Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (3 page)

H
arold Prince knew about
The Girls Upstairs.
He and Sondheim had been friends for years. He was a very active producer, having been responsible for several important hits, including
West Side Story, The Pajama Game,
and
Fiorello!
with partners, and then, on his own, A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
and
Fiddler on the Roof.
But as Sondheim wanted to be a composer, Prince wanted to be a director. When the opportunity arose to take over a musical in trouble entitled
A Family Affair,
written by John Kander and the brothers Goldman, William and James, he jumped. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to turn it around. His next venture as a director was
She Loves Me
, a chamber musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff, which he was also producing. Although not a financial success, it did garner a loyal following, but the direction was hardly mentioned in the reviews. He was then hired to direct
Baker Street,
a large musical based on Sherlock Holmes stories produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Cohen was known for extravagant spectacles (mostly bad), interesting theater pieces imported from England (mostly good), and an extraordinary and tasteful series of comic evenings with conveniently late curtains under the banner of “The Nine O’Clock Theater.” For
Baker Street
he had hired the legendary director Joshua Logan, but when Logan left the project, Cohen approached Prince. Although Prince initially saw the show as a moderately sized musical, Cohen wanted it to be an extravaganza. I saw
Baker Street
during its pre-Broadway tryout and loved every minute, including its jubilee parade of marionettes devised by Bil Baird. When it came to Broadway, Cohen did everything imaginable to convince New Yorkers that it was the biggest hit of all time. He plastered Manhattan with billboards, some painted on blank sides of buildings never painted before or since, a couple of which remained well into the 1980s. The marquee of the theater had color photographs of his three stars—Fritz Weaver, Inga Swenson, and Martin Gabel—appearing, alternately, as reflections in a huge Victorian looking glass. He even played an extra performance one week, thus allowing him to claim in an ad that the show had achieved “the largest gross for a week of performances in Broadway history.” The fact that there had been an extra performance was never mentioned. As it would turn out,
Baker Street
didn’t set the world on fire, and it didn’t do much for Hal Prince’s career as a director. It looked as if the best producer for him to work with was himself. And that’s what happened with
Cabaret.

When I saw
Cabaret,
I was floored. Among other things, it was really interestingly directed. The theater community noticed and began to take Prince seriously in that role. The show was a marvel—a musical that really had something to say and said it in a dramatic and stylish way not normally associated with musicals at the time. The show was set in a cabaret—mostly—or was the theater itself a cabaret? It featured a bizarre emcee who charmed us and then turned on us. The creepiness of the milieu matched the creepiness of the story, in which multiple realities existed at the same time. The score was influenced by the popular German music of the 1930s, and the cast even included Lotte Lenya, whose style and persona were so keenly linked to the era and its sound. She was singing new songs written in the style of her late husband, Kurt Weill. It felt authentic, it was theatrical, it was compelling, and it was brilliant. The same team followed the success of
Cabaret
with a less interesting musical adaptation of
Zorba the Greek,
titled
Zorbá.

The
New York Times
reported in the spring of 1969 that Prince would produce and direct a new musical titled
Threes,
based on several short plays by George Furth about a bachelor and his married friends. The score would be by Stephen Sondheim, the man who had originally sent Furth’s plays to Prince. The
Times
piece spoke of a new-style show, and who knew what that would mean? Prince and Sondheim had certainly worked together before, but never as director and composer. Few knew at the time that their friendship actually went back twenty years, to the opening night of
South Pacific,
when they met for the first time, Prince having come as a guest of the Richard Rodgers family and Sondheim having come with his Doylestown family friends Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein. It proved to be a pivotal event for the two young enthusiasts, who obviously shared a passion for the musical theater and wanted to be part of Broadway. They had remained friends through the years and had been working toward collaborating at what they both wanted most to do. This new show sounded as if it might be the right project.

Indeed it was.
Threes
became
Company.
Its premiere in April 1970 was greeted with the kinds of intelligent cheers reserved for something truly new and exciting. Some carped that the show was antimarriage and didn’t add up to much, but for those of us who flipped, it was a moment for rejoicing. Suddenly there seemed to be an interesting future for the musical theater. As Richard Rodgers observed toward the end of his autobiography when asked where the musical theater is heading, “One night a show opens and suddenly there’s a whole new concept.” That’s what
Company
felt like. Prince and Sondheim were suddenly a collaborative team to reckon with. Their own individual talents were singled out, but something about their collaboration made people feel the American musical theater had been set on a path to the future.

No one knew it at the time, but, in fact, Prince had agreed to produce
The Girls Upstairs
next if Sondheim would agree to write
Company.
That was actually the only way he could get Sondheim to agree to do
Company.
So on the Sunday following the opening of
Company,
the News of the Rialto column in the
New York Times
was titled “It’s Those ‘Girls’ Again” and contained the news that the show would be “available early next spring following rehearsals in December or January.”

