Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (2 page)

I
t is fall 2001. I am standing on the stage of the Colonial Theatre in Boston. A total renovation has recently been completed, timed to coincide with the theater’s one hundredth birthday, and the owners are throwing a party to celebrate. As president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, I have been invited to represent the contributions of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, many of whose shows played at the Colonial on their way to Broadway. Their first joint effort, originally titled
Away We Go!,
was being performed on this very stage while, out in the lobby, the decision was being made to rename it
Oklahoma!
That’s the kind of rich history that has been chronicled in a sumptuous new photograph-filled book, whose author is circulating through the crowd. There is a lot of mingling, sipping wine, and munching from the tables of food laid out around the stage.

I walk to the footlights, peering out at the empty auditorium. The cherubs adorning the front of the balconies, the frescoes on the ceiling, and the chandeliers are now gleaming. There is a gentle, elegant sweep to the rows and rows of newly upholstered seats, and over to the sides are the boxes, one on top of another, grand and ornate. Looking down to the orchestra pit, now covered, I think of the songs that were first played there, songs that have become famous.

My mind is on someone specific. A young man, who stood on this stage long before tonight. I can almost see him, that twenty-year-old, who found a way to observe rehearsals and the out-of-town period of a show he hoped—he knew—would be thrilling. Focused enough to keep a diary, he was enthusiastic and green; he kept his eyes and ears open to everything that was going on around him. Naive, but eager to please, he adored every minute.

I am thinking of myself, age twenty, the gofer on
Follies.

It’s been thirty years since I was in this theater, but in many ways it feels like yesterday. While the cocktail festivities continue on the stage, I wander surreptitiously up the back stairs to the dressing rooms, all of them now locked, down to the darkness below stage, and through the pass door into the paneled foyer of the men’s lounge. I climb up to the rear of the second balcony—not easy, since a separation of patron entrances was part of the initial design—and look down on the stage framed by the golden proscenium arch. It’s all just as I remembered it. Nothing seems to have changed.

I get back down in time for the formal part of the celebration. A small platform with a microphone has been set up, downstage center, facing upstage. When introduced, I thank the hosts of the party for the meticulous restoration job they have done. I reiterate how important the Colonial Theatre was to the careers of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and to the history of American musical theater. I mention
Follies,
the Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince, and Michael Bennett musical that played in the theater for four intense weeks during the winter of 1971. Acknowledging that I played a small role in that show’s Colonial Theatre life, I tell the guests that the spot on which I am standing is where a song was first introduced to the world, an out-of-town replacement that soon became one of the staples of the Stephen Sondheim repertoire: “I’m Still Here.” There is a bit of an “ooh” from the crowd. I conclude my remarks and go back to mingling. One stagehand, now in uncharacteristic suit and tie, tells me he has fond memories of
Follies.
He’s proud of the many years he has put in working at the theater.

Follies
is about the past, revisited, embraced, rejected, relived, denied. It is really about the effects the past has on the present and the future. Here I am, standing on this stage, thinking about that young man from the past and welcoming him into the present. I am back in 1971, with all those talented artists struggling to get their show right, with all those actors hoping this would be the one show that would do it for them. In the course of research for this book, I found that twenty-year-old in photographs, many of which I had no knowledge existed. He looks very young, he has too much hair, and his clothes have a decidedly collegiate look. I found him in one shot, seated among the entire creative staff, legal pad in hand, taking notes for Hal Prince (see page 110). What was he thinking at that precise moment? What was he staring at so intently? Damned if I can remember. There’s another shot in which everyone is laughing. At what? I realize he knew then, as I know now, that
Follies
would have happened without him. Its fate would have been the same. But his being there at the beginning has given me this gift today: the opportunity to get this all down on paper.

