Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (40 page)

Dick Jones arrived for the matinee. He was the producer of the cast album, which was to be recorded on the Sunday after the opening in New York. He would stay for the rest of the run in Boston to see the show several times, take timings, and plan the recording. For him, the matinee was “to see the show for emotion’s sake.” Since he was an old family friend, he invited me to dinner between shows at the Ritz, where he was staying.

His observations were interesting. “You really have quite a show there,” he started, “as much of a theatrical experience as
Cabaret.”
He said he could tell that a lot of research had gone into the showgirl costumes; he thought he recognized some as exact copies of Ziegfeld originals. A lot of the show hit home with him, since it reflected the period he grew up in. He loved the opening image. He thought the score was remarkably good. He then went on to detail some of his concerns. He didn’t like “One More Kiss”; he thought it was the one song that added nothing to the plot, and he felt that having it come right before “Could I Leave You?” was a mistake, since that put two songs in three-quarter time back to back. He found Ben’s line “I haven’t cried since childhood” too stiff, even for Ben. “People just don’t talk like that,” he said. He had already come up with an idea for the end of the album—a bit of the cacophony dissolving away to Phyllis saying, “Ben, I’m here.” He was still upset about Capitol’s decision to force it on to one LP, worried about what would have to be cut, and hopeful that his bosses might still change their collective minds, but he wasn’t optimistic. The album jacket was already designed—the Byrd poster, the top half on the front of the album and the bottom half on the back. It would not be a gatefold-opening album—again, a decision from the marketing department—but would include a six-page insert with photographs and production notes. (The insert ended up a mere single folded sheet.)

Follies
would be Jones’s last cast album before retiring. For decades he had been the senior cast-album producer for Capitol, and as such had made many much-loved albums of musicals of the 1950s and sixties:
The Music Man, No Strings, Funny Girl, Fiorello!
among others. For Hal Prince, he had made
Forum
and
Zorbá.
He was erudite and elegant, and he had great stories to tell. One of the early experiences he often spoke of was teaching the score
of Porgy and Bess
to the Harlem instrumentalists Gershwin had hired for the original band, none of whom could read music. He was most eager to meet the company, and asked if I would make the introductions. A student of musical theater history, he wondered whether Justine Johnston could possibly be the same actress who had appeared in Jerome Kern’s
Oh, Boy
in 1917 (the answer was no—that was an actress named Justine Johnstone); and he was looking forward to meeting Michael Bartlett and Ethel Shutta, both of whose work he had admired through the years.

The company was ready to get home. Morale was sagging. Boston audiences were generally positive about the show, but most every performance had its naysayers—and it would be those people whose comments would sting, and whose comments would end up being passed around the company. Harvey Evans described being out of town with Sondheim’s innovative
Anyone Can Whistle,
when everyone kept saying, “They’re not getting it here, but wait until we get to New York. This is really a New York show.” It came to New York and ran for nine performances. There was also a general flop feeling going around Boston:
Prettybelle
was on the way out as
Follies
pulled into town; then it died, and now
Lolita, My Love
was coming to the same theater, having already closed in Philadelphia and gone back into rehearsal. Word was bad on that one as well. As
Follies
was assured of a New York opening, some members of the company were joking that they should consider themselves lucky because it looked as if their show would at least get out of town alive. (
Lolita, My Love
closed forever four days after opening in Boston.)

The dancers were starting to get testy about “Lucy and Jessie.” It was going in tonight, and no one felt prepared. Alexis was especially nervous—she had a lot of tongue-twisting lyrics to spit out in addition to having to adjust to a new dance that was similar to the old, yet different. She had performed “Uptown, Downtown” for the last time the night before, and was feeling under-rehearsed and tense. Dick Latessa mentioned that the dancers would look great in white gloves to go with their red tailcoats. The idea took hold, so I was given fifty bucks and sent out to two local department stores, Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, to find gloves.

Michael had the stage most of the afternoon for “Lucy and Jessie” and the new Prologue. He was determined to put the Prologue in for the final performance in Boston on Saturday night, and that meant a lot more work—and fast. John Berkman was keeping up with him, helping him find places to insert as many of the cut songs as possible. Michael liked them—to him they were new—and loved their ghostlike atmosphere. He had already taken “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” and was now working with “That Old Piano Roll,” and “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” now a reject. Some of the songs still in the show—like “Broadway Baby” and “Rain on the Roof”—would be used as well.

