You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (47 page)

Eventually the troubled show reached its opening night in October 2001. Critical reception was tepid at best. In the city’s morning daily,
Volkskrant
, critic Hein Janssen took the production to task on every level, including the ostentatiousness of the theater’s decor.

For Coleman and his colleagues, the reviews were an end to what had been a difficult process, and so they decided to enjoy some time in Amsterdam before returning home. The night after the opening a group of them took a canal boat ride and at one point decided to take in a show in the city’s famed red-light district. Coleman and Campbell were seated together, and as Campbell recalled, “The curtain went up, and it was a live sex show. So since we had this kind of fatherly/daughterly vibe to us, it was really kind of awkward. It was
really
awkward.”
13

After watching the proceedings onstage in silence, Campbell broke the ice “by saying something about them looking bored.” She added, “He jumped on that and said, ‘Yes. Yes. They look very bored. That’s why I wrote ‘Big Spender.’” Coleman continued talking about the genesis of the song from
Sweet Charity
, and then, Campbell said, “A woman came out—there were all of these vignettes—completely by coincidence doing her number to ‘Big Spender.’”
14

The performer’s routine was the same as one seen in the movie
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
. She danced “with things coming out of her body,” as Campbell put it, before adding, “We started laughing, and we were on the third row. And I said, ‘You play the best places.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but am I getting royalties?’”
15

After Coleman left Amsterdam,
Grace
limped quietly into the New Year, sometimes playing to fewer than four hundred people in its specially built twelve-hundred-seat theater. Maas attempted to spur ticket sales but to little avail. Before the end of February 2002, the show closed at a complete loss, and Maas was facing lawsuits from creditors who had yet to be paid.

With
Grace
behind him, it was back to smaller-scale stagings for Coleman. One of these was for a tuner that had been on his plate for several years: a musical version of playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s children’s book
Pamela’s First Musical
.

Wasserstein, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for her play
The Heidi Chronicles
, had hinted that she was collaborating with Coleman in 1998, but at the time she would not commit to what the show was about. Then, on January 20, 1999, the
Daily News
reported that
Will Rogers
producer Pierre Cossette would “develop a ‘big-band musical’ with Cy Coleman and Wendy Wasserstein to open next year.”

Whether this show and the musical version of
Pamela
were one and the same is unclear, but by 2002 Coleman and Wasserstein, along with lyricist David Zippel, had been working on the project for a number of years. Zippel recalled its genesis. “When the book came out, I called [Wendy] and said, ‘This would make a great TV musical. Let’s write a TV musical about it.’ She called me back about six months later and said, ‘Okay. I have a producer. Let’s do a TV musical. Let’s pick a composer.’ And I said, ‘Who do you want?’ And she said, ‘I want Cy Coleman,’ and I said, ‘That’s who I want,’ and it was like a love match from the very beginning. The three of us were so happy and got along so well.”
16

Wasserstein’s book tells of a young girl’s fairy tale–like trip to Broadway, courtesy of her flamboyant Aunt Louise. For the musical Wasserstein expanded the story, providing the title character with a simple but effective conflict: attempting to reconcile her own extravagance and imagination, modeled on that of her aunt, with the more staid traditions of her widower father, her siblings, and her father’s new girlfriend. In both the original illustrated book and the new script Wasserstein sent an unabashed valentine to the theater and the people who create it, and in writing the music for the show Coleman followed suit, creating a plethora of brassy, razzmatazz numbers that Zippel outfitted with insider jokes, puns, and references.

