Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  News that Paul’s next major work would be a Broadway musical called The Capeman broke in early May 1995, pegged to the announcement that Paul would hold an open audition for teenage doo-wop singers in a talent contest with ten thousand dollars in prize money at stake. He pursued potential directors with care, seeing shows, getting in touch, visiting for a while. A lot of names came up. At one point in 1995 he sat down with Susana Tubert, an up-and-coming Argentinian director who had moved to New York in 1980. Tubert’s career was on the rise following a prestigious 1991 National Endowment for the Arts directing fellowship that had allowed her to work with leading directors from the avant-garde opera director Peter Sellars to Harold Prince, who was then developing his enormously successful musical adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman. By the midnineties Tubert had staged plays and musicals at theaters across the country, most often to great acclaim. When Paul called he invited her to his Central Park West apartment to play her the Capeman’s music on his guitar, then asked her to pull together some singers who might be right for the show. With a dozen performers scheduled, Paul, Tubert, and Walcott spent a day running auditions, and when the afternoon ended they had all hit it off. “I will see you again,” Walcott told Tubert when they were saying their farewells.

  Was Tubert the front-runner to be The Capeman’s director? Sort of, but not really. Paul interviewed other directors. He talked at length with the rebellious choreographer Mark Morris and tried to hire him to direct the play, but Morris had a dance company to run, and there weren’t enough hours in the day for him to also direct an ambitious Broadway musical. Morris did agree to create the play’s choreography, helping attract talented performers while also drawing fans to the ticket window. The cast would have to be almost all Latinos, primarily because the Agron family, like virtually everyone else in the show, was from Puerto Rico. Better, a nearly all-Latino show would be a first for Broadway. Finally, the city’s millions of Latinos would have a big, splashy musical to tell their American story beneath the brightest lights in New York.

  Paul’s reputation and checkbook made it easy to woo prominent actor-singers to lead the cast: Panamanian actor-musician Rubén Blades to play the older Agron and the rising twenty-seven-year-old Latin pop star Marc Anthony (born in New York to Puerto Rican parents) as the younger version of the character. They were great additions, but also an affront to the show’s eventual director, who would have to work with stars who might not fit into his or her conception of the show and its script. Paul hung on to as much authority as he could. He hired an experienced stage designer named Bob Crowley to create the sets. He hired Priscilla Lopez to play Agron’s mother. He made more decisions. In the late winter of 1996, he finally called Tubert again. “I just spent a year and went all the way to Puerto Rico looking for a director,” he told her. “Only to realize that the perfect person was back in New York City.” Tubert took the job.

  After a set of introductory meetings, Paul sent Tubert and stage designer Crowley to Puerto Rico to absorb the texture of Agron’s homeland. Tubert held some auditions; she and Crowley both met with Agron’s sister and other relatives, then visited his grave. They spent time with a santero, a priest in the Santeria faith—the mystical blend of Catholicism and Yoruba spirituality followed by Agron’s family. Back in New York, Tubert set to work with the script, searching for visual and dramatic devices that would not just serve the script and songs, but also project the work’s animating spirit into a kind of visual poetry; a chain of images that would not only underscore the action but also symbolize its deeper meanings. The task presented several puzzles, not the least of them being that the younger and elder Agrons barely encounter one another onstage. As a result, the show’s two central characters, and its two biggest, most dynamic performers, wouldn’t have a chance to play off of each other. Tubert proposed using the thread of magical realism running through the script—the spiritual element set forth by the santero—to open up more possibilities. When the younger Agron prowled the stage, the spirit of his older self would be onstage, too, observing and commenting on the action. The dynamic would reverse in the second half, the spirit of the Capeman continuing to stalk the older, reformed Agron.

