by Ted Chapin
Hal Hastings started to teach the opening number, “Beautiful Girls,” to everyone in the company. He also worked with individual actors on their solos. Often this was done so quietly that no one was aware of songs’ being rehearsed until they were ready to be presented in the big rehearsal room. He chose to start with the older actors, since they had already expressed concerns about learning everything they had to learn in the time available and he knew they would need a lot of hand-holding.
A full-page ad for the show ran on Sunday, the second day of rehearsal. This is a tradition that Hal Prince had adhered to for years; he felt that seeing a full-page advance advertisement in the Arts & Leisure Section of the Sunday New York Times, with everyone’s name in place, always gave the company a boost. It was also another subtle reminder that soon there would have to be a complete show to put in front of an audience.
Where they were headed: “Beautiful Girls” onstage in Boston.
Hal and Boris had a blowup early in the week. Although Hal liked the rehearsal platforms that approximated the side units of the set, he also wanted to have the set model in the rehearsal room with him so he could make reference to the real thing while he was roughing out his staging. Boris said it was needed at the shop as reference during the construction. Since it was painted in fine detail, it was also vital to the shop’s painting staff. Hal had a heated phone conversation with Boris, but because he was needed back in the rehearsal room, he turned the phone over to Ruthie. She shut the door while Hal walked back to rehearsal, muttering, “I don’t want to be in there.” Ruthie’s piercing voice, now rising in volume, could be heard through the door. Then the receiver slammed down and she emerged, heading for Hal, fuming: “Why do you do that to me?” Later on, Hal conceded that Boris was absolutely right, that as producer he understood completely the need for the model at the shop. But as director he wanted it in the rehearsal room.
If Hal had a conflict at this point in the process, it was that he was both sole producer and codirector. He had started his life as a producer, in partnership with a fellow stage manager, Robert E. Griffith. Together they had produced shows that were directed by the A-team of musical theater artists of the 1950s: George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse. Hal was the eager-beaver youngster of the lot, and was even parodied in a book called Say, Darling, written by Richard Bissell, the author of the novel 7½ Cents, on which The Pajama Game was based. Say, Darling told the story of how a book was turned into a musical. Then it, in turn, was made into a musical, with Robert Morse portraying the Hal Prince character in a not altogether flattering portrait. Nothing fazed Hal, though, and he kept right on producing. By the early 1960s, after the death of his partner, he had struck out on his own as one of the very few producers on Broadway to earn a solo credit (“Harold Prince presents . . .”). He still knew how to produce better than almost anyone else, and had assembled a solid staff. Included was Carl Fisher, an elegant elderly gentleman, nephew of George Abbott, who had declined to be a partner with Griffith and Prince in the early days, but who stayed on as their general manager. Fisher also headed a syndicate that invested in shows in his name and in the case of Follies was one of the largest investors. Hal was leaning more and more on Carl and the staff, and Ruthie in the rehearsal room, to take care of business, even to the point of arguing with them over expenditures that he as director thought were needed. The overall producing scheme and policy was clearly Hal’s, but the more he could remove himself from the daily nuts and bolts, the happier he was. One day I brought down a sheet of expenses from Carl for him to okay. It totaled over $200,000. He glanced at it, handed it back to me, and said, “Give this to Ruthie. I don’t have the strength to look at it and get mad.”
Hal was still the sole producer of Follies, although he gave Ruthie “in association with” billing, as he had since Cabaret. He had his usual large group of investors: for Follies there were somewhere between 170 and 207, each of whom put up between $875 and $52,500 for a total of $700,000. A limited partnership, imaginatively named the Follies Company, was formed as the business entity through which the show was produced; the investors were the “limited” partners who provide the capitalization, and the producer was the “general” partner who finds the property, hires the talent, and does the actual producing. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the limited partnerships formed to produce shows in New York, and because of the high rate of failure, the offering papers must indicate the track record of the producer raising money to present the show. The legal partnership documents include a lot of detail about the show, the personnel involved, how much they will be paid, and so on. Each investor and the amount of investment has to be listed and filed. The documents often allowed a producer the right to an overcall of a set percentage from each investor should the show go over budget. If there is no such provision (and there was none in the case of Follies), the producer is allowed to arrange for a loan to the partnership that would then occupy a first-payback position. Since the final reported budget for Follies was close to $800,000, a loan did have to be made. (Rumor had it that Hal put up the money himself, and in an article in Forbes it was reported that one of the obligations when the show made a first distribution to investors was “paying off $78,000 it had borrowed.”)
