You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (45 page)

As Coleman worked on the revisions, he also developed strategies to get the show and its music into the public’s consciousness. From publisher Buddy Morris he had learned how important promotional versions of show tunes could be, and for
The Life
he decided to put a new spin on an old-school idea: he would record an album of cover versions of the musical’s songs by artists ranging from Liza Minnelli to Lou Rawls to George Burns. “Cy’s hoping this platter will be as lucky for the show as—the 14 sides that preceded the bow of ‘Sweet Charity’!”
Variety
reported.
15

When the album was announced in summer 1993, it was to have been an EMI recording, but eventually the label backed out, giving another clear indication of people’s squeamishness with the property. Coleman then turned to RCA’s Bill Rosenfield, who remembered, “Cy called me and said, ‘In order for
The Life
to happen, we have to do this concept album. We have to get the music out there.’”
16

Rosenfield, however, had severe reservations about the show. He had seen it at Westbeth and “hated [it]. I found it morally reprehensible. But I said to myself, ‘You know something? I’m a pipsqueak in this world. I’m a speck of dust and he’s Cy Coleman, and this company has fucked him over on
City of Angels
and
Will Rogers
, and even though I hate this show, I should say yes to this. We can bring it in for the right amount of money and such.’”
17

Rosenfield said that he repeated this to Coleman and record producer Mike Berniker when they first met to discuss the album, and then added, “I also was doing a ‘make good’ for myself. And I said that to Cy. He and Mike came into the office and we were talking and I just laid it out. I said, ‘I don’t like this show. I really don’t. But we owe you.’” Rosenfield also laid out the specifics for what Coleman and Berniker would have to deliver and then, he remembered, “They delivered a tape that was thirty-seven minutes long. I told Cy, ‘I can’t release this. . . . You have failed me here. It needs to be at least forty-four minutes long.’”
18

Coleman made up the difference, recording “The Composer’s Turn,” a medley of three songs from the show. “He timed it out to be exactly what I had said. He did it the following week, and after that—and even though we were working on artwork and stuff like that—Cy was always a little frosty, because I had called him on that.”
19

Rosenfield continued, “I talked to Mike Berniker about it a few years later. And he said, ‘It was just that you had said in the first meeting you were a speck of dust and he was Cy Coleman and who were you to question Cy Coleman? And the fact when we delivered it, you questioned Cy Coleman. And he felt kind of betrayed by that.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know I can’t do anything about that.’”
20

The album,
Music from “The Life”: A New Musical
, was released in early 1996, and it did accomplish, at least on some levels, what Coleman had hoped: it brought twelve songs from the still-aborning show to the public. In one interview that appeared in tandem with the disc’s release, Coleman described his intentions to Patricia O’Hare for the June 9 edition of the
Daily News
: “What I wanted here was to start with a song, then cast it to a particular singer’s style. So we asked Billy Preston to do a gospel-style number; Joe Williams has a song that’s like what he did with the old [Count] Basie band. Jack Jones has a lush sound and Liza does a traditional Liza number on the song called ‘People Magazine.’”

Another artist featured on the album was comedian George Burns, who recorded his track, “Easy Money,” at the age of one hundred. He died just as the disc was being released, which meant that it got an additional publicity push, as it was the last recording made by the legendary performer. Despite this, and despite the campaign that Coleman and RCA engaged in, “The album came out and didn’t sell. Didn’t do anything,” Rosenfield said. “And we actually spent a fair amount of money trying to promote it, but there was nothing to promote. And we couldn’t create artwork for the show because there was no show. There were a lot of different issues.”
21

Beyond recording the disc—which required flights back and forth between coasts to accommodate the schedules of the singers Coleman had lined up—he was also actively involved in backers’ auditions during these three years. As Chuck Cooper recalled, “All I know is that we did so many of those things that we lost count. I remember joking with Lillias and Pam like, ‘Oh, here we go again.’” Ennui wasn’t settling in with him but rather an odd contentment, as he realized, “Well, these are great songs, and if they want to pay us to sing these songs in rich people’s houses while we eat up their food, that’s fine.”
22

The process of securing funding was abetted by the announcement in late 1996 of a new creative team for
The Life
. Michael Blakemore, who had helmed
City of Angels
, was on board to direct, and Joey McKneely, who had a long string of credits as a performer on Broadway and who had just created the musical staging for the pop-hit tuner
Smokey Joe’s Cafe
, was on board as choreographer.

