Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (24 page)

The task at hand was to see that everything worked musically. Does the orchestration work? Does it fit with the singer? Does it fit with the performance? Is the balance between orchestra and singer okay? Accustomed to a usually out-of-tune piano, everyone got swept away by the excitement of the violins, flutes, trumpets, and all the other instruments making the songs suddenly sound like real music. The energy in the room was palpable. As each song was played, the group listened intently and responded enthusiastically. The up-tempo dance numbers and the songs with a specific period sound were clear crowd-pleasers. Everyone loved “Who’s That Woman?” And when the full orchestra kicked in, MGM-style, after the last refrain of “Beautiful Girls,” everyone cheered. The solo violin playing the melody of “Broadway Baby” was also a big hit. Ethel, needless to say, couldn’t help herself and performed the song for the orchestra. “One lady violinist was looking at me every time she didn’t have to look at her music! And all the musicians were laughing,” she said afterward. Naturally, when “Ah! Paris” came along, Fifi tried to top Ethel. She couldn’t. The response to some of the present-day songs, such as “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,” was more cautious. Some of the ballads were less showy. Everyone noticed and loved the cacophony of whistles and noisemakers throughout “Buddy’s Blues,” the Burt Bacharach brass in “The Right Girl,” and the wa-wa trumpets in “Uptown, Downtown.” The dancers tended to find an empty corner and mark through the dances as they were being played. The general feeling was very upbeat indeed. Some songs, including “Losing My Mind,” weren’t yet finished.

Follies
was the third Broadway musical for which Jonathan Tunick had sole orchestrator billing. The other two,
Promises, Promises and Company,
were contemporary stories with contemporary scores that relied, to differing degrees, on electronic instruments and modern percussion.
Promises, Promises
was the first Broadway show to use pit singers and a true sound-mixing board, necessitated by the style of Burt Bacharach’s music.
Company’s
orchestra was based around a Roxi-chord, a state-of-the-art synthesizer keyboard capable of a percussive and slightly rock-and-roll sound.
Follies,
by contrast, was a show for acoustical instruments, both for the distinctive references to styles from the past—what Steve called “pastiche”—as well as for the songs in the present, which were very much in Sondheim’s own theatrical style. Jonathan’s task was, therefore, somewhat different this time.

Following the sitzprobe, it was time for the entire company to move into the theater. Dressing rooms had been assigned by the stage managers, with great care, of course, since billing plays a key role in who gets which dressing room. Each theater is different, and while the setup is never the same, there are always star dressing rooms, though never the same number. At the Colonial, there were two at stage level, and they went to Dorothy and Alexis; all the others were up a central staircase leading to five floors, each of which had seven rooms, providing more than enough space, even for a company this large. The stage managers took a room as an office on the topmost level. Below stage were two large rooms, one used for the chorus and another already commandeered by the wardrobe department.

The actors found their assigned dressing rooms, dropped off their belongings, found their way to the stage, and wandered around. Partly they were reconnecting with something known, but everyone had to become familiar with a variety of new traffic patterns—how to get from the dressing rooms to both sides of the stage, where the crossovers were, etc. Mary McCarty walked down to her “Who’s That Woman?” perch, saw that it was, as she had feared, just inches from the fifteen-foot drop-off into the orchestra pit. She took a deep breath and sighed. Fifi D’Orsay was praying as she found her way out onto the stage, which seemed even more terrifying than it had been in the Bronx.

The call was 7:30 P.M. for a full costume dress parade, onstage. By then, all the finished costumes had been hung in the dressing rooms by the wardrobe staff, along with the accessories—shoes, hats, gloves, coats, handbags. Most actors had more than one outfit, and the idea was to see everyone in every outfit during the costume parade. Dressers were in place to assist the actors when necessary, and to make certain all the accessories were put on correctly. Wigs were also to be worn, and it was the first time many of them would be seen. Hal, Steve, Michael, and Jim were out in the house with Flossie and a couple of Barbara Matera’s assistants armed with yellow pads. Barbara was down in the wardrobe room working on some of the late additions to the Loveland costumes. Every actor had had a minimum of three fittings at the shop in New York, so their clothes were not supposed to be a surprise to them. And some changes had already been made along the way, occasionally to suit an actor’s specific concerns: Alexis’s original outfit, for example, was sleeveless, but after she made it clear, with a smile, that she really didn’t think Phyllis would come to an evening like this in something without sleeves, they were added. The bust on Yvonne’s dress kept being changed in order to “get a good separation.” But no one had seen anyone else’s costume, and none of the actors had spent any appreciable time wearing their own. None, to be sure, had worn them through the staging and dancing, all of which, by necessity, was created long after the designs had been approved.

