You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (46 page)

Coleman’s strictness during these rehearsals—markedly different from accounts of his work with performers on previous shows—may have had something to do with the problems that he was facing as he fulfilled duties as both creator and producer of the show. On the artistic side, he knew that there were doubts about the property altogether. As Blakemore recalled, “We were up against it because Cy had done a musical,
Welcome to the Club
, which was considered very male chauvinist, and it got terrible press.” With this in mind, and remembering the conflicts they had had with their producers on
City of Angels
, Blakemore added, “So again, we went into rehearsals slightly ready for a battle.”
37

As the work on the musical continued, it still faced troubling financial issues. It hadn’t been fully capitalized, and the process of raising backing continued. “[Cy] was wearing many hats,” Harris said, “and we were in the middle of rehearsals, two weeks before we were onstage, stopping to do truncated backers’ auditions for more money. So while we were staging this and putting it up and having final fittings and cutting songs and fixing things, they were raising money.”
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The full backing was ultimately achieved, and with revisions (notably a new end to the first act)
The Life
finally reached its opening night on April 26 (a Saturday, and four days earlier than originally announced). When the reviews began appearing in the Monday papers, the critics were appreciative of the principals’ performances, and White’s specifically, but less enthusiastic about the show itself.

In his
New York Times
review Ben Brantley wrote that the book “reeks of bottom-drawer, movie melodrama” and complained that Coleman “provides some zesty jazz- and vaudeville-inflected tunes. But he often stretches them to the point of thinness.” Still, Brantley found himself forced to admit that “‘The Life’ has at least one thing going for it, something that’s been hard to locate in this season of big but bloodless musicals like ‘Titanic’ and ‘Steel Pier’: a definite human pulse.”

In the
Daily News
Howard Kissel was sarcastic and rhetorical in the opening of his review: “Is anyone, by the way, nostalgic for 42nd St. when it was a human sewer? Nostalgic enough, that is, to pay $75 to see the kind of sleaze you used to be able to get for free?” Michael Kuchwara echoed these sentiments and called the musical “an uneasy mixture of soap opera and sleaze.”

Unlike his peers, however, Kuchwara did have good things to say about Coleman and the score: “He is a jazzy, adult composer, able to toss off with equal dexterity a smoky, sophisticated melody as well as a bouncy old-fashioned show tune. Gasman’s lyrics are not on that level, but they will do.”

The Life
got one of its best reviews in a trade publication, the
Hollywood Reporter
, where on April 28 Frank Scheck’s notice proclaimed, “[
The Life
] is a tawdry and at times distasteful affair that also happens to be the most exciting new musical of the Broadway season.” He added, “Coleman’s music and Gasman’s lyrics offer a kind . . . of Broadway razzmatazz seldom heard anymore. The heavily rhythm-and-blues-inflected score offers one highlight after another, delivered by some of the most powerful voices currently heard on a New York stage.”

The nominating committee for the Tony Awards sided with Scheck in its assessment of the show. When the nominations for the annual prizes were announced just over a week later,
The Life
scored an impressive twelve nods, the most of any show of the season. (Of the other nominated musicals, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s
Steel Pier
garnered eleven; Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s
Titanic
received five; and
Juan Darien
, an offering directed by Julie Taymor for Lincoln Center Theater, nabbed six). Not only was
The Life
nominated for best musical, but performer Isaacs was recognized in the leading actress category, while Cooper, Harris, and White all received nominations in supporting categories. Coleman and Gasman got a nod for best score, and they, along with Newman, were nominated for their book for the show.

The nominations gave the production a much-needed boost at the box office, and the day following the announcement, producer Martin Richards told Associated Press writer Kuchwara, “We got exactly what we needed. . . . There is a line right now at the box office.”
39

The Tony Award voters, however, were not impressed with the musical. They put all of their support behind
Titanic
, which won for each nomination it received.
The Life
, meanwhile, picked up only a pair of prizes, for performers Cooper and White.

