Homeward Bound (55 page)

After a set of introductory meetings, Paul sent Tubert and stage designer Crowley to Puerto Rico to absorb the texture of Agron's homeland. Tubert held some auditions; she and Crowley both met with Agron's sister and other relatives, then visited his grave. They spent time with a santero, a priest in the Santeria faith—the mystical blend of Catholicism and Yoruba spirituality followed by Agron's family. Back in New York, Tubert set to work with the script, searching for visual and dramatic devices that would not just serve the script and songs, but also project the work's animating spirit into a kind of visual poetry; a chain of images that would not only underscore the action but also symbolize its deeper meanings. The task presented several puzzles, not the least of them being that the younger and elder Agrons barely encounter one another onstage. As a result, the show's two central characters, and its two biggest, most dynamic performers, wouldn't have a chance to play off of each other. Tubert proposed using the thread of magical realism running through the script—the spiritual element set forth by the santero—to open up more possibilities. When the younger Agron prowled the stage, the spirit of his older self would be onstage, too, observing and commenting on the action. The dynamic would reverse in the second half, the spirit of the Capeman continuing to stalk the older, reformed Agron.

Paul and Walcott seemed dubious when Tubert mentioned the idea in passing, so she let it go, confident that it would make sense to them when she staged her vision for the entire show during rehearsals. It was still early days in preproduction, new faces coming in to contribute their own talents, skills, and ideas; a time for blue-sky thinking, shared creativity, more possibilities than limitations. Tubert, Paul, Walcott, and the other main players worked together easily. Tubert had one small problem: although she had been working on the project for several months, her agent and Paul's representatives still hadn't worked out the terms for her contract. The problem boiled down to one point: as the youngest and least-established member of the creative team, Tubert wanted to make sure that her contributions to the show would be acknowledged, even if she wasn't the titular director on opening night. She was still building her career; her résumé needed all the high-profile credits she could get. Paul already had enough professional credits to float ten careers; nonetheless, her request became a sticking point. When it began to seem that their agents would never find common ground, Paul went to Tubert directly. Let's get rid of the business guys and work it out between the two of us, he said. Tubert, who had yet to be paid for any of her services, agreed, and they met after work on a Friday.

As Tubert recalls, she made her case strongly. By hiring her Paul had made Tubert a key member of his creative team. And in an industry where credit for developing shows is so often misassigned, she needed to be sure that her contributions to
The Capeman
would be recognized both contractually and publicly. Paul didn't see it that way. In the music industry he could hire and fire musicians without having to worry about what they did or didn't contribute to his songs. But, as Tubert knew from all of her experience in the theater, the director's vision of a show is the foundation for all of the many components in a production. Paul didn't, or couldn't, see it like that. It was a perfectly amicable conversation, but in the end they agreed to disagree. When it was over, he sat next to Tubert on the sofa and put his arm around her shoulder in a kindly way. “What made you think you wouldn't be the director when we open?” she recalled him asking. “Why worry?”

He had made none of the concessions Tubert wanted, but she came away feeling like he had opened up and revealed his confidence in her. When she got outside, Tubert called her agent and said she'd take Paul's offer as it stood. Everything seemed normal when she went back to casting the show on Monday morning, but in the late afternoon she learned that her meeting with Paul had somehow morphed into a catastrophe. Paul's publicist and coproducer, Dan Klores, called Tubert's agent to say that Paul had left his office on Friday afternoon feeling unsettled, and then angry, by what happened during their meeting. Now Tubert would need to take back what she said if she wanted to continue working on
The Capeman
. At first Tubert couldn't believe what she was hearing. How could they suddenly be at such an impasse? But Paul had drawn a new line in the sand. And so did Tubert. They'd had a disagreement and she'd made her case. She had nothing to apologize for. So that was it; Tubert left the show.

*   *   *

When the Born at the Right Time tour got to Chicago in 1991, Paul had invited Stephen Eich, managing director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, to see the concert, then come backstage to talk about his ideas for a new kind of musical. Four years later Paul called back and asked Eich to join the
Capeman
project. One of Eich's closest compatriots at Steppenwolf was a young director named Eric Simonson, who'd worked on a variety of productions for the company, most notably
Jacob Zulu
, a play about South Africa that featured the singing and dancing of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Jacob
had made it to Broadway and done well. Paul had liked it quite a bit, too, and when Eich suggested Simonson would be a good director for
Capeman
, Paul paid attention. Simonson had been in the running before Tubert was hired, and when she left in the summer of 1996 Paul hired him to take her place.

Simonson had a lot of experience in the theater, but he hadn't experienced anything like
The Capeman
before. Everything was complicated, including the casting of the minor characters. Paul insisted that the performers be great singers. Morris demanded good dancers, but Simonson needed actors who could embody their characters. The lines of authority in the show snared around Paul's ankles, and just to make things even more complex Derek Walcott, who had written and directed his own plays in the past, made no secret that he was sure he could direct
The Capeman
better than anyone else. Asked to keep his thoughts to himself during rehearsals, the poet did so, but given his Nobel-grade charisma, the displeasure hanging over his being was impossible to ignore. Ordinarily the director of a play is the uncontested leader of the production; his or her word is the law of the theater. But Paul came from a professional culture where the first sour note ended everything on the spot. He thought nothing of cutting off an entire scene the instant he saw or heard something that irked him. The whole company would be midway through a complicated scene and Paul would come rushing onstage waving his hands. “Stop! Stop!” The trumpet player hadn't hit his note on the pickup, so they'd have to go back and get it right. In one incident that quickly became legend, Paul halted a full-cast rehearsal because he didn't like the sound of the tambourine. After half an hour of scooting the guy from one corner of the stage to the other, Paul allowed the rest of the cast and crew to get back to work. Simonson might have been the director but, as everyone knew, Paul's word superseded everything. Simonson would take the stage to explain exactly how he wanted a scene to work, and it would take only a minute for his actors' eyes to seek out Paul's face, waiting to see what
he
thought. They all knew who was really calling the shots.

