by Ted Chapin
Jonathan Tunick came with Steve and Jim in the afternoon. Although he had already been at work orchestrating much of the score, he was eager to see any newly staged numbers in context. Like any good orchestrator, he always liked to see the staging before beginning his work. Details, subtext, and punctuation can be influenced by performances and staging. He pulled out his tape recorder as “Loveland” was run, followed by “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through.” Steve and Jim watched as well, looking increasingly like proud parents.
It was approaching the end of the second day in the Bronx, and Monday was going to begin the four-to-midnight schedule. It had been two difficult but exhilarating days. It had also been tiring for everyone. Hal wanted to close the rehearsal by starting at the top of the show, after the Prologue, and working through until time ran out. He stopped after “The Road You Didn’t Take.” Lots of mistakes were made in “Beautiful Girls,” in the blocking and in entrances. Hal addressed the company: “I am sick and tired of hearing errors in the lyrics on the opening number. From now on, I will not tolerate any more goofs. It’s ridiculous. We’ve been at this for three weeks. We’ll never get this show together if we can’t remember things.” Michael, who, unlike Hal, had started the day off in a good mood, added: “Listen, this is a very difficult show, and there is a lot of work involved in putting it all together. If you find it necessary, carry a pencil and write down the movements, because I am tired of seeing, as I saw time and time today, the same mistakes being made over and over. If you have one song, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know the lyrics. It’s nonsense. That’s all I have to say. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The cast shuffled out to the waiting bus, tired, exasperated, and chagrined.
Costume fittings were beginning to be scheduled during the daytime hours. The nighttime rehearsal schedule freed up the day, but any actor called to a costume fitting would be available for that much less rehearsal time, since actors were allowed to work only a set number of hours per day, and the clock started at their first call. One more thing to be coordinated by the stage management.
Hal asked me to take some dictation. He had the scene at the very end of the show on his mind. It didn’t yet exist, and he wanted to try to create a version that he could put into rehearsal. The challenge was to figure out how to get the principal characters out of the Follies sequence and back to reality. Steve wanted to try for a Pirandello moment in Ben’s song, in which somehow the character and the actor get confused and the audience wouldn’t be sure what was going on. (He succeeded skillfully in the song ultimately titled “Live, Laugh, Love.”) Steve also suggested they try an idea that was originally contemplated for Gypsy, in which the lead character becomes caught up in a kaleidoscopic nightmare of her life, with characters and bits and pieces of songs mashed together. (This became “Rose’s Turn.”) Hal’s concern at the moment was the scene that would follow the end of the Follies sequence. The assumption was that the four principals would be left alone on the stage. They would recover somehow from the group nervous breakdown and go back to their lives. But what would Ben, Phyllis, Sally, and Buddy be feeling? Hal was at somewhat of a loss to figure that out, since Ben’s number was only in discussion. “Loveland,” the songs for the Young Four, and “Buddy’s Blues” were finished, but there still was no determination about Phyllis’s and Sally’s numbers, so the problem of what they would actually say after going through their specific experiences hadn’t been solved. Hal had two different drafts from Jim Goldman, along with some pages of his own notes. Quietly reading from all the pages, flipping back and forth among them, he dictated his own version of the ending, very pensively, hardly raising his voice over a whisper. I wrote down whatever he said. When he was done, he asked that I type it up and bring a couple of copies to him so he could go over it with Michael. Two days later I was summoned to his office at Rockefeller Center, where he was going over the scene—his version, and a slightly different one he had received from Jim the night before. Jim sat silently as Hal discussed a couple of details, and then handed me a draft that he wanted typed out and distributed to the actors.
It was time for Michael to mount “Who’s That Woman?”—which was soon to get the nickname “the mirror number”—on the set. As with the Prologue, what started to become apparent was the brilliance of the staging as it was placed on the angular set. When the young characters appeared upstage in mirror image, with their backs to us, they were higher than the older women and fanned out on two levels. You almost got the feeling that there was a tilted mirror allowing us to see the dance from above at the same time we were seeing it from the front. When the older and younger characters melded into one at center stage, it looked cinematic. And when everyone danced around in the circle, they were actually dancing up and down several levels, so it looked like pure Busby Berkeley. Michael knew he had to keep running the number, so that the older women could feel comfortable with the rake, and also get their not-yet-mastered tap dance steps down cold. He didn’t want a day to go by without working through it on the set. And if the gentle walk and promenade of “Beautiful Girls” was panic-inducing, imagine what the first pass through the tap steps of “Who’s That Woman?” was like. But, as always, Bob Avian, George Martin, and Graciela and Mary Jane were there at Michael’s side, ready to encourage, cajole, assist, and lead the cheers when things went well.
