Everything Was Possible

by Ted Chapin

  All in all, the costumes pleased. And the brilliant ones were so brilliant that worries about the ones that might not work were squelched for the moment. Of course, there were many slight adjustments to be made and some normal fitting problems to attend to, but for the most part the creative staff seemed more than satisfied.

  Now it was time to put the entire show together.

  7 “Everybody Has to Go Through Stages Like That”

  FOUR FULL DAYS, THE TECHNICAL REHEARSALS,

  FEBRUARY 17–20

  Following the costume parade came the first technical rehearsal. Starting at the very top of the show, everything is worked through in sequence, with scenery, lights, costumes, props, and sound. No orchestra at this point—to have twenty-seven more people being paid to wait around while everything else is coordinated is unnecessary. They’ll come in tomorrow, after the show has been stumbled through at least once. For now, the rehearsal piano will do fine, and it is rolled down one of the aisles of the theater. Phil Fradkin sits at the keyboard. For the dancers, Paul Gemignani sits in the pit, alone with his drums, ready to play along.

  In comes the house curtain, and on go the house lights. The ragtag group of spectators out in the house remains the same: Hal, Ruthie, Michael, Steve, Jim, Bob, Boris, Tharon, and a few others. They scatter around, flopping down in whatever seat strikes their momentary fancy, but in predictable groupings—Hal and Ruthie, Michael and Bob, Steve alone. Tharon is still at her desk dead center, with assistants nearby. Fritz Holt is standing at his stage manager’s desk backstage, immediately off stage right. He’s wearing a headset and is in communication with all departments. George Martin is in charge of stage left. He has a headset as well. John Grigas is now in costume, doubling in his onstage role of chauffeur. He’ll figure out how to balance his stage-managing

  A conference in the Colonial Theatre: Hal, Michael, and Steve.

  duties with his acting responsibilities once the show is running. Now he’s on old-lady duty, keeping an eye out for Fifi, Ethel, and anyone else in need of a friendly arm. The onstage band members are, for all intents and purposes, actors: they’re backstage, and they need to be ready to make a proper entrance on the proper cue. Hal Hastings takes his conductor’s position at the podium in the pit, but until the cue is given to begin, he faces the auditorium, arms on the railing.

  Voices seem to be coming from everywhere, some of them loud and from backstage. Fritz tries to get everyone quiet so the rehearsal can begin. He wanders out onstage in front of the curtain to make certain Hal, Michael, and the rest of the gang out in the house are ready. It’s getting late—the costume parade has taken up the better part of two hours. There is no way the whole show can be run tonight, but it’s important to begin.

  “Places” is called. There is an eerie silence in the house, then the lights begin to dim. In the darkness, low notes come from the piano, sounding like a drumroll. The curtain rises and we see a tall showgirl at stage right on an upper platform, standing completely still. The lighting flashes, almost like strobe lights, then establishes a moody darkness, yet there are enough stray shafts of light for us to see everything we need to see. Slowly, the showgirl turns her head and starts to move. From out of the shadows, other ghosts begin to move—slowly, eerily. The Prologue begins, and immediately the prerecorded segments are late. Everything stops. Fritz Holt comes out onstage from his backstage perch. Michael hops up onstage and adjusts the entrances slightly, and asks Fritz to get the cues coordinated. He wants both Hal Hastings and the sound man, Jack Mann, to understand what he’s after. What will it take to get it right? Every question has to be answered, and some answers take time. It’s slow going. Although each element is familiar, putting them all together is new. For the actors, wearing the costume is new, walking out onto a darkened stage is new, feeling lights in their faces while they go through the staging is new. Spacing the people is a challenge. Entrances and exits are confusing—in the dark the side towers and units are less distinguishable than they are in bright light. Maintaining equilibrium is a challenge. And the hour is getting late.

