Broadway Tails (10 page)

I went home that afternoon to the apartment, and we started calling groomers all over New York City, trying to find a way to de-allergize a cat. Most of them thought we were crazy and wouldn’t even bathe a cat. The other half said there’s no such thing as de-allergizing an animal. On the second day, we started calling groomers in New Jersey and Connecticut because we didn’t know what else to do. I ran across a man in Fort Lee, New Jersey, who had a grooming school. When I told him the situation, he said, “No problem. Bring the cat in and I’ll take care of her.” We ran over to New Jersey, I waited, and two hours later, he handed Ophelia back to me. She looked a little cleaner but otherwise the same. He said, “That should work.” I ran her to rehearsal and told them the cat was de-allergized. Kate said, “This is great. I’m not sneezing.” We did the scene and everything was fine. (I later learned that the miracle treatment was Downy fabric softener,
believe it or not. I don’t know why it worked, but it did, and we brought Ophelia in for her treatment once a week for the rest of the run.)

Our first preview with an audience was December 8. Both animals performed brilliantly and continued to perform until December 23, which was our opening night. During that time we had also gotten some sad news—
Annie
was going to be closing in January 1983. Still, this meant that for the last two weeks of December, we would have two shows running on Broadway again, which made us very proud. But we were also looking at the end of an era.

We were now housing Hamletta and Ophelia in our apartment across the street, walking them over to the theater and then walking them home at night. We told our doorman, who knew Sandy and also knew where we worked, that we had two cats in the show. We had gotten two little covered carriers, one for the pig and one for the cat. The doorman was always interested in saying hello to the animals, but we couldn’t let him, primarily because we didn’t want him (or the landlord) to know we were keeping a pig in the apartment. Well, as Hamletta got used to getting into the crate, she would snort. The first time we were walking by the doorman and she snorted, he said, “What was that?”

Of course, I said, “Well, it was the cat.”

“She sounds sick,” he said.

“Yeah, she’s got a cold, she doesn’t feel good,” I said, and we hurried off. The doorman was very concerned that our cat had a lingering cold and would ask about her every day.

Meanwhile, members of the press department were working overtime getting publicity for the show. In her column, Liz Smith mentioned how two Broadway stars were sleeping together—the pig from
Alice in Wonderland
and Sandy from
Annie
.

My parents and my best friend, Dave, and his new wife came into New York to attend the opening. We were at the apartment and I was showing Dave this little pig that lived in a refrigerator box in my office. Dave said he would like to feed her. We were laughing at how crazy my life had become, and I forgot to tell Dave to hold the bottle level so the milk didn’t run into her lungs. All of a sudden Hamletta started to choke. She was having
trouble catching her breath. Dave looked at me, panicked, and said, “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The milk must have gotten into her lungs.”

“How can we get it out?” Dave said.

“Pick her up by her back legs and hold her upside down?” I yelled.

Dave did just that, but touching her made Hamletta panic, and she tried to squeal. My mother in the other room called out, “What’s going on in there?”

I yelled back, “The pig is choking, and we’re trying to save her!”

My father had grown up on a farm in the mountains of Italy. He came into the room and saw Dave holding the pig upside down while I tried to compress her chest to push the milk out and the pig gasped for air. In his broken accent he started yelling at us, demanding to know what we were doing to that poor pig.

“Pop, we got to save her!” I said. By now she was getting limp. My father yelled again, telling us to leave the poor thing alone because we were only making it worse. By now she was silent. Dad came over and took her from us and put her down on the floor. Dave and I were in shock—we thought we killed her. Dad just knelt over her and a few seconds later she burped and tried to get up and run. “What are you, crazy?” Dad said.

Hamletta was still coughing, so we called the Animal Medical Center and ran her over to be examined. They gave her antibiotics to prevent any upper respiratory infection, and the exotic animal doctor reminded me to make sure her bottles were level. He added that if it happened again, just let her cough it out. We didn’t tell the doctor we had tried to do pig CPR.

Opening night came; the reviews were mixed. It was a show meant for family audiences and kids. It got good reviews for its classic nature, but it really wasn’t high-tech enough for most young audiences of the day. Things were rough—it didn’t look like the show was going to run for very long. Also, opening before Christmas meant a lot of people bought tickets for presents. Going into January, it’s harder to sell tickets because everyone is paying holiday bills. It was a tough time to be trying to run a show that didn’t get rave reviews.

By the time we opened, Hamletta was almost six weeks old and about 30 pounds. She was getting too heavy for Kate Burton to carry. We had known this was coming, and a week before we opened, we had gotten another baby pig and started training her with the baby bottle and the jingle bells, to have her ready to replace Hamletta. A week after we had opened, when things had calmed down, we replaced the pig and even that news made the New York
Daily News
and other news outlets around the country.

Annie
closed on January 2, 1983.
Alice in Wonderland
closed a week later. It was a very solemn time in our year—what I believed was the end of my career, even though I now had four Broadway shows to my credit. We had succeeded in both plays and musicals; trained dogs, cats, and pigs; and had helped a lot of shelter animals along the way.