“Bolero d’Amour” was also taking up as much rehearsal time as Michael could find. I wasn’t sure why; one new number had come in and was being staged pretty quickly, but this one was taking forever. Fred Kelly, one member of the company who had pretty much kept to himself, was watching from the sidelines. I asked him if he had any thoughts. “Are you in college?” he asked. “Then do you mind if I answer you on a psychological level? When you have a fey director and fey dancers trying to create a dance between a man and a woman, you find that it takes a long time to get anything good. They add the same things to the dance and don’t know how to get it to the level they want. Of course when I worked with my brother, Gene, we both knew how to get the same result. One time we were choreographing a dance together, and my brother was late. So I worked alone—and when he finally arrived and saw what I was doing, he had come up with exactly the same steps.”
When the rehearsal was over, Michael called all the dancers together to tell them that he had decided to fire Don Weismuller, who was playing Vincent. He asked if any of them knew any dancers who were tall, of a certain age, and could dance well; any names, he said, would be appreciated. Graciela, who was one of Michael’s assistants as well as playing Young Vanessa, had been involved in every rehearsal of the number. She wasn’t thrilled at the thought of having to teach it to someone new. “Why not just get rid of Vincent and have Vanessa do the number by herself?” she asked. She was one of the few people in the company who could make Michael laugh.
Using the set: Several of the women—Sonja Levkova,
Mary Jane Houdina, Sheila Smith, Ethel Barrymore Colt, and
Jayne Turner—pose for a photograph at the party.
Tuesday brought a small contingent from the press. Rehearsals went on as if they weren’t there. Sam Norkin, the Daily News’s answer to the great Al Hirschfeld, was in attendance, sitting quietly in the background, sketching faces and poses on sheets of paper. He would simply draw on one sheet and then place it on the bottom of the pile. Norkin was happy to show his preliminary drawings to anyone, and only Ethel Barrymore Colt and John McMartin seemed recognizable. There were two photographers as well, one of whom came with Louis Botto, who had been given the go-ahead to proceed with his article on Hal for Look magazine—“The Prince of Broadway.” He and his photographer, Bill Yoscary, would follow the show along its developmental path from now to Boston. Hal, although encouraging, did caution them by saying, “I hate to do this to you, but I must have approval over all the photos to cut out any of the old ladies that are really awful. If anyone comes across like Elaine Stritch in the film
of the Company recording session, that’s one thing. But I don’t want any of these ladies to come off badly in any article.” He reminded them that Actors’ Equity has strict rules about using photographs, and that it can involve “a lot of dough.” “I think there would be a story here as long as it’s not indulgent,” he told them all. The other photographer, Robert Galbraith, was taking photographs of the set for Boris. And for the first time, one of the doily Follies drops was laid out on the floor—large string netting over which some liquid plastic substance was poured to make the filigree.
Both Steve and Jim began to be around more and more, even though the writing wasn’t finished. The show was starting to look and feel like a show, and it was their baby. They were often pulled aside into one of the rooms upstairs for discussion. They were also giving notes—for example, Steve wanted a clean musical end to “Too Many Mornings” before the next line of dialogue.
After one of the runs of “Who’s That Woman?” Hal decided to keep moving, linking it to the scenes that follow. The next song in sequence was “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Yvonne, who had been working with Michael, had been telling everyone how great it was, but she had also been saying that the number “wasn’t ready for public display.” Still, she allowed herself to be coaxed into doing as much of it as she could. The stage managers had to prompt her a lot, but she charged ahead and, with a twinkle, even used the “suggestive” gesture that Michael had devised for her and about which she had expressed concern—hands clasped together in front, bending at the elbows and bringing them up to her chest while making a slight grind with her midriff on the word “fox-trot.” Everyone applauded, and Steve complimented her. She was pleased. Hal kept moving on, staging her exit from the number. “Do you know it must be a week since we last did this scene—I don’t remember any of it!” he said.
I sat with Dorothy Collins, John McMartin, and Ruthie Mitchell during the dinner break. Dorothy was saying how thrilled she was to be part of Follies and what a brilliant director she felt Hal was. “I go out of here exhilarated every night.” Ruthie said that he actually hadn’t been such a great stage manager but that he sure was impressive as a producer and director. “Boy, oh, boy, I’ll say,” Dorothy agreed, going on to recount how her first husband had made her feel that she had no acting talent whatever, so she took it upon herself to attend some acting classes. Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse was useless for her, but Uta Hagen was brilliant, giving her great confidence. She also thanked Ruthie for being so patient when she had auditioned years earlier for She Loves Me. Hal came by, sat down, and she gave him her compliments directly. He then explained how the ending of the show was shaping up. Jim had an idea that after the group breakdown, the four principals pick themselves up and leave as if they were just leaving a cocktail party—niceties exchanged, nothing dramatic, just platitudes. Hal wasn’t convinced it was a good idea and wondered whether an audience would be able to make the shift so quickly after having been through the whole Follies sequence. “It may sound like I’m putting Jim down, but I’m not. I’m only expressing my fears. We all have to be big enough to let our honest thoughts affect how we deal with each other.”
