by Ted Chapin
Steve handed Yvonne the middle section of “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” “Well, I’ve finished it now. From here on, it’s up to you.” He had created a routine in which Carlotta looks for the guy and runs into two possibilities, a football hero and a poet, the former with a low-pitched voice, the latter with a high one, both of whom vie for her affection. Of course, Carlotta sang all the parts. (A new line, cut within a few days: “You never know—the poet was the better lay.”) By the end, all three were singing together. “Now this gets tricky.” She was to explain, “They start singing counterpoint . . . any music lovers here, take five.” Yvonne was thrilled and couldn’t wait to get started, but it was clear that Steve had handed her a challenge. And Michael made it known that he didn’t even want to talk with her about staging until she knew the words and music.
Once Hal heard the extended version, he decided to switch the order of “Fox Trot” and “One More Kiss.” Originally, “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” was to be tossed off just before the emotional denouement that prompts Phyllis’s song “Could I Leave You?” and the group nervous breakdown. Now that it was a real piece, he felt that putting it in the middle of the action and having a wistful, haunting waltz at the end would feel tighter and prepare the audience better for the emotional bloodbath to come. “One more kiss before we part, One more kiss and—farewell . . . Dreams are a sweet mistake. All dreamers must awake . . .” He kept making other small revisions—arranging for a curtain call for the Montage, moving party people into different positions, etc. He began to get hard-edged with some of the actors: “Don’t worry, it’ll work. And if it doesn’t, we’ll change it later.” When an actor made a suggestion he didn’t care for he said, “Don’t do me any favors. Just do what I ask you to when I ask you to do it.”
The second and final week in the rehearsal studio was to culminate in a run-through on Thursday afternoon before the day off, and before the move to Feller’s Scenic Studio on Saturday. Suddenly there seemed to be a real push to integrate all those pieces that had not yet been put in sequence nor finished being staged and choreographed.
Hal Hastings was spending a lot of time with Yvonne and with Gene, whose character song, “The Right Girl,” had quietly made its way down to the rehearsal room earlier in the week without many people noticing. This was to be a solo dance number for Buddy in which he expresses anger and frustration at his personal situation, ultimately deciding that he doesn’t love the right girl. It was being worked on by Michael and Gene alone, at odd times of the day, usually late in the evening or early in the morning. Gene, who hadn’t danced onstage in eleven years, was obviously nervous, and Michael wanted this to be a tour de force. Neither man wanted to let on what they were up to, or to show any of it to anyone.
Steve Boockvor Yvonne De Carlo, and Dorothy Collins in a cheerful moment.
Alexis was rehearsing her solos behind closed doors. In addition to “Could I Leave You?” Phyllis’s angry commentary to Ben (“Could I leave you? Yes. Will I leave you? . . . Guess!”), she presumably was rehearsing “Losing My Mind.” There was no way for those of us not in the summit meetings to know where things stood with “Losing My Mind” and any other songs in the Follies sequence for both Alexis and Dorothy. If they were concerned, they were keeping it very quiet. Dorothy just kept radiating good cheer. In fact, on Sunday she and Yvonne were sitting around chatting amiably, and when, at one point, Dorothy threw her arms around me, Yvonne shouted, “Oh no, you don’t. He’s mine!” Dorothy was happily married, and everyone knew that. Yvonne, on the other hand, appeared to be away from home and very much on her own. I wasn’t sure what to make of her, and the night before she had asked me to dinner. I couldn’t go, so I declined.
More production people came by and more meetings took place behind closed doors. Pete Feller sat with Michael and Hal for a long time, going over problems with the set construction. Press agent Mary Bryant arrived with a photographer from the Daily News for a spread that ended up appearing only in the early edition of the paper—bumped for some man throwing himself into the East River and drowning. (Hal, on seeing that the spread was captioned “Nostalgia for ’71,” said, “All this nostalgia shit gives me a pain in the ass.”) She also had to gather biographies from the actors for the Playbill in Boston. Hal Hastings was interviewing new rehearsal pianists since David Baker had, somewhat mysteriously, left the production. “It’s a long story that I will tell you sometime if you’re really interested,” he said. I never got the story. Florence Klotz appeared with some new costume sketches. Joe Tubens, the hair designer, came by with the makeup designer, Charles La France. Harold Friedlander, the man in charge of the printing for the advertising agency, came down with mock-ups of the poster. This was an expensive poster, not only because it used a lot of color, but because it had gradations of color, most prominent in the neck of the figure. Hal didn’t care; he loved it. There were some suggested adjustments to the billing, which didn’t work. There was also a “herald” for the theater in Boston, a 6” x 8” one-sheet flyer used traditionally as a handout at the box office with all performance and ticket price information. This was being done simply and economically and was based on a costume sketch so it could be printed in only two colors. Mary Bryant asked that I not pass it around as it had been printed before John McMartin joined the company and listed only three stars.
Michael relied more and more on his assistants to run those numbers that needed constant drilling so he could concentrate on finishing up “Bolero d’Amour.” He took as much time in the large rehearsal room as he could, often taking over the mornings and not calling in the rest of the company until the afternoon.
