Everything Was Possible

by Ted Chapin

  With nerves at fever pitch, the performance at night was flawless, and brilliant. The new staging of “I’m Still Here” was a great improvement, and the audience appreciated it more than ever. There were bravos and cheers in the middle of “Lucy and Jessie” and a roar at the end. Everything played well, and at the curtain call Alexis hugged Yvonne and said, “Well, we both got through!” She had long kept her distance from Yvonne, and this was a nice moment of rapprochement.

  Friday, March 19

  Steve continued to tinker, mostly with the lyrics. Today’s changes were for “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs.” He focused on the middle section, first making a cut and then changing the style of a lyric. The cut was four lines about remembering the old stage doorman, Max, and it was clean; nothing was lost. The real change came in a section sung by Ben and Buddy. Originally written to be sung by Buddy alone, every other line had been assigned to Ben when he was added to the song:

  Race off the stage.

  “I gotta phone!”

  “Houselights!”

  “Who wants to get a bite?”

  Rip off the wigs.

  “Come on, will ya?”

  “Strike it!”

  “Jesus, I look a fright.”

  Run up the stairs.

  “Who knows the call?”

  “Dumbbell!”

  “See you tomorrow night!”

  It had been staged with them running back and forth and up the steps, as if reenacting the moments they were describing. That made the lyrics hard to understand. So Steve simplified it and gave each guy three lines, with the final three sung together:

  Girls on the run

  And scenery flying,

  Doors slamming left and right.

  Girls in their un-

  Dies, blushing but trying

  Not to duck out of sight.

  Girls by the hun-

  Dreds waving and crying,

  “See you tomorrow night!”

  Once again, Sondheim was solving a problem in an inventive way. While the norm is to turn description into action, here the problem was solved by doing precisely the reverse. The action had gotten in the way of clarity, and in changing the lines of lyric into description of what happened, the focus of the song was helped. The puzzle man also created a perfect ABC/ABC/ABC rhyme scheme. Of course, the actors were in a mild panic, having to learn something new and put it in the show that night. Gene was operatic in his concern, but time was wasting. If a change didn’t get tried in Boston, it would have to wait through the technical days in New York before being performed in front of an audience.

  These weren’t the only lyrics that Steve was sharpening. He clarified several of the images in “I’m Still Here” and, in one instance, fixed a lyric that was hard to sing, two words together each beginning with “thr—,” into something more singable, and then into something just plain better. Originally:

  I got through three commercials

  And I’m here.

  Then to:

  I got through five commercials

  And I’m here.

  And finally:

  I’m almost through my memoirs,

  And I’m here.

  He also made small cuts in “Love Will See Us Through” and “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow.” Maybe this is how the rumors got started about these being cut entirely, but only internal edits were made. Still, the Young Four suspected the worst and were visibly on edge.

  It was Michael’s dream for the new Prologue to go in tonight, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was coming together nicely, and everyone was beginning to recognize that it would be a big help in starting the show on the right foot—but it was too good to rush. Still, Michael was determined to see it in front of an audience before New York, and Saturday evening would be the last performance in Boston.

  I was dispatched to buy more white gloves. The idea had caught on, but the dancers, who already had quick changes into and out of their red tailcoats, were worried. They didn’t want to have to think of one more thing. And, as Alexis pointed out as she and I were leaving the theater together, “Do they realize what claps sound like with gloves?” She had a good point: the dance section of “Lucy and Jessie” involved lots of hand-clapping. It didn’t look as if anyone had thought of that. Two dancers were also being added to the number—Victoria Mallory and Jayne Turner—in order to make the stage seem completely full. Gloves were worn for “Lucy and Jessie,” and, yes, the claps sounded muffled. By “Live, Laugh, Love” the gloves were gone, never to be seen again.

  The four principals were still wearing their street clothes for the Follies. Dorothy, ever the team player, who had spent so much time bucking everyone else up, had finally had it and went to Hal to complain. “As a girl I just want to feel pretty once in the evening. I don’t want to sing my song in that frumpy dress, especially with staging that was conceived for my slinky dress. Please don’t make me do it anymore.” Most everyone on the production kept silent, because it seemed so blatantly clear that having the stars of a musical wear dull clothes for their big production numbers was insane, whatever the conceptual justification. Whether it was Dorothy who won the day, or whether it was just plain good sense, they went back into their Follies costumes. The relief backstage was palpable.

  When the curtain rose for “Lucy and Jessie,” the silver fountain drops were missing. It turned out they had been taken down and were leaning up against the back wall, waiting to be loaded into the first truck of scenery headed to New York. The load-in at the Winter Garden was scheduled to begin at three P.M. on Sunday, and the idea was to fill a first truck on Friday night with every extraneous costume, prop, and piece of scenery that could be done without for the final two performances on Saturday. That truck could be ready for unloading as soon as the New York call began. Obviously, most of the scenery, lights, and costumes couldn’t be loaded until after the final performance, but this was getting a leg up on the load-out. The audience didn’t know any better.