Once they had finished drafting their television musical, the creators began to think about casting. “When it came time to discuss who would play Aunt Louise, Cy, Wendy, and I thought that Meryl Streep [who had starred in one of Wasserstein’s earliest plays,
Uncommon Women and Others
] would be an ideal choice,” Zippel recalled, “so Wendy called Meryl, and Meryl read it and said, ‘I’d love to do it.’ But another script for a TV musical,
Geppetto
, starring Drew Carey, was further along in development, and Disney [which had been planning to produce
Pamela
] ended up making that movie instead. In an act of incredible kindness, they gave us the rights back when we asked if we could change
Pamela
into a stage musical, and that’s how it became a stage musical.”
17

Shortly after Coleman’s return from Amsterdam, he and his collaborators had the chance to explore how what they had written would work onstage through a series of workshops at Lincoln Center Theater, which had a long-standing relationship with the playwright, having produced
The Sisters Rosensweig
and
An American Daughter
on Broadway. Zippel remembered, “Andre Bishop [Lincoln Center Theater’s artistic director] was kind enough to give us a workshop. He said, ‘It isn’t the kind of show we do, but we’d like to help you develop it.’ So they gave us two workshops. It was a great experience, and we learned a lot from both of them.”
18

Beyond giving the authors an understanding of how the musical worked in performance, the workshops at Lincoln Center also helped propel the show to its next stage. Two developmental productions were scheduled. The first would be offered in late 2005 at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre, where
Exactly Like You
started. The second was slated for 2006 at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, another nonprofit dedicated to nurturing new musicals.

By this time Coleman’s docket of shows in process had rebounded to the level of the late 1980s. One piece had actually been publicly presented during the course of the
Pamela
workshops and had started to look as if it might be a viable Broadway property. Another was inching toward its first public staging. Again, these two shows were developed under the auspices of nonprofit organizations, and both would help fill Coleman’s schedule until
Pamela
was back in rehearsal.

Campbell, who, after
Grace
, was also part of the workshops for
Pamela
, noticed Coleman’s penchant for working on multiple shows like this, and she asked him if he ever worried about working on too many shows at the same time. His response was: “‘No. You need to have a lot of projects simultaneously, because they won’t all happen, and they’ll all get delayed. So you just have to keep plates spinning. But it’s important that you do multiple things. If you just do one thing, you’ll just be waiting and waiting and waiting. And I learned a long time ago that’s not how you want to live your life.’”
19

One of the “plates spinning” for Coleman was the song cycle
Portraits in Jazz
, which debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in May 2002. He wrote it with lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning team who had penned the lyrics for songs ranging from “The Way We Were” to “The Summer Knows.” Alan Bergman recalled how the project began: “Billy Taylor called us one day from the Kennedy Center. He said, ‘If we commission you to write a jazz song cycle, would you write it?’ And we said, ‘Yeah. But what is that?’ He said, ‘It’s whatever you would like.’ And then we said, ‘With whom would you like us to write it?’ He said, ‘You pick the composer.’ And we called Cy, because of his jazz roots.”
20

During their initial conversation about the project, after reiterating the Bergmans’ original question about what a jazz song cycle might be, Coleman quickly joined them in creating it. He later said that the answer that he and the Bergmans had arrived at for their mutual query was to craft a series of songs “about the jazz world. . . . About the people who inhabit it. . . . About the people who play in it. About the lives of the musicians, the managers, the people who hang out in the bars.” In doing this, he said, the song cycle “became about jazz.”
21

Beyond allowing them to explore new ground in the creation of a completely undefined piece, the collaboration with Coleman gave the Bergmans a chance to work in a new manner. “We prefer to write to music. That’s our preference, but with Cy—and more often than with any other composer—we worked with him in a room,” Alan Bergman said. Marilyn Bergman added, “I think it was because he had so much to contribute.” Alan Bergman agreed and then gave an example: “We got an idea, and we wrote down four or five lines. And he looked at it and he said, ‘Well, you know, how do you hear this?’ Asking us which way he should go rather than putting it down on the piano.”
22

The team ultimately developed fifteen songs. Some were biographical, such as “The Double Life of Billy T.,” which paid tribute to Dorothy Tipton, who dressed as a man in order to find work as a jazz pianist. Others were more atmospheric, such as the gentle, bluesy ballad “Music You Know by Heart” and the smooth, Latin-influenced “In Miami.”

