Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (36 page)

Hal began the rehearsal by addressing the full company. “We’ve got a lot of text that’s going to be changed, and I’ve just seen six to eight pages which we’ll try to get staged tomorrow. What I want to say, though, is that we are in a grace period during which we can take out the flab by really performing the material that is there and pruning what isn’t essential. I’m going to ask the stage managers to be on top of the lines in the script and make you pick up any lapses.”

He then ran some small changes in the Prologue, once again trying to coax a stronger performance out of Ed Steffe. Michael changed a few steps at the end of “Uptown, Downtown,” gave some notes for “Live, Laugh, Love,” telling the dancers not to react to Ben’s breakdown, and announced that Suzanne Rogers and Rita O’Connor were going to be taking over the roles of Sally and Margie in “Buddy’s Blues.” No longer would the two roles be played in drag.

Monday was busy. I had no access to a Xerox machine the way I had in New York, so I had some serious typing to do to produce enough copies of revised script pages. I could make around ten good copies from one fat batch of carbons, but because I often had to distribute copies to more than ten people, I would have to type the pages out again, sometimes as many as three times. Late in the afternoon, Gene Nelson asked me to send an urgent telegram authorizing his wife to be admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles for a routine but necessary medical procedure. I had to find a Western Union office in Boston that stayed open after six, and then when I returned to the theater I was asked to take Mike Misita, one of the dancers, to the hospital because he was ill and no one could tell what was the matter. Knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to perform that night, Bob Avian made adjustments to the dances and made the decision that the Vincent and Vanessa dance team would have no ghost figures in “Bolero d’Amour,” since no one knew Mike’s role as Young Vincent well enough to attempt it. Graciela (Young Vanessa) was relieved. Simple adjustments were made in other places where Mike had solo bits—mostly in the Prologue and in “Loveland.”

The performance went well, for the most part. The shift in the Montage worked better than anyone could have expected. And “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” was at least shorter, although Yvonne wasn’t happy with the hand she received at the end; she sensed it was measurably less enthusiastic than what she was used to. Alexis slipped and fell in the dance section of “Who’s That Woman?” She picked herself up, kept smiling, and went on dancing. Later, she explained that she feels it’s vitally important for a performer to get right up if something happens onstage that might make the audience nervous. Keep smiling, keep going, and then once you’re off, look to see if you’re hurt. She seemed to be uninjured, but she did admit that she wasn’t feeling well in general, which may have contributed to her concentration not being at peak.

I had an interesting test in my role as gofer. Richard Avedon was scheduled to do a
Follies
photo shoot for
Vogue
at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel after the performance, so I was dispatched in mid-afternoon to rent a panel truck large enough to hold several of the ornate showgirl costumes. The only place I could find to park it until the end of the performance was an indoor parking garage that turned out to be so tight that I came within an inch or two of getting the truck stuck in the circular ramp going from one level to another. After the performance, I had to back the truck into “Allen’s Alley” and wait until a rack of showgirl costumes and wigs were loaded in. The call was for six of the women—two of the real Vegas showgirls and four dancers from the ensemble. As all these expensive costumes were loaded in, with my help, George Green, the show’s Master Propertyman and quite a character, laughed and said, “United Truckers better not find out you’re doing this.” I wasn’t sure how funny that comment was meant to be; I was simply doing as I was asked. But it did strike me as a little odd that with all the union jurisdictions around every aspect of the show, here I was driving a truck full of costumes to a photo shoot. I did, however, get to stay and watch the shoot, which was fascinating. A large roll of white paper, maybe fifteen feet across, hung from one side of the room to the other, allowing enough space for the dancers to stand in front and Avedon and his assistants to move freely in front of them. First, he had Suzanne Rogers and Rita O’Connor dress in their “Who’s That Woman?” ghost costumes and go through the dance steps in place. Avedon kept snapping photographs, and when he came to the end of a roll he simply handed the camera to an assistant, who handed him another camera. As Avedon kept going, the assistant detached the removable film-back from the first camera and replaced it with a new one. Next, Kathie Dalton and Margot Travers, two of the Bennett dancers who also played showgirls, were asked to strike various poses. These two women had great style and they looked gorgeous in their dresses, one white and one black. It was harder going with the two actual Vegas showgirls, who seemed to have no idea how to pose. Avedon had to be unusually precise with them—“Now, can’t you do something with that arm?” Because they were both so tall and were wearing such large headdresses, there were problems with height as well. At the end, Avedon expressed surprise that they were such trouble, since he had assumed they would be the easiest to shoot.