It was easy to sense Hal’s producer-versus-director conflict on a daily basis. One day when Ingram Ash, the head of the show’s advertising agency, brought down a series of photographs and layouts for Hal’s approval, he tried to talk Hal into leasing the large half-block billboard above the marquee of the Winter Garden Theater, where the show would play in New York. Ash had a rendering of how it might look, but Hal rejected it as an extravagant expense. Everyone on the support team thought he should take the plunge, but he saw it through the prudent producer’s eyes and didn’t want to take it on. (He was eventually talked into it.)
On the second day, Michael began work on staging the Prologue. Hal would sit in whenever he could, since what they were creating was a kind of mosaic—people arriving at this ghost-filled theater for the party, greeting each other, sensing the ghosts, hearing bits and pieces of shows from the past. The Prologue was to change three times before the New York opening, each version fascinating in its own right. It had been decided that there would be no overture. The house curtain would be down as the audience filed in. Once the house lights dimmed, the curtain was to rise on the half-lit set of the crumbling Weismann Theater after some flashes of lightning. The Prologue set the ambiance of the scene before anyone arrived for the party. We would discover—in some way yet to be determined—the ghosts of showgirls haunting the theater, lurking in the shadows, ready to do the show, only the show wasn’t happening anymore. It was to include specific memories from the days of the Follies, although what memories those were or how they would be manifested had yet to be decided. Slowly, the reality of the present would become apparent and the ghost figures would recede into the background, only to appear again when conjured up by the events of the play. The characters would begin to arrive, and each would react differently to the surroundings, as usually happens at reunions, only this time, the feelings would be verbalized and, in some instances, physicalized. When Solange LaFitte (Fifi D’Orsay) arrives, for example, she hears her old applause echoing in the past, and she brightens to its sound. Hattie Walker (Ethel Shutta), ever the pragmatist, enters directly with her black-and-white ghost figure shadowing her every move. The wheelchair-bound Heidi Schiller (Justine Johnston) is greeted by the swirling movement of her “waltz.” We could get glimpses into the people they were today before we learned about who they had been in the days of the Follies. When Stella Deems (Mary McCarty) is announced by the Major-Domo of the party by her maiden name, she has no reaction; her husband reaches out to remind her of her previous life. John Berkman, the arranger of the dance music, sat at the piano and created the arrangement as Michael worked, basing everything on elements and variations of the songs in the show. It was moody, atmospheric, and eerie. Each day
more characters were introduced, the staging got more specific, and the music related more to the characters. Sometimes the ghost figures would take over and influence the music with specific references to the past. On the day when Michael finally got to the end of the Prologue, Hal said, “Oh, well, good. It’s an opening.” And Michael replied, “And what do you know? I don’t have a clutch in my stomach.”
Another focus early in the week was “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” In some ways this song was the key to the whole show. Not only had it been one of the first songs written, but its evolution paralleled the evolution of The Girls Upstairs into Follies. Steve felt it; of all the songs, this was the one he seemed most anxious about. By Monday afternoon it was in presentable enough shape to be run for Hal, Steve, and Jim Goldman. Halfway through, Hal leaned over to Michael and said: “Terrific—it’s going to be terrific.” Steve was pleased. “It’s going to be great, really, you all keep the emotion very well, and it’s the emotion that carries the song through.” It is the first moment when the lead characters deal specifically with themselves as a foursome—then, and now. The emotions are, necessarily, complex, and since the song comes early in the show, it opens the Pandora’s box of emotional turmoil to come. The song begins on stage level with the men singing their verse. Without being quite conscious of what they’re doing, Phyllis and Sally climb a staircase on one of the side units, as if going back up to their dressing rooms. When they begin their verse, they are “upstairs,” singing about the “boys downstairs.” It was a nice moment, and it cleared the lower level for the young counterparts, who take over for the first time in the show. They enter filled with youthful anticipation of an evening on the town, discuss their plans, and then run off, leaving behind the four principals, who are somewhat dazed by the memory. Once the song was run, Michael went into the stage managers’ office, took a swig of Hal’s Fernet-Branca, and said, “I really like ‘The Girls Upstairs’ from when the young kids start until the end. I just don’t like the beginning. But . . . I’ve got too much to do to worry about it now.” Then there was a brief summit meeting.
