You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (32 page)

Also above the show title was Mike Kellin, who had proven that he could handle both musicals and dramas on Broadway with credits ranging from the sweetly simple Hazel in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Pipe Dream
to Dribble in the original Broadway staging of Eugene Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros
. He shifted from Broadway to Hollywood in the 1960s and since that time had, like Shawn, become a familiar face from roles on television and the big screen.

Alongside these three men was an impressive trio of Broadway vets, including Lisa Kirk, who was Broadway’s original Lois Lane/Bianca in
Kiss Me, Kate
in 1948 and who more recently had been featured in Jerry Herman’s
Mack and Mabel
. The show also boasted Teri Ralston, a veteran of Sondheim’s
Company
and
A Little Night Music
, and character actor Rex Everhart, whose credits included
Tenderloin
,
Skyscraper
,
How Now, Dow Jones
, and
1776
.

Home Again
began rehearsals in January 1979 in anticipation of a single week’s tryout in Connecticut in early March and a lengthier one that would follow in Toronto. The show was scheduled to arrive at Broadway’s Mark Hellinger Theatre for a first preview of April 19 before an April 26 opening.

By this point both the book and the score had undergone significant alterations. It still was charting TJ’s life through fifty years of the twentieth century, but it had become slightly more traditional, giving TJ a concrete aim through life.
Home Again
was now charting how he attempted to make it through life as a good guy, only to find himself thwarted at almost every turn, either by characters played by Shawn or by the pair of seemingly ageless gangsters (played by Kellin and Everhart). With this revision, the show began to resemble Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical
Allegro
.

Beyond the two gangsters, another new role had been added: that of Helen’s free-spirited mother, Andrea, the role assumed by Lisa Kirk. It was a part that was created, as Fried recalled, “[because] Cy insisted on Lisa Kirk being in the show. It was one of those things where they had been friends for years and years and years. . . . So he made Russell write that part. And we did a song for her, called ‘Traveling Together.’” Kirk also got the interpolated song “When It Comes to Lovin’,” one of Coleman and Fried’s first tunes. Fried admitted, “It’s not a good song. It doesn’t even make any sense. It was the first thing we’d done together, and I was not the writer I later became.”
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Coleman and Fried’s output prior to rehearsals was significant. In addition to the new tune for Kirk’s character, they also wrote several more traditional book songs for TJ, which required that others they had created for the show early on be cut. Among the songs that never made it to rehearsal were “Honky,” a vaudevillesque number for the Witherspoon character about his growing sense of being marginalized in society, and “Hello Again,” a bittersweet tune for TJ and Helen’s daughter as she explains her free-love philosophy.

To create the environment in which this semi-experimental tuner could unfold, the producers hired scenic designer Peter Larkin, who nearly twenty years before had designed Coleman’s first show,
Wildcat
. Larkin created a concept that ideally suited the show’s nontraditional underpinnings. Stage manager Craig Jacobs recalled, “The rule for the show was that all of the scenery had to come in in unconventional ways; so, for instance, the desks for the office scene were all bicycles, with a single wheel in the back and double wheels under the desks themselves. The young lawyers and such would ride themselves and their desks onto the stage. Same thing when you went into a restaurant in act 2; the tables were bicycles.”
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For a scene set in a Chinese restaurant, a huge dragon, of the sort used in Chinese New Year parades, was brought on with six men from the ensemble inside. Jacobs explained what happened next: “It came down to the front of the stage, and with the dragon facing the audience, the mouth opened and there [were] a table and two chairs inside of it.”
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The centerpiece of Larkin’s design was “a big fan that opened up during ‘America Is Bathed in Sunlight’ and then would be able to change colors.” In an ominous move, however, the piece was removed from the design to save money. “The budget kept getting cut . . . that was one of the first things that was cut. So we had a cyclorama in the back that was lit, but it didn’t have the same effect,” Jacobs recalled.
20

