Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (39 page)

The call was 11:30 Yvonne, noon the rest of the company. “I’m Here” was going in at the matinee. The orchestra was called early to run through the orchestration, which had been created and copied only days before. Jonathan Tunick and Mathilde Pincus were in the house, as usual, wandering back and forth along the orchestra rail, making certain all the players had their parts. Once through without the singer; everything seemed fine. Next, the company was brought out onstage and placed in their positions so it could be run with Yvonne. It went well, and when it was over the cast gave her a healthy ovation. As she was walking offstage, the applause started dying down, and she turned back to them, giggling: “No, don’t stop clapping!”

Alexis had been nursing her cold all week and hadn’t missed a performance but hadn’t sung “Could I Leave You?” at any of the performances. She now felt her voice was back enough to try for the matinee, but wanted to go through it once with the orchestra first. She was fine, except for the high notes—“Sweetheart, I have to confess”—and she asked Steve if it was okay for her simply to punch the note. He said it was fine, under the circumstances. Dorothy and John went through a slight rearrangement of lines around “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Luckily, Dorothy’s “corpse” line in the mad scene had been excised before ever making it to rehearsal.

Hal was called away for a phone call. The night before, David Burns had dropped dead onstage in Philadelphia during a performance of the Broadway-bound musical
70, Girls, 70.
Not only was David Burns a beloved actor and one who had worked for Hal in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
but the show he was in was a new musical comedy that celebrated old people.
70, Girls, 70
had a very different tone from that of
Follies;
it celebrated life with older folks singing and dancing up a storm, and the cast included many old theater veterans. Apparently Burns had finished a song, stepped behind a bar on the set, and collapsed. At first, the audience laughed, thinking it was a part of the show. It was all too macabre to contemplate, and Hal knew it would have a devastating effect on the
Follies
company. After making arrangements to send flowers, he asked those of us who had heard the news not to spread it around. It was too late; Bob Avian had already mentioned it to some of the dancers, and everyone was soon aware. Hal then decided to speak with the lead actors personally. The older members of the company took the news especially hard.

“I’m Here” went into the matinee as planned, and the reaction was very strong. It was a sold-out and enthusiastic house, and although Yvonne made a couple of nervous mistakes with the rhythms, on the whole she nailed the song. Even the candy lady from the lobby—a tough critic—who had sneaked into the back of the house because she’d heard a new song was going in, gave her approval.

Alexis performed “Could I Leave You?” with enormous emotional conviction, and it reminded us all how good that song was and how well she performed it—and how much it had been missed.

Larry Cohen and I were standing in the rear of the auditorium when a foppish English producer by the name of Peter Bridge came over to us. He had seen the very first performance, and, although he was a big fan of both Hal and Steve, he had left the theater thinking they had another
Anyone Can Whistle
on their hands. Then he came back for this matinee, performance number twenty-four, and was just amazed at the changes, every single one of which was decidedly for the better. “I’m Here” just blew him away; and he gasped when Gene did his swings around the poles in “The Right Girl.” The book seemed tighter, too, and he was just delirious.

At dinner between shows, Yvonne was as high as a kite. She had a new song, and she knew all the words and all the staging. On top of that, pretty much everyone agreed that “I’m Here” was just what the show had needed. She was on, and she felt like a star.

The evening performance was very strong, although this audience particularly loved anything that remotely smacked of double entendre. They were a Saturday-night crowd with one thing on their minds. I realized that audiences were now liking the show with more consistency; very few people left at intermission, and “bravos” had become commonplace at the curtain call, if not always for the same people. The biggest hands went, consistently, to Ethel Shutta, Yvonne, Alexis, and Dorothy. The men were treated respectfully, but Boston seemed to go for the gals. And whether the loudest applause was for Dorothy or Alexis changed at each performance. The box office was virtually clean for the rest of the run. There was no reason not to be pleased by the status of the show. There were still things to be tweaked, but there was reason to feel confident. In the week left in Boston, two revised numbers—the new Prologue and “The Story of Lucy and Jessie”—were to go in, and minor revisions were expected elsewhere. There were still sloppy moments at almost every performance: Yvonne messed up the end of “I’m Here,” although the audience still loved it; “The Right Girl” seemed tired, but then it had been an exhausting week for Gene; a piece of a yellow feather boa ripped off one of the “Buddy’s Blues” girls, which prompted George Martin to run out onstage to grab it before Alexis made her entrance for “Uptown, Downtown.” But at this Saturday-night performance, the show felt awfully good.