Hal was working with Yvonne in the men’s lounge on “I’m Still Here.” He was determined to make it work even better; he wanted to place it in its own unique time frame, not quite in the present, not quite in the past. Yvonne was somewhat freaked out about having to try different staging, and the more she and Hal went over it, the more worried she became. She started to sing lyrics wrong and, at one point, she just went totally blank. She couldn’t remember anything. A five-minute break was called, and she pulled herself together. Dorothy, who had become something of a confidante, was very worried about Yvonne, who, she felt, was more fragile than people realized. At the end of the afternoon, as Dorothy left to go back to the hotel, she took me aside and said that I should call her if I thought Yvonne needed a pal.

Gingerly Hal put Yvonne through her paces on the stage. The new staging went like this: She begins the song sitting on the platform, which is already in place instead of traveling down with her on it. Partygoers, mostly men, surround her. She starts almost conversationally, aiming it at the people around her, but not looking at them. Then on the line “I met a big financier, and I’m here” she stands up and comes slightly downstage. She wanders around a bit, as the partygoers, many of whom have been sitting, rise and follow her downstage, their attention still fixed on her. The lights then fade slowly on them, and they begin to wander into the shadows. By the time she gets to “I’ve been through Reno, I’ve been through Beverly Hills,” it has practically become a soliloquy to the audience. By the end of the song, she will be standing alone, isolated in three follow spots, from the front and both sides. Hal knew he would be giving the song emotional depth by shaping it into a real solo moment for the character of Carlotta, who could now make a direct connection with the audience. He was excited; Yvonne was nervous. Hal insisted on trying out the new staging that night.

Michael gathered the Montage group, whose performances had become quite peculiar, and he told them: “I saw the show last night, and I did not like it one bit. I will try to be nice in the way I say this, but I may not be able to.” He then laced into them all—Fifi for her constantly fluttering hands, Charles and Marcie for never being able to sing on key, and Ethel for all the shtick she’d added, including a ferocious stomping ending. I sensed that as so much attention was being paid to others over the past couple of weeks, these actors had begun to feel neglected. They were terrified of Michael, and slightly resentful of his harshness, but they listened carefully and promised to make the corrections. As Ethel was leaving the stage, she remarked to me in a strangely offhand way that her son had called to say that his father, George Olsen, had died. “My ex passed away,” she said and kept walking.

There was an orchestra call before the performance for “Lucy and Jessie.” The orchestration was jazzy and very cool. Everyone liked it. The dancers came out onstage to listen, and even they smiled. There were a few errors found in the orchestral parts—this one had been done in record time—and they were quickly corrected by Mathilde or Jonathan. Because the adjustments made to “The Right Girl” had sounded unsteady earlier in the week, that orchestration was played as well for safety’s sake.

With nerves at fever pitch, the performance at night was flawless, and brilliant. The new staging of “I’m Still Here” was a great improvement, and the audience appreciated it more than ever. There were bravos and cheers in the middle of “Lucy and Jessie” and a roar at the end. Everything played well, and at the curtain call Alexis hugged Yvonne and said, “Well, we both got through!” She had long kept her distance from Yvonne, and this was a nice moment of rapprochement.

Steve continued to tinker, mostly with the lyrics. Today’s changes were for “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” He focused on the middle section, first making a cut and then changing the style of a lyric. The cut was four lines about remembering the old stage doorman, Max, and it was clean; nothing was lost. The real change came in a section sung by Ben and Buddy. Originally written to be sung by Buddy alone, every other line had been assigned to Ben when he was added to the song:

It had been staged with them running back and forth and up the steps, as if reenacting the moments they were describing. That made the lyrics hard to understand. So Steve simplified it and gave each guy three lines, with the final three sung together:

Once again, Sondheim was solving a problem in an inventive way. While the norm is to turn description into action, here the problem was solved by doing precisely the reverse. The action had gotten in the way of clarity, and in changing the lines of lyric into description of what happened, the focus of the song was helped. The puzzle man also created a perfect ABC/ABC/ABC rhyme scheme. Of course, the actors were in a mild panic, having to learn something new and put it in the show that night. Gene was operatic in his concern, but time was wasting. If a change didn’t get tried in Boston, it would have to wait through the technical days in New York before being performed in front of an audience.

