Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (42 page)

By Wednesday, all departments had gotten themselves organized and reasonably ready for performance, but this was the day for everything to be a little off. The afternoon run-through added costumes and orchestra. Sound wasn’t finished, nor was the lighting ready. There was excitement, yes, and anticipation, but there were also raw nerves. Steve announced that this was one day that he always hates, because what seemed so together three days earlier always falls apart in the interim and needs to be put back together; at best it’s always ragged. Little mistakes were made: Ethel Shutta took a fall but picked herself up and continued; Justine Johnston dropped her cane, which rolled off the stage; and some of the costumes were off being repaired. The orchestra seemed very loud, especially during the moments of underscore. Hal wandered down to the rail, yelling that the music was too loud. Sheila Smith, who had been with
Mame
at the same theater for years, muttered quietly that the orchestra was always too loud in the Winter Garden.

After a dinner break, during which the crews kept working, there was a full dress rehearsal at the normal evening performance time. There was no audience, but many members of the greater
Follies
family were on hand. Judy, the people from Hal’s office, Mary Bryant and her staff, many of the design assistants, and the usual friends at court. Martha Swope and her assistants wandered the first few rows shooting the show, and Van Williams, another theater photographer, was moving around the theater as well, taking shots from different vantage points. Earlier, Mary Bryant asked me to come to the back of the theater because she wanted a photograph of Hal and me together “for the files.”

The show looked and felt great. The lighting had come a long way from the day before, and what was now onstage was the show that had closed in Boston. It was home. Not only did the set look as if it belonged in the space but the lighting was more precise and atmospheric. The sound was complete, although there was talk about rerecording some of the sweetening vocal tapes to suit the specific acoustics of the theater. Since the audience was never to know the tape was playing, it was important that it sound exactly like it was coming from the mouths of the people onstage. After the curtain came in, Hal called for it to be raised, then went down to the orchestra rail, thanked everyone, and told them all to go home and get a good rest. There would be a rehearsal in the afternoon tomorrow, then the first New York preview at night. He felt they were ready and was very upbeat.

 

 

O
n Thursday afternoon, once the cast had assembled, Hal announced that the intermission would be in a different place that night. The question of the intermission—where it should go, and whether there should be one at all—had been dormant since the beginning of the Boston run, where, after a couple of previews without one, the show had played consistently with a break following “Too Many Mornings.” Someone had now changed his mind—no one knew who—and Hal announced that the act would end several minutes earlier after “Who’s That Woman?” thus saving both “I’m Still Here” and “Too Many Mornings” for the second act. This came as something of a shock to everyone, but as always, Hal was firm in his control and fierce in his determination. The first act would now close with the ending of “Who’s That Woman?” and the second act would begin back into the middle of the song, so the ending would be repeated. Then things would proceed as before, with Weismann saying, “Are there any hungry actors in the house?” after the applause, followed by Stella’s line, “Wasn’t that a blast?” which often elicited a second hand. “Who’s That Woman?” had consistently stopped the show, so ending the act on it would clearly create a rousing finale to act one. Since the time sequence of the entire show was essentially continuous, it didn’t matter where the break came, and this way would make it even more obvious that the second act continued directly from the first. Michael found an appropriate spot in the number to begin again, and then, in consultation with the two Hals and Steve, ascertained where the orchestra should start and when the curtain would rise.

Then Hal spoke again. “We don’t have time for a lot of little things, although there were a lot of things that distressed me during last night’s run-through. We’ll work on them today, tomorrow, and Monday, and the rest of next week we’ll work almost exclusively on music.” He then gave specific notes, some of which he admitted were things he just hadn’t noticed in Boston. He told Fifi that she was “doing something horrible—wagging your finger as you cross on ‘Beautiful Girls.’ ” “But I’ve been doing that for four weeks!” she said. He saw Ethel Shutta chatting with Mary McCarty during the number, something she had also been doing for weeks. He thought Ethel’s line readings in her first scene were growing dull. Her joke wasn’t landing: “It’s always sad to lose a husband. I lost five.” She vowed to do it better. He said that Heidi Schiller (Justine Johnston) would be seated onstage and simply revealed rather than make her entrance, which seemed to be getting longer and longer with each performance.