In fact, there was a summit meeting almost every day in which Hal, Michael, Jim, and Steve would sequester themselves behind a closed door and discuss the status of the show. This often took place over lunch, but sometimes happened on the spur of the moment.
Of all the creators, the one who was least in evidence the first week was Jim Goldman. He was probably feeling more gun-shy than anyone, simply because as exciting as Follies was, it was a far cry from the show that he and Steve had begun. Changing gears to accommodate a new producer and a new directing team must have made him cautious, and this was the third try, although this time was for real. There had been six complete drafts of the script before Hal got involved, each of which had rough and final versions. (The first one he gave Steve had on its cover: Untitled musical, unpolished book by James Goldman, unfinished music by Stephen Sondheim.) When Hal wanted him in rehearsal, he was always there. And every time he came in, he brought new revisions, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes a new lead-in to a song, sometimes a shift of sequence, sometimes an entirely new scene. He was game, certainly, and appeared to be very laid-back, and very un-showbiz. I found this letter stuck in an earlier draft of the script in the stage managers’ office:
Dear Hal,
What you’ve got here is a first attempt at 1) clarifying and improving Ben and 2) tightening the first sag in the show, the area between “The Girls Upstairs” and “Who’s That Woman?”
It wasn’t that what Ben did was so wrong. The problem was that he didn’t do anything. Being unsure of him, I had taken the sure course of leaving him out, with the result that between his opening monologue and his scene with Sally after “The Girls Upstairs,” he had something like two lines of dialogue.
I’ve come across a way of formulating what the past means to our four people. I’ve found it enormously helpful and before you read this stuff, particularly with Ben in mind, I wanted to offer it to you.
It’s just that when the past stays alive in our lives in harmful or damaging ways, it means we have unfinished business with it. For Ben, Sally represents unfinished business. It’s not the lady herself who attracts him and evokes old feelings. It’s the past within himself that he has never faced or come to terms with.
This may be a highly personal way of putting it and of no help at all. But I’ve begun to feel so much clearer and more certain what this piece is all about by thinking that our people have unfinished business with the past and when the show is over, they have finished with it.
Anyway,
Jim
At one of the summit meetings during lunch (I brought in the food—gofer, remember?), Jim announced that he had found some answers the night before but had had no one to tell them to. This seemed like a slow-track comment delivered to a bunch of people on a fast track and brought the conversation to a bit of a standstill. But soon the conversation was focused on the Follies sequence. Steve was lying on his back on one of the stage units, Jim was puffing away on a pipe, Ruthie was seated, looking up at Hal, Michael and Bob were sitting quietly, and Hal was pacing. The discussion turned to how metaphorical the entire Follies sequence should be. Steve wasn’t sure exactly where he stood; he had mentioned to me a few days earlier that Hal was injecting a lot more obvious “meaning” into the show than had originally been intended. Ruthie said: “This is the first chance all evening for the audience to enjoy something without having to think every moment of the time, and I think it should be kept that way.”
