You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (40 page)

Blakemore’s objection to the title
Death Is for Suckers
was profound. “What I thought was so awful about
Death Is for Suckers
is that in the Raymond Chandler books that Larry had pastiched quite brilliantly, Chandler would never make a joke about death. Death was the ultimate reality. Death was the big sleep. It wasn’t something anybody evaded. So
Death Is for Suckers
was kind of a silly title, really, and that’s why I didn’t like it.”
20
For a few months the show had an interim title,
Double Exposure
, before a casual conversation in a car between Coleman and Blakemore yielded
City of Angels
.

“We were driving back to New York from Southampton,” recalled the director, “and
City of Angels
came up, and I thought that was far and away the best title, because it was an ironic title because the babes in it were so poisonous. It was very noir. It was an ironic title, but it wasn’t a send-up title.”
21

Once this issue had been settled, the men turned to the show’s overall look. Who could create two worlds onstage that could alternate between black-and-white and Technicolor? For this, they turned to designer Robin Wagner, who, as he had for
On the Twentieth Century
, created an elaborate and visually stunning period world for the show. Wagner’s set simultaneously allowed Blakemore to realize the filmic aspects of the musical, providing the means for cross-fades between scenes and even the stage equivalent of tracking shots, where audiences sense they are seeing the action from a character’s perspective.

As for the casting, Blakemore took an unconventional approach, particularly for a musical, but it signaled that he was treating the show as something fairly serious. Actress Dee Hoty, who played Chairy in the national tour of
Barnum
and eventually won the dual roles of the film producer’s wife and the femme fatale of the noir fiction in
City of Angels
, recalled, “The first call was a meeting, an interview with Michael Blakemore. He probably just wanted to get a vibe from people, knowing Michael as I once did. So, it was an interview and very British.”
22

More traditional auditions (or callbacks, as some people called them) were held after such meetings at the Virginia Theatre, and during these the close collaboration between Coleman and Blakemore could be felt. Hoty recalled how, while Blakemore was asking for adjustment in her musical material from her, Coleman called out from the house, “She’s great. I don’t need to see any more. She can belt.”
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Randy Graff, who snagged the roles of Oolie and Donna, remembered the active role Coleman took with her during the process. “After I had sung my two songs, he said to me, ‘Do you know a song called “Nobody Does It like Me”? And I said, ‘Why, yes. It was my big audition song when I had just graduated college.’ To which he replied, ‘Now you’re making me feel old.’” Graff also admitted that she wasn’t entirely sure that she would remember Dorothy Fields’s lyric for the
Seesaw
tune. So Coleman helped out from the darkened theater. She started singing and “he was shouting the words at me from the house.”
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The casting was completed over the course of the summer of 1989, and the company grew to include James Naughton, who was in the original cast of
I Love My Wife
, as the detective, Stone. Gregg Edelman, who had been steadily making a name for himself on Broadway since the early 1980s in shows ranging from
Anything Goes
to
Les Misérables
, got his first chance to originate a role on Broadway when he was cast as writer Stine. For the non sequitur–spewing producer who was in the process of turning Stine’s book into a movie, the creative team turned to René Auberjonois, who had earned a Tony Award in 1970 for his performance in
Coco
, the musical about fashion designer Chanel, and also had a string of Hollywood credits that encompassed television and film work.

The show required two additional leading ladies. Kay McClelland, who had recently made her Broadway debut in
Into the Woods
, was tapped for the roles of Bobbi, Stone’s chanteuse girlfriend, and Gabby, Stine’s pragmatic wife; and Rachel York, like Edelman, got the chance to be an original cast member of a Broadway show when she was cast as the “bad” rich girl whom Stone was hired to find and the Hollywood starlet who was hired to play her.