Michael was next. He was upbeat and cheerful. “You all played with a hell of a lot of energy, and that’s great. The Prologue was good, but it has to be played a little faster.” He complimented the women on the mirror number, reminding them always to keep smiling, that everyone is watching their faces, which must show enthusiasm and spirit. He wanted to fix several things in the “chaos,” making certain everyone was aware of entrances and exits—especially the exits, as they had to be quick, since the scene that followed was very quiet. He wanted Young Sally and Young Phyllis to be in their Prologue costumes—identical feathered and beaded chorus outfits, one black and one white—which they would keep on for the final scene. Young Buddy and Young Ben would be in their casual street clothes, but placing the women in Follies clothing put them squarely in the world of the past. He had a few other fine-tuning thoughts: he asked for the music for “Loveland” to come in three beats later because it was so loud, and he wanted only two bars of vamp before “Beautiful Girls.” He cut the musical “button” from “Bolero d’Amour” so that it would continue into the next scene without a stop.

As in Boston before the first paying audience, all the tech paraphernalia had to be cleared from the auditorium. There was less of it, but when the house lights were brought up full in preparation for the crowd, things were reminiscent of a month earlier. The ushers were loading Playbills in stacks at the rear of the aisles. Outside the theater, there was some new activity: sign painters were now hanging from the top of the big billboard, painting the word “FOLLIES,” with headdress, in the middle of the white expanse.

 

 

T
here was clearly a buzz in the house as the audience entered. They looked to be an eclectic mix of musical-theater buffs,
Follies
fanatics who must have been in Boston at some point over the past few weeks, and just plain theatergoers, although the latter group was clearly outnumbered by the former two. Whether they had seen the show in Boston, or just heard about it from someone else, this audience was crackling with excitement. The buzz continued as the house lights dimmed and the drumroll began. “Bravo” was yelled along with applause as Yvonne and Alexis made their entrances; the others just got applause. Each woman received a hand as she appeared at the top of the stairs for “Beautiful Girls.” That never happened in Boston. The audience was attentive from beginning to end. They laughed at the humor and clapped wildly at the end of the songs. When Ethel brought down the house with “Broadway Baby,” Hal, standing with the entire creative staff at the rear of the theater, turned and said, “You know,
70, Girls, 70
is all about getting out there and strutting your stuff, but there is really only one old person today capable of doing that—and we have her.” There were big laughs on some of the more campy lines, like Alexis’s “Let’s dish” to Dorothy, and Yvonne’s “I haven’t seen your picture in the papers in a while” to John. At the end, there was a long and loud response for each principal during the curtain call. Everyone was relieved and excited. It looked as if New York would take to the show. We had made it this far, but the creative staff still wanted to tinker. And there was only one week left until the critics arrived.

I loved what the show felt like in the Winter Garden. It fit the space like a glove; somehow the scale of the theater, the production, the actors, and the text all meshed into one. I couldn’t imagine it anywhere else, and had almost forgotten what it looked like at the Colonial.

 

 

W
hen the company assembled in the house for Friday-afternoon notes, Hal told everyone, “Well, I guess they liked us.” There was a distinguished, silver-haired man standing nearby, diminutive in stature but elegant in style. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Arnold Moss. As of tomorrow night, he will be assuming the role of Dimitri Weismann.” The announcement came with no more preparation than that, but it was long felt that something like this was in the works. Moss had auditioned on Sunday, and it had taken the week to make a deal with his agent. Ed Steffe was staying on with the company and had agreed to remain as the standby. He was present, and was extremely gentlemanly about the whole situation. It was then Moss’s turn to address the company, and he said that he had watched the show the night before and knew that it was something quite extraordinary. He said he was honored to be part of the company and would do his best to get up to speed as quickly as possible. It was hard to fault management’s decision, and the company just accepted the news. It was too close to the opening for anyone to feel that there would be another firing, even if this one brought the total to three: Donald Weismuller, Dortha Duckworth, and Edwin Steffe.

