“If you ever figure out where I fit into the family,” she once said, “let me know. I never did.”
McKechnie, perhaps the greatest Broadway dancer of her generation, remembers bouncing around the set of Hullabaloo and asking Bennett what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. “I’m going to be a choreographer,” he said, while doing the jerk.3
He got his chance in 1966 with A Joyful Noise, a Broadway musical about hillbillies based on the novel The Insolent Breed by Borden Deal.
“I was having lunch with Ed Padula, who wrote the book for the musical, and he said they needed a choreographer,” Norman Twain, the producer of Bajour, said. “I suggested Michael. Ed wanted to know if he was ready. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘You’d better try him. Somebody’s going to.’ ”
While casting A Joyful Noise, Bennett met another person who would become an important part of his family. Tommy Tune, from Wichita Falls, Texas, arrived in New York in 1965 to become a Broadway dancer. At six feet, six inches, he towered above every Broadway gypsy in town. After a stint in the short-lived musical Baker Street, Tune went to an audition for a show that was going to open Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The audition was held at the Variety Arts, a seven-story building next to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Forty-Sixth Street that was a beehive of rehearsal studios. Bob Fosse had a key to the building and could come and go as he pleased. He could often be found in the middle of the night on the top floor, working out dance routines. The Variety Arts was at the heart of the Broadway theater world in the 1960s. When it burned down in the 1970s “we lost our center,” said Tune. Presiding over this buzzing showbiz honeycomb was the switchboard operator, who also functioned as an unofficial casting director.
Tune recalled, “You’d walk in and she’d say, ‘You! You’re a tall dark swarthy type, Peter Gennaro is looking for tall dark swarthy types for his new show, Bajour. Get over there now!’ The minute you walked in the door, she knew where to send you.”
On this particular day, Tune was in the elevator with a small, wiry man wearing a baseball cap. Michael Bennett looked up at him and said, flirtatiously, “Well, who are you?”
“I said, ‘My name’s Tommy Tune. Do you think I should change it?’ I always asked everybody that. The minute I got to New York I asked everybody that question. ’Cause I knew it was catchy, but I also knew it was unbelievably unbelievable. And he said, ‘Not if you want to go around being Tommy Tune.’ And you know, I never asked the question again.”
Tune told Bennett he was auditioning for the show at Caesars Palace. “Well, stop on three when you’re done,” Bennett said as the elevator door opened on the third floor and he got out.
Bennett dispatched his assistant on A Joyful Noise, Leland Palmer, to peek through the door at Tune’s audition. Tune figured out he’d been spied on when he stopped on three to see Bennett.
Palmer asked him, “Well, did you get it?”
“Yes, and I’m going to take it,” he said. “It’s good money.”
“Oh, come on,” Palmer said. “You’re gonna want to do this?” She stood up and executed the combination Tune had just done for the Vegas people.
“She mocked it,” he said. “She made me realize how lousy it was.”
“Why don’t you want to do this?” Palmer said, and turning to Bennett added, “Let’s show him.”
“And they did a combination that I could do for you right now,” Tune recalled. “I had never seen anything like it. Michael had taken ‘street’ and ‘western,’ because Joyful Noise was set in Tennessee, and put them together. It was brilliant.”
“Come with us,” Bennett said.
Tune turned down the job at Caesars Palace.
• • •
A Joyful Noise opened on December 15, 1966, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, and closed nine days later. The critics hated it but praised Bennett’s choreography, and he became Broadway’s leading Mr. Fix It, the man you called when your show was in trouble. Bennett worked faster than just about anybody. He could take a lackluster number and turn it into a crowd-pleaser. He “doctored,” as the saying on Broadway goes, By Jupiter, Your Own Thing, and How Now, Dow Jones.
At night he would stay up till the wee hours in his small West Seventy-Ninth Street apartment, thinking about what he wanted most: total control. Total control not just over a show but over Broadway itself.
