Phyllis were originally conceived for the characters driving in a car on the way to the party and that now they made no sense. “I want two new monologues.” “Is that an order?” Jim replied. “Yes,” Michael answered. Jim fired back that while he had been listening over the past weeks to a lot of talk about polishing the gem that is “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” he felt the song was no gem at all. There was agreement that the length of the song was a problem, now that the middle section had been added, and concern over whether Yvonne would be able to sustain interest in it. Steve said he hated “Ah, Paris!” Hal was worried that “Bolero d’Amour” wasn’t working and might have to be cut, but acknowledged that so much work had been put into it that he didn’t want to consider actually cutting it until he could see it in front of an audience. He also brought up the question of an intermission, saying that they might have to try one in Boston, and his vote would be to place it after “Who’s That Woman?” Concerns were voiced about the character of Ben, and whether he was the least complete of all the principals. Michael had no patience for Ben, and wondered whether Jim and Hal identified in some ways with the character, which would be a hindrance in their ability to zero in on the problems. He also felt there were important moments missing from the dialogue, although he insisted he wasn’t criticizing the book. “Yes, you are,” Hal said.

By the end of the meeting it seemed clear that if there were to be opposing views from here on, the antagonists would be Michael and Jim. Steve understood the give and take of the collaborative process, and didn’t take offense when his work was criticized; at least he never showed it in front of his collaborators. He and Hal had known each other for so long that they spoke in a kind of shorthand. Steve was supportive of Jim, and confessed quietly that he thought Michael, although terrifically talented, was getting a bit too arrogant for his own good. That was making it hard for him to deal with Michael in production meetings, even though he acknowledged that he agreed with some of Michael’s concerns. Hal was trying to play the mediator, but his own tension with Michael was apparent.

After the meeting, Michael confessed to Larry Cohen that he hated the book of the show and hoped never again to find himself in this kind of collaboration. In his opinion what the show needed was George Furth or Neil Simon to come in and write twenty good jokes.

Tuesday was a workday, devoted mostly to cleanups and slight modifications in staging. Michael, having stated his concerns about the book—and gotten nowhere—decided to solve the problems himself. One of his ideas was to turn the show over to the ghosts whenever possible, since many had no lines at all and he found them far more interesting than the characters. He began at the top of the Prologue and changed the order of the entrances of the principals, making Phyllis and Ben enter first, and together. Since, as he noted, their monologues were carryovers from an earlier draft and had been written to take place in a car, and since Jim Goldman seemed unwilling to change them, Michael thought that they’d make better sense as the first dialogue we hear. He also thought it would be “cleaner” to have them enter, say what they had to say, and then leave, so Sally could come in next, alone. (In the earlier version Ben froze when Sally entered.) Buddy would be last, since he has come separately and doesn’t quite know what mood he’s going to find Sally in. Michael had the ghost figures physically shadow the corresponding characters as soon as they arrived; that would help the audience make the connection between the memory figures and the present-day characters. He gave Yvonne a long movie-star entrance, crossing the whole stage, while the ghost of the choreographer complaining that she’s on the wrong foot is heard, and six of the dancing-girl ghosts come running on behind, almost as if they were backing her up. It will work, I thought, if the audience recognizes Yvonne. He also took Fifi D’Orsay’s behavior in rehearsal as inspiration for her entrance by underscoring it with riotous echoing applause—from way back when, when her character had been a big star. Of all the actors, Fifi had the toughest time dealing with the reality of the present. Let her live in the past.