The financial difficulties were kept from the cast as they rehearsed, and by all accounts putting the show on its feet was a collegial—and sometimes fun—affair. Ensemble member D. Michael Heath looked back on the weeks leading up to the first leg of the show’s tryout fondly: “We were having a great time. You always wanted to go to work.”
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Ralston also recalled the time warmly, particularly her sessions with Coleman: “Cy taught me all my music, and the thing I remember most was his smile. He’d always be playing with this big smile.”
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The high spirits of the rehearsal process were dampened, however, once it was time for the show’s initial tryout engagement at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stamford, CT, where the first performance was cancelled after the sets failed to arrive on schedule. When the curtain did rise on
Home Again
, it ran an unwieldy three hours.

Jacobs recalled that certain sections worked beautifully, notably the “Superland,” which, he recalled, “stopped the show,”
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but overall the musical’s mixture of homespun charm and biting satire bewildered audiences. The dichotomy of tone might have had something to do with the fact that at the time of
Home Again
, Baker was also beginning to contemplate his sepia-toned memoir,
Growing Up
, about his family’s surviving the Great Depression. Looking back on the show’s development, he felt that the gestating work “surely influenced me in shaping the musical’s plot, if plot it could be called.”
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Indeed, a number of specifics that ultimately were part of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book can be found tucked throughout
Home Again
. One anecdote from Baker’s past, in fact, seems to have informed a song in the show. In
Growing Up
, Baker relates how an uncle got his first job as a reporter at a newspaper in Pittsburgh. During the interview, the editor asked, “Young man, how do I know you’re not a damned fool?,” to which Baker’s uncle replied, “That’s a chance we’ll both have to take.”
25
In
Home Again
, TJ returns from fighting in World War II and also applies for a job as a reporter, and when he’s asked why he should be hired, he replies with a similar level of moxie, proclaiming in song “I’m Your Guy.”

The combination of gently wistful and sardonic tones that were part of Baker’s book extended to the score as well, further confusing the message the show was sending to audiences. It was filled with some of Coleman’s sweetest melodies, but the lyrics with which Fried outfitted them were frequently tart.

Home Again
’s problems were exacerbated by an ill-advised marriage of director and material. “Cy decided he wanted Gene Saks,” Fried remembered, and added, “He was persuaded to be the director. He did not understand the show, in the sense that it should have been extremely impressionistic.”
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When the reviews began to appear, they ran the gamut from supportive to scathing. The March 15 review in the
Hartford Courant
fell into the former category, with Malcolm L. Johnson writing, “There is much to like in this original musical. . . . At the outset in fact, ‘Home Again’ really sings, evoking a clever collage of say, ‘The Music Man,’ ‘L’il [
sic
] Abner,’ and even ‘Oklahoma.’ Too soon, however, it becomes more like a ‘Candide’ of the American heartland—the original Lillian Hellman version, that is, which suffered from fragmentation and longeurs.”

On the dismissive side was the March 21 review in
Variety
, which began, “It’s difficult to be constructive about a show as mediocre as ‘Home Again.’ To use the old phrasing, there’s nothing wrong with the show that a new book, score, cast, direction, choreography, sets and costumes wouldn’t help.” The piece even made reference to the fact that
Home Again
“suggests an impoverished rerun of the 1947 Rodgers and Hammerstein experiment, ‘Allegro.’”

In the face of the critical and audience reaction, the creators panicked. To quickly shorten the show, Lisa Kirk’s role was eliminated. “After the fourth performance in Connecticut,” Jacobs said, “Cy came up to me during the last part of the show and said to me, ‘When you get a chance, get your script and figure out how we can cut Andrea’s part out of the show,’ which was Lisa Kirk.” Jacobs later explained to Coleman and his collaborator what removing the part would entail: cutting just two scenes and two songs. “And bingo. She was out of the show.”
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There wasn’t time during the one week of performance to do much else that was substantive in terms of integrating rewrites, but the process had begun. Coleman, never at a loss for melody, started writing new numbers to replace ones that were being cut or curtailed. Matching him was Baker, a neophyte to the tension-filled world of a musical’s out-of-town birthing pains, who worked on adjustments to the book.