On Tuesday, Hal spent the afternoon staging the one part of the show that hadn’t yet been touched: the scene following “Could I Leave You?” when the generations start turning on each other, resulting in the breakdown that leads into “Loveland” and the Follies sequence. He had the full company present, and before beginning he asked to run the prior scene, including “Could I Leave You?” This was the first time Alexis had performed it in the big room for people, and she gave a real performance, quite stunning in its strength. When she finished, there was a brief moment of silence, and then the entire group burst into applause. She just giggled and smiled.
Staging the new scene was a little like planning the strategy for an invasion. There was a script, and it had everything that was needed: present-day characters turning on their spouses, starting with Ben and Phyllis. Then ghost figures would enter, yelling at their partners. Slowly, the characters would begin crossing over the time line and turning on themselves in the other reality. Those multiple confrontations would lead into the “group nervous breakdown.” There were lots of ideas tossed about, all of them having to do with planned confusions and who was actually hearing whom, as if the whole sequence were unfolding one step at a time. Hal would push people around, look at what he’d done, like it or keep moving bodies around. “Every once in a while I think, ‘Ooh, is that pretentious.’ ” Gene Nelson had an idea, but hesitated to throw it in. “You have an idea? Let’s hear it!” Since his character came on to confront Ben, he thought it would be interesting if when he stormed in he went first to Young Ben, stared into his eyes for a moment, then broke off and went over to the older Ben. Hal liked the split second of confusion, then decided that it wasn’t right. He thought he should keep the generations separated in groups, the old ones on stage left and the young ones on stage right. Then he realized that that worked directly against the point of the scene. He tried to get the Bens and the Buddys all to huddle in the middle, then have both Young and Old Sally enter; because she is the reason for the tension among the characters, we could see each man react differently to the two Sallys. When he was done he felt the action looked right. “Everybody take it down and then let it build up from there. When we get to performance, the emotions will be growing as the scene goes on.” Knowing that there would be music underscoring, he said, “You know, I’m glad this is a musical, becau
se if it were a straight play, I wouldn’t have any idea what to do with this scene.”
Tensions were mounting between Steve and Michael. Steve watched, stone-faced, as “Who’s That Woman?” was performed without the old girls. When it was over he smiled, said a quick word to Michael, and went over and conferred with Hal Hastings and the pianists. A few weeks before rehearsals began, Steve had warned Michael that he might not have all the songs until the third week of rehearsal, largely due to the indecision about the specifics of the Follies sequence. Michael and the dancers were now finishing up their fourth week. It became clear to everyone associated with the production that it was past time for the score to be finished. Every time I went to the Prince office I was asked about it. Mathilde who, like Michael, knew that Steve needed to finish before she could start her work, said she wouldn’t badger him about finishing because she had done it once and gotten her head handed to her. She was quick to point out that Steve had called back to apologize, and Steve knew that she had thin skin and would cry at the drop of a hat. David Wolf, assistant to Joanna Merlin, made a joke that maybe the solution would be to have a drop made with the words “STILL TO BE WRITTEN” that could be flown in to end the show. The feeling was that the summit meetings behind closed doors were at least partly about doing whatever needed to be done to get Steve to finish.
Hal’s need for a bona fide run-through on Thursday won the day. The show was written to be performed without an intermission, but there was much discussion about whether it would have one. It was felt that it might be just too long to run as one act, but it was decided to run it straight through. The company sat around the periphery of the room and cheered everyone on when they weren’t performing. Still skipped were “Can That Boy Fox Trot!,” “The Right Girl,” and “Bolero d’Amour.” The run-through began at eleven A.M. and finished a little after one P.M. When they got to the end, Michael asked that they run “Loveland,” even though it hadn’t been run in days, and “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through,” which had been staged fairly quickly and weren’t finished. Many of the company members were seeing numbers they had never seen before. It was especially gratifying to see those pieces of the show that were integrated into the whole for the first time. Ethel Shutta was a favorite, as she continued to be. “Who’s That Woman?” was cheered as well, although everyone was beginning to get sick of it. Mary McCarty had been downplaying the fact that she was the lead singer and that the other women were all, in fact, her backups. Whether she was being clever or just unaware, it was working well. It wasn’t for several more weeks that it would become apparent that the stars were actually being used as a chorus—a brilliant stroke. Now it was just that the damned number was taking up so much rehearsal time.
For the first time, with the inclusion of “Loveland,” the company began to get the sense of how the Follies sequence was going to work. “Loveland” would take us into Loveland, a place where “Time stops, hearts are young,” and where our principals would crack up.
All in all, the run-through was a fair sight better than the one earlier in the week, and it was encouraging enough to have everyone finish up in the rehearsal room on a high note. I got excited. For the first time I realized that the Follies in Follies could be even better than the cabaret in Cabaret—so many of the songs in the body of the show are Follies songs, but because they’re ostensibly sung by old people at a party, they bring up the question of whether they’re really at the party or back in the Follies, at least in their own minds. The fact that each of these numbers is slightly different from the others in feel and staging only adds layers to the show. In Cabaret, even the book scenes took place within the frame of the cabaret. Here, we’re both in the Follies and not at the same time, depending on who’s singing what. And then, of course, we do go “in” Loveland at the end, but even then the show continues to operate on many different levels at once. If this thing works, it’s going to be truly remarkable. And for the first time, it felt as if there really was a show.