Alexis’s new dress for “Lucy and Jessie” was somewhere in the ether. It was promised, but no one knew its status. Clearly, she had made her feeling about the Marlene Dietrich dress known to her confidantes, one of whom was now Joe Tubens, the hair and wig designer. Tubens had a good sense of fun, and he decided to play a joke on her. He went to a Goodwill thrift shop and bought an awful red dress, to which he had attached every odd piece of fringe and every stray bead he could find. Then he found a box from Matera’s, some fresh tissue paper, and wrapped it all up so it looked like “the new dress.” Tubens roped Michael Bennett into the scheme, since he knew that Michael, too, hated the Dietrich dress, and at intermission, Michael came across the stage saying, “Alexis, your new dress has arrived from Barbara Matera.” She opened the box and shrieked with laughter. She was game—she went in and put it on and paraded around the stage. It actually fit pretty well, so Michael suggested she wear it for the first technical rehearsal in New York at which time he would tell Flossie, “Okay, Alexis has decided to wear the fringe dress.”

I sat in the balcony, way to the side. Watching the stage from that high up revealed patterns of movement that weren’t readily apparent from the main floor, especially in the dances. Then I noticed something late in the show that floored me. It was a subtle shift in the scenery during “Could I Leave You?” While Alexis sat on the middle platform delivering the song in what now seemed like almost a catatonic state, tight spotlights focused in on her. John McMartin stood in the shadows on the side, and the overall lighting was very dim. At some point in the song, my attention was caught by the most solid piece of hanging scenery, the one that looked like a broken-off piece of a proscenium arch. Slowly—very slowly—it was being raised up into the flies and out of sight. The audience was completely unaware of this; I had been watching the show for the past couple of weeks and hadn’t seen it. But now that I did take notice, I understood what was happening: while all the focus was directed to one spot and one performer, every bit of atmospheric goods hanging from above was taken out, so that when the lights came back up for the confrontation scene before “Loveland,” the stage would seem strangely bigger, emptier, and more filled with shadows. That was because it actually
was
bigger and emptier. Doing this also cleaned up the top of the set so that when the Follies drops flew in, nothing would be hanging in their way. This was so subtle, and yet so brilliant. (It was so subtle that years later neither Lisa Aronson nor Frank Rich noticed that one shot in a sequence of photographs detailing this very transition into “Loveland,” in their book
The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson,
was from some other moment in the show: all the hanging pieces were still in place.)

The cast wasn’t called on this day off, but the production team gathered to discuss strategy. Steve said he had been “zonked” by the show on Thursday night when he sat and watched. He was overwhelmed within the first forty-five minutes, and just stayed with it right to the end. His work was finally done, so now he was casting a careful eye over the whole show, looking for ways to make more connections between the characters and the events. One of his ideas was to have the four leads perform their Follies numbers in their street clothes rather than in their Follies costumes. They would watch “Loveland” from the edge of the stage, and then simply step up into the scene when their song came along. Steve suspected that might clarify the connection between the characters and the songs. And he thought that taking those four costumes out would make the show less “rich,” which he felt would be beneficial. He was also interested in exploring the possibility of shifting the order of “I’m Here” and “One More Kiss,” which would move Carlotta’s song to the “eleven o’clock” position.

I had dinner with Hal Hastings, who was worried about how long the show could run in New York. He said the critics have influence only for the first three months after the opening; from then on, it’s all word of mouth. He was worried in the realistic way of someone who had been there through countless triumphs and failures. He noted that Clive Barnes, the chief drama critic for the
New York Times,
had taken a swat at Jim Goldman in a recent review of
Abelard and Heloise,
a modern English play based on a twelfth-century story. Barnes had written that the writing was “often effective, particularly in that slickly anachronistic way characteristic of James Goldman’s
The Lion in Winter.”
Few in the company had seen it, and Hastings wasn’t about to spread it around. Hal Prince knew of it but chose to ignore it.

The dance music for “Lucy and Jessie” was pretty much finished, and clustered around the piano were John Berkman, Jonathan Tunick, Hal Hastings, Michael Bennett, and Paul Gemignani. Berkman played it while Michael marked his way through. Before passing it on to Jonathan to orchestrate, Michael wanted to go through it with his dancers. It looked wonderful—reminiscent of “Uptown, Downtown,” but more spirited and edgy. At one point Michael stood in the aisle of the theater, doing Alexis’s steps while listening to the arrangement. Because the number was faster than its predecessor, the dancers complained that their top hats were unsteady; they had been measured for hats with their own natural hair, but because they were now all wearing wigs, the hats were small and would probably fall off doing this new, faster choreography. The number definitely had shape, and everyone signed off on it. The plan was to put it in the show on Thursday night; that meant three days to get the music orchestrated and copied.

