Broadway Tails (23 page)

The lights went out, Peter grabbed Ed, and the play ended. When the director said all the cat had to do was walk out on a shelf and eat some food, he neglected to say that the audience becomes unglued. At the production meeting after the show, I said I wished I had been warned of this reaction, so we could have prepared Ed with a laugh track, to desensitize him to the sound. I had our sound designer do exactly that the next day, and we began using it. But the damage was already done. The next night Ed went out, then turned around to come back through the hole. The third night, he sat there and cried. We played the laugh track for hours in his room, and onstage, and by the weekend, he got over it. Now the theater had become the biggest and loudest kitchen he had ever eaten in.

The reviews were positive, and the run was hugely successful—a sellout for all nine weeks. Except for the first week, Ed was flawless and everyone was amazed, but I got no credit. Obviously, if my name was out in front of the theater or in the program, people would know there was a live animal in the show and that would spoil the surprise. Unlike shows whose producers said I wasn’t important enough to get credit, this show told me I was
too
well known to get credit. I gladly agreed to a plaque being placed in
the lobby at the end of the show, with Mr. Ed’s photo and my credits.

After opening, they moved forward, planning the move to Broadway. The set was transferred intact. Ed had the exact same place to perform each night. In the meantime, a Broadway show would require an understudy. At the Humane Society of New York, we had received a group of cats and dogs displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Among them was a black cat named Fairfax. While he was in our hospital recuperating, he talked constantly, and would reach out of his cage to play with everyone. He had survived a hurricane, confinement, transport to New York City, and was still willing to play—I felt doing a show would be nothing for him.

But putting these two tomcats together would be like putting two divas together—one huge catfight. The day after we closed at the Atlantic Theater, Kirsten and I moved Ed and Fairfax to the Lyceum Theater, where they had separate dressing rooms. We had to have the crew build playscapes for the cats because the rooms were so small, and they had to install full spectrum lights on timers because there were no windows.

While Ed settled into his dressing room, Fairfax screamed for attention so much that they could hear him onstage. At first the crew put soundproofing foam all over the inside of his dressing room. The next day we came in to find it shredded to bits. It looked like there had been a black snowstorm. Fairfax seemed grateful we had given him a new toy to shred. Finally, we decided that in the first act, we’d put a harness on Fairfax and sit with him in the basement with all the actors and crew, to wear him out. They played with him to the point of exhaustion. The wardrobe room had a shelf that looked like the one in the play, so Kirsten asked the wardrobe supervisor, Nancy, if we could practice on it. During each show, Fairfax would walk into Nancy’s room, do his little bit, get fed, and move on.

We began getting Ed used to the new theater. While his shelf was exactly the same, the room, its airflow, and feel were much different. From
day one we had the sound department play his laugh track at a very loud level to mimic the bigger audience. And with Peter Gerety holding a gun to his head every night, then loving him up, he got right back into the routine. We began previews in late April and opened in May. The reviews were again great but warned people about the extreme gore. Only one review spoke of the cat.

We were very popular with the younger crowd, and they tried to make a go at a long run, but the sad fact is on Broadway, a play that gets good reviews and wins prizes usually closes for lack of audience. In the last two weeks before closing, the two original actors from London (who had done the Atlantic Theater production and the Broadway opening) had their visas expire, and they had to leave. The young man who was in the scene with Peter and Ed was replaced by his understudy. His rhythm and energy were totally different from the first actor’s, and it was just different enough that after eight months of voluntarily going onstage, Ed decided he didn’t like this actor’s performance and wouldn’t go out. In the best tradition of “the cat must go on,” Fairfax stepped in. We all were nervous. Imagine a cat having no experience, going on cold. But outside of being too happy and animated, Fairfax went on and closed the run.

Nancy, in the wardrobe department, was so taken by Fairfax—and the fact that we couldn’t have another male cat at home—that it led to the perfect adoption for this Katrina refugee. Fairfax is living happily in New Jersey with Nancy’s other cat and two dogs.

