Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  The overhaul of Seesaw in Detroit was costing Cryin’ Joe Kipness a lot of money. He came to Bennett one day and said he couldn’t afford to go on anymore. Bennett paid for the final week of the run in Detroit himself.

  Back in New York the Broadway grapevine hummed with the news that Michael Bennett was saving Seesaw. The show was an advertisement for Michael Bennett, Broadway’s best director. Bennett wanted the theater world to know that he could restage a major musical in record time. Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, and Bob Fosse did the same in their day. And now it was Bennett’s turn.

  When it came time to do the billing in New York no one would take credit for the script. Stewart wasn’t interested and Neil Simon didn’t think a few jokes entitled him to be sole author. Bennett asked lyricist Dorothy Fields. “I can’t be the author,” he told her. “I didn’t even graduate from high school.” Fields demurred. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I’ll be laughed out of the business.”

  Bennett suggested Cohen. But Cohen had a better idea. “In a weird way, you’re the author of the show,” he said. “You may not have written five lines, but you directed the storyline.”

  Seesaw opened on Broadway at the Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin) on March 18, 1973. The opening night Playbill read, “Written, directed, and choreographed by Michael Bennett.”

  It would not be the last time.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The One

  Clive Barnes understood what Bennett had achieved with Seesaw. Though he noted in his Times review that the show had “quite obviously been built rather than inspired,” Barnes praised its “efficient slickness” and fresh look. “The American musical theater has for long neglected projection techniques,” he wrote. “Seesaw, which has its scenic design by Robin Wagner [who would come to be one of Bennett’s closest friends and collaborators], makes a determined effort to catch up, and with its projection of skyscrapers and cityscapes it really does look very good.”

  Bennett, along with Wagner, was beginning to change not only the way musicals moved but how they looked.

  Despite the strong reviews, Kippy and his coproducers were, once again, out of money. They’d already spent $1 million on Seesaw, and there was nothing left to advertise the good reviews. Seesaw was about to join the six other musicals that season that had closed after fewer than twelve performances. But Bennett could not let his calling card die. He rallied the cast and crew. Tune led the actors in performing numbers from the show outside the theater, while stagehands distributed Seesaw flyers to passersby. Bennett, meanwhile, sought to raise money to keep the show going. He turned to one of the people he respected most in the business, the lawyer John Wharton. During their meeting Wharton introduced Bennett to his smart young associate, John Breglio, just out of Harvard Law School. Bennett and Breglio liked each other. They met for lunch, and Bennett, who was four years older, cast his spell over Breglio. “I was taken with him right away,” Breglio said.

  Breglio had begun to learn the movie business at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. “The theater was dead,” he said. But after he got to know Bennett, he cast his lot with the theater. He became Bennett’s lawyer and a crucial member of his surrogate family. If Bob Avian was Bennett’s older brother, John Breglio was his younger brother.

  “They were two Italian boys in a world of old Jews,” producer Elizabeth I. McCann said with her usual bluntness.

  The campaign to save Seesaw, aided in no small part by New York Post columnist Earl Wilson, who loved the show and wrote about it almost every day, succeeded, to a point. The show didn’t close overnight. It ran till the end of the year, but it didn’t make a dime. Bennett was nominated for a Tony for his direction, and won for his choreography. More importantly, his work on the show vaulted him to the top of the list of musical directors. He was “the One.”

  • • •

  Joseph Papp, the energetic, ferocious, and mercurial head of the Public Theater, disdained Broadway. Public Theater productions occasionally moved uptown—Two Gentlemen of Verona, Sticks and Bones, Much Ado About Nothing—but Broadway was mainstream, safe, commercial, all of which Papp despised. He often said, “Broadway is shit.” The comment got back to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who had donated the money from a pair of house seats at every performance of The Sound of Music to Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Broadway’s pashas were not amused, and Papp had to apologize to keep that Sound of Music money flowing.