  Paul and Walcott seemed dubious when Tubert mentioned the idea in passing, so she let it go, confident that it would make sense to them when she staged her vision for the entire show during rehearsals. It was still early days in preproduction, new faces coming in to contribute their own talents, skills, and ideas; a time for blue-sky thinking, shared creativity, more possibilities than limitations. Tubert, Paul, Walcott, and the other main players worked together easily. Tubert had one small problem: although she had been working on the project for several months, her agent and Paul’s representatives still hadn’t worked out the terms for her contract. The problem boiled down to one point: as the youngest and least-established member of the creative team, Tubert wanted to make sure that her contributions to the show would be acknowledged, even if she wasn’t the titular director on opening night. She was still building her career; her résumé needed all the high-profile credits she could get. Paul already had enough professional credits to float ten careers; nonetheless, her request became a sticking point. When it began to seem that their agents would never find common ground, Paul went to Tubert directly. Let’s get rid of the business guys and work it out between the two of us, he said. Tubert, who had yet to be paid for any of her services, agreed, and they met after work on a Friday.

  As Tubert recalls, she made her case strongly. By hiring her Paul had made Tubert a key member of his creative team. And in an industry where credit for developing shows is so often misassigned, she needed to be sure that her contributions to The Capeman would be recognized both contractually and publicly. Paul didn’t see it that way. In the music industry he could hire and fire musicians without having to worry about what they did or didn’t contribute to his songs. But, as Tubert knew from all of her experience in the theater, the director’s vision of a show is the foundation for all of the many components in a production. Paul didn’t, or couldn’t, see it like that. It was a perfectly amicable conversation, but in the end they agreed to disagree. When it was over, he sat next to Tubert on the sofa and put his arm around her shoulder in a kindly way. “What made you think you wouldn’t be the director when we open?” she recalled him asking. “Why worry?”

  He had made none of the concessions Tubert wanted, but she came away feeling like he had opened up and revealed his confidence in her. When she got outside, Tubert called her agent and said she’d take Paul’s offer as it stood. Everything seemed normal when she went back to casting the show on Monday morning, but in the late afternoon she learned that her meeting with Paul had somehow morphed into a catastrophe. Paul’s publicist and coproducer, Dan Klores, called Tubert’s agent to say that Paul had left his office on Friday afternoon feeling unsettled, and then angry, by what happened during their meeting. Now Tubert would need to take back what she said if she wanted to continue working on The Capeman. At first Tubert couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could they suddenly be at such an impasse? But Paul had drawn a new line in the sand. And so did Tubert. They’d had a disagreement and she’d made her case. She had nothing to apologize for. So that was it; Tubert left the show.

  * * *

  When the Born at the Right Time tour got to Chicago in 1991, Paul had invited Stephen Eich, managing director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, to see the concert, then come backstage to talk about his ideas for a new kind of musical. Four years later Paul called back and asked Eich to join the Capeman project. One of Eich’s closest compatriots at Steppenwolf was a young director named Eric Simonson, who’d worked on a variety of productions for the company, most notably Jacob Zulu, a play about South Africa that featured the singing and dancing of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Jacob had made it to Broadway and done well. Paul had liked it quite a bit, too, and when Eich suggested Simonson would be a good director for Capeman, Paul paid attention. Simonson ha
d been in the running before Tubert was hired, and when she left in the summer of 1996 Paul hired him to take her place.

  Simonson had a lot of experience in the theater, but he hadn’t experienced anything like The Capeman before. Everything was complicated, including the casting of the minor characters. Paul insisted that the performers be great singers. Morris demanded good dancers, but Simonson needed actors who could embody their characters. The lines of authority in the show snared around Paul’s ankles, and just to make things even more complex Derek Walcott, who had written and directed his own plays in the past, made no secret that he was sure he could direct The Capeman better than anyone else. Asked to keep his thoughts to himself during rehearsals, the poet did so, but given his Nobel-grade charisma, the displeasure hanging over his being was impossible to ignore. Ordinarily the director of a play is the uncontested leader of the production; his or her word is the law of the theater. But Paul came from a professional culture where the first sour note ended everything on the spot. He thought nothing of cutting off an entire scene the instant he saw or heard something that irked him. The whole company would be midway through a complicated scene and Paul would come rushing onstage waving his hands. “Stop! Stop!” The trumpet player hadn’t hit his note on the pickup, so they’d have to go back and get it right. In one incident that quickly became legend, Paul halted a full-cast rehearsal because he didn’t like the sound of the tambourine. After half an hour of scooting the guy from one corner of the stage to the other, Paul allowed the rest of the cast and crew to get back to work. Simonson might have been the director but, as everyone knew, Paul’s word superseded everything. Simonson would take the stage to explain exactly how he wanted a scene to work, and it would take only a minute for his actors’ eyes to seek out Paul’s face, waiting to see what he thought. They all knew who was really calling the shots.