The important third member of the
Company
team was its young choreographer Michael Bennett. Bennett had been quietly working his way up through the ranks, from dancing in Broadway choruses to dancing in the youthful television series
Hullabaloo,
and then to choreographing Broadway musicals. He had done four so far, and had received Tony nominations for them all.
Promises, Promises
had been the one for which he was the most noticed. His energetic dances matched the spirit of a show written by the then enormously successful pop songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. I enjoyed
Promises, Promises,
but it didn’t feel special to me. So I was unprepared for my reaction to his contribution to
Company.
I had never seen anything quite like it. With a cast made up almost entirely of non-dancers (his muse, Donna McKechnie, was the only bona fide dancer in the group), he managed to keep a fluidity to the movement in and around Boris Aronson’s multileveled steel and chrome set so there was no discernible seam between dance and other stage movement. His use of standard dance steps performed by non-dancing actors felt appropriate, dramatic, and almost political. Case in point: during “Side by Side by Side,” a song about having a partner, there was one section in which each married couple did a little time step, in turn—first the husband, then the wife. The couples were lined up across the stage, and alternated—first from extreme stage right, the next one from extreme stage left, working to the lead character, Bobby, who was in the center. When his turn came, he did the husband half and then pointed to where his wife should be, and there were simply four empty counts of nothing. It was funny, it seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was totally appropriate. The audience wasn’t prepared for it, yet it told us everything we needed to know about how single and alone that character was, especially as the rest of the company continued to dance cheerily on with their partners beside them while Bobby just stared at the empty spot on the stage.

Once I knew that the same team would be doing another show, I wanted to be there, so I wrote Hal Prince a formal letter asking if I could observe the rehearsal period of
Follies.
I had met him through my parents as well as having seen him during the week when the National Theater Institute had come to New York. One of the shows we saw was
Company,
and afterward we all went back to George White’s apartment to meet with both Hal and Michael Bennett. Hal wrote back, urging me to meet with his trusted associate and right hand, Ruth Mitchell, who didn’t seem overly thrilled with the notion. After some gentle coaxing, I was given the green light, but I was told that I would have to be Ruth Mitchell’s general assistant as well. I was soon to learn that two other people had also been given permission to observe rehearsals—a young playwright named Carole Wright, who had won an established position of “observer” through the New Dramatists, and Larry Cohen, the New York–based theater critic for the
Hollywood Reporter.
He was planning to write a book about the making of a musical. Carole didn’t appear to be too interested in the process and stayed close to Jim Goldman on the rare occasions when she was around. Cohen came and went, and he and I became friends. He started out knowing no one, but as the rehearsal period progressed he established a friendship with Michael Bennett. When he realized that would give him a bias were he to follow through on his plans to write a book, he abandoned his project. He and Michael remained friends and colleagues after
Follies.
I’ve stayed in touch with him through the years. He has become a respected screenwriter, and we worked together when he wrote the teleplay for the ABC-TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
South Pacific.

 

 

A
nd so I became part of the
Follies
family. For the most part, I was made to feel welcome. Any new show in rehearsal becomes a family, if a forced one, and the
Follies
family was pretty good. Some reached out to me more than others did, but I never felt like an intruder or an outsider. Some in the company knew that I was making notes and keeping a journal, others did not. Justine Johnston, elected the Equity deputy, asked me early on if I was writing a novel. One of the actors, Fred Kelly, brother of Gene Kelly, offered observations from time to time for “that journal of yours.” But for the most part, I was just the gofer to everyone. Conversation was spirited and gossipy in some quarters, while in others discretion was strictly maintained. I tended to be more interested in the creative staff and the principal actors, but that was at least partly because the chorus tended to stick together.

What I wrote in my journal was only what I actually saw and heard. Some of what went on behind closed doors filtered out to the rest of us; some of it will never be known. My adventures took me away from rehearsals a fair amount, but there was always something to learn from the task at hand. I loved the experience of watching the show as it grew, changed, and emerged. Whenever I didn’t have a specific task, I would sit in on rehearsals. There were usually three different ones happening simultaneously—dance, music, and dialogue—and I couldn’t be in three places at one time. I had to choose. I grew to love the show and came to have my own opinions about the changes that were being made. Sometimes I questioned a choice, and, confused, would jump to the conclusion that someone didn’t know what he or she was doing. Perspective is hard to come by when you are in the trenches. I grew to respect some of the artists more than others. Some people were kind; some were downright mean. Some observed strict hierarchical lines and wouldn’t speak to those they deemed on a level below theirs. Mostly, everyone was extremely professional. Obvious tensions caused some appalling behavior. I watched people become totally stymied. I overheard conversations I thought were insulting, and yet I believed they were all in the interests of saving time and cutting through to the best idea. I watched collaboration at work, and wondered whether there were any fixed rules to the process. I saw good work being done; I saw some work I thought embarrassing. The constant was the show and getting every element coordinated to be ready for the curtain to rise for the first paying audience on Saturday, February 20, 1971, in Boston. That is, of course, one of the magic aspects of the theater—hate or love your collaborators, no one can avoid the fact that everything and everybody must be ready at the same time. That curtain will go up, no matter what. By the time the show opened in New York, I wasn’t sure whether
Follies
was brilliant or flawed, or both. I knew elements were brilliant—of that there was no doubt. And I was hooked. I was also having the most magical experience of my life. “Goddamnedest hours that I ever spent,” as one lyric goes.