In the credits at the back of the Playbill for the original Broadway production of
Follies,
I am listed as “Production Assistant.” That means “gofer”—the low man on the theatrical totem pole who runs all the errands and does whatever the management asks him to do: go for this, go for that . . . Hence the name. At the time, I was a junior at Connecticut College, which had recently gone coed. I had spent the fall on an experimental off-campus theater program and wasn’t anxious to go straight back to school. The
Follies
rehearsal period neatly paralleled the second semester, and I felt I could probably sell the college on allowing me to make a credit-worthy independent study of observing the creation of an intriguing new American musical. In order to graduate on time, I would need to get two courses’ worth of credit, so I agreed to keep a journal that I would fashion into a report. It was 1970; colleges then were somewhat in turmoil anyway, and they tended to welcome creative independent studies initiated by students. Thanks to one particularly sympathetic registrar, a holdover from the days of Connecticut College for Women with a twinkle in her eye for show business, my request was accepted. I hadn’t yet quite gotten Harold Prince to agree to let me observe the rehearsals.

My fall semester’s experience had been extraordinary. I was part of a group, and a motley group we were, of thirty undergraduates from all over the country participating in the inaugural semester of the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It was designed as an intensive program in which students would have nothing but theater thrown at them all day long, seven days a week. Courses were taught by professional theater practitioners in all kinds of disciplines; we had to take every one, regardless of what we thought our ultimate career goal might be. We designed sets; we studied acting. We put on kimonos and practiced Japanese theater techniques. Someone from Joseph Chaikin’s innovative Open Theater had us twist into athletic clumps. The two design teachers, David Hays and Fred Voelpel, were working on a new Broadway-bound musical entitled
Two by Two,
so we piled into a bus and went to see a dress rehearsal at the Shubert Theater in New Haven. We came to New York for a week to see shows and meet with actors, directors, and producers—including Hal Prince and Michael Bennett. Friday afternoons were set aside for puppetry, since Margo and Rufus Rose, the originators of
Howdy Doody,
lived nearby. For them we suffered through a series of visiting puppeteers who attempted to teach us what one referred to as “the most basic of all art forms because there is nothing between the creator and his art.” We were, however, won over the day a gangly, soft-spoken Jim Henson arrived with a duffel bag full of his creations for a new children’s television show that had just gone on the air. They were the Muppets from
Sesame Street
and he simply told us: “These are my friends.” We were enthralled. Somehow going straight back to an undergraduate collegiate program of directing and acting in one-act plays at a college that didn’t have a theater department and only a 2,000-seat proscenium auditorium known mostly for the American Dance Festival felt like an inevitable letdown. Working on
Follies,
I imagined, would provide a great decompression chamber. And I promised the college that I would gear up for a senior year in which I would stay on campus and do all the right things.

I had become a big fan of three of the creative artists who were collaborating on
Follies:
composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, producer-director Harold Prince, and choreographer-director Michael Bennett. I was staggered by their work on
Company,
the musical they had all produced the season before and which I had seen at an early preview matinee. Everything about the show struck me as new, vital, interesting, bold, contemporary—and wildly exciting. It told a story in a nonlinear way that still made logical sense. The characters and the relationships were modern and understandable. Something about it made me feel for the very first time that a musical could really be a serious work of contemporary theater. I couldn’t quite explain why, but it made a connection for me both emotionally and intellectually as no other show had. I knew I wanted to be around the people who were creating this kind of theater. I had talked my way into attending the recording session of the original cast album of
Company
—an event captured brilliantly on film by D. A. Pennebaker (if you focus over Hal Prince’s shoulder to the wavy hair and the plaid sport jacket in the background, you can see me lurking). I was just hell-bent determined to be part of their world. I hungered for the opportunity to watch them work. I knew that
Follies
was their next project. And I wanted to be there.