Before the glamorous costumes that everyone knew would come in Loveland at the end of the evening, came the party clothes. The party was a reunion, and the guests represented a variety of social and economic strata, which their clothes reflected. Only one couple was clearly well off, Ben and Phyllis, and they were dressed elegantly in royal colors—purples and reds. Many of the others may just have pulled an old dress from their closet, or made it themselves, or merely dressed as well as they could, given their circumstances, which were probably modest. The women now lived all over the country, so their sense of fashion would not be the high urban fashion of the day. Some might be inspired to wear clothing that echoed, or relived, the past. The palette had been decided early on: present-day clothes were all going to be in colors—dark, bold, or subdued; the ghost figures would be in black and white; the Follies sequence would begin in pastels. But no one had seen what all the present-day colors were and how, or if, they were going to work together.

 

 

M
ary McCarty was the first out onstage, in an aqua-blue, long-sleeved, unwaisted dress; it had half of a beaded brown sunburst emanating from her left hip and going up, down, and across her ample front. The hem was uneven and slightly ripped—by design. There was also some beading at the end of the sleeves. She wore a wide-brimmed hat of a matching color with a pillbox center and blue feathers lying flat around the brim. Beneath her hat she was wearing a carrot-colored Betty Boop wig. The look on her face was matched by the one on Hal and Michael’s faces. Within a moment, the wig was gone, never to be seen again, and the hat would be worn only at the very beginning of the show. Yvonne’s dress was knee-length, sheer dark purple over silver, with mink trim along the bottom of the skirt and six-inch mink tails hanging off her sleeves. Alexis’s outfit was bright red, one-piece, fitted, backless, and looking rather like a pantsuit, beads carefully and discreetly stitched throughout to give it some texture, with sweeping strips of fabric drooping down her back from the neck to the small of the back. Dorothy’s frumpy dress had a skirt with lots of petticoats; pink, sleeveless, and full of flowers, with a stiff bodice ending in two hard points at her bare shoulders. Ethel Shutta stalked out in a little-old-lady suit of metallic green. She was pulling and tugging at everything, hardly disguising her disgust. Fifi came out in a high-necked, long-sleeved, powder-blue dress; beaded, sequined, and with a skirt of puffy blue feathers, the impression it gave was that of a giant feather duster. Her hat was the same color, small and round, with two long, dyed peacock feathers jauntily stuck in one side. Sheila Smith wandered onstage in a dark rosy-red, very long, very full, floor-length bias-cut dress made out of heavy fabric, with a large red feathered hat similar to the one Mary McCarty wore. Her wig was enormous and shockingly blond. Sheila was fair-skinned with very dark hair and features, so this get-up struck everyone as highly peculiar. The costume really was so oversized that it was hard to find the actress underneath.

The men were in suits of slightly different styles and different colors—John McMartin’s was stylish, eggplant-colored, and double-breasted, while Gene Nelson’s was single-breasted, medium blue, and plain. Other guests were dressed in various shades of dark burgundy, brown, olive, and blue. Waiters were in almost black trousers and white shirts, waitresses in short dark skirts and white tops.

The Young Four (Young Ben, Buddy, Sally, and Phyllis), as per the concept, were dressed in whites and grays—and were wearing powdery white makeup. The clothes looked quite good, but the makeup made the actors look as if they were in a freak show. There was much discussion about trying the makeup in at least one performance. When Harvey and Kurt came on in two very large and very white overcoats, Hal remarked: “I don’t ever want to see
those
coats on
that
stage again.” The costumes for the ghost figures with specific modern counterparts had interesting references. Young Hattie, the Broadway Baby, for example, had a dress with piano keys across the bust. Young Vanessa, played by Graciela Daniele, had an all-white full floor-length dress with multiple underskirts. Young Heidi Schiller had a short ruffled skirt with a large black hat with long white feathers. Young Stella was dressed in a dancer’s tutu that flared out from the waist, a diamond-patterned bodice, beaded headdress, and gauntlets—all covered with small mirror chips for “the mirror number.” For the Prologue, several of the chorus girls wore identical black or white scanty but feathered costumes with strategically placed beaded patches.

And the wigs. For some reason, Joe Tubens, the wig and hair designer, seemed to have gone completely over the top. He had been to rehearsals several times to discuss hair with the actors and with Hal and Michael. Some actors, it was decided, would use their own hair, while others needed wigs. As the rehearsals progressed, Tubens had sent some of the actresses to have their hair dyed or cut. But what came out onstage during the dress parade seemed excessive on almost every count. Both Alexis and Dorothy were to have wigs for their numbers in the Follies sequence—for Alexis, cascades of long, dark red Rita Hayworth hair, falling on one side to the shoulder; for Dorothy, a wavy, platinum-blond Jean Harlow wig. Young Phyllis and Young Sally had enormous concoctions on top of their heads, white-blond for Sally and dark-brown for Phyllis. They seemed as plainly wrong as Mary McCarty’s carrot-colored wig and the blond one for Sheila Smith. Most of the wigs were quickly cut or modified, but both Dorothy and Alexis wore their Follies-sequence wigs in a run-through documented by Bill Yoscary and Martha Swope.