You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (30 page)

Fuller continued, “I think that was in the morning. Anyway, a few hours later, when Cy had done this, I again happened to be standing with Hal when Cy came out of the rehearsal room and came over to us, and Hal said, ‘Well, how did she do?’ And Cy said, ‘She won’t sing above a G.’ And Hal said, ‘What do you mean? I thought they hired her—we hired her—because she could sing high Cs whenever needed.’ And he said, ‘Well, she can, but she’s afraid she can’t do that eight times a week.’”
17

Eventually, Fuller recalled, a compromise was reached. “There were maybe three numbers where she had to sing the high C. They made alternate endings to each one of those numbers, so if she didn’t feel vocally strong enough that day, she would do the lower note.”
18

It was the beginning of what Cullum called a “fraught time” as all of the creators, from Prince to Coleman to Comden and Green, struggled to hone the show, in particular the sections that illuminated the backstory of Oscar and Lily’s relationship.

When the show went into rehearsal, Comden and Green’s book included a series of flashbacks to Oscar and Lily’s earliest days together, first as her theatrical star was rising and then the moment when she broke off with him. It came after she discovered that he was being unfaithful to her while she was touring in a production. For this section of the show, Coleman had written “Oscar Jaffee,” a song that brings to mind the burlesque revelries featured during a birthday celebration for Orson Welles’s character in his film
Citizen Kane
.

By the time the show reached Boston, these scenes, which moved back and forth between the action on the train, had been integrated into one extended sequence that took theatergoers through Lily and Oscar’s stormy relationship. In the revision, Oscar wasn’t unfaithful; rather, he deliberately undermined her in front of other producers as she was attempting to secure a role in a new play by Eugene O’Neill.

For this section the songwriters devised a new song, “This Is the Day,” a Rudolf Friml–like aria in which Lily expressed her delight about the new prospects on her professional horizons. Coleman even wrote a small snippet of recitative for Lily and Agnes that harked back to the sorts of exchanges between maid and mistress in such operas as
The Barber of Seville
.

During the course of rehearsals, Prince took out two other numbers. One, “Lucky Lily,” preceded the flashbacks to Oscar and Lily’s personal life, and the other was a comedy piece for Oscar’s aides-de-camp, “Show Biz Is the Lowest Biz There Is.” He also had Coleman, Comden, and Green write one more new song, “Mine,” which gave Oscar and Bruce a chance to preen in front of mirrors in two adjoining compartments on the train.

Prince recalled Coleman during rehearsals, saying, “I knew that he was more site specific than anyone I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of people,” adding, “When I direct, I do not let the authors come to the rehearsal. They come after I’ve put stuff on the stage. It’s very difficult for authors to understand that, but I’m at a point—well, I have been for a long time—where I say, ‘Let me do it. You come in in the afternoon and see it, and if I didn’t do it right, I’ll do it right the next day, but I can’t have you sitting at my elbow.’ That was hard for Cy, really hard. And I knew it. But he’s the only one it’s ever been hard for in all of my experience, including Lenny [Bernstein].”
19

In looking back on his work with Coleman, Prince also said, “[Cy] was fun to work with. So knowledgeable about music. I’m not. I’m knowledgeable about theater. . . . He really knew everything there was to know about orchestrations and all of it. He was taking more responsibility than anyone I’d ever collaborated with before, including Sondheim or Bernstein really. Bernstein, no, I guess not. I don’t know, because Lenny wrote a show and then just kind of went away and then came back once in a while. Cy was there all the time.”
20

Coleman might not always have been able to be at Prince’s side while the director was staging the piece, but his involvement in the show was palpable, particularly for Kaye: “I really got to know Cy in the rehearsal process. Madeline, I don’t know if she didn’t like to rehearse or if she was afraid. Something was going on that I really couldn’t tell. But I wound up being asked to sing a lot of stuff during the rehearsal process, and I had a couple of private work sessions with Cy, and it was like a match made in heaven. It was so much fun. It was just me going over to his office and working on music.”
21

Fuller remembered how he, too, worked with Kaye during rehearsals. “I would stage a number with Judy and the men, and when I had it more or less set, then I would teach Madeline separately, so that she didn’t have to learn in front of anyone.”
22

With the rewrites that were happening and because of his work with Kahn and Kaye, Coleman didn’t have as much time to spend with leading man Cullum, a fact that the actor regretted, particularly because he had gotten to work closely with the composer before rehearsals began.