  Carl Fisher and his wife, Joan, came up from New York, bringing with them some new waiters’ costumes for the improved Prologue. Carl had been holding down the fort at the Prince office in New York. He said the advance sale in New York had started with a bang but was now reduced to a whimper. “Maybe,” he suggested, “we’ve exhausted the Boston word of mouth.” He reiterated that the Boston gross in the final week would not quite reach the $100,000 goal Hal had hoped to achieve. He also explained the story about the large billboard at the Winter Garden, the one that Hal still didn’t want to rent but which Ruthie and others felt would be great. Hal was still balking at the initial cost of $3,000 and the $250 per month maintenance. What Ruthie and the others knew, of course, was that a show in the Winter Garden without the billboard looks like a flop that knows it won’t be staying long. Hal realized he was stuck. He had to use it, so a design and plans for installation were proceeding.

  The performance was sluggish, and afterward there was a one-hour overtime rehearsal for the Prologue. John Berkman was late, so Steve played the piano, doing the best he could since he didn’t know how his songs had been arranged for the choreography. Justine Johnston, Equity deputy, was the first one out of her costume and down for rehearsal, determined to keep a close watch on the clock. One hour of overtime was going to mean sixty minutes and no more.

  Saturday, March 20

  The last day in Boston. Hal had been working with Jim on Sally’s “mad” scene. A final version was rehearsed at eleven A.M. with great precision, and everyone felt a problematic moment had probably been solved once and for all. Hal had a few brief notes, then Michael took the stage for some further cleanup work on the Prologue. The full company was present, whether they were in the Prologue or not. As the performance time drew closer and the crew heads arrived, some costumes and props became available for the rehearsal; but there wasn’t a lot of time, and everyone had to get ready for the matinee.

  The matinee was rough—Fifi got her shoe caught in one of the
steps coming down for “Beautiful Girls” and nearly fell over, and Gene botched the new lyrics in “The Girls Upstairs,” although John McMartin had them down cold. Lighting designer Jules Fisher, who was dating Graciela Daniele, stood for the performance and loved every minute of it.

  The orchestra was called at six to play through the new Prologue. The company was called for 6:10—precisely an hour and a half after the curtain fell for the matinee, because Equity rules decree there be at least that much time between calls. For the first ten minutes, Hal Hastings talked the orchestra through the music, Mathilde and Jonathan standing by to answer any questions. Then the company came wandering on, including the onstage band, who had a more prominent position in the new version. After hushing everyone, Hal gave the downbeat. At first the music was somber and serious, and the cast looked worried. Then as “That Old Piano Roll” and “Broadway Baby” kicked in, the mood changed dramatically. Suddenly it sounded like fun. When it was over, Michael asked everyone to get in position so it could be run with the staging and orchestra. This time through, something very special happened: it was majestic, it was atmospheric . . . it was beautiful. Everyone applauded. Michael had been working on this for the whole Boston run, and now that it was put together, it felt very good indeed. Bob Avian congratulated Michael, who was smiling immodestly. “Yes, I did that,” he said. Dorothy threw her arms around Steve and gushed, “It’s like our baby is walking.” It gave a great boost to the end of the Boston run. The performance was wild, and everyone finished on a high.

  When it was over, the stagehands started breaking everything down and loading the trucks. I went out for dinner with Dick Jones and my grandmother, who had come up from Plymouth to see the show. As I walked back to the theater at half past midnight, nine trucks (“Clark Transfer—Getting the Show on the Road”) were lined up along Tremont Street. Three more were parked, ready to be backed, one at a time, into Allen’s Alley, to be filled as quickly, and as noisily, as possible. Clanging, yelling, pushing, banging—pieces of the set, mostly made out of metal anyway, were being loaded in as fast as they were disassembled. Lighting equipment, wardrobe trunks, prop trunks, music trunks, stage managers’ desks—everything Follies was being rolled out of the Colonial and onto a truck. The stagehands and haulers had done this before, and they lived for the excitement—and golden overtime—of a load-out. It was after midnight of a Saturday night, and it certainly sounded like a madhouse. Fritz Holt was standing guard over everything, and all the department heads were looking after their own. Someone had plotted what was to go in which truck and in what order, so both load-out and load-in would go smoothly. There were, after all, only four days before everything had to be fully reassembled and ready for the first preview performance in another city.

  Fritz casually mentioned that at ten o’clock on Sunday morning there would be auditions at the Alvin Theater in New York for a replacement for Ed Steffe.

  I went back into the theater to get a final look at it. Organized chaos. The theater no longer looked like ours; already the set was more than half gone, pipes were being lowered from the flies, lights were being unbolted, pieces of gray scenery were being detached and rolled up. And there were people everywhere on the stage. In the darkened auditorium there was only Jack Mann, coiling up his cables and packing away his sound equipment. I found house manager Alex Mohr, who had promised me one of the posters from the display cases in the outer lobby. His word was good; we went out into the dark lobby, where he took a key, opened one, and gave me a window card. It was actually just a sheet of paper stapled to a blank cardboard back, but it had “Colonial Theatre” printed across the bottom.

  Follies was going home, and it was leaving in far better shape than it had arrived. The Boston run was successful, but when a show moves from out of town to Broadway, it can seem as if it’s traveling between two totally unrelated galaxies. We had seen both triumphs and disappointments in Boston, but no regrets. Playing out of town was the best thing Follies could have done. Now it was on to the Great White Way.

