Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (35 page)

Today, Michael Bartlett, the silver-haired septuagenarian who played Roscoe, decides that he needs to be introduced more fully in the show. This is a concern that has never been raised before, and it smacks of influence by some friend who has seen the show and rendered an opinion. This kind of interference can’t be avoided, but it tends to be less than helpful. The request seems out of character: Michael has been a quiet and diligent member of the company, working hard to remember his lines and his blocking. He has also been saving his high B-flats at the end of “Beautiful Girls” for the actual performances, and has hit them every time since Saturday. He certainly looks the part, and sounds it. Yet now he is complaining that “The character of Dimitri Weismann just
says
my name once. How are people supposed to know who I am?” He puts this question rather generally to whichever of his fellow actors will listen. He won’t dare, however, ask anyone in authority. (Nothing was added; he continued to be introduced by Weismann’s line, “Here, as always, the inevitable Roscoe. . . .”). Harvey Evans and Kurt Peterson (Young Buddy and Young Ben), who share a dressing room, have established a nice camaraderie, and joke like two “husbands” comparing notes on their “wives”—played by Marti Rolph (“Harvey‘s”) and Virginia Sandifur (“Kurt’s”). Changing the subject slightly, Gene Nelson remarks that when Virginia first appeared onstage during the dress parade she reminded him so much of his first wife that it was positively scary.

Before rehearsals, the “sweetening” tapes for “Who’s That Woman?” and “Loveland” were rerecorded. As the company gathered around the foot mikes for a brief rehearsal, Hal Hastings reminded everyone of the notes in the final chord of “Who’s That Woman?” Ethel Barrymore Colt lost her note and, reaching into her past as a recitalist, asked, “What was the penultimate note of that chord?” It seemed so in character. There wasn’t time, unfortunately, to test the new tape with the orchestra before the evening performance, and, of course, the synchronization was chaotic. Everyone kept on dancing, and much of the audience probably had no idea anything was amiss.

Since Michael Bennett wasn’t around, Hal could rehearse whatever he wanted. He chose to run the Prologue and to try a slight rearrangement of the dialogue around “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Jim and Steve also took the opportunity to work with the actors directly. Jim had brought a new line for Yvonne for her entrance. He had two ideas, both of which were tried at different performances: “This reminds me of alumni day at Forest Lawn” and “I got my start on this very spot, four score and seven years ago.” These were to replace her lines “Act? Me, act? I just go out and let fly and heaven help the leading man.” This became a pattern with Jim—bringing in small line changes, many of which were tweaks to make lines land better. Large-scale libretto changes didn’t seem to be under consideration. Steve took Hal Hastings, Phil Fradkin, the Old Four, and the Young Four into one of the lounges for a rehearsal of “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” Steve was unhappy with the performance, which had gotten musically sloppy. He said he wanted “to hear the downbeats” and told Gene, “It is important that the first section be as square as possible. You tend to be a little off the beat.” Hal corroborated the places where Gene and the others tended to get sloppy. The second section, conversely, was “too sharp. It should be more of delight and not as if someone is challenging you—it shouldn’t have the feeling of recollecting a blow.” Steve said that as soon as Gene sings “I remember, me and Ben . . .” the audience “should feel that the song is an ‘up.’ ” He wanted Alexis more wry when she sings “One of them was borrowed and the other was blue.” Then he wanted them to anticipate the “down in a minute” section, not to do it square but rather with anticipation. His direction was precise, detailed, and brilliant—he knew exactly what he wanted. The session may have gone a bit over the heads of the performers, but they were game.