Beyond these principals, a key component of the show was a vocal group dubbed “the Angel City 4.” This quartet, plus a lead singer known as Jimmy Powers (played by Scott Waara, a
Welcome to the Club
veteran), was on hand as a kind of 1940s pop-music Greek chorus, delivering both songs that were being heard by the characters as if in real life and material that commented on the action. The arrangements for these songs were tight, intricate harmonies devised by vocal arranger Yaron Gershovsky (principally known for his work with the vocal group Manhattan Transfer) in consultation with Coleman. They were the kinds of numbers that Coleman believed could only be delivered by studio singers.

Unfortunately, and in a foreshadowing of the sort of battles the entire creative team would face over a production that had been quite frugally budgeted, there was a push to hire Broadway singers so that the members of the Angel City 4 could also be cast in other roles. Coleman was adamant on this issue, however, and as the show’s musical director and conductor Gordon Lowry Harrell recalled, “Cy really dug his heels in on this one. He kept saying, ‘They have got to be studio singers. They can’t be Broadway people pretending to be studio singers. They’ll never pull it off.’”
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Coleman described why such singers were needed just before the show opened: “[They] are not trained in theater or dance, but they know how to sing from a dissonance to a consonance on sight,” he said, adding, “This intricate approach, with intricate harmonies and lyrics singing scat, along with a hot 22-piece orchestra, has never before been done quite like this on Broadway. In fact, I hadn’t done it before myself.”
26

Gershovsky recalled how surprised the show’s orchestrator, Billy Byers, a man who had been around the sort of music Coleman had written since his days as a trombonist with Benny Goodman, was by what the quartet was being required to do. “I remember Billy Byers asking, ‘Did you really harmonize that?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ And he was like, ‘Amazing.’”
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For Blakemore, Coleman’s ferocity on this issue of how the Angel City 4 was to be cast proved that “he was a battler. You crossed him at your peril, but once he was assured of your good faith, once he knew you were both working on the same show, he couldn’t have been more supportive or nicer. I was full of admiration for him, and I got very, very fond of him.”
28

Because of the way Gelbart, Coleman, and Zippel had constructed the show, there was no need for extensive revisions to the material during the rehearsal process. But that is not to say that any of the writers were idle. Gelbart honed his book constantly, eliminating extraneous material; but, as he pointed out just before the show’s opening, “This is not the kind of show where you can put the second act song in the first act or drop that scene and write a new one. We’ve had to make all of the adjustments on the basis of what the show is. We’ve done a lot of work anyway, but it’s been refining and clarifying.”
29

Among the notable refinements that emerged during rehearsals was the elimination of the interior monologues sung by many of the characters. A few remained, principally during Stone’s first scene with Alaura, the wealthy woman who hired him, but what had been a series that ran through the musical’s opening scenes was decidedly curtailed.

In other instances the score was gently augmented during rehearsals. To showcase Edelman’s range, Coleman and Zippel added a cadenza at the end of “Double Talk,” a tautly syncopated riff that establishes Stone’s and Stine’s characters. Another adjustment that came during rehearsals was in the early duet for Stine’s secretary and Stone’s wife. As Graff remembered it, “The riff that happened at the end of ‘What You Don’t Know About Women’ was written during rehearsals. I remember Cy calling us over and teaching us that.”
30

Graff also remembered a more significant addition to one of her songs, “You Can Always Count on Me,” which came during technical rehearsals: “We were on a break, and Cy said, ‘Randy, come on down to the piano’ (in tech the piano is always down in the house). I sat down next to him, and David was there. And David had written the lyrics out, like on a scrap piece of paper, and he said, ‘Listen to this,’ and he played me the verse and he said, ‘That’s what was missing to the song, a verse!’”
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Graff recalled how Coleman, who was himself also a performer, helped her perfect her delivery: “Working with him was heaven. He taught me how to sing that song, and every time I sing it, I still remember the phrasing that he taught me. It’s just in my bones. And he’d just say, ‘Think of Sophie Tucker.’ And he would say things like ‘Men don’t give a waaaar-antee.’ Just little phrasing things that have stayed with me.” Graff, who would go on to record an entire album of Coleman’s songs, said what was remarkable about his work on
City of Angels
was that “he wrote on you. . . . He wouldn’t write a song and say, ‘Come to me,’ because he knew if you were comfortable, it was only going to make his music sound better.”
32