  11 “What Will Tomorrow Bring?”

  BACK TO NEW YORK AND BROADWAY PREVIEWS,

  MARCH 21–APRIL 3

  Sunday was travel day. The load-out at the theater continued into the small hours of the morning, and by midday Sunday not a trace of Follies remained at the Colonial; the entire physical production was in trucks somewhere between Boston and New York. The challenge was to reassemble the show in New York efficiently, and for the most part the last items loaded out were the first items loaded in. Time was tight, with the first preview scheduled for Thursday. And in New York, unlike Boston, there was no Allen’s Alley where trucks could be parked; the Winter Garden extended from Broadway to Seventh Avenue, with the loading dock on Seventh Avenue. The Follies trucks could line up in the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets, but it was a busy Manhattan thoroughfare, even on a Sunday. Somehow, though, it all went as planned: hanging pieces in first, including drops and lighting rigs; then the raked deck, including all the winches and cables to move the units; then the angled floors; and finally the seven steel units on the sides and the downstage towers. Trunks with costumes were brought upstairs to the wardrobe room, which looked out onto Fiftieth Street. Prop trunks went to the basement, as did all the music. There were two small set pieces that hadn’t been used in Boston; they were delivered from Feller’s and were laid out gingerly over seats in the auditorium. Although Broadway stagehands tend to be thought of as guys who spend a lot of time hanging around, watch them during a load-in. There is no better indication of just how skillful they are than to see them deal with the logistics of loading a big show into what amounts to a surprisingly small space.

  Home at last—the marquee of the Winter Garden Theater; New York.

  The actors traveled back to New York in much the same way they had gone to Boston, most of them on buses, though the principal actors and creative staff flew. Some drove, and I volunteered to rent a car to drive Yvonne. Along the way, I showed her some New England sights, including the O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut. Not quite a B movie, not quite a Robert Anderson play, the two of us walking on the Connecticut beach on a cold March day, she wrapped in her white fur, me in a plain winter jacket, would have made a curious sight for any of the people I knew at the O’Neill. We ran into no one.

  When we got to New York, I couldn’t wait to go down and see the theater, so before returning the rental car, I drove down to have a look. The main entrance of the Winter Garden is on Broadway, but there is a second marquee on the Seventh Avenue side. The enormous billboard, about which there had been so much discussion, was on the Broadway side, and still empty, although there was evidence of work being done to prepare it for painting. But the marquee was lit up, and it said Follies. The entire poster was reproduced on the left side, against a white background, but on the right was the lettering of the title only, separated from the artwork and with its vanishing point visible, so it looked as if it was zooming out at you. Underneath it said “A New Musical.” I assumed the idea was to punch up the title itself, but it was slightly jarring seeing the title all by itself. Otherwise, things were quiet; all the commotion was on Seventh Avenue, where the trucks were spilling out their contents, briefly onto the sidewalk and then in through the theater’s large loading doors. It was as noisy as the Boston load-out had been the night before.

  The company wasn’t wanted at the theater until Tuesday—till then they’d be back at the American Theater Lab—but I decided to stop in on Monday to get a look inside. At ten A.M. only the farthest upstage hanging pieces were in view; the rest of the drops and hanging scenery had already been raised up and out of the way. The deck was in pieces all over the stage, slowly being assembled like a puzzle. Some of the set looked beaten up by the move, but I was reassured that touch-up work would make it all look like new. The theater, which had been dark since the abrupt closing of Georgy, a musical version of the popular film Georgy Girl, in the spring of 1970, was being cl
eaned and spruced up. Originally built in 1885 by William K. Vanderbilt as the American Horse Exchange, the Winter Garden had been renovated many times over the years, at first turning a building meant for the display and sale of animals into a bona fide theater. It was wider and lower than most Broadway theaters. The Shubert brothers leased it for revues in 1911, creating a garden motif for the interior design. The great theater architect Herbert Krapp spearheaded a major renovation in 1923, “in the more traditional Adamesque style,” and nothing, other than routine maintenance, had been done to the theater since then. Some alterations to the orchestra pit had been made for Follies, however, and the show was asked to share the costs with the landlords. Chandeliers were lowered for cleaning, painters were doing touch-ups on walls and molding, seats were being vacuumed and railings polished. One cleaning woman said she hoped the show would run a long time since, frankly, she needed the work. She was worried, though; she said she’d read somewhere that the first act didn’t work.

  Boris had designed the show specifically for the Winter Garden, and had taken its width into consideration from the beginning. The two set elements that hadn’t made their way to Boston were crumbling proscenium columns, strewn with rubble at the base. The proscenium arch of the Winter Garden is one sweeping frame without caps on top of the verticals. Boris’s set pieces created false caps, which defined the opening in a more traditional way. These units were attached to the theater’s actual proscenium; they helped blur the reality of the set, so you weren’t sure where the still-intact Winter Garden left off and the crumbling Weismann Theater began. They also provided a preview of the set for the audience, since they remained visible when the house curtain was lowered.