Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (26 page)

When those same dancers and showgirls changed from their black-and-whites to their “Loveland” costumes, everyone was blown away once again. The six dresses were entirely in pastel colors, with the hoop skirts so large that they had to be attached just offstage before the girls made their entrances. Each dress was themed with the spirit of a different kind of love—First Love, Young Love, True Love, Pure Love, Romantic Love, and Eternal Love—each of which was referred to, variously, in the song. Appropriate props were attached to each hoop skirt—cherubs, celestial instruments, violets, hearts, birds, and jewels. The skirts were open in the front, so that you could see beautiful legs underneath. The rest of the chorus were in eighteenth-century maiden and lad outfits, also pastel-colored, with large white shoes and hats with white wigs attached. They looked like something out of a Fragonard painting.

The costumes for the rest of the Follies sequence were paraded as well. Young Ben had an electric-blue sailor suit with cap and Young Buddy a bright-orange tailored military suit and hat. Gene Nelson came out in a bright-blue blazer and outrageously loud yellow-and-blue-plaid trousers. For “Live, Laugh, Love,” John McMartin was dressed head to toe in white—tailcoat, trousers, bow tie, and top hat. Dorothy had a yellow bias-cut, floor-length dress with a low-cut, inelegantly draped front. Alexis had a pink, form-fitting bathing-suit top with spaghetti straps, and, hanging from her waist, two-inch-wide, foot-long straps ending in little points. The front of her costume had what looked like a Christmas tree in sequins sewn on, and there were beads down the straps. For “Uptown, Downtown” and “Live, Laugh, Love” the chorus had bright-red outfits: red tailcoats, red pants, red top hats, and red shoes for the former, while for the latter the women stripped down to red hot pants and white vests and bow ties.

All in all, the costumes pleased. And the brilliant ones were so brilliant that worries about the ones that might not work were squelched for the moment. Of course, there were many slight adjustments to be made and some normal fitting problems to attend to, but for the most part the creative staff seemed more than satisfied.

Now it was time to put the entire show together.

FOUR FULL DAYS, THE TECHNICAL REHEARSALS,
FEBRUARY 17–20

 

 

 

 

F
ollowing the costume parade came the first technical rehearsal. Starting at the very top of the show, everything is worked through in sequence, with scenery, lights, costumes, props, and sound. No orchestra at this point—to have twenty-seven more people being paid to wait around while everything else is coordinated is unnecessary. They’ll come in tomorrow, after the show has been stumbled through at least once. For now, the rehearsal piano will do fine, and it is rolled down one of the aisles of the theater. Phil Fradkin sits at the keyboard. For the dancers, Paul Gemignani sits in the pit, alone with his drums, ready to play along.

In comes the house curtain, and on go the house lights. The ragtag group of spectators out in the house remains the same: Hal, Ruthie, Michael, Steve, Jim, Bob, Boris, Tharon, and a few others. They scatter around, flopping down in whatever seat strikes their momentary fancy, but in predictable groupings—Hal and Ruthie, Michael and Bob, Steve alone. Tharon is still at her desk dead center, with assistants nearby. Fritz Holt is standing at his stage manager’s desk backstage, immediately off stage right. He’s wearing a headset and is in communication with all departments. George Martin is in charge of stage left. He has a headset as well. John Grigas is now in costume, doubling in his onstage role of chauffeur. He’ll figure out how to balance his stage-managing

duties with his acting responsibilities once the show is running. Now he’s on old-lady duty, keeping an eye out for Fifi, Ethel, and anyone else in need of a friendly arm. The onstage band members are, for all intents and purposes, actors: they’re backstage, and they need to be ready to make a proper entrance on the proper cue. Hal Hastings takes his conductor’s position at the podium in the pit, but until the cue is given to begin, he faces the auditorium, arms on the railing.

Voices seem to be coming from everywhere, some of them loud and from backstage. Fritz tries to get everyone quiet so the rehearsal can begin. He wanders out onstage in front of the curtain to make certain Hal, Michael, and the rest of the gang out in the house are ready. It’s getting late—the costume parade has taken up the better part of two hours. There is no way the whole show can be run tonight, but it’s important to begin.