Hal proceeded to give a slew of little notes, tossing each page into the orchestra pit when he was finished. Small line changes continued—Ben’s joke line to Carlotta about the pronunciation of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s name was cut—and there was plenty of tinkering with staging moments. Steve had a few musical notes that Hal Hastings took on. They were, as always, about staying with what was written and not taking liberties.

I had been maintaining an up-to-date script all through Boston and I had used it to make copies of pages as needed, but Arnold Moss’s arrival caught me off-guard, and I hadn’t heeded the warning I had been given that there would be auditions for a new Weismann. I hadn’t had time to prepare a copy for him. I was asked to hand over my copy, which I did, reluctantly. He learned his lines quickly, however, and was able to return my script to me within a couple of days. Some requests for the script were beginning to come in from the press, so I needed to have a couple of extra copies on hand. To do that, I went to the Prince office in Rockefeller Center and fed the pages, one at a time, through the Xerox machine. There was always some good gossip to get from the people who were office-bound, but mostly they wanted to hear from me about what was going on in the theater.

The new placement of the intermission was deemed a partial success. Hal said it “helped the book in every possible way.” But starting the second act in the middle of a song seemed confusing. Turning the clock back in real stage time was one time twist too many; some audience members thought it was just a mistake. So a new decision was made: tonight the second act would simply begin with the final tableau of the song—exactly where the curtain had fallen at the end of act one. If anyone was alert enough to notice, the song ended in a spread-out version of the initial pose in which the six present-day women stood in three pairs. There were now six pairs, with each woman opposing her own ghost figure. It was the culmination of some brilliant staging—the stage now filled with twice as many bodies, half of them in the present and half in the past. That was the image the audience would now experience both at the end of the first act, and at the start of the second. And so it was at Friday night’s performance.

Preview number two, on Friday, went well, though minus the euphoria of Thursday night. Lines of dialogue that had gotten big reactions on Thursday were received with silence. There were still cheers, to be sure, but the overall reaction had clearly come down a notch. Some in the company felt this was a more realistic idea of how the show would play. The cast was still giving its all, and there was plenty to be confident about, but New York is New York. Carl Fisher acknowledged that there were fewer complimentary tickets at each subsequent preview, so reactions would be more those of normal ticket-buying audiences. Some celebrities were coming by to see the show as well. After Yul Brynner saw it, he became a vocal advocate, calling
Follies
the best musical he had ever seen. Such declarations were encouraging.

By Saturday morning, the thinking about the intermission had changed yet again. New decision: the second act would still begin where the first act had left off, but the ghost figures would no longer be onstage. That would leave the present-day characters spread out in their positions at the end of the song, but their memories would have vanished. I thought that was a really interesting idea, and that it played into the sense of memories coming and going in an instant. It had been pointed out that maintaining the same image meant that the chorus women who danced the number as ghost figures had to stay in their mirror-chip tutus during intermission. They weren’t thrilled at that idea, and obviously they had a spokeswoman who made their concerns evident. Michael told the company: “At the request of Graciela, she and her friends will not be onstage at the beginning of act two.” Because the second act was starting at the end of the number, it was felt that there should be some entr’acte music. Hal Hastings quickly arranged for the second half of the Prologue to be played, starting with the up-tempo “That Old Piano Roll” and continuing through “Who’s That Woman?” (the orchestra could simply turn to the front of their books). That is how the show was played at the Saturday matinee. On the final note of “Who’s That Woman?” the curtain rose. The ghosts had vanished. It worked. Past and present, memory and reality, old and young—they were being messed around with yet again.