Once the run-through was over, Hal, sensing Michael’s increasing annoyance, took him off to a room alone. They were sequestered for a long time. Afterward, they went back to work, cleaning up sections they wanted to keep working on—“Bolero d’Amour” and the Montage—and sent the rest of the company home early. The next step was to decide upon how the Follies sequence—Loveland—would end, for Steve to finish the score with enough time to choreograph and stage the new numbers, and see how everything fit on the actual set.
No one had any idea what was in store once we got to the scene shop, but because we were starting on a weekend, at least the first two days could be at normal working hours. There was both excitement and trepidation. It was quite unusual for a show to rehearse on the actual set, so that would be an adventure. Nor was it normal to rehearse from four P.M. until midnight. And it certainly wasn’t normal to take a motley group of people to a corner of the South Bronx several blocks away from Yankee Stadium to rehearse on a multileveled structure still being constructed in the middle of a workshop. But there was a lot about Follies that wasn’t exactly normal, if there is such a thing as normal in the theater.
4 “But Every Height Has a Drop”
ON THE SET AT FELLER’S SCENIC STUDIO,
JANUARY 30–FEBRUARY 5
Feller’s Scenic Studio occupies a nondescript, two-story brick factory building in the Bronx, a couple of blocks off the Grand Concourse and a few blocks from Yankee Stadium. Nothing about its exterior is inviting or interesting, let alone theatrical. The doors are of unfriendly steel, the windows, framed in standard-issue factory metal. Whatever its original use, it hardly looked like a place that was about to house the eclectic family of Follies, few of whom, one would have to guess, had ever been anywhere quite like it.
Everyone converged at 10:45 A.M. Most of the company came in a very full chartered bus, having departed, in a wonderful reversal of usual matinee theatrical practice, from a Broadway theater, the Alvin, home to Company. There was lots of gossip about what everyone had done on the day off—Fifi regaled everyone with accounts of all the fascinating and expensive things she’d bought; Mathilde Pincus mentioned that she had copied out a new song for Buddy in record time and that Steve had called to thank her. As the bus drove up avenues, over bridges, and under highways, it was clear that getting to wherever we were going wasn’t an easy feat. No one ventured to guess what kind of public transportation might be an alternative. As the bus arrived, so did the limousines carrying the honchos. Everyone had the same response: “Where the hell are we?” As Alexis emerged from her car she looked around and commented, to no one in particular, “Well, this is certainly a curious place to be.”
Inside, the building seemed to consist of one large, vast space punctuated by columns, with workbenches all around the perimeter. Areas were dedicated to different aspects of making scenery and large props—carpentry, metalwork, plastic and fiberglass fabrication, painting, even an enormous vacuum form in which 4’ x 8’ sheets of plastic can become fake brick or stone walls, bookshelves filled with books, and even armor. Every nook and cranny seemed to hold some magical machine designed to do something specific. Situated at various places around the studio—laid out on the floor, standing up against columns, leaning across sawhorses—were bits of scenery for two other musicals scheduled to open on Broadway in the spring: Lolita, My Love, and 70, Girls, 70. The sets for Lolita, My Love were decidedly weird, with walls cut on the diagonal every couple of feet revealing different wallpapers. The small solid standing units for 70, Girls, 70 were much more conventional, with rooms, a bar, seating areas, all of which seemed full scale yet remarkably small. Never far from each project was its appropriate shop drawing, drafted and painted by the designer or an assistant on cardboard, with notes about dimensions, colors, and other details. Often a quarter-inch or half-inch scale set model would be used as reference as well—the one for 70, Girls, 70 was in one of the offices, along with the model for another musical
, Ari, based on Exodus, which had left the shop shortly before we arrived. Odd props and old pieces of scenery were leaning up against back walls, out of the way. There was a stairway leading up to a second floor that had enough empty rooms to serve as impromptu rehearsal spaces, actors’ hangout, and a stage managers’ office.
Feller’s was known as the best studio for three-dimensional, constructed scenery. The main competition, Nolan’s, was known for its painting, so they tended to get the shows that relied on drops and scrims. Follies was clearly a show that had to be built, so Feller’s was the logical choice. There was also a long-standing relation between Hal and the Feller family, since Pete had been investing in Hal’s shows for years, including Follies. It must have been because of this connection that the company was allowed to rehearse on the set, which had to be an inconvenience to the shop. For the Feller family it was challenge enough to find and hold on to good craftsmen for a job that was cyclical by nature; to have their space invaded by a bunch of actors who would be using the very set they were trying to finish couldn’t have been their idea of fun. But they were as accommodating as they could be; an integral part of the Broadway community, they always came through. During the pre-Broadway run of The Rothschilds, I remember Pete Feller himself struggling to fix a renegade wall panel on a central piece of that set—on the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit, and during a performance!