“Places” is called. There is an eerie silence in the house, then the lights begin to dim. In the darkness, low notes come from the piano, sounding like a drumroll. The curtain rises and we see a tall showgirl at stage right on an upper platform, standing completely still. The lighting flashes, almost like strobe lights, then establishes a moody darkness, yet there are enough stray shafts of light for us to see everything we need to see. Slowly, the showgirl turns her head and starts to move. From out of the shadows, other ghosts begin to move—slowly, eerily. The Prologue begins, and immediately the prerecorded segments are late. Everything stops. Fritz Holt comes out onstage from his backstage perch. Michael hops up onstage and adjusts the entrances slightly, and asks Fritz to get the cues coordinated. He wants both Hal Hastings and the sound man, Jack Mann, to understand what he’s after. What will it take to get it right? Every question has to be answered, and some answers take time. It’s slow going. Although each element is familiar, putting them all together is new. For the actors, wearing the costume is new, walking out onto a darkened stage is new, feeling lights in their faces while they go through the staging is new. Spacing the people is a challenge. Entrances and exits are confusing—in the dark the side towers and units are less distinguishable than they are in bright light. Maintaining equilibrium is a challenge. And the hour is getting late.

“Beautiful Girls” is a shambles. No one is comfortable with the entrances down the rubble/staircase, and almost every woman now has a floor-length gown. They can’t see their feet—will they need to hike up their skirts to land on that first step? Are there things on the staircase that will catch the hem of the skirts? Is there enough of a railing to hold on to? By the time they hit the stage level to do the Miss America glide there won’t be anything to hold. Even the timing of getting from backstage up the escape stairs to the top level of the tower and walking across behind the stage band to get ready for the individual poses at the top of the stair is tricky. The older women are in a panic; the younger ones are simply having their patience tested. Michael and Bob come right down to the front row of the theater, lean against the orchestra rail, and offer helpful suggestions. When that isn’t enough, they jump up onstage and walk the women through their paces, slowly and carefully. When everyone finally gets down to stage level, walks around, and lines up behind Michael Bartlett in a Rockettes-like stance, it’s clear that the stage picture will be wonderful. A more motley assortment of shapes, colors, styles, and ages would be hard to imagine. Each woman wears a gold banner off one shoulder proclaiming the year of her Follies. If this lineup doesn’t convey who the people of
Follies
are, I doubt that anything will. When this gets pulled together, the moment will be golden.

The tech gets to “Ah, Paris!” and Fifi D’Orsay is in a complete panic. She is frazzled by where she is supposed to enter—she thinks her spot has been changed. She can’t hear the piano accompaniment. The heels on her shoes are too big. She can’t see the end of the platform. She flubs the lyrics. Hal Hastings, now standing at his perch at the podium, facing the stage and only a few feet away from her, treats her with kid gloves. He is standing where he will be standing from this moment onward, ever patient, there to help. He stops the piano, gets Fifi’s attention, and assures her that he’s here to make her comfortable, that she should just take a deep breath, get her bearings, look around, and see what the stage looks and feels like, and then move on.

But by now it’s time to stop. It’s eleven o’clock. Hal Prince comes down to the front of the stage, thanks everyone for a good day’s work, and tells them to go home and get some sleep.

Hal had been remarkably quiet throughout the day. During tech rehearsals the boss is the production stage manager, since he’s the one who has to coordinate everything behind the curtain. The producer can only sit and fret about how much everything is costing, and the rumor now going around is that Hal is personally covering any overages above the original budget. Every time some costume needs to be fixed or changed, and every time there’s a problem with the set, it hurts the exchequer. And all the director can hang on to is the hope that his staging will work as well on the stage as it did in rehearsals. So Hal wasn’t especially happy. Neither was Steve Sondheim. Jim Goldman remained very quiet, sometimes just standing at the rear of the auditorium, hugging one of the marble columns at the top of the aisles. This part is agonizing—so near, yet seemingly so far.