But now I have to let you in on a theatrical secret, one not even known by the show’s producers or creative team. In a case of life imitating art, we had a case of mistaken cat identity, because the cat that performed in the show was not the cat that auditioned for it. If you reread this chapter, you’ll see I talk about introducing “Mr. Ed” to the producers and writer, but then I call the cat “Ed” during rehearsals and performances. Two days after the audition, Mr. Ed started vomiting and losing weight. After another two days, we took him over to our vet. He was diagnosed with that catchall phrase,
irritable bowel syndrome
. My vet prescribed a little cortisone to calm his bowels, but it didn’t work. More tests showed scarring on his intestines. A simple surgery could remove the scarring, and after that, he should be fine.

While I was assured Mr. Ed would recover, I decided we needed to look for a backup. We tried for a month to nurse Mr. Ed back to health. Although his spirits were good, he’d become skin and bones. Dorothy and I went online to Petfinder.com and found a cat in a municipal shelter in Connecticut. It was two weeks before our first rehearsal. I drove down to see the cat. I wasn’t thrilled with the cat I had seen online, but I saw another black cat in a cage nearby. He was a big male. The card said he had been found as a stray with a leg injury. With the infection from his leg injury cured, he was ready for adoption. They had named him George.

I took him out and he stretched, purred, hung out with the other cats meowing and dogs barking. I decided to take him out of desperation. We set him up in my basement office because he didn’t get along with other cats. I began feeding him on our shelf, and in fourteen days, I brought him to New York City. We had decided telling this group we were bringing in an inexperienced cat would cause undue worry—but, as far as I was concerned, this stray had as much chance of succeeding as the real Mr. Ed, because, as I always say, there is no such thing as a trained cat.

At home Dorothy and I started calling the new cat “George Eddie” so he would come when you called him Ed. George Eddie did the entire off-Broadway run and ultimately made it to Broadway, as described. After the show, George Eddie came back to my office to live. We tried incorporating him with our three other cats, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t fair to such a great cat to keep him in my office, so we placed him with a wonderful public relations agent we had worked with in New York City. She had moved to New York, bought a condo, and missed her dogs but couldn’t have one with her lifestyle. One day she said to me, “If they only made cats that act like dogs.” I said, “Boy, do I have a cat for you!” George Eddie now lives in that condo in New York City. Mr. Ed held on until July 2006—he was a great cat, and we miss him dearly.

So that’s the true story. To the producers, directors, and playwright of
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
—well, this time the joke’s on you. We provided a cat that was not the cat you hired to play the role of a cat whose mistaken identity causes mayhem.

With
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
closing,
The Woman in White
running, and our involvement in
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
, I couldn’t have felt more proud of our animals and the work we did. Unfortunately, though, all of the shows listed above were transfers from the English stage. Theater is theater, but I longed for a good, old-fashioned American musical. What presented itself was a good, old-fashioned American drama.

In mid-December 2005, Melanie Weintraub called from the management office of Lincoln Center. They were doing a production of
Awake and Sing!
, generally considered the finest work by American playwright Clifford Odets. Lincoln Center was honoring both the work of Odets and the famous Group Theatre. Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg founded The Group Theatre in 1931. Their ambition was to transform American theater by creating an acting ensemble that would present powerful, naturalistic works. Although it lasted only ten years, The Group Theatre was very influential, particularly among actors. That’s because The Group wanted to break down the line between life and acting onstage. Actors were to actually
feel
the emotions their characters were having every moment of the play. In order to do this, they created their own acting style, called The Method, which was an Americanized version of the Stanislavsky Method developed at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Other famous original members of The Group Theatre included Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. Students of The Group Theatre included Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and many others.

I’ve always felt the reason animals are so appealing onstage is that they are the ultimate Method actors. Animals onstage are always in the moment. While human actors have to strive to be real onstage, animals
are
real—and that’s what I believe makes it so exciting for an audience to watch an animal onstage.