The show fared well enough at the box office through the summer, but after Labor Day it began to experience some lean weeks. It was at this point that Vincent Canby filed a second review in the
New York Times
. As with Walter Kerr’s follow-up on
Seesaw
in 1973, Canby’s assessment was a love letter, headlined “Why Whisper About It? ‘The Life’ Is a Joy.” Canby went on to praise almost every aspect of the show (he did admit the book was “serviceable” but even attempted to turn that description into a compliment). Most notably, he wrote, “Mr. Coleman has composed not only his most driving, big-beat score since ‘Sweet Charity,’ but also his most varied and melodic work since ‘On the Twentieth Century.’”
40

The timing of Canby’s review could not have been better. Ticket sales rebounded and continued strong through the holidays. Then, however, as with many Broadway offerings, it began to struggle during the leaner winter months; by spring, it was playing at times to just over 50 percent capacity.

The decision to close came at the beginning of June, a little over a year after it opened, and when the curtain went down on
The Life
on June 7, it had played 466 performances. The show had consumed much of Coleman’s attention for the past five years, meaning that for the first time in nearly a decade he watched one of his musicals shutter without knowing when his next one might be.

31.
“It Needs Work”

When
The Life
played its final performance, Coleman was just one week away from his sixty-ninth birthday and still a newlywed. He had spent the bulk of the previous five years doing everything in his power to see that the musical reached Broadway, even as he embarked on his new relationship, and though he had juggled a quartet of projects (
The Life
, along with
City of Angels
,
Will Rogers
, and
Welcome to the Club
) along with personal matters just ten years before, he had not laid out a similar array of new shows for himself as the 1990s wound down.

True, there had been small projects (notably the mini–movie musical
A Simple Melody
), and Coleman had continued his philanthropic work. There had also been talk of shows that he might be working on, ranging from a musicalized version of the 1957 film
Sweet Smell of Success
to a stage version of the iconic film
A Star Is Born
for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company, but only one show had gone beyond the talking phase while Coleman was getting
The Life
into production.

The show was a revision of his 1989 flop,
Welcome to the Club
, and by the spring of 1998 it was in good enough shape to receive a developmental production at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, Connecticut. This new property was called
Exactly Like You
, and Coleman had devised it with his
Club
collaborator A. E. Hotchner and Pat Birch (who had done musical staging for the original). She recalled that after
Club
closed, “[Cy] wanted to play around with it, and I said, ‘Let me take it and really do something totally different with it.’ I came up with the idea of doing it in the courtroom. And getting rid of a lot of the macho stuff.”
1

Hotchner set about rewriting the show with Birch’s thoughts in mind, and what emerged was a musical set in a courtroom where a man was on trial for assaulting his meddlesome and intrusive mother in-law. Friction understandably ran high between the defendant and his spouse, who still had deep feelings for one another, and as the trial proceeded, other romantic feuds developed. The female prosecutor and male defense attorney—once married—were still in love. Additionally, one of the jurors, a country singing star, came to the court wounded from her first four marriages and found a potential match in a man (her polar opposite) empaneled along with her.

The show also satirized America’s thirst for televised trials (which had reach an apogee a few years earlier with the murder trial of O. J. Simpson), and the action was frequently interrupted by commentary from the anchors observing the events in the courtroom. Coleman and Hotchner also returned to a device used in
I Love My Wife
, and the production’s four musicians doubled as performers, with the judge, for instance, serving as the keyboard player.

Coleman described the show as “a very sweet, zany and darling story. If you ask me what’s it close to, I’d say it’s closer to [the film] ‘Adam’s Rib’ than ‘Welcome to the Club.’” He had written over a dozen new songs for
Exactly Like You
, which were augmented by a handful of tunes from
Welcome to the Club
that had been repurposed and a couple that were performed as originally written, including “At My Side.” As Coleman commented, “I’m not going to throw out a good ballad that works. What am I? a fool?”
2

The staging in Connecticut gave the creators a clear sense of what revisions still needed to be made, and then, in early 1999,
Exactly Like You
got a second outing, in New York at Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company. The basic arc of the show remained, as did most of the score. The heaviest revisions involved its first moments, which gained a “Courtroom Cantata,” and its finale, where a number was tweaked to turn it into a title song. Unlike the presentation in Connecticut, the York production was open to reviewers, and although the material had changed, the critics’ response was not much different than that for
Welcome to the Club
. Charles McNulty, writing in
Variety
on April 19, described the show as a “new musical comedy that never manages to transcend the silliness of its book,” adding that “not even the lushly varied rhythms of Coleman’s score can salvage the shamelessly cliché-ridden antics.”