One interesting side note: Later that year, PBS decided to film the version of
Alice in Wonderland
with Kate. We were to work with some of the greats of the theater we had worked with previously. In this version, Kate was reunited with her father, Richard Burton, who played the White Knight. Also in the cast were Eve Arden, Kaye Ballard, Geoffrey Holder, Nathan Lane, Donald O’Connor, and Austin Pendleton, as well as many other talented cast members. So we got a chance to re-create our roles, both with Ophelia and another new pig from the 4-H Club of Hunterdon County, and also to see Mr. Burton perform with his daughter once again.

Alice in Wonderland
turned out to be one of those pivotal times in my life. It showed the power of publicity and how it could help a show—but it also showed that I was able to create press events that would become beneficial for selling tickets and raising animal awareness. At the end of the run, the pigs went back to their farms where they lived long, healthy lives, and Ophelia was adopted by one of the dressers in the show. He was an older gentleman who was by himself. He had just lost his cat, and he had always come down to visit her. We decided she would be better off living one-on-one with a person who had no other animals and a very quiet lifestyle, instead of living in a house with eight dogs and other animals. She lived another fifteen years with this gentleman before she passed away.

In the fall of 1983, I was contacted by the general managers of
Annie
, who were representing Cameron Mackintosh, the young British producer of
Cats
. For his next production, he had done a very successful revival of
Oliver
in London.
Oliver
was his favorite musical, and it was his vision to bring it back to Broadway. He wanted the revival to be very close to the original production, and had even hired the original director and one of the stars. The call for this show couldn’t have come at a better time.
Annie
and
Alice in Wonderland
had closed in January. I had spent most of that year setting up productions of
Annie
all around the country and doing guest appearances with Sandy. So even though this was a revival, I was very excited.

Oliver
is a musical version of
Oliver Twist
. The villain, Bill Sikes, has a dog named Bull’s-Eye that appears in several scenes. At the climax of the story, the dog leads an angry mob to find Sikes after he has murdered his girlfriend. We found out that a bull terrier played Bull’s-Eye in the original production. You’ve probably seen bull terriers—the Target store chain uses one as a mascot—but they’re a fairly rare breed. They’re pretty odd looking, with a long Roman nose, triangular eyes, and pointed ears; white bull terriers, like the one in the play, look a little like pigs. They were originally bred to fight, so they are powerful dogs, very determined, and they can be very aggressive toward other animals. But they adore humans—the people who bred them to fight also bred them to love people, so they wouldn’t bite their handlers.

Because they’re a rare breed, I had a difficult time finding good dogs. Besides doing my shelter search, I also contacted breeders throughout the country. I found a respected breeder who agreed to lend us an eight-year-old female named Buffy, who got along well with other dogs, in return for publicity and a fee.

In the play, the first time Bull’s-Eye enters the stage he’s being carried, and the second time he’s walking on a leash and has to stay calm while Bill Sikes gets very violent. In the final scene, the dog has to run through a crowd of angry townspeople and lead them to Sikes. I decided I needed two dogs: one that was trained to do the final scene and a calmer dog to do the quiet scenes. I found the second dog at the Westchester Humane Society. Lydia had been brought in for medical treatment after being abandoned. In addition to recovering from surgery, she was at least ten—old for a bull terrier. So she was quiet and calm, fine for the early scenes, but she could never do the final scene. I still needed one more dog as an understudy.

Then I got a call from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Manhattan. The FBI had broken up a dog-fighting ring, and one of the dogs was a beautiful male bull terrier. He didn’t get along with other dogs, but he was very good with humans. His name was Vito. When I went to see this dog, I found he
was
a magnificent specimen of a bull terrier—big, strong, handsome—but what struck me was the way he’d very calmly look in your eyes and follow your every move. I didn’t really think I could use him in the show because of his fighting background, but there was something about his attentiveness that I really liked, so I decided to adopt him. So, by December I had the three bull terriers: Buffy would be trained for the final scene, Lydia would be the dog that was in the quiet scenes, and Vito—on paper, at least—would be the backup for both those dogs.

I soon found out that Vito had heartworms, which can be fatal to dogs. The treatment is almost as bad as the disease—my vet had treated O’Malley, who had been in
Annie
on Broadway, for it. The recovery time can be quite
long. When he returned after being freed of the heartworms, we had to be very careful because he was so aggressive with other animals. But he was very sweet with humans—he loved to be petted and have his belly rubbed, and he looked into your eyes with so much gratitude when you were kind to him. Vito seemed to be completely untrained, which I thought was probably because he had been a fighting dog. You could call him and he would never come—he wouldn’t even turn to look at you. I let it slide because he’d so far had such a horrible, brutal life, and he was finally on the road to recovery. I never thought he would have to be in the show, he was an understudy on paper only, so I let him enjoy being outside in the sun.