To re-create the feel of the original production, this revival was going to be presented at the Belasco Theater, where
Awake and Sing!
was originally produced fifty-one years earlier, rather than at Lincoln Center. It would open almost in the same month. The set was being replicated with modern updates. Famed director Bartlett Sher, who had just directed
The Light in the Piazza
for Lincoln Center, would be directing
Awake and Sing!
The cast featured many talented performers, including Zoe Wanamaker, Ben Gazzara, and Mark Ruffalo.

Awake and Sing!
was written during the height of the Great Depression. It was a comedy/drama about a Jewish family trying to stay afloat in the 1930s, and raised the question: What is life for? What I found unusual was not the fact that the family in the play had a dog, but rather, the breed they chose. The script called for a miniature white poodle to play Tootsie, the grandfather’s dog. In all the research they had done for the show, there was absolutely nothing on the origin of the dog—who owned it, who handled it, why they chose a poodle, since a poor family wouldn’t be able to afford a purebred dog during the Depression.

Being familiar with The Method from my studies with Stella Adler, I could imagine that a Group member had had a dog at the time, and Harold Clurman put it onstage as an exercise to keep the actors in the moment. If you don’t know what a dog will do in a scene, then you have to focus. When Melanie said the script called for a messy white poodle, I
said, “I don’t have a white one, but I have a black one with a résumé.” I was referring to our old friend Barney. Since Lincoln Center is a nonprofit, I thought the cost savings of using a dog I already owned would be attractive. An audition was set up for Barney at Lincoln Center. It was actually a people audition, and actors were coming and going. In fact, I saw a cast member from
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
there. He asked what I was doing—I told him Barney had an audition. Ultimately Barney got the job and the other cast member didn’t.

We went into the audition room and met Bartlett and the casting director for Lincoln Center. Barney was very outgoing and friendly in that poodle-ish sort of way. Then I demonstrated how he could do all the basic commands. They liked him, but they weren’t crazy about his color. They really wanted to stick with the script as it was written. When I explained the cost and trouble of acquiring a new poodle, they decided Barney would be fine.

Bartlett then explained the first cue was Barney entering and jumping up on Ben Gazzara. His next cue was to come out to Mark Ruffalo, and for his final cue, he exits up a staircase with Ben. It sounded pretty simple. I explained the need to bond with the actors, especially since the set had walls and I couldn’t command him from the wings. Bart said he needed the dog well trained so the actors could concentrate. That didn’t make sense to me. I tried explaining how my training techniques sought to create a real bond with the actors so the audience would see the reality, but apparently the new Method didn’t include dogs.

Because Barney was only in those three short scenes, they didn’t need us to come in at the beginning. The acting company would need a chance to bond and get to know one another. Rehearsals began in mid-February in the studios at Lincoln Center—we started in early March, two weeks before the first public performance. Rob, my trainer from
The Woman in White
, agreed to handle Barney.
The Woman in White
had closed and the salary for
Awake and Sing!
was better than unemployment. Rob would bring Barney in each day on the subway in a dog-carry bag to save the theater money.

The first day for me was very exciting—I had always dreamed of working with a cast of this stature. Also, the production stage manager, Bob Bennett, was an old friend. Bob was the original production stage manager of the Goodspeed production of
Annie
the summer I found the original Sandy. We hadn’t worked together in thirty years, but Bob had followed my career with pride. He understood what I needed and tried to accommodate it. That day, we also met Ben Gazzara, an amazing actor who owns dachshunds. He was working very hard on his character in the play. He actually knew some of the original members of The Group Theatre, and we spoke about the old days, with everyone listening. The other actor who handled Barney was Mark Ruffalo. He was making his Broadway debut, having had a great film career. He loved dogs, was a down-to-earth type of guy, and got down on the floor and just loved Barney up.

At our first rehearsal, we were blocking the show. Bartlett seemed a little distant. I got the feeling he didn’t enjoy wasting time blocking the dog. I tried to be as professional as possible—having studied The Method myself, I wanted to know the motivation for the scene so I could devise a behavior that seemed natural. Barney would enter from a room upstage, about halfway into the first act. I asked if there was a way to wait in that room with Barney. They said no, because the set had four walls. I explained that a dog couldn’t wait in a dark room for twenty minutes and enter on cue, so either Rob would have to be there with him, or a trapdoor would have to be installed. We all decided the trapdoor was the better option.