Peter Marks’s
New York Times
review on April 27 noted Coleman’s determination to make a success out of the older musical and then said that the new one “suggests that fealty to one’s failures in no way guarantees an eventual transfer to the win column.” If there was one “win” to be had from the production, it had already come by the time Marks’s piece ran: Coleman had scored a Drama Desk Award nomination for outstanding music.

After the engagement at the York, Coleman, Hotchner, and Birch continued to revise, rework, and retitle the show. A few years later it resurfaced, slightly modified, under the name
Lawyers, Lovers, and Lunatics
, playing at the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach, and the Forum Theatre in Metuchen, New Jersey. With all of these stagings, Coleman demonstrated how he had learned the ropes of developing new work through the American regional theater system. This musical was one of four that he would test out in this manner over the course of the next five years, while another would be produced outside the American model altogether.

The musical that took Coleman abroad was also the one that allowed him to work with a financial freedom he hadn’t had on Broadway in many years:
Grace
, a show about Grace Kelly, the American film star who became princess of Monaco. The piece was the brainchild of Dutch businessman-turned-producer Bert Maas, who had a twofold agenda. He wanted to pay tribute to the actress who had fascinated him when he was a teenager, and in doing so he also hoped to establish a theatrical empire akin to that of Joop van den Ende, who since 1988 had been successfully carving out a niche for himself in Holland as a producer of popular musicals.

Before approaching Coleman about writing the score, Maas engaged a book writer–lyricist, Seth Gaaikema, who began his career in musical theater in 1956 translating English lyrics for Dutch productions. Among his earliest credits in the late 1950s and early 1960s were shows like
My Fair Lady
and
Oliver!
Gaaikema had also enjoyed a career as a popular television comedian.

His script centered on Kelly’s life with Prince Rainier of Monaco, following her from just before her marriage through the early 1960s, when Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in
Rear Window
,
Dial “M” for Murder
, and
To Catch a Thief
, was trying to lure her back to Hollywood to star in the film
Marnie
. Under pressure from the royal family, she ultimately turned down the role, and Gaaikema used this slice of her life to explore how Kelly had been consistently manipulated by men—first her father, then the director, and finally her husband.

While putting the show together Maas also hired a director, Frans Weisz, who had never worked in the theater but had a number of film credits, including the 1975 comedy
Red Sien
and a 1988 drama,
Havinick
, which was screened at Cannes. Together the two men cast the show’s principals. Dutch musical theater luminaries Joke de Kruijf and Ernst Daniel Smid would play Kelly and Rainier, respectively, while Rob van de Meeberg was cast as Hitchcock.

It was at this juncture that Maas turned to Coleman. When they met in 2000, Maas described his plans for
Grace
, which was going to open in a theater that would be built especially for the production. Maas was sparing no expense in creating the venue, which would ultimately become a palace worthy of a princess, studded with crystal chandeliers, outfitted with huge murals, and surrounded by wrought iron gates bearing the initial “G.”

Beyond his plans for the decor of the facility, Maas had also engaged a celebrated designer for the musical itself: Broadway’s Eugene Lee (the scenic designer for Harold Prince’s landmark stagings of
Candide
and
Sweeney Todd
). Maas was prepared to commission Coleman for the score, and in addition he was committed to paying for Coleman, his family, and his creative team to live in Amsterdam during rehearsals.

