You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (44 page)

By the time Colemans tied the knot, they had not only shared vacations, official trips to Washington, and the like; they had also weathered, together, the financing, rehearsals, previews, and opening of a Broadway show. It was a piece that had its genesis in the early 1980s and had been on Coleman’s docket ever since. In the space between
City of Angels
and
The Will Rogers Follies
, he had found time to workshop it, and as the 1990s progressed, he did everything in his power to see that the tuner finally reached Broadway.

30.
The Life

The seeds for the musical
The Life
were planted in 1975 when Coleman, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green were all working on the songs for Phyllis Newman’s
Straws in the Wind
. Another contributor to the show was lyricist Ira Gasman, who, with Galt MacDermot as composer, contributed two songs to the production, including the provocatively titled “It’s Not Such a Brave New World, Mr. Huxley.” Gasman also penned a lyric set to Stephen Sondheim’s melody for “Broadway Baby” (from
Follies
), but his revision, “Test Tube Baby,” went unperformed.

Coleman and Gasman met during the rehearsal process for
Straws
, and Gasman fondly recalled the banter of their first exchange: “I had been a fan of his ever since I’d heard
Sweet Charity
. Somehow I got up the nerve to introduce myself. ‘I’m a lyricist.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he joked, adding, ‘What have you written, kid?’ ‘Well, I wrote a political revue,
What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This?
’ ‘Catchy title. I hate catchy titles.’”
1

Coleman asked if Gasman had any other projects in development, and Gasman mentioned a project he had begun. It centered on the seedy denizens of Times Square. Gasman would ultimately say that his inspiration came when “I was walking down 42nd Street one night, probably coming from Theatre Row, when suddenly a police car pulls over to the corner, two guys get arrested, a couple was arguing across the street. What theatre, I thought, right there in the street! It got me thinking about this show.”
2

As Gasman told Coleman, “‘It’s called
The Life
.’ ‘Well, that’s certainly not a catchy title. What’s it about?’ ‘It’s about Forty-second Street, filled with prostitutes, pimps, and pickpockets.’ ‘How the hell am I supposed to write music for prostitutes, pimps, and pickpockets? Is that a musical?’ ‘It could be.’”
3
Despite the wisecracks, Gasman remembered that Coleman was intrigued and told him to set up an appointment so that he could hear Gasman read some of his lyrics and they could discuss
The Life
in greater detail.

As amusing and convenient as the anecdote is, it’s contradicted by a note, dated August 3, attached to an early three-scene, fourteen-page draft of the musical that Gasman sent to Coleman. In the handwritten note, Gasman references his long friendship with the composer (indicating that it came several years after
Straws
) and says that the enclosed material is the first thing he has written that he believes warrants Coleman’s consideration. The short script contains a scenario about a hooker named Queen; her pimp, Candy Man, and a teenage midwesterner, Mary, newly arrived in New York. It also contains lyrics for several songs, including one called “I’m Getting Too Old for the Oldest Profession.” It was enough to attract Coleman’s attention, and the two men began work on the show, seemingly at the beginning of the 1980s.

In many ways
The Life
would become the third in a triptych of Coleman shows about the darkness that crept into American culture during the 1970s. He began with
Home Again
and its look at what had happened to the nuclear family and American Dream over the course of five decades. Coleman’s work in this vein continued with the unproduced
Atlantic City
, which explored how that once glamorous seaside resort fell into decay and disrepair. With
The Life
, Coleman moved to territory he had witnessed firsthand as New York teetered toward bankruptcy in the 1970s.

Yet
The Life
was set apart from the other two pieces by the fact that it was a musical drama in which the songs were integrated into the book rather than placed alongside an episodic narrative. It might have been
The Life
that Coleman, in part, was referencing in October 2004 when he told Jerry Tallmer of
The Villager
: “In a show I write for character and for the person. When it’s not in a show, I just write for myself.”