  Even if Paul didn’t have expertise in theater, his intellectual and perceptive powers could be stunning. Simonson was particularly impressed by his ability to grasp a person’s character and motivations. “I think actually he’s a great psychologist,” the director said. “He really gets to the core of what a person is about almost immediately. He’s got really great instincts, and can sense things.” Simonson could sense how powerful a show The Capeman could be. The raw material, no matter its flaws, was inordinately rich with possibility. All he needed, he figured, was the space to do his job in the way he always worked. Yet, so far, Paul wasn’t eager to let that happen. Simonson’s top priority that fall was to whip the show into shape for a workshop performance for friends and investors in December. A scratch version of the production, no costumes or sets, but an important step in the process. When the day finally arrived, the preshow stress in the Westbeth Theatre Center was overwhelming. But when it was over, the audience stood and cheered, and triumphant smiles lit faces all around the theater—except for Paul, who rose from his chair scowling angrily. The music hadn’t sounded right. He had noticed other mistakes onstage too, blown steps and ill-timed entries, the usual early production foul-ups. But Paul thought of it as a catastrophe, though, and Simonson was fired by the end of the next day.

  Mark Morris finally agreed to take over the director’s chair, but news that Paul Simon’s show had spat out two directors in less than a year clanged alarm bells all across the city. The New York Times ran a story. Was the self-proclaimed reinventor of Broadway finding the job a bit more difficult than he imagined? Flocks of dancers and other cast members were sent away. The show’s budget swelled, then burst through the ceiling. Investors got antsy. Jimmy Nederlander reduced his family’s stake from six million dollars to one million. Klores, the producer-slash-publicist, took to the media to declare that all was well; new investors were beating down the door, stuffing wads of cash through the mail slot, desperate to be a part of the Capeman team. It made for a nice story, but Klores didn’t have any names to offer, and it took months for them to surface in public. To save money, they canceled the show’s out-of-town tryout, a crucial opportunity to gauge audience reaction and fix or revise accordingly. Originally set to open in the fall of 1997, the show was pushed back to the winter. If you were looking for signs of trouble, The Capeman bristled with them. The sound of sharpening knives rang across Midtown.

  What else could go wrong? The New York Daily News published an item about The Capeman that would have been harmless except for the reminder that the show’s hero had been a real New York City street punk and a murderer. The word Disgrace-land featured in the headline. In September, Newsday ran a Broadway establishment–friendly story headlined “A Neophyte Capeman: Simon Musical Relying on Untested Talent.” The story described The Capeman’s creative team as thoroughly inexperienced in the theater. Walcott, it sniffed, had only ever written and directed for regional theater. The piece was riddled with errors, including its central premise—“the creative team includes a number of Broadway veterans,” read the published correction—but there was plenty more criticism to come, and most of it was far too accurate.