Blakemore actually became involved several months before his name was officially attached to the production. “It really interested me, and not just because of Cy, but also because I like shows that are about the life under your nose. (Not that ‘the life’ is under everyone’s nose.) But it was about New York. It was a proper New York subject, but I wanted to do it.”
23

Along with his enthusiasm for the subject, Blakemore felt that “it had absolutely brilliant lyrics by Ira Gasman.” The director added, “I loved the score when [Cy] sent me his sort of demonstration discs and some arrangements of some of the songs.” The director did have reservations about the book, though, and over the course of the summer of 1996 he and Newman worked together on revisions. “The book wasn’t quite right. . . . So I did a bit of work on the book myself, and I wrote the opening speech for Jojo. I did a couple of scenes during the course of it and worked with David over a long summer. We faxed each other back and forth.”
24

The result of the men’s work was the most sweeping revision the script had had in several years. Not only did Newman and Blakemore shift the action from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s (in order to raise the specter of AIDS), they also rethought the show’s overall dramatic thrust.
The Life
still centered on Queen and her boyfriend-pimp Fleetwood and the ways in which his interest in a new woman affects their relationship. In the new version of the book, however, they were being manipulated in both subtle and direct ways by Jojo, once just a minor character but now both the audience’s guide to the world (he delivered the opening monologue that Blakemore penned) and an Iagolike villain, a man willing to play people off one another in order to make a quick buck or further his own career in the worlds of the sex trade and adult entertainment. With this revision,
The Life
gained a significant dramatic, and even tragic, arc.

After the book revisions, which also brought a new song, a soaring eleven o’clock number for the two female leads, “My Friend,”
The Life
got yet another staged reading in December—at the New Victory Theatre, which, symbolically, represented the reclamation of Times Square from the seedy squalor that the show was portraying. Blakemore remembered, “We had a desperate one week’s rehearsal together, and that went pretty well, and a wonderful cast. Then Marty Richards was very much on our side and he wanted to go. I think Roger Berlind had another show going on, and he wasn’t so keen on going at once. I was mad to get it on. So we sort of pushed it through, and then we started rehearsal.”
25

The reading came just after the first inklings of what the show’s
actual
schedule might be had come to light. Audition notices in late September and early October noted that the musical would begin rehearsals in mid-January in anticipation of an April opening, but, unlike similar notices before, no specifics were given. For anyone watching the progress of
The Life
, the lack of specificity could have been seen as an ominous sign, particularly because the announcement coincided with what was described by
Back Stage
as “a logjam of musical productions waiting impatiently for Broadway houses.”
26

Coleman himself seemed to be among the musical’s skeptics—he once quipped, “I started out as a young man on this project”
27
—but by January 1, 1997
The Life
had an opening date of April 30, and once existing productions began shuttering during the usual winter-time slump on Broadway, the show found a home: the Barrymore Theatre, where
I Love My Wife
had enjoyed a two-year run in the late 1970s.

It was the end of a long journey for Coleman, as well as for three of his principals. White had been involved with the show for approximately fifteen years. Isaacs and Cooper had been working on it since being cast in the Westbeth workshop seven years earlier. As Cooper pointed out, however, “Cy was loyal to us beyond anything I’ve ever seen or heard of in show business. I’ve never heard of anyone sticking with actors over different directors over a period of years trying to get a piece together. It really is kind of a testament to the kind of guy he was.”
28

The company for
The Life
included more performers who had been with the show along the way, mixed with newcomers. Sharon Wilkins, for instance, who made her Broadway debut with the musical, was in the Westbeth staging. Others, like Vernel Bagneris, who played the sage bartender Lacy, came to the company during the show’s last set of readings. But Sam Harris, who played the heavily revised character of Jojo, was cast just before rehearsals began.