It’s projects like these (either completed, still aborning, or about to begin) that help to explain a comment he made in 1981, when the crowd-pleasing
Barnum
was still playing: “Look, I have things to say. My own feelings, my own important statements. This is what I am, and this is what they are.”
4
One would be hard-pressed to find the “statement” that
Barnum
made. However, with these other projects, as well as others, such as
Julian
, which had entered Coleman’s consciousness in the 1970s, the man who was identified more often than not with frivolous entertainments was attempting to explore deeper and more meaningful subjects. In fact, he would eventually describe
The Life
as “the show we couldn’t do in ‘Sweet Charity,’ which was a wonderful fairytale about hope. With ‘The Life’ you’re into a new era.”
5

By late 1983 the collaboration had resulted in several additional songs for
The Life
. They had also worked on numbers for the short-lived revue
Shecago
, which boasted two Coleman-Gasman tunes, “I Start Sneezing” and “My Body,” a song that ended up in
The Life
. Over the course of the next seven years, Coleman and Gasman would periodically work on the show. They had made enough progress on it by July 1986 that it was included alongside other shows like
Death Is for Suckers
and his Will Rogers project, which Coleman was writing with Comden and Green, to be included in a
New York Times
feature.

As the years progressed and
Welcome to the Club
,
City of Angels
, and
The Will Rogers Follies
all moved into production, Coleman didn’t lose sight of
The Life
. By the spring of 1990, just before the Tony Award victories for
City of Angels
, it was in good enough shape for a showcase production that would be directed by Coleman’s frequent collaborator Joe Layton.

One member of the company was Lillias White, who had been attached to the project since its earliest days and would be playing the role of Sonja, a hooker who was passing her prime as she moved toward thirty. White had gotten to know Layton and Coleman when she replaced Terri White in the role of Joyce Heth in
Barnum
. After that she worked with Layton on the short-lived revue
Rock and Roll! The First 5,000 Years
. Shortly after it closed, she remembered, “I got a call from Cy and Joe. They said they were doing this show. It was called
The Life
, and they wanted me to come in and sing some stuff. They also said I had the job. It wasn’t an audition. They just wanted to see how the music was feeling in my range and how it sounded.”
6

White was joined for the workshop by Pamela Isaacs, who played Queen, a woman trying to get out of “the life” with her boyfriend-pimp, Fleetwood, played by Edwin Louis Battle. Chuck Cooper was Memphis, a pimp who had a number of women working for him. The role of Mary, the young woman just arrived in the city, was taken by Lori Fischer.

Cooper, like so many actors of the period, remembered Coleman’s significant presence during his audition: “I went in and did my up and my ballad or whatever, and he asked me if he could teach me a little something. He played a little bit of ‘Don’t Take Much’ and taught it to me right there at the audition, and as I recall I don’t even think I had a callback. When it’s Cy, he knows when its right, and when it ain’t, he also knows that. So I guess he heard something in my voice that he liked, and I got the job.”
7

Cooper remembered that during rehearsals—which took place not in Times Square, where the show was set, but rather at Westbeth Theatre, the downtown venue where the show was performed—Coleman’s work with him was meticulous and caring. “Cy knew what our process was, and he knew how to merge that with what he desired musically and how to make the dramatic line match the musical line match the breath that you were taking. I can’t remember where it was exactly in [‘My Way or the Highway’], but he said to me, ‘Just carry the note over the bar. Breathe before you attack this note, and carry the note over the bar, and that will lead you to the next level.’”
8

Cooper found that Coleman’s advice worked. What surprised him was how the composer “just kind of cavalierly threw this out there,” and then, Cooper added, “I did it, and it busted the song open for me and helped me move through it in a place where I was stuck. He would do this all the time. He was very gentle, very patient, but he also expected you to do your work and come prepared, and as I said before, no slackers. He brooked no fools. You had to bring it because he was bringing it. That’s how he rolled, and everybody knew that.”
9

During rehearsals and the two weeks of performances that
The Life
had at Westbeth, Coleman, Gasman, and Layton were able to explore and revise the piece, which Coleman had almost completely through-composed. Underscoring was heavily prevalent in the arrangements for the small combo, and the production featured extensive sections of recitative. In many regards
The Life
was sounding a lot like a latter-day incarnation of
Porgy and Bess
, and even the casting notices made reference to the Gershwin folk opera, describing Cooper’s character as “a combination of Joe Williams and Charles Dutton, Crown in ‘Porgy & Bess.’”
10

The workshops demonstrated to the creators that they had “the nucleus of it,”
11
as White recalled, and that what had been accomplished in three weeks was enough to show them where work needed to be done before the show reached Broadway. But after the Westbeth engagement in August 1990, Coleman had to focus his energies on
The Will Rogers Follies
. It would be over two years before
The Life
resurfaced.