  “Beautiful Girls” is a shambles. No one is comfortable with the entrances down the rubble/staircase, and almost every woman now has a floor-length gown. They can’t see their feet—will they need to hike up their skirts to land on that first step? Are there things on the staircase that will catch the hem of the skirts? Is there enough of a railing to hold on to? By the time they hit the stage level to do the Miss America glide there won’t be anything to hold. Even the timing of getting from backstage up the escape stairs to the top level of the tower and walking across behind the stage band to get ready for the individual poses at the top of the stair is tricky. The older women are in a panic; the younger ones are simply having their patience tested. Michael and Bob come right down to the front row of the theater, lean against the orchestra rail, and offer helpful suggestions. When that isn’t enough, they jump up onstage and walk the women through their paces, slowly and carefully. When everyone finally gets down to stage level, walks around, and lines up behind Michael Bartlett in a Rockettes-like stance, it’s clear that the stage picture will be wonderful. A more motley assortment of shapes, colors, styles, and ages would be hard to imagine. Each woman wears a gold banner off one shoulder proclaiming the year of her Follies. If this lineup doesn’t convey who the people of Follies are, I doubt that anything will. When this gets pulled together, the moment will be golden.

  The tech gets to “Ah, Paris!” and Fifi D’Orsay is in a complete panic. She is frazzled by where she is supposed to enter—she thinks her spot has been changed. She can’t hear the piano accompaniment. The heels on her shoes are too big. She can’t see the end of the platform. She flubs the lyrics. Hal Hastings, now standing at his perch at the podium, facing the stage and only a few feet away from her, treats her with kid gloves. He is standing where he will be standing from this moment onward, ever patient, there to help. He stops the piano, gets Fifi’s attention, and assures her that he’s here to make her comfortable, that she should just take a deep breath, get her bearings, look around, and see what the stage looks and feels like, and then move on.

  But by now it’s time to stop. It’s eleven o’clock. Hal Prince comes down to the front of the stage, thanks everyone for a good day’s work, and tells them to go home and get some sleep.

  Hal had been remarkably quiet throughout the day. During tech rehearsals the boss is the production stage manager, since he’s the one who has to coordinate everything behind the curtain. The producer can only sit and fret about how much everything is costing, and the rumor now going around is that Hal is personally covering any overages above the original budget. Every time some costume needs to be fixed or changed, and every time there’s a problem with the set, it hurts the exchequer. And all the director can hang on to is the hope that his staging will work as well on the stage as it did in rehearsals. So Hal wasn’t especially happy. Neither was Steve Sondheim. Jim Goldman remained very quiet, sometimes just standing at the rear of the auditorium, hugging one of the marble columns at the top of the aisles. This part is agonizing—so near, yet seemingly so far.

  The subject of amplification in the musical theater is something about which everyone has an opinion. A strong opinion. It is a complex subject that has as much to do with the design of modern theaters and the placement of the orchestra as it does with manner of staging, style of performance, and sophistication of scenic design. There is a general feeling of nostalgia for the time before microphones, but really that takes us back before 1938, when the first microphones were used in a Broadway musical. Their use over the next decades was modest, mostly with foot mikes across the front of the stage. Modern audiences, whether they realize it or not, have grown accustomed to a more naturalistic style of performance in which actors can face each other in scenes as easily as they can face front, all the while being heard with clarity. In the days before microphones, actors with big voices got the parts, and they tended to come down fr
ont and sing straight out. The sets, when designed in “box” format, acted like scenic megaphones; but as sets became more impressionistic and sculptural, more open, they gave no help to the sound. In Follies, microphones were used, mainly across the front of the stage, on the floor. There were other microphones hidden within the set, often shotgun style, aimed at a specific area from a fair distance away. These were most useful when a song was sung by one person remaining in one place all the way through. Although a body mike was first used on Broadway by Anna Maria Alberghetti in Carnival in 1961, using them with regularity was still a few years away.

  Michael, Hal, and Ruthie conferring in the

  Colonial Theatre’s auditorium..

