Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (47 page)

The show continued to generate an amazing amount of publicity. The cover story in
Time
appeared in the May 3rd issue. In addition to a lengthy feature on the show, it also included a mini-feature, “Sondheim on Songwriting,” in which he responded to several specific subjects—for example, “On Rhyming: Clever rhyming is easy . . . Hammerstein said that the really difficult word to rhyme is a word like day, because the possibilities are so enormous” and “On Lorenz Hart: I find him sloppy all the time,” “On Lyrics and Poetry: Poetry exists in its conciseness . . . lyrics exist in time.” Louis Botto’s article on Hal appeared in the May 18th issue of
Look
, with several wonderful color photos, including a two-pager of Hal sitting on the steps of the Colonial Theatre surrounded by the showgirls in their most elaborate costumes.
Show
magazine ran its cover story in July, and a new Avedon photograph of Alexis and some of the showgirls appeared in
Life
. In February of 1972,
Forbes
ran a cover story on Hal; the magazine’s cover showed Hal’s face imposed on the
Follies
poster, with his expression the same as the face on the poster.
Theatre Crafts
did an article on the costumes in its May/June issue;
Stereo Review
featured Steve in July; and
After Dark
sent Craig Zadan to interview Steve for its June issue.

Also in June, David Frost devoted the entirety of his ninety-minute TV talk show to
Follies.
This was rare, and in addition to the five principals, Frost invited Steve, Hal, and Jim Goldman. The program provided some amusing moments, including John McMartin’s witty and understated comments about how he got into the show: “I went out to California last year because I wanted to work in films, and when I arrived, the various studios went bankrupt. So I spent most of the year practicing driving to the airport. Then in December I got the call to come back east to audition for three shows. I got on the plane, I auditioned, they wanted me, and here I am.” Yvonne spoke about having auditioned for the role of Phyllis, and of receiving a very sweet note from Hal saying that it wasn’t going to work out, and then getting a call from her agent about “another part in there that would be very suitable.” She then sang “I’m Still Here”—and, no surprise, she went up on the lyrics. Then, to give some sense of how Yvonne’s Carlotta (and the show in general) evolved, Steve played “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Alexis giggled when clips from her movies were shown, and both she and Gene spoke convincingly of the excitement of coming east for this particular adventure. Dorothy just kept saying how thrilling the experience was for her and how much admiration she had for everyone connected with the show. Hal and Jim were asked to describe the complex genesis of the show. All in all, it was fun, lively television—and the kind of publicity that everyone on Broadway craves.

The
New York Times
ultimately acknowledged that the show was controversial.
Follies
had a champion in culture editor Seymour Peck, who continued to encourage various articles, both pro and con. Three weeks after the opening, a rave review by Martin Gottfried titled “Flipping over ‘Follies’” ran on the first page of the Sunday Arts & Leisure Section. He said: “I am convinced
Follies
is monumental theater . . . if it is not consistently good, it is always great.” Having received many letters in response to their double-whammy in-house negative reviews, the paper devoted the entire Drama Mailbag on May 2 to the controversy surrounding the show. Labeled “Feudin’, Fussin’ and ‘Follies,’ ” it led with an eloquent letter from historian and author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in which he complained about New York’s newspaper of record having an Englishman wielding so much power over several recent shows that were not to his taste:

Immediately following, Barnes responded, “Should only homosexuals review homosexual plays? . . . An immigrant to any country must expect one or two ethnic slurs. It is only surprising when they come from the man who occupies the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities of the City University of New York.”

Other letter writers included two actors who came to the show’s defense—Jerry Orbach: “Clive Barnes has been wrong a few times in the past, but in the matter of ‘Follies’ he is criminally mistaken”; and Remak Ramsay: “Barnes completely missed the basically idealistic and optimistic point of the show: namely, that despite whatever difficulties there may be in any deep relationship, we all risk losing our membership in the human race if we fail to make an emotional commitment to somebody.” Two other letter writers spoke out against the
Times
men—Tom Couto: “While Kerr saw some of the trees, he never managed to see the forest”; and Geraldine Stutz: “That your critics—alone—failed to hail ’Follies’ with hosannas is sad and significant for the
Times.
But that they did not even recognize the monumental breakthrough for the musical theater, I find appalling. Where are their eyes and their ears—and their expertise?” They did find one person who sided with their men: Allen Churchill, who wrote, “Hal Prince chanted, ‘send him back to England.’ ‘Follies’ is one of the dreariest and least rewarding shows I have seen in a lifetime of theatergoing. It is a fraud perpetrated on the public.”

Follies
had arrived. It was being talked about and written about, and it was highly visible. The Tony Awards weren’t going to come around for another year, but it did get recognized by some lesser panels. As soon as it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award later on in the spring, Hal had the words “BEST MUSICAL” painted on the marquee below the title.