Then one day a kid set off a firecracker in the next yard. All the dogs in the house started barking—except for Vito, who was looking blissfully in another direction. I became suspicious, so I walked up slowly behind him, yelling his name and clapping my hands. He didn’t move. I was right behind him and he didn’t turn around. Then I tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned and acted very happy to see me. I realized that he wasn’t untrained, he was completely deaf. That was the reason he was so attentive. If he wasn’t looking at you, he didn’t know that you were speaking to him. I found out from breed experts that deafness is one of the possible hereditary problems with bull terriers. I was heartbroken because I loved this dog so much. I thought there would really be no way for me to train a deaf dog in a theatrical situation. If the show became a hit, I would have to find another understudy and help find Vito a good home.

Rehearsals for
Oliver
started in March, and we began getting the cast used to the dogs. We also had to get the dogs accustomed to wearing makeup—we had to paint a black bull’s-eye around one eye. I didn’t bring Vito with me because at that point, I didn’t think it would be important for him to get to know anyone. Because he was so difficult to handle when he was around the other dogs, he just stayed at home and rested. Lydia and Buffy came in every day to socialize with the cast, and then I would have a session with the actor who played Sikes. He would carry them around, and we also worked on getting them to walk by his side and stay. We couldn’t really do the final
scene until we got into the theater. They showed me a model of the set, and explained that Buffy would have to run up a staircase, across a bridge that was sixteen feet off the ground, and then come down another staircase and out a door, with the cast running and screaming behind her.

Believe it or not, I didn’t think that it would be too hard. As long as the dog knew the pattern and was sure of getting a treat at the end, it should be a piece of cake. The key was that Buffy would have to learn everything on the set, so she could get used to the actual stairs, bridge, and the noise. That made me a little nervous, because we wouldn’t have a chance to do that until a week before the show opened.

Then I was thrown another curve. Sam Stickler was the stage manager for this show, and he had also worked as a stage manager on the national tours of
Annie
. He and I had very different ideas about how we should rehearse the dogs and how the dogs should behave. On a few occasions on
Annie
I had to ask Martin Charnin, the director, to decide how we should do things, and Martin told Sam to do whatever I wanted. It was pretty embarrassing for a stage manager to be told he had to listen to a dog trainer. Well, Sam apparently chose this show for payback. And he did it in such a way—by giving the appearance of trying to accommodate me or by claiming a situation was out of his control—that he made it seem like
he
wasn’t doing anything wrong.

I had explained to Sam that I would need a minimum of one hour alone onstage with Buffy, to teach her the pattern. But rehearsal time is expensive. On a Broadway production, everyone belongs to a union. There are unions for the actors, directors, lighting designers, choreographers, stagehands—even the ushers—everyone except dogs and dog trainers. These unions have very strict rules about what can be done onstage and when it can be done. For example, the stagehands’ union requires that every time there’s a rehearsal onstage, anywhere from four to eight stagehands have to be paid a four-hour minimum, even if they don’t move a single piece of scenery. If you want to work onstage during a lunch hour or dinner break, for the crew, that’s overtime. So when we get to the theater, the priority is always to get the actors ready without wasting crew time. I have to rely on
the production stage manager to talk to the director, the actors, and the stagehands to help find time to rehearse the dogs.

The first day we were in the theater, I was told there was no time available, which was fine. I walked the dogs through the theater, getting them used to the different areas, having them in the wings. Next day, again, there was no time scheduled for me to rehearse the big scene with Buffy. I reminded Sam that it was his job to find me the hour I needed, and he said he would try.

Finally, on the fourth day, we got to the scene and I had the stage. I put Buffy on a leash and led her up the stairs, over the bridge, and down the other side. She was afraid because the bridge was slippery, and we made a note to put carpet down. When I tried to take her across again, the director said we had to move on. When I said I needed more time, he told me to talk to Sam. When I found Sam later, he said he was just following the schedule the director had set out, and it was my problem. He simply wasn’t going to help me at all. Fortunately, bull terriers are smart. Even though she had only been on the stage a couple of times, Buffy came out and did her part in the final technical and dress rehearsals. But she was very tentative, and it was clear to me that she was frightened—and it was getting worse.

Our first preview was on a Thursday night, and I had no idea what would happen. The first part of the show went very well. When Buffy walked onto the stage for the final scene, the audience made a very audible cheer, at which point she turned around, ran offstage, and went straight to the dressing room. One of the actors covered by ad-libbing, “I think Bill Sikes is over there!“—and they all ran off. Back in my dressing room at the end of the show, I felt terrible—not because Buffy didn’t do her part, but because she hadn’t had enough time in rehearsals to get over her fear.

All of a sudden a young man with dark hair flung open my dressing-room door. In a British accent, he rudely asked why Buffy hadn’t done her trick. I turned around and said, “Excuse me, but who are you, and what are you thinking, coming into my dressing room?” It was Cameron Mackintosh, the producer, and he was unhappy with both me and Buffy. I was taken aback because I had never met Cameron Mackintosh before. I had
seen him, but he had never introduced himself to me. Also, I thought he was being extremely unprofessional, and he was upsetting the dogs. That made me angry, so I stood up to him in a way I might not have otherwise. I told him, “The dog’s not performing because we haven’t been provided the proper rehearsal.” Cameron said we’d have the stage at 12:30
P.M.
the next day, but he expected to see a perfect performance that night. Then he stormed out.