Harris was the show’s star attraction. Although he had only one other Broadway credit (Doody, in the early 1990s revival of
Grease
), he was a familiar face to general audiences because of his appearances on one of television’s first reality series,
Star Search
, in which he had been the grand-prize winner.

The actor-singer vividly remembered his audition experience with the composer: “I decided to sing this coupling of ‘There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This’ (from
Sweet Charity
) and ‘Move On’ (from
Sunday in the Park with George
) that I had [once] recorded with Peter Matz doing the brilliant orchestration. So I came in the room and I said, ‘Cy, it’s wonderful to meet you. I’m so excited to meet you. I should warn you that I have rewritten some of Dorothy Fields’s lyrics in putting these songs together.’ And he said, ‘Well, did you change any of the music?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ And he said, ‘What the hell should I care for, then? She’s dead.’ And that was my introduction to Cy Coleman.”
29

Coleman worked closely with Harris after he was cast, particularly as he was the newest principal performer and the role had so recently been reconceived. “It was great for me, because then they could build it and the arrangements on me, and play with what I could do.”
30

Harris remembered, too, that their camaraderie had its ups and downs. One particularly positive memory related to the show’s opening number, “Use What You’ve Got.” As he worked with Coleman, “Cy said, ‘At the end, we’re going to sit on this note.’ He did the oddest thing, because, you know, typically in musical structure something is in increments of four bars or eight bars and there’s the obvious button. We did it, and he kept playing, and I kept holding the note. It was this odd, endless, six-bar—they were slow bars—note that I had to hold and then not breathe after, to finish the song. Through every performance I did of that song, I secretly had to count on my fingers to know how many bars it was, because it was so odd. It made no sense to my musical head.”
31

It’s the kind of musical choice that Harris said was emblematic of Cy in general. “He wanted to do things that were surprising or unpredictable. Just when you thought something would be happening, something else would happen.”
32

Harris also remembered a less cordial moment during rehearsals, when he was working on the number that opened the second act, “Mr. Greed.” “[It] had a jazz vibe that allowed a lot of play, which Cy encouraged me to do.” But the song wasn’t just a solo for Harris. It was also a big dance number that Harris remembered McKneely re-choreographing “every day.”
33

Harris continued, “I was always trying to figure it out and be in it. . . . And I didn’t learn it from Cy; I learned it sort of haphazardly, and then we were staging it. But I had never really solidified it with Cy. And the arrangement was ever-changing. So we were doing like the fourteen-thousandth version of this choreography, and I’m just sort of singing it but not really, because I’m doing choreography. And Cy comes in the back of the large rehearsal room and walks slowly and keeps walking and as he’s continuing through he says to me, ‘I hope you’re not going to sing it like that in the show.’ And exited.”
34

The rehearsal continued, but Harris said, “I was embarrassed. I was humiliated.” During a break, Harris found Coleman and had a private conversation with him. “I said, ‘You are Cy Coleman, and it is my great honor to be in this show performing your work, but until you have taught me the song, and until you have laid out what you want me to do so I can honor and respect your vision for this, please do not comment on my work publicly, in front of the company, ever, ever again.” Harris’s stand earned Coleman’s respect. “From then on we were like the best of pals and collaborated on everything.”
35

White shared similar memories of Coleman during rehearsals: “Cy was a strict taskmaster. When he wanted to hear something, he wanted to hear it a certain way. I remember him givin’ the business to Sam Harris. To Kevin Ramsey, because he wanted things a certain way. I remember Chuck working really hard to get the tones and the words out, and to be able to hold those notes and make them ferocious.”
36