  Bernard Gersten, Papp’s second-in-command, did not hate Broadway and kept on top of its shows and gossip. He’d seen Seesaw and heard what Michael Bennett had done with the show out of town. He thought Bennett would be a good choice to come downtown and overhaul a musical that was in trouble at the Public—More Than You Deserve, which had a score by Jim Steinman and featured a performer named Meat Loaf. Papp had never heard of Bennett. He checked out Seesaw and liked the staging. A few days later, he told Gersten he thought Bennett should direct a revival of Kurt Weill’s 1938 musical, Knickerbocker Holiday. Gersten sent the script and the score to Bennett. But Bennett wasn’t interested. A revival of a musical from the thirties was not going to be his ticket to the top. He had another idea, however, and wondered if he might come down to the Public and pitch it.

  Bennett arrived at Papp’s office at the Public Theater carrying a bulky Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder and several reels of tape. He had nearly twenty-four hours of interviews with Broadway dancers—the gypsies. He thought there might be a show somewhere in those hours and hours of tape. He played some of them for Papp. After listening to the recordings for forty-five minutes, Papp said, “OK, let’s do it.”

  “That’s all there was to it,” Gersten said. “Joe liked Michael, so we gave him space and some money to go to work.”

  • • •

  For many years those tapes languished in a vault in the law offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. In 2004, John Breglio, Bennett’s executor, decided to revive A Chorus Line on Broadway. He also wanted to make a documentary about Bennett and the show. “I wanted to use the tapes,” he said. “But nobody had listened to them in thirty years. I went to the vault and thought, Oh, my God. I’m going to open them up and they’re going to be ashes. It would be my own scene out of The Artist!”

  The tapes did not crumble in his hands. Breglio transferred them to MP3s before listening to them. And when he did, the first person he heard was Michael Bennett. “I really want to talk about us. Now I don’t know whether anything will come of us, or whether there is anything interesting. I think we’re all pretty interesting, all of you are pretty interesting, and I think maybe there is a show in there somewhere, which would be called A Chorus Line.”

  A Chorus Line.

  Bennett didn’t know what the show would be, but he had the title from the start. It was the original title of Twigs, the play Bennett had directed before Seesaw. He called the writer George Furth and asked if he could use the old title. Furth said yes.

  The first taping session took place at midnight, January 18, 1974, at the Nickolaus Exercise Center on East Twenty-Third Street. It was late at night because most of the dancers Bennett corralled were working on Broadway and couldn’t meet until after their shows. Bennett provided food and wine—“very cheap red wine,” said Donna McKechnie. Among the dancers who took part in what amounted to a group therapy session for dancers were Nicholas Dante, Priscilla Lopez, Michon Peacock, Wayne Cilento, and Kelly Bishop. Most, but not all, were longtime friends of Bennett.

  “We wanted the biggest cross section possible so that we could try to find what the common experience was,” said choreographer Tony Stevens. “And Michael wanted some enemies in the room, so there were rivals there, people who had histories that were not so great.”1

  With Bennett asking most of the questions, and fueled by cups of cheap red wine, the dancers told their stories. Many, like Bennett, had grown up in unhappy households. Some talked about alcoholic parents. Others spoke about philandering fathe
rs and broken marriages. Many of the men talked about their sexuality, and the consequences of having to hide it from friends and family. Nicholas Dante recalled his experiences as a teenager working at night as a drag queen in a tawdry club. His story would inspire what would become the show’s climax, Paul’s monologue about meeting his parents, unexpectedly, at the stage door of a drag club where he worked. One dancer talked about her weak singing voice and how it hurt her at auditions (“Sing”). Another spoke about her father’s string of infidelities and how she found solace in ballet class (“At the Ballet”). A third recounted her humiliation at the hands of an acting teacher in high school (“Nothing”). The session lasted twelve hours, and was so fruitful that Bennett decided to hold another one on February 18. By all accounts, the second session was not as successful as the first. It was, as Ken Mandelbaum notes in A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett, unfocused and repetitious. Most of the material for the show would come from the first session.