It was an offer Coleman couldn’t refuse. After he accepted, he reached out to Birch. As Coleman’s wife, Shelby, recalled, “He said, ‘I’m not going to do this with someone who doesn’t know how to stage a show.’”
3
Birch remembered, “Cy called me and told me that the producer had all the money in the world. And there was a great set, and they were building a new theater.”
4

At this juncture Coleman needed to figure out what sort of music the show required. He later reflected, “A lot of that was determined by the fact that they cast it before the show was written, which is amazing to me. They have to do that in Holland, they told me, because if you want some stars, there’s a limited talent pool.” After he heard the principals sing, he decided that the show would require “big music. . . . These are not small voices. Musically, I wanted to do a meld of European style and American style—the European feeling along with American pizzazz.”
5

Coleman’s aims for the music were more than thoroughly realized. The show boasted over two dozen numbers—lushly romantic waltzes, buoyant ragtime, and seductive jazz. Furthermore, Coleman gave all of the music the sort of dramatic sweep that one associates with movies from the era of the studio system in Hollywood. More than any score he had written since
On the Twentieth Century
,
Grace
demonstrated the fusion of his classical, pop, and theater experience, and when played by a thirty-seven-piece orchestra using lush orchestrations by Don Sebesky, it had a grandeur unlike any score he had previously written for the stage.

But Coleman’s accomplished music was part of a production that faced significant obstacles. As Birch described it, “The guy who was directing couldn’t get control of a big musical. I had a huge job helping him out and choreographing at the same time. . . . And the rules are on their side. You cannot fire anybody. So was it easy? No. Was it fun? Sometimes. We had good times. We were living right next door to each other. Shelby cooked. We had wonderful dinners.”
6

Beyond Birch and his own family, Coleman also brought another American to Amsterdam: Mary-Mitchell Campbell, who served as musical coordinator on the show. Coleman and Campbell had come to know one another three years earlier when she served as rehearsal pianist for a concert presentation of
Sweet Charity
that was a starry benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. “The first time he ever spoke to me was coming over to the piano to ask me to transpose ‘There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This’ for Chita Rivera,” Campbell recalled.
7
Shortly after this, he phoned and asked her to come to Connecticut to assist with a Hole in the Wall Gang benefit. During her time there, she found herself sight-reading for renowned violinist Isaac Stern, in performance.

“I begged Cy to do it. I said something about him having played Carnegie Hall, and I said, ‘You should go out and play for Isaac Stern and sight-read for him in concert.’ My favorite part of that whole story was that he said, ‘You’re young. You’re resilient.’ But then he came out on the stage and helped me fix the music stand, which was broken, and I was like, ‘You don’t have to come out and do this.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to
abandon
you.’”
8

In retrospect, Campbell realized that the incident was “a bit of a litmus test,”
9
and when it came time to do
Grace
, he invited her to be part of the team. In addition to serving as the musical coordinator, she collaborated with Coleman on the arrangements.

Campbell described her time in Amsterdam as “a wild adventure” and shared several revelatory stories about the show’s development. “[Eugene Lee] ended up leaving. I don’t honestly remember why, and we had a different set designer come in to make [Lee’s sets] work, and that was not the most successful marriage. It was very amusing, because all of these set pieces were showing up and nobody knew really what they were for.”
10

Beyond the problems with the physical production and extensive delays in the construction of the theater itself, there were difficulties because of the language barrier between the American and Dutch collaborators. Coleman and Gaaikema developed methods of communication while working on the songs. At times Gaaikema would describe the mood and the emotional through-line of a scene, and from this Coleman would write a melody to which Gaaikema would set a lyric. Or sometimes Gaaikema would provide Coleman with a lyric, which he also recited, so that the composer could hear the rhythms, and then a melody would be developed.

Campbell explained that Coleman had never been given exact translations of the lyrics, and this became an issue. During the opening of the second act, a scene set on Aristotle Onassis’s boat, one song “wasn’t getting a very good response when we were in previews. And we weren’t sure what was going on with it. So Cy comes to me one day in the theater and says, ‘I think we need to think about cutting it. I think it’s just too long. I think people just get bored.’”
11

Before trimming the song, however, Coleman asked Campbell, who had a working knowledge of Dutch, to translate a lyric. “I said, ‘Well, the start is “Power makes me horny. Power, I really like it.”’ And he said, ‘That can’t be right.’ And I was like ‘Uh-huh.’ And he’s like, ‘That can’t be what it says.’ And I said, ‘I’m pretty confident on this one.’ And so he called a couple of directors and asked them, ‘Can you tell us what this means.’ And they said the same thing. So he looked at me, ‘Well. Maybe it’s not the music.’”
12