These weren’t the only lyrics that Steve was sharpening. He clarified several of the images in “I’m Still Here” and, in one instance, fixed a lyric that was hard to sing, two words together each beginning with “thr—,” into something more singable, and then into something just plain better. Originally:

Then to:

And finally:

He also made small cuts in “Love Will See Us Through” and “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow.” Maybe this is how the rumors got started about these being cut entirely, but only internal edits were made. Still, the Young Four suspected the worst and were visibly on edge.

It was Michael’s dream for the new Prologue to go in tonight, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was coming together nicely, and everyone was beginning to recognize that it would be a big help in starting the show on the right foot—but it was too good to rush. Still, Michael was determined to see it in front of an audience before New York, and Saturday evening would be the last performance in Boston.

I was dispatched to buy more white gloves. The idea had caught on, but the dancers, who already had quick changes into and out of their red tailcoats, were worried. They didn’t want to have to think of one more thing. And, as Alexis pointed out as she and I were leaving the theater together, “Do they realize what claps sound like with gloves?” She had a good point: the dance section of “Lucy and Jessie” involved lots of hand-clapping. It didn’t look as if anyone had thought of that. Two dancers were also being added to the number—Victoria Mallory and Jayne Turner—in order to make the stage seem completely full. Gloves
were
worn for “Lucy and Jessie,” and,
yes,
the claps sounded muffled. By “Live, Laugh, Love” the gloves were gone, never to be seen again.

The four principals were still wearing their street clothes for the Follies. Dorothy, ever the team player, who had spent so much time bucking everyone else up, had finally had it and went to Hal to complain. “As a girl I just want to feel pretty once in the evening. I don’t want to sing my song in that frumpy dress, especially with staging that was conceived for my slinky dress. Please don’t make me do it anymore.” Most everyone on the production kept silent, because it seemed so blatantly clear that having the stars of a musical wear dull clothes for their big production numbers was insane, whatever the conceptual justification. Whether it was Dorothy who won the day, or whether it was just plain good sense, they went back into their Follies costumes. The relief backstage was palpable.

When the curtain rose for “Lucy and Jessie,” the silver fountain drops were missing. It turned out they had been taken down and were leaning up against the back wall, waiting to be loaded into the first truck of scenery headed to New York. The load-in at the Winter Garden was scheduled to begin at three P.M. on Sunday, and the idea was to fill a first truck on Friday night with every extraneous costume, prop, and piece of scenery that could be done without for the final two performances on Saturday. That truck could be ready for unloading as soon as the New York call began. Obviously, most of the scenery, lights, and costumes couldn’t be loaded until after the final performance, but this was getting a leg up on the load-out. The audience didn’t know any better.

Carl Fisher and his wife, Joan, came up from New York, bringing with them some new waiters’ costumes for the improved Prologue. Carl had been holding down the fort at the Prince office in New York. He said the advance sale in New York had started with a bang but was now reduced to a whimper. “Maybe,” he suggested, “we’ve exhausted the Boston word of mouth.” He reiterated that the Boston gross in the final week would not quite reach the $100,000 goal Hal had hoped to achieve. He also explained the story about the large billboard at the Winter Garden, the one that Hal still didn’t want to rent but which Ruthie and others felt would be great. Hal was still balking at the initial cost of $3,000 and the $250 per month maintenance. What Ruthie and the others knew, of course, was that a show in the Winter Garden without the billboard looks like a flop that knows it won’t be staying long. Hal realized he was stuck. He had to use it, so a design and plans for installation were proceeding.

The performance was sluggish, and afterward there was a one-hour overtime rehearsal for the Prologue. John Berkman was late, so Steve played the piano, doing the best he could since he didn’t know how his songs had been arranged for the choreography. Justine Johnston, Equity deputy, was the first one out of her costume and down for rehearsal, determined to keep a close watch on the clock. One hour of overtime was going to mean sixty minutes and no more.