  When Bennett told Breglio about the tapes and his plan to make a show from them, the lawyer blanched. “Wait a minute. You can’t have all these people sitting around telling you their life stories for a show. You’re going to have twenty authors—and twenty lawsuits. You’ve got to get them to sign a release.”

  In the end, the dancers who took part in the tapings waived their right to their life stories for a dollar each—and the stipulation that if their stories were used, their names would be changed. When the show became a hit, Bennett had Breglio draw up a contract that gave a share of his royalties to the dancers who had participated in the tape sessions and in the workshops at the Public Theater. At the height of its popularity, A Chorus Line was earning close to $10,000 a year for each dancer. That, of course, was nothing compared to the millions it earned Bennett and the other creators. And many of the original dancers would later complain that they had sold their lives for a pittance. But nobody had any idea that two twelve-hour tape sessions would became the basis for the biggest hit in Broadway history.

  “They trusted Michael not to screw them,” said Breglio. “And every single one of them signed the release.”

  • • •

  Working with Dante, who was an aspiring writer, and his friend the playwright James Kirkwood, Bennett fashioned a rough script from the tapes. To write the music, he turned to another friend, Marvin Hamlisch, who had been the dance arranger for Henry, Sweet Henry, one of the first shows Bennett choreographed. In the intervening years, Hamlisch had won Oscars for The Way We Were and The Sting. He was one of the most sought-after composers in Hollywood, and stood to earn millions scoring movies. But Hamlisch loved Broadway musicals. He had dreamed since childhood of writing one. His agent was not happy. Papp was paying everybody who worked on A Chorus Line a hundred dollars a week. But Hamlisch didn’t care. He would have paid for the chance to write a musical with Michael Bennett. For his lyricist, Bennett turned to Ed Kleban, a songwriter whose work was starting to get noticed around New York. Bennett put Hamlisch and Kleban together. They “kicked the tires,” Hamlisch recalled, on a possible relationship, sat down at the piano and went to work. Kleban poured over transcripts of the tape sessions, looking for song hooks and titles. “Most of it was intensely boring, the same nonsense over and over again,” he said.2 But every now and then, he’d find something that inspired a song. For instance, one of the dancers recalled going to his sister’s dance class. “I can do that!” the dancer remembered thinking.

  And there was a song.

  Kleban’s drafts of lyrics for A Chorus Line show the importance of rewriting a song until it conveys, in the most direct way possible, a thought, an emotion, a story. Here, for instance, is an early draft of a song called “Love”:

  Talk about the past

  Talk about tomorrow

  But I can’t regret

  What I did for love

  Talk about the joy

  Talk about the sorrow

  Where do I belong?

  The day after tomorrow

  Funny, but it’s hard to say

  And I can’t regret

  What I did for love

  What I did for love

  Several drafts later, most of the lines have been jettisoned and Kleban has found the hook that would give the song its driving idea and its title:

  Can’t regret

  What I did for love

  Kleban recorded the state of his pre–A Chorus Line finances on his lyric manuscripts. He was picking up a few hundred dollars here and there teaching musical theater and writing a show for a children’s theater. For his work on A Chorus Line he received $1,000 from the Public Theater. He attended his high school reunion just after A Chorus Line opened on Broadway. Had the reunion taken place six months prior, he said he would have written in the updated yearbook, “Occupation: Failure.”

  And indeed, with the exception of Hamlisch, nearly everybody working on A Chorus Line was broke. But that didn’t deter them from committing nearly a year to the show. As usual, Bennett never tired of restaging numbers until he got what he wanted. “The Music and the Mirror,” Cassie’s celebrated dance in front of five rehearsal mirrors, was originally staged with four boys dancing behind her. But it wasn’t right. Cassie (Donna McKechnie), who had almost been a star, had fallen on hard times. She was alone, desperate for a job. And she was dancing for one person, the director of the show and her ex-lover Zach (clearly, Bennett’s stand-in). Out went the four boys. Now it was Cassie, alone, dancing as she’s never danced before, with Zach watching and deciding her fate.3