Even if Paul didn't have expertise in theater, his intellectual and perceptive powers could be stunning. Simonson was particularly impressed by his ability to grasp a person's character and motivations. “I think actually he's a great psychologist,” the director said. “He really gets to the core of what a person is about almost immediately. He's got really great instincts, and can sense things.” Simonson could sense how powerful a show
The Capeman
could be. The raw material, no matter its flaws, was inordinately rich with possibility. All he needed, he figured, was the space to do his job in the way he always worked. Yet, so far, Paul wasn't eager to let that happen. Simonson's top priority that fall was to whip the show into shape for a workshop performance for friends and investors in December. A scratch version of the production, no costumes or sets, but an important step in the process. When the day finally arrived, the preshow stress in the Westbeth Theatre Center was overwhelming. But when it was over, the audience stood and cheered, and triumphant smiles lit faces all around the theater—except for Paul, who rose from his chair scowling angrily. The music hadn't sounded right. He had noticed other mistakes onstage too, blown steps and ill-timed entries, the usual early production foul-ups. But Paul thought of it as a catastrophe, though, and Simonson was fired by the end of the next day.

Mark Morris finally agreed to take over the director's chair, but news that Paul Simon's show had spat out two directors in less than a year clanged alarm bells all across the city. The
New York Times
ran a story. Was the self-proclaimed reinventor of Broadway finding the job a bit more difficult than he imagined? Flocks of dancers and other cast members were sent away. The show's budget swelled, then burst through the ceiling. Investors got antsy. Jimmy Nederlander reduced his family's stake from six million dollars to one million. Klores, the producer-slash-publicist, took to the media to declare that all was well; new investors were beating down the door, stuffing wads of cash through the mail slot, desperate to be a part of the
Capeman
team. It made for a nice story, but Klores didn't have any names to offer, and it took months for them to surface in public. To save money, they canceled the show's out-of-town tryout, a crucial opportunity to gauge audience reaction and fix or revise accordingly. Originally set to open in the fall of 1997, the show was pushed back to the winter. If you were looking for signs of trouble,
The Capeman
bristled with them. The sound of sharpening knives rang across Midtown.

What else could go wrong? The
New York Daily News
published an item about
The Capeman
that would have been harmless except for the reminder that the show's hero had been a real New York City street punk and a murderer. The word
Disgrace-land
featured in the headline. In September,
Newsday
ran a Broadway establishment–friendly story headlined “A Neophyte Capeman: Simon Musical Relying on Untested Talent.” The story described
The Capeman
's creative team as thoroughly inexperienced in the theater. Walcott, it sniffed, had only ever written and directed for
regional
theater. The piece was riddled with errors, including its central premise—“the creative team includes a number of Broadway veterans,” read the published correction—but there was plenty more criticism to come, and most of it was far too accurate.

Tickets for the show went on sale in early September 1997. Sales weren't bad at first, but also not spectacular. The
Daily News
noted
The Capeman
's imminent arrival with a story called “Teen Slay Caper Nearing Stage” that included the outraged complaints of the victims' survivors. “Why would anyone want to write a show about a guy who killed two boys?” the uncle of one of the victims asked. “Is he going to sing and dance?” Paul and Blades responded as sensitively as possible, pointing out that the heartbreak of the victims' mothers would be explored in one of the show's stand-out songs. It didn't matter, another
Capeman
controversy had blossomed. In mid-September a different Agron play, this one by a writer named Fred Newman, who had befriended Agron while serving as his psychologist following his 1979 parole, opened in an Off-Off-Broadway theater in SoHo. The story centered on a romance Agron had with a leftist political activist in the Southwest, but also addressed the strange celebrity visited upon him due to the murders, and his unexpected rehabilitation and release. “Salvador was forever concerned with other people commercializing his life,” Newman said. Oh, and one of the characters in the Newman play was a famous musician/aspiring dramaturge named Paul Simon. “He represents the commercialization of pop music,” Newman explained.

In October, hoping to stir up buzz for the show, Paul released
Songs from the Capeman
, his performances of thirteen tunes from the show's score. Ranging from doo-wop to early rhythm and blues to Puerto Rican
bomba
to something like theatrical lieder, the album was rhythmically diverse, melodically engaging, and expertly performed—everything you'd expect from a new Paul Simon album—and generally celebrated as such, despite a few critics who couldn't fathom hearing a wealthy white-skinned fifty-six-year-old musician singing in the voice of a teenage Puerto Rican gang member. “Act your age (and class advantages),” demanded the
New York Daily News
, a newspaper that seemed to harbor a distinct enmity for
The Capeman
. At the same time, the
New York Times Magazine
published Stephen J. Dubner's cover story “The Pop Perfectionist on a Crowded Stage.” Invited to write about the inner workings of the production just as it was getting started, the author had observed nearly everything along the way: the hirings, firings, breakthroughs, breakdowns, and every other form of Sturm und Drang
The Capeman
had created over the years. Starting with the cover portrait of a nearly hairless Paul, Dubner's report was most striking for its portrayal of its subject's descent from cool confidence to grim forbearance. Asked about the many controversies erupting from the play's story and characters, Paul made like
The Capeman
narrative was all but irrelevant. “If you're asking
me
this is about an incredible love of sound. This is
all
about music,” he said. “This is about how I fell in love with music and who I was when that love happened.”