The photo shoot over, I got to return the costumes to the theater, park the truck once again, and wait for the next morning, when I could return the truck and retire from my shady role as a teamster fink.

I was sent to Hal’s suite at the Statler Hilton to pick up new pages for a reorganization of what was called scene 6, which included the songs “The Road You Didn’t Take” and “In Buddy’s Eyes.” The order of the two songs was to be reversed, and they were no longer going to be separated by “Bolero d’Amour.” Hal and Michael were sitting and talking, waiting for Jim to arrive with the new pages they had obviously all discussed. When Jim came in, he handed the pages to Hal, who read them, made a couple of notations, and handed them to me with the request to type them out and get them ready for the noon rehearsal. It was about 11:10.

When the cast assembled, Hal announced the new arrangement of scene 6, but said that he had decided to wait until tomorrow to rehearse it and put it in the show. Michael did some cleanup work on “Loveland,” changing some of the entrances so more of the dancers would enter upstage and sweep downstage with the sequencing of the Follies drops coming in. Because the offstage tap-dance “sweetening” was never in sync with the dancers, the Masonite board was moved to a spot underneath the stage, just outside the orchestra pit but well within sight of the conductor. It was hoped that things would be better coordinated if George Martin and his tap-dancing associates could watch Hal Hastings directly instead of watching the dancers from one side of the stage. Since the taps would be put through the sound system, it didn’t matter where they came from. And as long as the tappers had time to get to the floor below, it would work. It did.

Among the industry people who ventured up to Boston to see the show were my parents. At the time, my father was working with Leonard Bernstein, who was composing a theater piece for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. With the opening scheduled for September, only seven months away, no stage director had yet been chosen; Jerome Robbins, everyone’s first choice, had passed. Hal was on the list, and so my father decided to come to see
Follies,
at least partly to report on his work. I had dinner with my parents before the show, then as they filed into their seats, I returned to my lair on the fifth floor to get going with the job of retyping copies of the new version of scene 6 to be ready to hand them out at the end of the evening’s performance.

When I finished, I went down to watch the end of the show, which seemed very low on energy. The audience was awfully quiet; in fact, it was the first time the “reveal” for “Uptown, Downtown”—the entire dancing ensemble dressed in red tailcoats and hats and a silver fountain set at the rear—got absolutely no applause. “I could absolutely kill you!” Hal exclaimed when he saw me coming across the lobby. “Why did Betty and Schuyler come tonight? This is the worst performance yet! I thought they were coming on Wednesday, and I had a hunch this was going to be a lousy performance.” He added that they would probably tell him they loved it no matter what—so I pulled them aside after the performance and told them to be honest. They were, even to the extent of saying that they didn’t feel Ed Steffe was effective. My father had worked with Steffe in his days with Columbia Artists Management, and liked him, but he zeroed right in on the problem, which was also being felt among the staff: Steffe lacked the presence to play such a commanding role. Hal asked Michael to come over and listen. My parents were quite positive about the rest of the show, but I got the feeling that they weren’t entirely taken with it; they had been big fans of
Company,
but this one seemed to leave them a little cold. Dorothy met them both and was very cordial, hugging me and telling them that she thought I was great. And Hal did listen to the Bernstein Mass (as it ended up being called), but Gordon Davidson was ultimately chosen to direct the piece.

Word got around that it was now official:
Prettybelle
would be closing this weekend and wouldn’t be coming to Broadway.
Company’s
odds at the Tony Awards had suddenly improved.

Hal began rehearsal by handing out the new scene 6 and telling everyone involved how he intended to work on it: read it through, block it, then break for an hour so everyone could memorize the new lines, then do it onstage. He dismissed those members of the company whose roles were not affected by the change. Generally, everyone took the new scene well, and its staging didn’t look as if it was going to create too many train wrecks. There was work on other bits and pieces: cleaning up the beginning of “Beautiful Girls” with Michael Bartlett; a little adjustment and rehearsal of “Who’s That Woman?”; and the beginnings of some understudy rehearsals in the lower lounge with Peter Walker, understudy for John McMartin, going over Ben’s music with Phil Fradkin.

Larry Cohen arrived, full of the New York gossip on the show. From Mary Bryant he had heard that several new publications were now interested in doing feature stories, along the lines of the “Prince of the Theater” story that Louis Botto had been working on for
Look.
That meant good word of mouth filtering back to New York, a very good thing for the show’s prospects. The impression in New York was that the show had gotten great reviews in Boston. Business at the box office had started very strong, and there were hopes that it would continue. One curiosity: Larry had been in the Prince office one day when Joanna Merlin seemed to be on the phone with the agent of one of the lead understudies, and the agent was telling Joanna that he didn’t think his client should ever go on in the role. He had been to Boston, seen the show, and frankly didn’t feel his client was up to the rigors of the role.