  Thursday began with a recording session, of sorts. Jack Mann, Hal Prince’s chief sound man, had been a fairly invisible member of the team up to this point. He had been to a couple of the New York run-throughs, and had quietly made his notes. Earnest and humorless, he took his job very seriously and would say anything he wanted to anyone, often getting himself into trouble if he spoke too harshly to Steve, Hal, or Michael. He knew the sound needs of the show, and took over one of the boxes on the orchestra level of the theater, setting up his sound board and mixing equipment behind a makeshift black curtain, in such a way that he would be able to see the stage without the audience seeing him. The cables running in from the microphones and out to the speakers—there were mikes in the orchestra pit as well as onstage—were snaked into the box as subtly as possible, along the floor and over the railing.

  Jack replugged the stage mikes and shifted dials in order to turn his makeshift sound booth into a recording studio. The reasoning behind the exercise was this: by the end of the big dance numbers, everyone will be winded. To prerecord these same people singing what they’ll be singing onstage and to play the tape along with the live performers will allow the audience to hear the song clearly and take a little of the onus off the dancers. And no one will need to know it’s happening. The biggest challenge was tempo: without actually singing the song and doing the dance, it’s only a guess what the tempo will be. The cast assembled on the front of the stage and sang into the foot mikes. Two sections were recorded: the end of “Who’s That Woman?” and, more for diction than for windedness, “Loveland.” Hal Hastings made a best guess at the tempo for both, and counted off. Once recorded, the tapes were played back for the company to hear. Jack had made “Loveland” slightly celestial by adding some echo and reverb, as befitting the fantasy world of the song. The company was amused. (When Actors’ Equity got wind of this, they slapped Hal with a bill for a week’s salary for everyone whose voice was used on the tape.)

  The other sound challenge was the tap dancing. If an audience sees tap dancing, it needs to hear tap dancing. Tap shoes, however, can be treacherous: the little metal pieces on the toes and heels make them awfully slippery. Cheater taps—two-piece metal tips for shoes that make a loud tap sound—are even worse. And there were no flat floors on the Follies set. Gene Nelson damn near killed himself doing “The Right Girl” in tap shoes on the set in the Bronx, so it had been decided that no one would wear tap shoes during any of the tap choruses in the show. Jack Mann rigged up a microphone off stage left pointing down to a piece of Masonite. For “Who’s That Woman?” George Martin and two other dancers would put on tap shoes, watch the stage, and dance the rhythm of every routine along with the dancers—but in place and on the Masonite board. The audience would see tap dancing and hear tap shoes and would assume they were coming from the same place.

  The technical rehearsal continued, beginning where it ended the night before, still very much in stop-and-start mode. Many light cues were written and adjusted as the rehearsal proceeded. The actors who were confident and consistent had little problem adjusting to the stage. Those who had already taken up a lot of everyone’s time continued to do so. When it got to “Who’s That Woman?” the offstage tapping and the prerecorded “sweetening” were added for the first time. Nothing matched. The singing tape was much too slow, and the taps weren’t remotely coordinated. In addition, during the costume parade, the chorus girls playing the ghost counterparts had complained that the mirror chips on their gauntlets were cutting into their skin, so now they were dancing in only partial costumes. Once they began their chorus, it was discovered that mirror chips on the skirts were also cutting into their arms. One by one the women just stopped dancing, and after Hal Hastings caught on to what was happening, he stopped everything while the girls went to change out of their costumes. The skirts were sent downstairs to Barbara Matera’s makeshift shop to join the gauntlets, which were being sheathed in clear plastic.

  Yvonne ad-libbed a line before “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” After “I had a number once all my own . . . a college number,” she tossed off: “See, it’s funny already,” as she realized how preposterous it was for her even to mention college. Everyone laughed. It was a keeper; it stayed in the script. There was fussing about whether she should crash the cymbal of the onstage band to get everyone’s attention at the top of the song, or whether it would be better for the onstage percussionist to do it. Everyone agreed: let the pro handle the drum.