Cullum had one particular memory of a meeting that took place in Coleman’s apartment: “We discussed what would be the pleasant and convenient and doable notes that I could use in songs that he was going to have me sing, and I remember him saying, ‘What are you comfortable with on a high note?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can hit an F-sharp, but I’m better off with an F.’ And he said, ‘No. What is your real comfort level?’ And I said, ‘Well, an E. I can sing that very well, and that’s a good high note for me.’ And he said, ‘No, what are you really comfortable with?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can sing an E-flat all night long.’ And so that was what he put into his brain, and I remember in certain songs, for instance, in ‘The Sextet,’ where I had about thirty-two E-flats all in a row.”
23

Similarly, Coleman crafted “Mine” for Cullum’s and Kline’s voices. Kline recalled that before the number was added, “They called me in during the second week of rehearsals and asked me to sing scales for them.”
24

Cullum said that ultimately “I didn’t have that much to do with Cy during rehearsals, because there were so many other problems.” What’s interesting is that while he was aware that the show was going through a rough rehearsal period, he was not aware of specific difficulties with Kahn until the company was about to leave for Boston and Prince came to him to talk about her. “When Hal came to me and said that there might be a problem, it was the first time I knew it. And it was the last week of rehearsal in New York, and I said, ‘Madeline Kahn is my leading lady. You are not going to get me to say anything against my leading lady, because I love her and I love what she does and I’m just not going to run her down.’”
25

Whatever problems Kahn might have been having during rehearsals, either personal or professional, did not stop her from putting on a brave face for the press as the show neared its tryout run at Boston’s Colonial Theatre. In mid-December 1977 she told
Boston Globe
reporter and critic Kevin Kelly, “My real dream’s at hand, a big Broadway show, a really big Broadway show, ‘Twentieth Century.’” Yet she did admit to him that she had concerns about being back onstage. “I know when I step out on that stage on opening night that I’m there to be judged, and that, truly, is what I detest.”
26

It wasn’t only Kahn who was worried about the critics. Prince was too, because, as he remembered, “She could not sustain a performance night after night. She was used to doing Mel Brooks movies. She’s hilariously funny. She had a nice operatic sound, but she tired easily. . . . I could not get a consistent performance out of her.”
27

Boston critics noticed something was wrong when the show opened on January 11. Kevin Kelly wrote in the
Boston Globe
, “Madeline Kahn is still outside Lily Garland, edgy in the first act, oddly restrained in the second.” Beyond concerns about the performance, reviewers cited the extended flashback sequence as one of the show’s most problematic points.

But, there was praise too, particularly for Coleman’s score. Kelly might have felt that there was too much of it, but he called it “wry, precise, comically apt, and/or romantically appealing,” and a January 18
Variety
review called the score “suitably bouncy, matching the literate, amusing lyrics by Comden and Green.”

In the days that followed the opening, Prince began to further refine the show, and when it came time to tackle the section that dealt with Lily and Oscar’s early days together, he took a draconian measure. After spending a day working on the scene, Cullum remembered that “the next day Hal . . . cut the entire scene, taking out a whole major set and leaving a big void in the play.” The excision meant that the show might have lost one of Coleman’s most lush ballads, “Our Private World,” but Coleman, Comden, and Green managed to revise the book so that it was sung “not really as a duet, but rather as Oscar singing to himself and Lily singing to herself,” said Cullum, who added, “Thank God Cy put that together and we were able to integrate it into the train scene. It was done in the compartment. It’s one of the loveliest moments in the play as far as I’m concerned, and I was afraid we were going to lose it.”
28

Not only did they not lose this number, but the show gained “Life Is Like a Train,” a song for four Pullman porters that served as a coda to the first-act finale in Boston and came to open the second act in New York. Coleman also significantly extended Kahn’s act 2 musical soliloquy, “Babbette.” As originally written, the song served to illustrate how torn Lily was between taking the role Oscar was offering, Mary Magdalene, and an offer to star in a stock drawing-room comedy that had come from another producer. With Coleman’s addition of a mock British jazz extension, the song also came to solidly demonstrate that Lily chose the latter.