Adigression. On Tuesday night, Mary Rodgers and her husband, Hank Guettel, came to our house for dinner with my parents. They were friends, and we had gone as a family to Hank and Mary’s on Christmas night for dinner. Steve Sondheim had been one of the other guests, and since I knew I would be working on Follies, I asked about it. He said his greatest fear was there would be no one boss; Hal was the logical boss, but because he knew Michael Bennett was going to be a real force this time, he was concerned there might be a tug of war between the two. So on this Tuesday night, four days into rehearsals, Hank and Mary brought gossip from Steve, whom they had spoken to earlier that day. Steve had helped Mary out of a crunch with The Mad Show a few years earlier, when, under the pseudonym Estaban Rio Nido, he wrote a funny set of lyrics to Mary’s music in “The Boy from . . . ,” a parody of the then-popular song “The Girl from Ipanema.” Their song told the story of a young woman’s frustration with her man who lives in places with unpronounceable names, and somehow seems unresponsive to any woman’s affection, which she just can’t understand. “Why are his trousers vermillion? . . . Why do his friends call him Lillian?” It was the hit of the show. Steve paid homage to them both with a line in Company: “Hank and Mary get into town tomorrow.” Listen—it’s still in the score.
Mary said Steve had reported that the show was “terrible—if people thought Company was depressing, wait until this show opens. It really is very depressing.” She didn’t give much credence to his comment, explaining that songs are never sung the way you, the composer, imagine they would and should be, and it’s always a shock when you first hear them coming from the mouths of actors. Hank said that Follies was a labor of love: “If someone is able to come up with something as brilliant as Company when he said his heart wasn’t really in it, imagine what this score, which has indeed been a labor of love, is going to be like?” He also said to keep an eye open—in Company the whole score didn’t come together until Steve wrote “Being Alive” in Boston. He suspected something similar might happen on this show. They also both stressed that they had the utmost respect for Hal as a producer. “He is high above other New York producers in the way he handles his backers. He treats them well without pandering to them and prefers to have many people invest small amounts rather than a few big investors.”
Back at Nineteenth Street rehearsals were forging ahead. Hal Hastings took any actor who wasn’t otherwise occupied to teach and drill mus
ic. He would play the song for the actor first, then give the piano over to a rehearsal pianist so he could concentrate on coaching—phrasing, breathing, enunciation, and rhythm. He wanted to spend the most time with those who needed him the most, and Michael had made it known that he didn’t want to work with any of the solos until the actors knew their material cold.
Ethel Shutta was one of the first to learn her song and begin staging rehearsals. She was a delight. Of all the actors in the show, she became the embodiment of what the show was about. She had been a big star in the 1920s, appearing on Broadway in shows like Whoopee! and in several editions of the Follies. When married to bandleader George Olsen, she became a well-known vocalist, and even went to Hollywood, where she appeared in several films, including the film of Whoopee! Her career had stalled in the 1950s, and drink became something of a demon for her as she tried to return to the stage. Her most recent Broadway credit was an unsuccessful Mary Martin vehicle called Jennie, but she had been plugging away, looking for jobs wherever she could find them. She was grateful for the role in this show, and it would prove to be her last great hurrah. The song given to her character, Hattie Walker, “Broadway Baby,” was a pragmatic statement of a Broadway hopeful. She sang the words with such conviction, spirit, and determination that you couldn’t help but smile. “At!! My tiny flat!! There’s just my cat!!” She was easily a favorite among the company, and every time she rehearsed, people would laugh. In response to my compliments, she replied, “Well, you know, I was in six Ziegfeld shows starting with the Follies in 1925. Don’t expect a grand voice from an old girl like me. When you start singing after not having sung for so long—I am so bad about exercising—you have to get worked into it again.” She told me she thought I looked like Ryan O’Neal, and ripped an ad out of the newspaper for his movie Love Story to prove it. She was worried that she was going to have trouble remembering things, but she was a trouper. When she was passed on to Michael for staging, he began by just letting her do what she wanted. When something pleased him, he would tell her to keep it in. She would stop in her tracks and look at him whenever he spoke, affording him the courtesy traditionally given by a performer to her director. She was fighting to remember things, but that didn’t stop her from trying. At the end of each rehearsal she would thank him for taking the time to work with her. She was having trouble with her small part in the Prologue. Michael wanted her to enter, walk five steps in rhythm, stand still for four counts, and then walk downstage for sixteen more counts. When she finally got it right, Graciela ran over and threw her arms around her in a big bear hug. “Hey, I didn’t know acting could be so hard!” she exclaimed.