Music director Harrell commented that Coleman’s work with the actors in this capacity was just one of the many talents he brought to any show. “Cy was a self-contained package. He could be a music director. He could be an arranger. He could be a composer. He could be a pianist.” Of Coleman’s work with the performers, Harrell said, “Cy was also a wonderful vocal coach. And he had no problems at all putting on a different hat. If a singer he was working with needed vocal coaching, he’d put on his vocal coach’s hat. He knew how to do that impeccably, and not as the composer enforcing his will on him or her, but as an accompanist and a coach, drawing the song out of them.”
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Even as Coleman was working with the performers and with Zippel on changes, the composer was also writing copious amounts of underscoring for the movielike production. “He was so enormously fecund as a composer. He had music coming out of every pore in his body. And you wanted something and he gave it to you,” Blakemore remarked.
34

Harrell remembered turning to Cy frequently with requests for such material. “I’d go to him and say, ‘They need some music there Cy, to cover forty-five seconds for the transition of the black-and-white set to the color set.’ And then he’d go and do that. Sometimes he’d pull in an actor, like Jimmy Naughton, and have them read the scene for him so he could get the feel of it, where are the actors taking this, because he wanted the music to go along with that and, in some cases, lead and take them there.”
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With each piece of orchestral transition music, Coleman was drawing on his own experiences with and expertise in scoring films. Lowry described the work admiringly, saying that in each instance Coleman was creating non-songs that were meant to “make a dramatic moment. It was definitely not scene-change music. It was a dramatically structured non-vocal that got everybody to some place.”
36

As with Coleman’s last two Broadway shows,
Barnum
and
Welcome to the Club
, and as was becoming increasingly the norm for new musicals on Broadway,
City of Angels
did not have an out-of-town tryout but rather opened “cold” in New York—although that term is somewhat loose, given the length of the show’s overall rehearsal period, which ultimately stretched to an extravagant nine weeks.

The complexity of having two stories unfold side by side was one reason the show rehearsed for so long. The production simply needed a longer-than-average technical-rehearsal period. It was during this time that the producers’ desire to cut corners was felt most keenly: “[They] hadn’t taken the advice of the brilliant designer Robin Wagner and got the builder that Robin wanted. They had gone to someone else, with the result that when we got into the theater, the set was only half finished,” said Blakemore.
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When pieces did arrive, the director remembered, “Something was always wrong, so I would get to the theater immediately before lunch and be told we couldn’t possibly start until eight o’clock in the evening. The technical dress rehearsal went on forever. We scheduled about ten days and I think it went on for about a month.” The construction decision was indicative of what Blakemore felt about the producers’ overall attitude toward the show: “We got a lot of obfuscation and skepticism in the producing side of it, except perhaps from Roger Berlind, who I think always saw the merit of it.” As a result, “Larry, Cy, and David and I bonded very closely, and we formed a kind of military square. And just drove it through without listening to anybody.”
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The show eventually started its preview period on November 21, a week later than originally planned, and when there was also a delay in the show’s opening (which was pushed from the desirable day of Thursday, December 7, to the less advantageous Monday, December 11), some of the producers’ lack of faith may have seemed justified. Beyond the delays, their fears may have also been exacerbated by the negative buzz that had begun to circulate about the show. Bill Rosenfield, who was at RCA and involved in the discussions about the company doing the show’s cast album, recalled, “The first early word on
City of Angels
was that it wasn’t working, and they hadn’t found the tone and such.”
39

When opening night did finally arrive, scenic designer Wagner remembered: “At intermission, the producers were all out in front of the theater, saying, ‘Anyone want to rent a theater?’ They were all so certain it was a flop. And I never forgot that. And Michael was very insulted by that, because he heard it too. By the end of the show that night, there was a standing ovation.”
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