 

 

T
he subject of amplification in the musical theater is something about which everyone has an opinion. A strong opinion. It is a complex subject that has as much to do with the design of modern theaters and the placement of the orchestra as it does with manner of staging, style of performance, and sophistication of scenic design. There is a general feeling of nostalgia for the time before microphones, but really that takes us back before 1938, when the first microphones were used in a Broadway musical. Their use over the next decades was modest, mostly with foot mikes across the front of the stage. Modern audiences, whether they realize it or not, have grown accustomed to a more naturalistic style of performance in which actors can face each other in scenes as easily as they can face front, all the while being heard with clarity. In the days before microphones, actors with big voices got the parts, and they tended to come down front and sing straight out. The sets, when designed in “box” format, acted like scenic megaphones; but as sets became more impressionistic and sculptural, more open, they gave no help to the sound. In
Follies,
microphones were used, mainly across the front of the stage, on the floor. There were other microphones hidden within the set, often shotgun style, aimed at a specific area from a fair distance away. These were most useful when a song was sung by one person remaining in one place all the way through. Although a body mike was first used on Broadway by Anna Maria Alberghetti in
Carnival
in 1961, using them with regularity was still a few years away.

Thursday began with a recording session, of sorts. Jack Mann, Hal Prince’s chief sound man, had been a fairly invisible member of the team up to this point. He had been to a couple of the New York run-throughs, and had quietly made his notes. Earnest and humorless, he took his job very seriously and would say anything he wanted to anyone, often getting himself into trouble if he spoke too harshly to Steve, Hal, or Michael. He knew the sound needs of the show, and took over one of the boxes on the orchestra level of the theater, setting up his sound board and mixing equipment behind a makeshift black curtain, in such a way that he would be able to see the stage without the audience seeing him. The cables running in from the microphones and out to the speakers—there were mikes in the orchestra pit as well as onstage—were snaked into the box as subtly as possible, along the floor and over the railing.

Jack replugged the stage mikes and shifted dials in order to turn his makeshift sound booth into a recording studio. The reasoning behind the exercise was this: by the end of the big dance numbers, everyone will be winded. To prerecord these same people singing what they’ll be singing onstage and to play the tape along with the live performers will allow the audience to hear the song clearly and take a little of the onus off the dancers. And no one will need to know it’s happening. The biggest challenge was tempo: without actually singing the song and doing the dance, it’s only a guess what the tempo will be. The cast assembled on the front of the stage and sang into the foot mikes. Two sections were recorded: the end of “Who’s That Woman?” and, more for diction than for windedness, “Loveland.” Hal Hastings made a best guess at the tempo for both, and counted off. Once recorded, the tapes were played back for the company to hear. Jack had made “Loveland” slightly celestial by adding some echo and reverb, as befitting the fantasy world of the song. The company was amused. (When Actors’ Equity got wind of this, they slapped Hal with a bill for a week’s salary for everyone whose voice was used on the tape.)

The other sound challenge was the tap dancing. If an audience sees tap dancing, it needs to hear tap dancing. Tap shoes, however, can be treacherous: the little metal pieces on the toes and heels make them awfully slippery. Cheater taps—two-piece metal tips for shoes that make a loud tap sound—are even worse. And there were no flat floors on the
Follies
set. Gene Nelson damn near killed himself doing “The Right Girl” in tap shoes on the set in the Bronx, so it had been decided that no one would wear tap shoes during any of the tap choruses in the show. Jack Mann rigged up a microphone off stage left pointing down to a piece of Masonite. For “Who’s That Woman?” George Martin and two other dancers would put on tap shoes, watch the stage, and dance the rhythm of every routine along with the dancers—but in place and on the Masonite board. The audience would see tap dancing and hear tap shoes and would assume they were coming from the same place.

The technical rehearsal continued, beginning where it ended the night before, still very much in stop-and-start mode. Many light cues were written and adjusted as the rehearsal proceeded. The actors who were confident and consistent had little problem adjusting to the stage. Those who had already taken up a lot of everyone’s time continued to do so. When it got to “Who’s That Woman?” the offstage tapping and the prerecorded “sweetening” were added for the first time. Nothing matched. The singing tape was much too slow, and the taps weren’t remotely coordinated. In addition, during the costume parade, the chorus girls playing the ghost counterparts had complained that the mirror chips on their gauntlets were cutting into their skin, so now they were dancing in only partial costumes. Once they began their chorus, it was discovered that mirror chips on the skirts were also cutting into their arms. One by one the women just stopped dancing, and after Hal Hastings caught on to what was happening, he stopped everything while the girls went to change out of their costumes. The skirts were sent downstairs to Barbara Matera’s makeshift shop to join the gauntlets, which were being sheathed in clear plastic.