Fuller remembered that the book and music changes were driving Kahn “crazy,” adding, “I was surprised at how resistant she was to doing new material with hardly any rehearsal, since she came from the stage and Broadway and that’s the way they did it in those days, especially when they’d say ‘That doesn’t work? Well [makes the sound of murmured rewriting], here, do this now.’”
29

Still, Coleman found ways to make the revisions fun. Wagner recalled how Coleman had mused about wanting some sort of special effect in the overture. It wasn’t long after, according to Wagner, that “[Cy] brought in a train bell, and suddenly a train bell was coming out of the pit. And the next thing, we had fire extinguishers firing behind the wheels.”
30

With the book streamlined and the score revised, the production shifted back to New York and Broadway’s St. James Theatre, where, according to Cullum, it was during “the last four previews in New York, on a Thursday, [that] the show worked. And it only worked, not because of the performers, but because the set worked. The set finally worked. And when that worked, the show worked.”
31

When opening night arrived on February 19, Kahn gave the performance Prince had been hoping for. “I rushed up to her dressing room, and I said, ‘You finally gave me the performance I want! Thank god you did it!’ And she looked in her mirror, in the dressing room, and she said, ‘I hope you don’t think I can do that every night.’ And my heart sank, and I thought, ‘We are in terrible trouble.’”
32

Most critics had not seen the opening-night performance but rather the press previews that were given just before the official opening. Regardless, the notices that appeared on February 20 praised Kahn highly. In the
New York Daily News
Douglas Watt described her work as “lovely and spirited,” and in the
New York Post
Clive Barnes called her performance “marvelous”: “She is a consummate performer who can always do too much with taste, and skillfully vary it as too little with energy. A mystery encrusted with realism.”

Additionally, Coleman received some of the strongest notices of his career. In his
New York Times
review Richard Eder wrote admiringly: “There are grandiloquent and amusing suggestions of everything from Tchaikovsky through Puccini and Friml and up through Kurt Weill. Mr. Coleman is witty and inventive, and though much of his energy is spent in serving the comic-theatrical mood of the production, a number of the songs stand beautifully on their own. The title song, with its eight-note motif like a trumpet flourish and its exuberant chorus, is one of the best.”

Similarly, in his February 21 review for
Women’s Wear Daily
Howard Kissel wrote: “The title song is less a song than a fragment, which makes it easier to remember. It is so infectiously harmonized that you can’t wait for it to come back and you can’t help singing it as you leave the theater. Apart from its bright period charm, the strength of Coleman’s score is its tongue-in-cheek formality, its bravura, which is very much in the style of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play.”

Not all of Coleman’s reviews were so glowing. In
Newsday
Allan Wallach complained, “Many of the songs seem to be mock-operetta numbers that make you wonder just what they’re mocking.” There were also reservations about the book. “Miss Comden and Mr. Green are not writing at the top of their form,” said Edwin Wilson in his February 22
Wall Street Journal
review.

These and similar criticisms may have contributed to a curious ambivalence expressed in many of the reviews, and most explicitly in
Newsday
. “‘On the Twentieth Century’ . . . blends old and new with Broadway professionalism, yet the show never achieves that magical fusion of laughter, story and songs that a truly satisfying musical comedy needs.”

One aspect of the show that received unanimous raves was Wagner’s scenic design. In the
Daily News
Douglas Watt wrote that it was “an ingeniously versatile Art Deco setting . . . that practically cheers itself.” Wagner’s work was so notable, in fact, that it ended up spawning features, such as one in the March 12
New York Times
that was emblazoned with the headline “On Broadway, the Spectacle’s the Thing.” In it Leticia Kent not only reported the cost for the set—$196,500 (about $750,000 in 2014 dollars)—but also described how theatergoers “clap for it as if for a star.”