With the pieces written for the show that Kennedy Center materials described as “part concert, part theater, part series of ‘jazz ruminations,’” a cast was assembled that included Broadway performer Lillias White in addition to jazz singers Carl Anderson, Patti Austin, Janis Siegel, and Steve Tyrell.
Portraits in Jazz
was offered for a single performance, and as Alan Bergman remembered, “It was a smash. . . . When it was over, they came to us saying, ‘This is just the intermission, right?’ And we’d only done fifteen songs. We didn’t have any more.”
23

The audience’s reaction that evening prompted Coleman to turn to his collaborators and say, “Well, we can’t do this for just for one night. Let’s make a theater piece out of it.” So they set about trying to refashion the show into a traditional musical format. But this raised a question, as Marilyn Bergman observed: “It was a series of songs, . . . [and] each song was a kind of self-contained story. So, if each little song is a kind of self-contained story, how do you connect them?”
24

Birch, who staged the concert, thought that Warren Leight, author of the Tony Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning play
Side Man
, who had also contributed to the event, would be an ideal candidate for further developing the show. “But then Cy goes to Larry Gelbart,” she said, “and Larry comes up with this idea of a sort of Everyman who’s going to explain jazz.”
25

The idea stuck. The songs were packaged in a show named
Like Jazz
(echoing the phrase “like cool, man”), and it was put on the schedule for the 2003–4 season at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The theater’s artistic director, Gordon Davidson, would direct, and Birch would choreograph. The cast for the new incarnation of the show once again featured Austin and White, along with Harry Groener (a Tony nominee for his performances in
Cats
,
Crazy for You
, and the 1980 revival of
Oklahoma!
), who was cast in the new role developed by Gelbart. Along with a ten-person dance ensemble, the musical also had as headliners another Broadway veteran, Cleavant Derricks (a Tony winner for
Dreamgirls
), and vocalists Jennifer Chada and Jack Sheldon.

After a rehearsal period that Birch simply characterized as being “pretty funny,”
26
Like Jazz
opened and received the sort of praise the creators might have expected after the initial Washington concert. In his review in the
Los Angeles Times
on December 5, Reed Johnson said that they had found “a way to translate this relentlessly shape-shifting art form into a warmly memorable entertainment.” Johnson praised Gelbart’s conceit for pulling the disparate songs together, calling it “a spare but effective narrative through-line,” adding, “Yet in the main, the show’s coherency derives from the practically seamless fit between the Bergmans’ charming, sophisticated lyrics and Coleman’s effortlessly urbane melodies.” In the
Los Angeles Daily News
that day, Evan Henerson found more to praise in the cast than the material, but he did predict that the show’s songs would “have some staying power.”

A few days later, on December 9, Tony Gieske’s
Hollywood Reporter
review began with “Almost everything works in this ‘new kind of musical,’” and the piece had a “Bottom Line” summary that said, “Songs about something like substance in a revue that is something else—something like a hit.”

Only Phil Gallo, in a
Variety
notice from December 4, dissented. In his assessment of the show, saying it provided little except “a cursory history lesson and a load of stream-of-conscious malarkey in the text and lyrics.”

The reviews in the general press ensured that
Like Jazz
played to capacity houses into early 2004, and at that point it looked as if the show was set for a Broadway transfer courtesy of Transamerica, which had provided enhancement money for the Taper production and was poised to serve as the show’s primary Broadway producer. Unfortunately, the company had invested and lost money on two other Broadway shows,
Brooklyn
and
Hot Feet
, and this prompted the withdrawal of Transamerica’s planned support of
Like Jazz
.

“The Transamerica people came to us and said, ‘We’re going to get out of Broadway. Whatever you have of ours, you keep. Good luck to you.’ . . . And that was the end of that,” Alan Bergman recalled.
27
It was just another example of the kind of delay to which Coleman had become accustomed.