“He saw himself in an office building, the highest floor of an office building in New York, looking down on all of Broadway,” Tune said. “And if you wanted a choreographer, you had to come to him. And he would say, ‘This is the right person for that show. You can have him. But only for this show.’ You had to come to him before you could do anything. That was his fantasy.”
Although Bennett projected confidence in public, in private he battled periods of depression, self-doubt, and paranoia, a state he called “Black Friday.” When Black Friday came around, he could barely function. Hired to doctor the musical How Now, Dow Jones, Bennett stopped showing up to rehearsals one week. Charles Blackwell, the stage manager, took aside Tune, who was playing a waiter, and told him to find Bennett. “We need him here at ten a.m. tomorrow,” Blackwell said.
At 8:30 the next morning Tune, who lived near Bennett, went to Bennett’s apartment and found him in bed with the covers over his head. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t face them anymore.” Tune put a wet cloth on his face, hauled him out of bed, turned on the shower, and pushed him in. “I don’t want to go,” Bennett protested. In the cab on the way to rehearsal, Bennett curled up into a ball and said, “I can’t face them, I can’t face them.” As the cab pulled up to the Variety Arts rehearsal studios, Tune said, “Come on, Michael. This is going to be a great day.”
Outside the door of the rehearsal studio, Bennett closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then entered the room. “OK, let’s go!” he shouted at the dancers, and proceeded to fix the opening number.
“Boom! Like that he was another person,” Tune recalled. “He was incredibly complex. He was as sure as he was in the rehearsal room as he was unsure outside it. And that’s where the drugs came in. He needed them to bolster himself.”
Bennett experimented with just about every drug available in the 1960s, often washed down with vodka. But he was remarkably resilient, never showing the effects of drugs and alcohol in the rehearsal studio. “I remember him talking about cancer,” Tune said, “and he said, ‘We’ll never get it. Not us. That’ll be somebody else. But not us.’ And of course you believed him. I believed everything he told me.”
The show that cemented Bennett’s reputation as a leading Broadway choreographer was Promises, Promises, a big hit in 1968. He received his third Tony Award nomination. It was also the first show on which he worked with Donna McKechnie, whom he called “my favorite instrument.”4 Bennett put McKechnie at the center of a show-stopping number called “Turkey Lurkey Time.” Two years later, he used her in Company, where she danced the “Tick Tock” number. “Bennett created passionately expressive movement . . . only McKechnie could do full justice to it,” Ken Mandelbaum writes in his book A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett.
Hal Prince directed Company, Stephen Sondheim’s urbane and cynical musical about a single man and his married friends. Prince realized that Bennett was more than just his choreographer. Sometimes, Prince would step aside and say to Bennett, “Take it for a minute and move them somewhere.”5 What Prince noticed was that Bennett never relied on steps. Characters inspired him, the movement flowing from who they were and the situations they found themselves in.
“What I did in Company was choreograph the characters,” Bennett would later say. “I think a lot more of the show was choreographed than most people realize.”6
Larry Cohen, a young stringer for the Hollywood Reporter, saw Company five times and became friendly with Prince at the recording session for the cast album. He asked Prince if he could watch the development of his next show from rehearsals to opening night. “Hal gave me
complete access,” he said. “I thought I would write a book about it.” (He never did.)
The next show was Stephen Sondheim’s landmark Follies, about a reunion of middle-aged ex-Follies girls in a dilapidated theater. The show contained one breathtaking Michael Bennett number after another, from the opening sequence in which ghosts of showgirls intermingled with the living ex-Follies dancers, to the thrilling “Who’s That Woman?”—which show buffs always refer to as the “Mirror Number.” As the middle-aged women re-created an old number downstage, young versions of themselves, wearing costumes dangling with mirrors, performed a mirror image of the number upstage. The past and the present came together at the climax. “It was both an all-out showstopper, a reflection of the show’s theme of self-confrontation, and another scary reminder of the ravagement of time,” writes Ken Mandelbaum.