When you rehearse in a big rehearsal room, walls and scenery are indicated by tape on the floor so the actors can approximate their moves. Barney had to enter from that room and go downstage to Ben, who was sitting in a chair. At first, without the wall, Barney just walked across the tape. The director said he couldn’t step over the tape. It seemed kind of silly to me to have to explain that the dog didn’t know there was a wall there, so we just got some cardboard boxes and made fake walls. Barney was supposed to run to Ben, uncued. I explained he would need a cue or a treat from Ben onstage. At first Bart was resistant, but when Ben spoke up and said he
thought his character would have goodies in his pocket to spoil the dog, the problem was solved.

The other two scenes were easy to stage but, again, I didn’t feel very welcomed by the company. Rob and I would come in on their lunch breaks to work the pattern in the room with Barney, and then we would steal moments with the cast members when they weren’t onstage. They had become a very close-knit group, which is part of The Method, but by excluding me and Barney, they were missing the point about him needing to be familiar with everyone.

About the fourth day in of the cold-shoulder treatment, I needed to do something, so I asked Bob if I could make an announcement. He said I could have three minutes. I introduced myself to the group and said what an honor it was to be there. I could see eyes roll. Then I said, “It’s especially moving for me, having studied acting with Stella Adler.” Everyone perked up. I explained she would have understood the cast having a relationship on- and offstage with the dog, to help with the reality. I invited everyone to say hello to us at any time, and we would help facilitate it. I thanked everyone and went back to our spot.

The cast had a new respect for me. Not only was I familiar with The Method, I had studied with one of the original cast members. It was during that brief time after
Annie
had closed at Goodspeed but before it opened on Broadway. I moved to Greenwich Village with Sandy and entered New York University. I had chosen Stella Adler’s conservatory as part of my university training. She instilled a great respect for the theater but also told us to respect ourselves, which I never forgot. Mark Ruffalo came up to me and said he had studied with her, too, and we started trading stories. Even Bartlett every now and then would come and ask me for my opinion of a scene.

We moved to the Belasco Theater one week later. We had a beautiful old-time box set that also had the ability to fly out the walls as the play progressed. The union crew guys at the Belasco were very accommodating. They had set up a dressing room for us in the basement. There was a lot of history in that theater. They talked about the ghosts there, and showed us an old pulley system that Houdini had installed to make an elephant disappear.

It took Barney a couple of days to learn his path through the set to Ben. It’s one thing to be in an open rehearsal room, hiding behind some cardboard boxes, but quite another to enter through a trapdoor onto a room onstage, wait for another door to open, and then run to someone. By the first preview Barney had it. His second cue with Mark was flawless, and for his third cue, Ben carried him up a flight of stairs. Unfortunately, the theater was so small they couldn’t get escape stairs there for Ben, so Rob had to climb up a ladder to retrieve Barney so he wouldn’t have to spend the whole third act up in the air. There was no curtain call for Barney, so we got to leave early.

The second day of rehearsal, we heard barking coming from Ben’s dressing room. Bob the stage manager investigated and found that Ben had brought his dachshund along to keep him company. This presented two problems. First, we had tried to make Barney think he was special in Ben’s eyes—but having Ben’s dog in his dressing room meant we couldn’t visit. The second problem was that you could hear Ben’s dog barking onstage. It distracted Barney and the other actors as well. It was only the second day, and it was an honest mistake. The next day, Rob took Barney to visit Ben. He knocked on his door and Ben said to come in. As Barney rushed in, Ben’s dog ran up and bit Barney. Quick reflexes on Rob’s part prevented anyone from getting hurt. It seems Ben really loved his dog and was hoping we could get the dachshund and Barney to be friends. Ben felt very bad about the accident and didn’t bring his dog to the theater after that.