According to Ralston, during the weeks that followed in Toronto, “It felt like they didn’t know what they were doing,” but, as she also pointed out, “I had done
The Baker’s Wife
, so I had been on the road in a show that was in trouble for eight months. . . . That was such a horrendous experience, I kept saying, ‘Nothing could touch that. This is a breeze. It’s okay. I can get through anything.’”
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Jacobs said that all of the changes that happened in the next few weeks stemmed from the creatives’ being “desperate,”
29
while Fried noted that some changes were made for personal reasons. She said that “Superland” (which had been landing well with audiences in Connecticut) “was taken out because Onna White, who was the choreographer, said to me, ‘I’ve done this kind of thing many times. And I don’t want everybody saying that I can only do one thing. So I want to get rid of this number.’”
30

Eventually the Toronto papers weighed in on the show, and the reaction was no better than it had been in Connecticut. In his March 21 review in the
Globe and Mail
Ray Conlogue said, “You expect with a Broadway-bound show that somebody will still be caulking the leaks, hoping even for something buoyant, but those who bet today on ‘New York Times’ columnist Russell Baker’s ‘Home Again’ would have bought tickets on the Titanic yesterday.”

In her
Toronto Star
review the same day, Gina Mallet gave the still-evolving show the benefit of the doubt, despite her dismay about the actual narrative. “I think this is what happens” was how she introduced her description of the musical’s plot. What she admired was that in her opinion
Home Again
was “a rarity these days, a musical that defies anyone to take it seriously. It’s slight, funny and throwaway.” Concluding her review, Mallet compared sections of it to lunatic Marx Brothers films and then pondered the show’s future: “Can the show make sense and still keep that spirit?”

At this juncture, the creators had three weeks in Toronto to fix
Home Again
. Coleman and Fried’s contributions included “The Daily Rag,” a cynical song about the newspaper business, which White choreographed as a tap number; “President,” an amusing tune about the travails of the commander-in-chief, inserted and then quickly cut; “Call Your Daddy,” a droll lullaby for one of the father figures played by Shawn; and “I Don’t Remember When I Didn’t Love You,” a gentle country ballad for TJ that, according to Fried, “we wrote downstairs in the basement of the theater.”
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Baker’s rewrites encompassed not only building scenes to accommodate the new songs but also revising sections to help clarify the story and the show’s objective. In looking back on the experience, Baker realized that he would never have escaped one problem with the show: being “committed to the absurd task of writing a book for a Broadway show for which the music had already been written. I was too ignorant about theater to know that this couldn’t possibly produce anything but disaster, probably even with Hammerstein writing the book.”
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Another revision to the show came at the suggestion of “some misguided corporate thinker,” according to Baker. There was a problem with the title. “He had run a poll and found it didn’t fetch the public, which, he went on, had responded happily to a title that included the phrase ‘sunshine mountain.’ Cy and the rest of us wasted an evening wrestling with this until I pointed out that there was a fine old Protestant Sunday school hymn titled ‘Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain.’ After which we decided to change the title from ‘Home Again’ to ‘Home Again, Home Again.’”
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In public, producer Meyer explained the change by saying, “We thought the new title would be funnier, and give someone a laugh.”
34

Still, the writers, Saks, and White persevered, incorporating more changes. But the strain began to show. Even Ralston, who believed she would be impervious to the pressure, given her laborious experiences on the road with
The Baker’s Wife
, snapped. “I had been so strong and just dealing with everything, and one day I just broke down crying onstage. And Gene said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve made Teri Ralston cry.’”
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At the same time, however, Ralston understood what the team faced and admired what they were trying to accomplish. “With the money involved, it was huge pressure on Gene. . . . They had a point of view, certainly, with what they believed about the American Dream and good versus evil. They just couldn’t get it together on how to tell a story. . . . So they kept reaching around, trying different things.”
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