Hal told the principals about having them perform their Follies songs in the costumes from the rest of the show. They were not pleased. Alexis was the most unwilling, but Hal asked her to put on her red pantsuit and go through the staging of “Uptown, Downtown” with the dancers. She did, but not happily. All four performed in their street clothes—dispiritedly—for the next few performances, but none of them could believe that this change would stand, and they prayed to get their beautiful colorful clothes back.

Michael took everyone onstage to do more work on the new Prologue. He had been making small changes throughout the Boston run whenever he had a moment with his dancers, but now that every other number seemed pretty much mapped out, he wanted to focus on completing this new version, which was going to be more atmospheric, using bits of songs long ago cut from
The Girls Upstairs,
starting with “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” (When he had Steve play him all the material cut from the show, this is the song he pounced on.) The ghostlike announcements weren’t going to be used anymore; instead, the Prologue was going to be turned over completely to the world of the ghosts, who would evoke the general world of the Follies in slow motion. The principals entering the party would be the first hint of the present. Michael turned to Steve and asked him to give the dancers the words to “All Things Bright and Beautiful” so they could mouth them while dancing; Steve said they were mostly words of one syllable and would therefore probably not give Michael the effect he was looking for. Michael tried using the words of “Who’s That Woman?” slowed down to fit the music of “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” That seemed to work. An entirely new Prologue struck some in the company as a bit mad, but Michael was focused—there were only a few days left in Boston to make changes.

Everyone knew this was the crunch week. The adventure of being out of town was wearing thin, and everyone longed to be home. Hal had expected this, so he threw a party for the company following the performance on Tuesday night. He announced we would “keep it sloppy—some drink and food and entertainment—but know that we all have a matinee on Wednesday.”

Monday’s performance had gone uneventfully, but Hal wanted to tinker with “I’m Here.” He had plugged it roughly into the staging for “Fox Trot” and now he was having second thoughts. Was it right for Yvonne to stand surrounded by partygoers on one of the stage-left units as it rolled downstage? Would she sing this new song to the same group that had been interested in “Fox Trot”? He was wondering whether the new song demanded a less showy staging and suggested she just come downstage, but he wasn’t sure whether that would solve the problem. He tried cutting her opening monologue so she would just start by singing. That didn’t work so he left it alone. He agreed to think about the staging, saying that he’d leave it alone for a day or so. Steve decided to change the title of the song from “I’m Here” to “I’m Still Here.”

The pre-party performance was fine. Afterward, everyone headed over to the Statler Hilton. The room had a sunken dance floor with a small stage area at one end. A piano and microphone stood waiting for any impromptu performance. The open bar was well attended all night, and tables sorted themselves out in the usual groupings. I sat with Alexis, Craig Stevens, Suzanne Rogers, Michael Misita, Larry Cohen, and the entire entourage of hair and makeup: Ted Azar, Charles La France, Michael Gottfried, and Joe Tubens (in red hot pants). For some reason I never quite understood, Tubens and Alexis had struck up a friendship that would continue through the run of the show. Ruthie, who had obviously done the planning, urged me to play the piano. I don’t know who had told her I played, and although I wasn’t very good, I felt the path of least resistance was simply to sit down and get it over with, so I played through a couple of the short piano pieces I remembered from grade school. Dorothy came over, followed by Ethel Barrymore Colt, both surprised to see that I could play. And as soon as I could, I left the keyboard to others. When it seemed that everyone was finally present, Hal called for attention, pointed to the food, and quoted a Dimitri Weismann line from the show: “Are there any hungry actors in the house?” It was a nice gesture for an exhausted company that needed a little fun. Alexis regaled our table with stories about Ann Miller and other Hollywood dames, assuming the role of hostess with delight. After a fair amount of eating and drinking, various members of the company were coaxed to the microphone. Some needed no coaxing. Mary McCarty did a brief nightclub routine that went over pretty well, and Ethel Shutta brought down the house with some old dirty songs. Fifi was unusually quiet, choosing not to perform. Elaine Stritch was visiting from New York, and after several people had made their way to the mike, shouts of “Elaine! Elaine!” were heard. She finally agreed, reluctantly, and grabbed Steve Sondheim to accompany her. After making a few jokes at Hal’s expense—“He never likes to rehearse, you know”—she started singing some old nightclub number of little consequence whose lyrics she warned us she’d never be able to remember. Sure enough, she forgot some, but Steve calmly threw her the words. This was exactly the sort of situation Steve had said was an inspiration for “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” All in all, it was a very happy, lighthearted evening.