I was lucky in one important respect. My father, Schuyler Chapin, had made his professional career in the arts, from concert management through running the classical division of Columbia Records, to general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, eventually becoming New York City Commissioner for Cultural Affairs. In him, I had a resource to be used—carefully—to help make connections. He had helped me get my first job as a production assistant in 1967, when I was sixteen. It was on the original production of Peter Ustinov’s antiwar play
The Unknown Soldier and His Wife,
which was produced as part of Lincoln Center’s Festival ’67, one of the projects that fell under his general responsibilities as vice president for programming for Lincoln Center. The show was produced by Broadway’s Alexander H. Cohen, whom I met at a family dinner. “So which one of you is coming to work for me?” he had asked. I piped up. He told me to write to his assistant, which I did, and became the production assistant, at seventy-five dollars per week. Originally only the gofer, when the rehearsals moved into the Vivian Beaumont Theater, I became the assistant to the director, John Dexter, as well. Dexter was a brilliant, demanding, and acerbic Englishman—just trying to keep on his good side was a task unto itself. A
New York Times
profile appeared at the time titled: “The Geometry of Pleasing Mr. Dexter.”

A slightly rumpled figure hung around the theater during rehearsals, sitting in the auditorium, coming and going as he pleased. He didn’t say much; he just sat there, unobtrusively, watching. He was Stephen Sondheim. Dexter was scheduled to direct Sondheim’s new musical,
The Girls Upstairs,
which was to be produced the following season. They had worked together once before on
Do I Hear a Waltz?
an unhappy collaboration of a musical based on the Arthur Laurents play
The Time of the Cuckoo
with music by Richard Rodgers. But Dexter had been signed for the new show, and he invited Sondheim to hang around. Dexter described
The Girls Upstairs
as “a brilliant study in nostalgia with a breathtaking score.” This was 1967, when Stephen Sondheim was known primarily as a lyricist, having written the words to Leonard Bernstein’s music in
West Side Story
and to Jule Styne’s music in
Gypsy,
both of which, of course, were big hits. He had then written both words and music for
A Fanny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
which, though successful, failed to gain him recognition as a composer. His contribution wasn’t even nominated for a Tony Award. The prevailing opinion in the theater community was that his music wasn’t up to his lyrics, which were acknowledged to be brilliant. But he persevered, and his next effort was words and music for
Anyone Can Whistle,
an innovative, original story dealing with the question of insanity, which lasted only nine performances. It did have a champion, however, in Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, who felt so strongly about the show that he made an original cast album on the day after the show closed. The failure of
Anyone Can Whistle
threatened the future for Sondheim the composer. But after
Do I Hear a Waltz?
he swore he would never write only lyrics again. According to Dexter,
The Girls Upstairs
would show the world once and for all that Sondheim was as good a theater composer as anyone.

The Girls Upstairs
had its genesis when Sondheim approached James Goldman about writing a musical together. Sondheim had read Goldman’s play
They Might Be Giants
and felt he would be a good collaborator. Goldman had been contemplating a play about a reunion, and that led to discussions about a musical centered on a high school reunion. The focus shifted to ex—Ziegfeld Follies girls when an article about a gathering of Ziegfeld alumnae appeared in the
New York Times.
Inspired as well by the actual tearing down of the Ziegfeld Theater in 1966, the show they began to write told the story of a group of ex—Follies girls attending a party in the “Follies” theater the night before it was to be torn down. It evolved into a murder mystery, more of a “who’ll do it,” than a “who done it,” as old jealousies among two ex–Follies girls and their husbands came to the surface. Finding a producer took several years, and in the interim Sondheim and Goldman collaborated on a television adaptation of a John Collier story titled
Evening Primrose
for ABC Stage 67, a bold series of specials, including original musicals created especially for television. In June of 1967
The Girls Upstairs
was scheduled for the coming Broadway season, to be produced by David Merrick and Leland Hayward. The plan ultimately fell through, and a year later the show found its way into the hands of Stuart Ostrow, an innovative producer who was making something of a specialty of producing oddball musicals. He announced
The Girls Upstairs
for the 1969–70 season and hired Joseph Hardy to direct, fresh from Off-Broadway’s successful
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
At one point both
The Girls Upstairs
and
Company
were scheduled to open in the same season. But the Ostrow production plan also fell through.