At half-hour, Ethel was nowhere to be found. Fritz called her hotel; she answered the phone and said that her clock must have stopped at six o’clock, since that’s what it read. She got to the theater as quickly as she could.

Alexis was in great spirits, though she confessed in a quiet voice that she had no idea what her singing would be like tonight. She had been fighting a cold all week, and no one had seemed to care, but now it was beginning to affect her voice. Once the performance began and she spoke her first line, it was apparent she had a problem. You could sense everyone clutching as they wondered what was going to happen when she had to sing.

There is never a good time for people to get sick on a show. And out of town is the worst time possible. Leading actors being sick can mean either Ruby Keeler—like
42nd Street
moments when unprepared understudies go on, or in the worst case, having to cancel a performance. In the case
of Follies,
although understudies—actors already in the show who learn other roles—had been assigned, there had been no time to rehearse. (There were no standbys—actors who are not in the show but cover leading roies—yet hired either.)

In addition to Alexis’s obviously deteriorating condition, the audience seemed to be the stoniest one yet—no one in the Prologue or “Beautiful Girls” got a hand—and the orchestra must have been filled with subs because there were wrong notes all over the place. As soon as Alexis tried to sing the line “Waiting around for the boys downstairs,” it was very clear she was in big trouble. Pitch was nowhere to be found, so she simply spoke her remaining lines. Even so, the song was still having problems landing. And everyone onstage seemed suddenly to get nervous. Little mistakes were made. Ethel missed one of her lines in the party scene, John McMartin seemed unclear of the staging in the newly restructured scene 6, and the Montage was very low in energy. Alexis barreled through until intermission, but it was obvious that she’d never be able to make it through “Could I Leave You?”—one of the few moments in the show that had come to be rock solid. At the start of the intermission, Hal was standing at Fritz Holt’s desk looking at the script and trying to figure out what cutting the song entirely would entail. His mood was strained; it was almost as if he couldn’t believe anyone would have the audacity to get sick. Fritz went out into the auditorium to find Michael. All three looked over the script and worked out how to adjust the cues to allow for the song simply to be excised from the performance. Agreeing that this was the best thing to do, they summoned Hal Hastings, who went over it with Fritz. As Fritz canvassed the crew and told them about the change, Hal summoned the Old Four and the Young Four to Alexis’s dressing room to go over the changes with them. They were attentive and focused. Fritz then made a special announcement backstage over the sound system, alerting everyone that “Could I Leave You?” would not be performed. The audience would have to take the show as it came—they knew that when shows are out of town, the listing of musical numbers may not accurately reflect what is performed onstage.

The second act went off without too many problems, although Alexis sounded pretty grim in “Uptown, Downtown.” When she came out for her curtain call, the entire company applauded her. Then once the final curtain came down, the company applauded her again. Company manager John Caruso had phoned a doctor, and as soon as she was out of her costume and into her street clothes, she was taken off to see a specialist. She was amused that no one had paid any attention earlier in the week when she announced she wasn’t feeling well, but now that she’d lost her voice it was a crisis. As she was whisked off to the doctor, Hal told Sheila Smith to begin learning the role. Sheila Smith was listed in the program as the standby for Yvonne and Fifi only, but no one was listed as either understudy or standby for Alexis. The original notion had been for Yvonne to cover the role of Phyllis, but I think that began to fade as soon as rehearsals started. No one had paid much attention to the whole issue.

The company rumors were that Yvonne’s new number was going to be a Harold Arlen—style blues song and that Steve was also fiddling with “Uptown, Downtown.” Steve hadn’t been seen in a few days, so it was only natural that rumors would get started. In this instance, however, they were true. Michael was never happy with “Uptown, Downtown,” felt that because it came late, he never had proper time to plan for its staging. It had been shoved at him at the last minute, and he asked for a new number. Judy Prince was said to be in favor of a new number as well. Steve was willing to oblige.

Larry Cohen watched the show, sitting next to an old couple who just loved it. They were so grateful to be seeing a musical with old people in it—and couldn’t fathom why anyone young would have the slightest interest in the show. In the old days, you see, people had talent—not like today. Of course, they had come to the show with no idea it was a musical.