When it did, it wasn’t in an announcement of upcoming Broadway plans but rather in casting notices in October 1992, which noted that the show would begin rehearsals on January 25, 1993, officially opening April 15. The casting notices also carried the names of the show’s producers.
The Life
would come to Broadway under the auspices of Roger Berlind, along with Martin Richards and Sam Crothers (of the Producers Circle). Coleman and his old friend James Lipton were also backing the show.

Then, however,
The Life
went into a state of suspension, and just two weeks before the show was to have debuted, Bruce Weber mentioned it as he focused on what might open in the fall of 1993. In his April 2
New York Times
“On Stage, and Off” column, he wrote, “Cy Coleman’s ‘The Life’ is breathing out there somewhere.”

What happened over the course of the following three years demonstrates how fiercely committed Coleman was to this specific show as well as the herculean efforts it was taking to secure financing for the production. Toward the end of the year lead producer Berlind, while discussing the troubles he was having in raising money for another project, a musical version of the film
Paper Moon
, mentioned
The Life
, calling it “a dangerous show.” The report on his efforts also included the following: “Berlind came to Broadway from Wall Street. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, almost wistfully, the other day, ‘the good old stock market. . . .’”
12

Berlind, however, seemed to have to put the financing together for
The Life
in short order, because by the following January the Nederlander Organization had committed to having the production play at its eponymous Broadway theater late that year. This home for the show appeared to be even more of a sure thing a month later when the Nederlanders had to turn to the Shubert Organization to rent a theater—the Ambassador—for another production that might have used the venue, Bill Cartwright’s
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
.

The Life
faced a new hurdle in May, however, when director Joe Layton passed away “after a long illness,” as stated in his
New York Times
obituary on May 9. He hadn’t kept the illness from Coleman, but the composer had attempted to keep it secret from potential investors. As Gordon Lowry Harrell, who became the show’s musical director after the Westbeth performances, recalled, “Cy kept that very much under his hat. I remember them doing a backers’ show, and they were somewhere over on the East Side. And Joe Layton wasn’t there. And I said to Cy, ‘Where’s Joe Layton?’ The truth of the matter was that Joe was at home dying. He was that sick. And Cy said, within earshot of several other people, ‘Ah, you know Joe. You throw a nickel his way, and he jumps off the wagon.’ Cy didn’t want backers to know that Joe wasn’t going to direct.’”
13

Immediately following Layton’s death there was an unexpected announcement about the show. David Newman, who cowrote the book for the musical
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman
and later contributed to the screenplays for the first two
Superman
films starring Christopher Reeve, officially joined the creative team. In tandem with this news, the
New York Times
reported, “Among the shows that definitely aren’t going to get to Broadway this fall, in spite of hopes, dreams or rumors is ‘The Life,’ the long-percolating Cy Coleman-Ira Gasman musical.”
14

Over the next six months Newman worked with Coleman and Gasman on revising the book, and by January 1995 a new version of the first act, with the billing of “Book by Ira Gasman, Cy Coleman and David Newman,” had been completed. By the time the show opened, Newman would carry top billing.

The changes, though not radical, were significant. The role of a Times Square bartender, Lacy, was built up so that the character could contextualize the history of the neighborhood and its denizens. In addition, the role of Sonja was altered. During the Westbeth staging she had been a drug addict. In the new version she no longer was relying on her pusher, which necessitated that “Reefer Man,” one of the most interesting Coleman-Gasman tunes in the score, be cut; but even with this excision, the score for the first act boasted a healthy sixteen numbers.