The matinee was nearly sold out, with only a few seats left in the extreme corners of the house. A good sign. I stayed backstage to watch the routines that had developed during the running of recent performances. Starting at the half-hour call, the stage turns into a veritable gymnasium. Dancers and actors are stretching against parts of the set, using the levels as supports and the pipes in the movable units as ballet barres. John McMartin marked through his number, muttering to himself. Going up on his lines on Thursday had spooked him, and he wanted to pace himself ahead of time. Ursula, the tallest showgirl, the one who is preset when the curtain rises, walked through some of her blocking trying to figure out how best to deal with the heavy, beaded train to her dress. She has to maintain a ghostlike aloofness, but at one performance the train had gotten caught on some of the rubble in the set. Freeing it up while remaining in the ghost reality wasn’t easy. She was trying to find a foolproof path that would minimize the possibility of its happening again. Hal Hastings sat on one of the levels of the set in his white tie and tails, talking with the stage managers. Several members of the company wandered out on the stage, said hello, asked the stage managers some questions, and wandered off. John Grigas, as stage manager number three, went around to all the dressing rooms collecting “valuables”—wallets, jewelry, whatever—that needed to be put in a safe during the performance. Once “places” was called, Fritz Holt stood, headphone on, at his desk immediately off stage right, and George Martin manned his desk on stage left. John Grigas was now arching the occasional eyebrow when escorting the same older women to their same entrance spots.

During the performance, most actors kept to themselves as they prepared to make their entrances. Alexis and John were of this school. In fact, Alexis preferred to stay in her dressing room until right before entering, and she preferred everyone to be quiet around her. One night she said she must have scared one of the showgirls to death by turning around and telling her to shut up. Dorothy, on the other hand, had no problem socializing right until the moment she was to go on, whether the scene about to be performed was comic or emotional. At one moment when she finished a scene with Ben and wandered upstage to one of the party tables, I could see that she huddled right in with the rest of the actors, giggling along with them.

An intercom system brought sound to all the dressing rooms on every level. In addition to piping in the show, the “squawk box” system allowed for announcements by the stage managers, who would give warnings and cues, and sometimes specific calls to actors who might not be on the “deck,” ready for their entrances. Wardrobe people were stationed at strategic spots backstage, either for quick changes or, in the case of the showgirls, to assist with the large costumes. Mostly those actors with costume changes had enough time to go back to their dressing rooms. On
Follies,
only Alexis and Dorothy had individual dressers.

During intermission, some costumes were taken from the stage to the dressing rooms or down to the wardrobe department for cleaning or repair. Since the set didn’t change between acts, there wasn’t a lot of activity during the intermission—a good thing, since by the time the show opened in New York, the intermission was gone.

In between shows I went to dinner with Yvonne and an actor who had done
Hello, Dolly!
with her on a tour. With two young potential gigolos on her arms, she downed two large martinis before dinner and generally enjoyed being the center of attention. That night, however, when it came time for her entrance for “Fox Trot,” she forgot to step onto the platform that brought her onstage. I was in the stage managers’ office on the fifth floor, typing some script changes and listening to the performance over the intercom, when I heard some very odd ad-libs—” Hey, Carlotta, come on out here, we want to hear your number!” Later I learned that she turned offstage to Pete Feller and yelled, “Hey, I missed the boat! Bring it back!” And so he did, reversing the platform until she could step easily on. Apart from the missed cue, her good spirits made for a carefree rendition of the song, which she sang correctly for the first time in several performances.

Rehearsal call was for “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” Out of concern for how the song was coming across, Steve changed the last four lines of the lyric. The original lines:

were changed to:

There were people in the company who couldn’t understand why the change was made. The change placed the lyric in the past instead of the present, and it had been pulled off deftly. Another example of the puzzle man at work.

The Young Four were not called at the beginning of rehearsal. After the new lyric had been run and Hal had adjusted the staging of the dialogue going into the song, including cutting four stinging chords that had introduced the number, the Old Four got up onstage to run the entire song, with fixes. When they got to the transition section when the young counterparts appear, the Young Four were just arriving in the theater. As they heard the transition, they started singing from wherever they were while making their way to the stage—Virginia Sandifur and Harvey Evans dashing in from the wrong side of the stage, Marti Rolph running down the aisle of the theater and crawling over the orchestra pit, and Kurt bouncing on from stage right. Somehow, they all made it to their spots right on cue. Everyone laughed; it was one of those spontaneous moments that could never have been rehearsed and would never be repeated.