  While there were some exciting dances, nobody was quite sure if A Chorus Line worked as an evening of musical theater. Tommy Tune was living with one of the original cast members, Michel Stuart, at the time. “Michel would come home and tell me, ‘We ran the whole show today, and Joe Papp fell asleep. It was three hours long.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry. Michael will trim it. He knows what he’s doing.’ ”

  Hamlisch said the collaboration on A Chorus Line was the most exciting and enjoyable of his career in show business. There was little bickering. Everyone trusted Bennett’s judgment. The one big fight was over the show’s anthem, “What I Did for Love.” Papp, who only occasionally dropped by rehearsals (he believed in leaving artists alone to do their work, interceding only if he thought they were screwing up), loathed it.

  “Joe wanted to cut it,” recalled Gersten. “He thought it was ‘just a Broadway number.’ It was pandering to the Broadway audience.”

  But Hamlisch, whose music was all over the radio, wanted a hit song from the show. And Bennett, always attuned to what an audience wanted, knew the show needed its tearjerker.

  “Fine,” said Papp, and walked out of the rehearsal room.

  A far more serious stumbling block was money. Bennett conceived the song “One” as his finale, with the chorus kids dancing, anonymously, behind the big star—the “singular sensation” (who, of course, the audience would never see). A Chorus Line was not an expensive show. It took place on a bare stage. The costumes were dancers’ tights and sweats. But “One” needed the full Broadway treatment: gold lamé tuxedos and top hats and a sparkling curtain, called a drop. The cost of each costume was $1,000. The drop wasn’t cheap, either. “One” would cost $25,000. Papp didn’t have it. He’d already sunk $100,000—most of which was on credit—into the show. Jack Lenny, Bennett’s agent, offered to give Papp the $25,000 in exchange for 50 percent of the show. Papp said no. “The idea that we would give Jack 50 percent of the show for just $25,000 seemed absurd,” Gersten recalled.

  And so Papp told Bennett that was it. A Chorus Line was over. That’s when Bennett and Hamlisch hightailed it up to the Shubert offices and broke the old piano. Papp must have gotten wind that Bennett was up to something because he turned to someone who had always given him money in the past: LuEsther Mertz, heir to the Publisher’s Clearing House fortune. She believed in Papp and the mission of the Public Theater, and had always been a soft touch when the theater was in tro
uble. Nobody remembers the exact deal today, but between the Shubert and LuEsther Mertz, Papp got the $25,000, and A Chorus Line played its first preview on April 16, 1975.

  A few minutes before the show started, Bennett and Tune stood in the alley next to the Public Theater smoking. Tune was disappointed he could not be part of A Chorus Line, but after Seesaw and his Tony Award, he was no longer a gypsy. Bennett looked up at his good friend and, crying, said, “I promise you, if this works I will take you with me on the next one.” He paused and added, “But I don’t think it will. They’re not going to understand what it is that we do. I’m going to have to bring it down, and I don’t want to do that. I want it to be real. I don’t want it to be fake.”

  “What are you talking about, Michael?” Tune replied. “This show is going to be wonderful.”

  They went inside, stood at the back of the house, and heard Zach say at the start of the show, “Again . . . step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch . . . Again!”

  • • •

  Anybody who was at the Newman Theater at the Public that night—and most were friends of Bennett—will never forget the experience of seeing A Chorus Line for the first time. At the end of the opening number—“I Hope I Get It”—the audience of 299 stood and cheered and cried. In theater circles that night, phones rang off the hook with the news that the Public Theater had a massive hit.

  “I don’t think there was a ticket left the next day,” said Gersten. “People, celebrities, started coming down and sitting on the steps to watch the show.” At any given performance, you could see Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Shirley MacLaine, David Geffen, or Cher crowded on the stairs of the Newman.

  “Fire laws were ignored,” said Breglio. “You hear today about people trying to get tickets to Book of Mormon. It was twenty times that. People would do anything to get in. And Joe wasn’t charging them $20,000 a seat—he wasn’t doing anything like that.”