Watching the creation of the show from the sidelines, Cohen “was in awe of Michael. When the show went out of town to Boston, they couldn’t come up with an opening number. Michael tried dozens of opening numbers, and I don’t mean little changes. I mean completely different numbers every time until he finally found the one that worked. Michael had no fear of throwing it all up in the air and starting all over again. The discipline and the drive were incredible.”
What also became clear to Cohen was a rift developing between Prince and Bennett over the show’s tone. Prince wanted to keep the show dark, haunting, and sad. Bennett thought it too bleak. In a snit one day he summed up his feelings about the characters in Follies: “I don’t give a shit about two middle-age couples who lost it in a rumble seat!” Bennett wanted to bring in his friend Neil Simon, whom he knew from Promises, Promises, to add some jokes to James Goldman’s script. The characters were either brittle and cynical, or sad and pathetic, and the audience didn’t care about them. A few well-placed Simon jokes might help the audience warm to them.
But Prince refused to change a word. He was the director. He had total control. Bennett found sections of the show unendurable. During those scenes, he would flee to the alley behind the Colonial Theatre with Avian and Cohen, light up a cigarette, and talk about how he would solve problems that Prince couldn’t—or wouldn’t—acknowledge. Watching him in the alley, Cohen thought, There is no way he is going to be in this position again. He’s ready to be a director. He wants total control.
• • •
Wanting to be a director and finding the right show to direct do not always coincide. Bennett cast about for a musical, but settled on a play, Twigs, by George Furth (who had written the book to Company). It was about three sisters and the men in their lives. Bennett cast Sada Thompson, who played all three sisters. The play had a decent run, and Thompson won the Tony for Best Actress. Bennett was now ready to direct a musical, and many producers offered him shows. One that came up was Seesaw, an adaptation of William Gibson’s charming two-hander, Two for the Seesaw. The show had a score by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields and a book by Michael Stewart (Hello, Dolly!). Bennett, Avian, and Cohen, who was now working informally for Bennett as an in-house dramaturge, read it. “It was total crap,” said Cohen. “We passed.”
Still in demand as a show doctor, Bennett was turning down most assignments. Tune had an embroidered pillow made for him that said, “Thou Shalt Not Doctor.”
And then Tune and Cohen both got calls summoning them to Detroit to work on the Broadway-bound Seesaw.
Cohen, then in Los Angeles, got his call at three in the morning.
“I need you to get on a plane to Detroit,” Bennett said. “We have taken over Seesaw. Put down everything else and get here. You’ll see the show and we’ll have dinner and talk about it.”
“But, Michael, we turned this down,” Cohen protested.
“I know, I know. Just get here.”
Tune got the call the day he returned from London, where he’d been filming The Boyfriend. He’d given up his apartment in New York, so he asked Bennett if he could stay in his until he found another. (Bennett had moved from the Upper West Side and was now living at 145 West Fifty-Fifth Street, 13A; the previous tenant had been Tennessee Williams.) “I got there, there was a note that said, ‘The key is under the doormat. Call me.’ I went in and the phone was ringing. It was him. He said, ‘Oh good, you’re there. I’m in Detroit. I’m directing a show. It’s called Seesaw. I need you to choreograph a couple of numbers. I’ll pay you $500 a number. Don’t unpack. Go to the airport and come to Detroit. We’ll reimburse you. Just go to the airport.”
Why did Bennett take over a show he thought was “total crap”? He had a soft spot for the producer, Joe Kipness. Kippy was a colorful and beloved character around Broadway. He owned popular restaurants and was a friend of the “bent-nose gang,” as one of his friends said, referring to the Mafia. There’s a story about him being backstage at one of his shows in a theater that was still under construction. Work was going slowly, so Kippy confronted one of the theater’s owners. “Get this place finished, or the garbage workers won’t pick up at your buildings!” he screamed.
Another time, he was screaming at someone over a pay phone until he cut himself off by ripping the phone out of the wall.
When Kippy was having a feud with David Merrick, somebody broke into Merrick’s office above the St. James and trashed it. Around Broadway, people secretly applauded Kippy for hiring some of the bent-nose gang to put the fear of God into Merrick.