  Tickets for the show went on sale in early September 1997. Sales weren’t bad at first, but also not spectacular. The Daily News noted The Capeman’s imminent arrival with a story called “Teen Slay Caper Nearing Stage” that included the outraged complaints of the victims’ survivors. “Why would anyone want to write a show about a guy who killed two boys?” the uncle of one of the victims asked. “Is he going to sing and dance?” Paul and Blades responded as sensitively as possible, pointing out that the heartbreak of the victims’ mothers would be explored in one of the show’s stand-out songs. It didn’t matter, another Capeman controversy had blossomed. In mid-September a different Agron play, this one by a writer named Fred Newman, who had befriended Agron while serving as his psychologist following his 1979 parole, opened in an Off-Off-Broadway theater in SoHo. The story centered on a romance Agron had with a leftist political activist in the Southwest, but also addressed the strange celebrity visited upon him due to the murders, and his unexpected rehabilitation and release. “Salvador was forever concerned with other people commercializing his life,” Newman said. Oh, and one of the characters in the Newman play was a famous musician/aspiring dramaturge named Paul Simon. “He represents the commercialization of pop music,” Newman explained.

  In October, hoping to stir up buzz for the show, Paul released Songs from the Capeman, his performances of thirteen tunes from the show’s score. Ranging from doo-wop to early rhythm and blues to Puerto Rican bomba to something like theatrical lieder, the album was rhythmically diverse, melodically engaging, and expertly performed—everything you’d expect from a new Paul Simon album—and generally celebrated as such, despite a few critics who couldn’t fathom hearing a wealthy white-skinned fifty-six-year-old musician singing in the voice of a teenage Puerto Rican gang member. “Act your age (and class advantages),” demanded the New York Daily News, a newspaper that seemed to harbor a distinct enmity for The Capeman. At the same time, the New York Times Magazine published Stephen J. Dubner’s cover story “The Pop Perfectionist on a Crowded Stage.” Invited to write about the inner workings of the production just as it was getting started, the author had observed nearly everything along the way: the hirings, firings, breakthroughs, breakdowns, and every other form of Sturm und Drang The Capeman had created over the years. Starting with the cover portrait of a nearly hairless Paul, Dubner’s report was most striking for its portrayal of its subject’s descent from cool confidence to grim forbearance. Asked about the many controversies erupting from the play’s story and characters, Paul made like The Capeman narrative was all but irrelevant. “If you’re asking me this is about an incredible love of sound. This is all about music,” he said. “This is about how I fell in love with music and who I was when that love happened.”

  * * *

  Imagine the scene in that Hell’s Kitchen playground in 1959: a couple of kids looking for trouble, a couple of other kids more than happy to provide it. The neighborhood boys against the invaders; wh
ite skin against brown; the Irish against Puerto Rican, Micks against Spics. It’s about turf, about keeping the outsiders where they belong—nowhere near here. Move the setting, and even if the faces and details change, the story remains the same: about anti-Semitism, about slavery and Jim Crow and South African apartheid, too; about purity, authenticity, and the promise/threat of assimilation; about the politics of folk music in Greenwich Village and the politics of folk music in England; about the generation gap in the 1960s and apartheid in South Africa; and about rock ’n’ roll and Broadway, too; about who you think you are and who you know you aren’t. “I was in some fights,” Paul had claimed of his own delinquent ways back in the studded-leather days of Baldies, Demons, Vampires, and Norseman. And as The Capeman headed to its playground rendezvous, Paul’s blade was sharpened, oiled, and ready for action.

  “I couldn’t care less what the theater community, or whatever it is that they call themselves, think about this [The Capeman],” Paul snapped to Vogue’s Bob Ickes. “I didn’t write it for Broadway. I wrote it for me.” Paul had been dropping similar bombs since he started talking about the early reaction to The Capeman, but never so bitterly. Set into type in the pages of a popular national magazine, Paul’s dismissive words ignited all of the anger that had been gathering around the play. The families of the victims, flanked by leaders of victims’ rights groups, complained and led demonstrations. Still, some Puerto Rican immigrants and their families anticipated that The Capeman would be an enormous breakthrough: a showcase for their joyous culture and difficult history in America. But other Nuyoricans, as they had come to call themselves, saw yet another version of the violent stereotype that had reigned since Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. As Vampires leader Tony Hernandez tells Agron in the play, “What home of the brave? This is a fuckin’ war zone!” Indeed. Soon after, complaints from the cast and crew bubbled into view, with one anonymous source telling the New York Post that the atmosphere inside the production had become “almost intolerable.”