That evening Hal walked through, and restaged, the tricky moment after “Could I Leave You?” when the present-day characters turn on their former selves. Now that Hal had the actual levels to use, he played around with entrances and blocking. First he tried moving all the action onto one level, and rejected it right away. Then he tried different levels, and when he saw something he liked, he said, “I’m almost there, but it’s still static.” One moment had Ben all alone on one side of the stage, looking lost. Hal turned to Jim Goldman and said, “See what I mean by needing more for him here?” He brought Buddy on upstage right and then had Young Buddy enter downstage right—he liked the idea of the two characters confronting each other across the whole stage as if no one else were present. “It just looks terrific.” When something didn’t work, he’d say, “That’s just awful.” But he was cooking tonight, and having a grand time almost conducting the action.
I had become something of a chauffeur, as I had made myself available to drive people to the Bronx in my red convertible Volkswagen Bug, a hand-me-down from my grandmother. I was asked to fetch and carry some of the principal actors and, on occasion, some of the staff. Larry Cohen was a frequent passenger as well, and he always had interesting gossip coming from the Michael camp, since he had become friendly with Michael and Bob Avian.
The next day Hal made his first attempt at rehearsing the very end of the show with the actors. He gathered all four principals and their young counterparts upstairs, handed the pages out to them all, and had them read through it once. Silence. He made some encouraging remarks, and they read it again, with Hal making more observations, giving direction, answering questions. Then he got them up on their feet. The initial idea was to have each character hug his or her younger counterpart, but it was awkward, and it clearly wasn’t making the actors happy. Hal moved his actors around; then he would run through what he had done. The actors would look to him for reassurance. He tried changing one of Sally’s lines to a gentle singing of a section of “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Then, as they are left alone, he had the four young characters break away from their present-day selves and drift up to the corners of the set, back into the shadows. As this was happening, the present-day characters expressed their cocktail-party niceties and exited, leaving the ghosts in the theater. The actors remained glum. Only Alexis seemed to find a way to make her lines work. Since the Young Four had no lines, the whole thing felt awkward to everyone. Hal asked me to find out when Michael would be on a break so he could try to stage it on the set. A few minutes later, down everyone went, and after making a few slight adjustments to the placement onstage, he ran it a couple of times. You could have heard a pin drop. “Well, we’ll show it to Jim later when we run the whole thing. We’ll run it with and then without what we’ve just done, and we’ll see what it looks like.”
Wednesday night’s run-through was the most complete so far. Beforehand, Hal said to me, “In a week we’ll really have something to look at.” He then gave the company a pep talk: “Let’s not stop and fix things tonight. Let’s go through everything, absolutely everything we’ve done so far, and see what we have. Energy—that’s the word. Lots of energy. That’s something that will help us through the next few weeks.” Hal wanted to do it without a break, to run the whole show as one entity. They did; it began at 9:15 and ended at 11:15, even without “The Right Girl,” which was still not ready, and much of Loveland, including the songs for Phyllis, Sally, and Ben. Most of the winching mechanics for the side units were finished enough for the moves to be attempted; despite some skepticism, they ran smoothly, with only a single stop all evening to get one unit back in its track. Lyrics were still flubbed by Michael Bartlett, Ethel Shutta, and Fifi D’Orsay. One change that had been made, which struck many of us as a surprise, was that Alexis performed “Could I Leave You?” drunk, reeling around the stage, even clutching Ben’s leg at one point. None of us knew where the idea came from, but it was clearly a big mistake. Still, Alexis was roundly credited for throwing herself into it full force. It turned out she had thought the song would be her one musical moment in the show and therefore asked that it be staged by Michael. For whatever reason, he decided to stage it as a drunken rampage. She was supposed to sing “Losing My Mind” in the Follies sequence, but she must have known instinctively that it was the sort of number she couldn’t really deliver.
Jim Goldman confers with Hal Prince.
As the polite applause died down, Michael, knowing how incomplete the Follies sequence was, yelled: “This is a work in progress!” Following “Loveland,” the only other finished songs run were “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” and “Love Will See Us Through.” Once they were done, Hal skipped to the new ending scene that he had rehearsed earlier in the day. Both Steve and Jim sat forward. When it was over, there was general silence, just a littl
e too long for comfort. Hal called for a break, and then turned to Steve and Jim and asked to speak with them about several things—“not just that shitty ending which I did to show you but which I don’t think is right.”
There was quite a production meeting following the run-through. The clearest evidence of something that had been brewing came out right at the beginning of rehearsal the next day. Michael gathered the full company on the set and announced: “I am now going to begin version number three of the Prologue.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but Michael hadn’t worked on the Prologue in days; it had simply been part of the run-throughs. I also hadn’t noticed that there had been more than one version so far. “You will all please be patient. I am going to have people moving in different tempos, so everyone must be with me. Pay attention and be patient.” He then addressed the dancers and showgirls: “For those of you who have seen your costumes at fittings and know how big they are, please let me know if I am asking you to do something that you won’t be able to do—that will save us all a lot of time.” Although it was hard to see what had been considered wrong with the Prologue, one of the goals of the new version was to tie music more into each character. The first version had begun with eerie, atmospheric music composed by John Berkman that emphasized the ghostlike world of the Weismann Theater. Michael added some of the ghost figures to his second version, without necessarily driving the point home that they were actually the same characters who were inhabiting the theater.