Despite his mobster reputation, theater people found Kippy hopelessly sentimental. His other nickname was “Cryin’ Joe,” because whenever his shows were in trouble and he needed someone to help him out, tears would come to his eyes. Seesaw was in serious trouble in Detroit. Cryin’ Joe called Bennett for help and didn’t stop sobbing until Bennett said yes.
Another reason Bennett took the job was money. He was broke. He never earned much from his shows because they didn’t run that long. And he never saved. “Money meant very little to him,” said John Breglio, who would become his lawyer. “If a producer wouldn’t pay for something he needed in a show, he’d pay for it. He gave money away to dancers who needed it.”
His accountant, Marvin Schulman, kept him afloat. Years later, Tommy Tune discovered how. Tune was making money from appearances in the movies at the time. Schulman was his accountant, too. Whenever Bennett needed money, Schulman dipped into Tune’s account and transferred some cash to Bennett’s.7
But the main reason why Bennett took over Seesaw was because Kippy agreed to his terms: total control.
Within a week of taking over Seesaw, Bennett fired twenty-six people.8 Edwin Sherrin, the original director, quit. When Bennett demanded script changes, the writer, Michael Stewart, threw a fit and went back to New York. Performers Bennett had worked with for years were let go if they didn’t fit his new concept of the show.
“He was doing what he had to do, which was to take a show that was going to flop and turn it into a show that was going to run,” said Cohen. “Everything he did was in service of the show.”
The most brutal firing was of the leading lady, Lainie Kazan. The character she was playing was a dancer, but Kazan was forty pounds overweight. She’d promised to slim down, but never did. Bennett wanted to replace her with the beautiful (and thin) Michele Lee.
When someone has to be let go from a Broadway show, the producer delivers the news. But Cryin’ Joe couldn’t face Large Lainie. Bennett had to wield the ax.
The scene was “an All About Eve on steroids moment,” recalled Cohen.
Kazan begged to stay. This was her shot at Broadway stardom.
“You’re too fat,” Bennett told her.
“I’ll cut off my tits if you let me stay!” she screamed.
He cut off her head.
“Because of what happened on Seesaw, Michael had a reputation of being ruthless,” Cohen said. “He steeled himself to deal with Lainie, but it killed him inside. He was not a brutal person. It was all about the show.”
Bennett liked the score and persuaded Coleman and Fields to wr
ite four new songs, including what would prove to be the show’s most popular, “It’s Not Where You Start.” An aspiring and openly gay choreographer performed the song. Bennett cast Tune as the choreographer and gave him complete freedom to choreograph the number. Because Tune had not unpacked his bags in New York, he arrived in Detroit without his tap shoes. But he had a pair of clogs. Bennett liked the idea of a clog dance.
“But I’ll break my neck,” Tune protested.
“No you won’t!” Bennett replied.
Tune performed the number in his clogs holding a bunch of balloons.
The “Balloon Number,” as it came to be called, stopped the show and eventually won Tune the first of his ten Tony Awards.
Bennett worked fast. The company performed the old (bad) Seesaw at night, while Bennett created a new show during the day. “He did two years’ worth of work in eight weeks,” Cohen recalled. “He set a certain amount that he was going to accomplish each day and if you couldn’t keep up, you were out.”
The original play, Two for the Seesaw, was about the romance between a button-downed lawyer from Nebraska and an eccentric struggling dancer from the Bronx. Enlarged to fill a big stage, the musical had lost the charm of its simple story. Bennett and Cohen went through Stewart’s script and tossed out every line that wasn’t in the original play. Bennett asked his friend Neil Simon to contribute some jokes. As for the staging, Bennett took a cumbersome and clunky show and turned it into a slick contemporary musical comedy.
“It was the beginning of what he would eventually achieve in Dreamgirls,” said Cohen. “He knew people were attuned to the movement of the movies, so he created the stage equivalent of wipes and dissolves. The old vocabulary of a show was to stop after each number for applause. Screw the applause, Michael thought. Keep going. You’ll get even more applause two numbers later because the audience will need the release.”
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