  Tharon was playing around with lights during “Could I Leave You?” Suddenly a blue wash came from stage left, and then a white pin-spot backlight found John McMartin standing to one side. The two follow spots focused tighter and tighter on Alexis while she sat on the downstage corner of the second platform, delivering the song. She carried on, with an occasional look around, decidedly out of character, curious about what was going on.

  Alexis finished the song, stood up, and continued with the dialogue as the others began to enter for the transition into “Loveland” and the Follies sequence. This had never been done before with the actual scenery and drops, so Fritz came out onstage and said, “Hold everything, please.” He warned everyone to keep an eye on what was about to happen, explaining that the Follies drops would fly in, one at a time, and cautioned the company not to get hit by them as they flew in, and to mark through the transition carefully. No one, in fact, except the stage crew and designers had even seen the drops in the theater, as they had been the first pieces of scenery loaded in. Flying pieces are always hung before the floor is laid down, and this was especially necessary for Follies because the set was so complicated—who would want to carry a large, rolled-up drop out onto a stage made up of so many levels? Also, because the Follies drops were so bright, they were hung as high as possible in order for them not to be seen during the rest of the show. The gray pieces of hanging flotsam were purposely designed to hang low enough to block out any hint of color above.

  Hal, Lisa and Boris Aronson, Ruthie.

  Fritz called for the scene to start again, and the actors picked up where they left off. The four principals continued, confronting each other and their younger selves, and the piano began playing “Loveland.” Everyone onstage looked up, and one by one, from far upstage to downstage, the drops came in. First was a fan, then the oversized doilies, then, farthest downstage, a rich, silky, velvet-looking curtain, sky-blue and white, different in color and texture from all the others, which tabbed up as it flew in. As the dancers entered, they looked up to make certain the staging they had learned put them out of the way of what was coming at them from above. The company came sneaking out of the wings to gasp and applaud. Hal and Michael both nodded in approval. Fritz was proud of having pulled off the complicated transition. Steve Sondheim, standing in the auditorium, turned and said, “Not bad, Boris.” Boris smiled. The drops filled about two-thirds of the width of the stage; there was no masking on the sides, allowing the side units to be seen lurking in the shadows. It worked brilliantly. Michael went over to Fritz to discuss the speed at which the drops should fly in. He felt they had all come in too slowly, and wanted to make certain they could be timed precisely, to fly in one after the other in perfect sequence, as if they were methodically taking over the entire place. He also wanted to synchronize the appearance of the two s
emicircular stair units from under the platform, although he didn’t want their appearance to be noticed.

  This was a difficult and important transition, so it was repeated several times. After five passes, it finally all came together: drumroll, fanfare, staircases, drops in, one at a time, coming to a stop right as the vamp began, tape synchronized with the onstage singing, chorus of pastel Dresden figures in position, and the showgirls ready to make their entrances. “No matter what audiences may feel about Follies, these Follies drops coming in is already one of the rare, glorious moments in the theater”—that’s what I wrote in my notebook.

  Marti Rolph and Harvey Evans, performing

  “Love Will See Us Through. ”

  The hope was to finish the tech rehearsal in the afternoon and do a full dress rehearsal in the evening, with orchestra. But time ran out after “Love Will See Us Through” and “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow.” As a result, the first portion of the evening rehearsal was used to get through the Follies sequence, into the chaos, out of it, and to the very end of the show. The tab curtain closed before “Buddy’s Blues,” then opened only slightly for “Losing My Mind” to reveal Sally standing in her slinky gown in a small opening only slightly larger than she was. The chorus was dressed in its reds for both “Uptown, Downtown” and “Live, Laugh, Love,” but it was quickly discovered that the red translucent canes used in “Live, Laugh, Love” were rubbing off on the white vests. The rehearsal was stopped instantly, the canes disposed of, and the few vests that had already been stained were taken off and sent down to Barbara Matera’s underworld.