Michael showed up back from New York, refreshed and ready to work. He had watched the show on Saturday night, and was poised to get started. His first order of business was to cut the middle section of “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Despite Yvonne’s efforts at portraying the low-voiced football-playing jock and the high-voiced poet, and despite her game attempt at singing a trio all by herself, the middle section now became her simply pointing at two different men in the company, dancing with each one briefly—a box step only—and rejecting them both. It needed only a simple line change, from “I can’t find him” to “I find him—
you
!” and then she plucks two guys from the party. Michael had her choose John J. Martin and Dick Latessa, who were still playing “Sally” and “Margie” in drag in “Buddy’s Blues,” and it was suspected they were picked because it was doubtful they would remain in the “Buddy’s Blues” number much longer. By this time, Yvonne had discovered there was a big laugh to be gotten in the line “Remember when they used to dance at college?” by emphasizing, for all it was worth, the word “dance”—and waiting for a reaction. She got it every time.

Another fix made and rehearsed was the rearrangement of the Montage. Clearly, “Broadway Baby” was the hit, and one of the high points of the entire show. To sandwich it in between the throwaway “Rain on the Roof” and Fifi’s “Ah, Paris!” was to put it at a decided disadvantage. “Rain on the Roof” was never intended as much more than a vignette—the stage direction from an early script says: “the number goes as quickly as it came, almost as if it never happened.” As the older characters emerged in the various early drafts of the script, the sequence saw “Broadway Baby” added as well as a new song for a French chanteuse, titled “Hello, Doughboy.” The latter only got as far as one version of the script. The lyrics were about a French tart imploring her GI beau to take her back to the good old U.S.A. now that the war was over:

That song somehow turned into “Ah, Paris!” As the Montage was assembled and rehearsed, the ending with all three songs together never quite worked. Now the task was to switch the order, placing “Ah! Paris” in the middle (and cutting its first verse) while moving “Broadway Baby” to the end. Steve, Michael, and Hal Hastings devised a new ending, in which the three songs would appear to come together, building to a rousing trio finale. This was rehearsed on both Sunday and Monday so it could go into the performance Monday night. Obviously, it made both Fifi and Ethel nervous, but they had no choice. Somehow when Fifi became aware of the shift of order and the elimination of the first verse of her song, she grew very quiet. Ethel simply did what she was told. But despite this strengthening of her song, she was troubled once again, about her salary. She hadn’t acted on her urge to ask for a raise while the show was in rehearsal, but now she was bothered enough to speak up. She told me what she was making—$225 per week plus an additional twenty-five dollars to cover out-of-town expenses. Somehow she had found out that Fifi was making $400 per week, and that galled. (To put this in perspective, Alexis was making $1,500; Gene, $2,000; Dorothy, $1,000; John, $1,250; and Yvonne, $1,000.) She decided to go and speak with the company manager and say that she needed a fifty-dollar-per-week increase or she would have to leave the show—she would stay until a replacement was found, but she just couldn’t remain, it was too insulting. After she had approached company manager John Caruso and asked him to take her request to the general manager, Carl Fisher, Ruthie came over to tell her that Hal had overheard the conversation and that he was giving her a raise effective immediately, not the fifty dollars she had requested but a hundred. That pleased her. On the lighter side, she mentioned that both Soupy Sales and Jack Cassidy had been spotted in the audience on Saturdaynight and that she’d heard a rumor Hal was not happy with John McMartin and was thinking of replacing him with Cassidy. That seemed unlikely; Cassidy was an old friend of the Princes, and I was sure that that was the entire reason for his being in attendance. Ethel also said there were rumors that Soupy Sales was having an affair with one of the dancers, and she wondered aloud if Sales couldn’t just replace Fifi.