 

 

T
he recording of the
Follies
cast album was my final official project as gofer. It took place at Manhattan Center, an odd building on West Thirty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, built as an opera house at the turn of the last century by Oscar Hammerstein I. His goal was to produce opera competitively and put the Metropolitan Opera Company out of business. This was in 1903, and his plan failed, although he did scare the Met sufficiently for them to pay him a significant sum of money not to produce opera in New York for a specified period of years. On the seventh floor of his building, Hammerstein built a stately ballroom with a fully equipped stage at one end. The acoustics in the room were quite good, and in the 1960s and seventies it was used by a variety of recording companies to record albums involving large forces—full orchestras, choruses, and so on. It was used for recordings of operas, and Capitol often used it for cast albums. (Capitol’s corporate home was its famous round building in Hollywood; all it kept in New York were some offices on Sixth Avenue and a small studio on West Forty-sixth Street, in the same building that housed Eaves Costume Company.) This was still the era when companies boasted unique recording technologies and sound qualities all their own—“Stereo 360” from Columbia Records, “Dynagroove” from RCA Victor. Capitol, however, professed no such proprietary innovations, and when they used Manhattan Center for recording, they simply hired whatever mobile recording equipment a given session called for. Such was the case with the
Follies
cast album.

Every song used in the recording had been subjected to internal cuts, and most musical transitions were cut entirely. Because the entire album had to be recorded in one day, the company’s day off (for which cast members were paid one week’s salary), the schedule was carefully designed so that no one had to spend extraneous time in the studio. (The orchestra, of course, was there for all four three-hour sessions.) A certain amount of time was carefully allocated to each number, and once that time expired, they had to be “on to the next.” Otherwise, the domino effect took place and the day could conceivably end with a song not being recorded. There was, moreover, one song that Dick Jones didn’t want to include on the album but which Steve Sondheim most definitely did. The song was “One More Kiss,” and the compromise was that if there was time, it would be recorded, even if Jones couldn’t promise it would end up on the album. (It did get recorded but didn’t make its way onto the album until the CD reissue years later.)

The cast handled things well. Dorothy seemed to be the most comfortable, perhaps because the recording studio was where she was most at home. Everyone had special lyric sheets that indicated how the truncated versions of each song would go. This was slightly unnerving for some, but for the most part they were troupers.

What wasn’t any fun was the technical end. One problem was that a large coatroom just off the elevator lobby served as the control room, and it had no visible connection to the main floor, where the orchestra and singers were located. There was sound communication, but because the engineers couldn’t see the performers, the control room might as well have been blocks away. Although recording engineer Andy Wiswell and the Capitol recording staff had what should have been enough time to set up, the session was plagued with technical glitches. For example, I was standing in the makeshift control room during a take of “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” when suddenly a buzzing sound could be heard on every other beat. It seemed to come from the bass, so the take was stopped, and before it could continue one of the guys had to run out onto the floor, check the connections to the microphone next to the bass, then run back into the control room and try it again to see if that fixed the problem. It hadn’t. Suddenly the wires and the microphones were taking up precious time that should have been spent laying down performances. Problems continuously arose throughout the day—some microphones weren’t turned on when people began to sing, sometimes the actors were standing too far from the microphones. Jones had no choice but to forge ahead as best he could.

When the album came out, it looked great: the cover was well printed, although they opted for the whole poster on the front; the insert had nice photographs and Larry Cohen’s excellent notes. But the technical problems were clear from the first release. There was a lot of unhappiness over the songs being abridged, and the fans were down on the album from the very beginning. In
The Harvard Crimson, John
Viertel, a classmate and friend of Frank Rich’s, wrote, “The production of the album has taken the fire out of
Follies.
No care has been taken to allow the riches to surface. The album is a commercial venture in the worst sense of the phrase.” He then quoted a line from “Lucy and Jessie”: “In Sondheim’s own words, ‘It is a sorrowful precis, It’s very messy.’ ” It does capture the performances of the original cast, but the technical shortcomings have, to this day, made the original-cast album
of Follies
a disappointment.

 

 

P
ublicity kept coming. Stars attending performances were chronicled in the gossip columns, as were the whereabouts of the leading actors. There were further articles about the performers. Fifi, resolved to doing her bit for what looked like a hit show, gave an interview in which she was quoted as saying, “Hal Prince is going to heaven, whether he likes it or not. Can you eemagine, geeving me a break on Broadway? I’m 67 and I make my Broadway debut!” Dorothy was followed backstage during a performance for a profile in the
Daily News Sunday Magazine:
“Racing around backstage as usual, she shouts ‘happy show!’ to every performer in the general vicinity. . . .” Alexis avoided the press when she could, but was frank—about herself—when she was corralled into giving interviews. From one: “In Hollywood I always got the roles I didn’t want, the ones everyone else turned down. They would start at the top of the list—first Bette Davis, then Ida Lupino, then Ann Sheridan. If they didn’t want it, I got it.” Even some members of the chorus got press attention. Ursula Maschmeyer, the tallest of the Las Vegas showgirls, lamented that “there are no stage-door Johnnies on Broadway. It’s very boring every night, like a walking coat hanger putting on glamorous clothes and trying to look glamorous.” Ethel Barrymore Colt gave an interview in which she described being the daughter of Ethel Barrymore, recognized as the first lady of the American Theater: “When I started in theater I was eighteen, straight from the convent, with no dramatic training, and I was a dreadful failure. Then I became a singer—at least no one could say I didn’t sing as well as my mother!”