Madeline Kahn (43 page)

Madeline flew to Atlanta on June 17 to record a TV commercial for
Dolly
before flying to Charlottesville to spend time with Jef and Eliza. Then it was back to New York and a July Fourth weekend on Fire Island before returning to Atlanta on July 9. Rehearsals began on Saturday, July 11. Reams began by staging the dinner scene from act 2, which contains
a great deal of business between Dolly and Horace; he’d learned in Paris that this way, the leads could practice on their own while he worked on other scenes, making profitable use of limited time. Working with the props can even help the actors playing Dolly and Horace to learn their lines, Reams says—though he notes that Madeline was off-book already by the time she got to Atlanta.

Madeline’s determination became clear at once. She wanted the director to respect her habitual process of finding a character, despite the limitations on rehearsal time and the conventions of a musical so well known that many actors manage to play it perfectly well almost by reflex. Reams indulged her to a degree, though he says he had to remind her not to overcomplicate the role: “It’s not Chekhov. You have to have that kind of simplicity, and to play the intent.” Certain conventions of
Dolly
vexed Madeline. For any business that she considered “shtick,” Reams had to supply her with motivation, and he had to coax her to turn to the audience whenever Dolly addresses her late husband, though from the first scene Dolly frequently breaks the fourth wall. Despite her recent work with Julie Bovasso, “She wasn’t comfortable doing
big
,” Reams says. “She was an intimate actress.” Reams showed her “how to be larger-than-life.”

Hello, Dolly!
contains no moment larger than the heroine’s triumphant return to the Harmonia Gardens, an occasion celebrated by the title number, and, ever since Champion’s original production, staged as a grand promenade along a passerelle or ramp projecting over or beyond the orchestra pit and into the house. Arriving at Atlanta’s Theater of the Stars, Reams wanted to stage “Hello, Dolly” right away—and Madeline got her first glimpse of the ramp. Roughly three feet wide and skirting the edge of the orchestra pit, it looked precarious. To allay her fears, Reams walked with her the first time. But she still felt uncomfortable. “I can’t walk like this, like ‘Here Comes Miss America,’” she told Reams. He explained that Dolly is greeting people she knows in the restaurant, and he rattled off specific names, other characters she could visualize, instead of merely waving at the audience. She even found a feminist subtext in Dolly’s kiss-off to Horace, “So Long Dearie,” making a political statement in a show that depicts an era when women couldn’t vote. “It was wonderful to see her discover Dolly and to feel free enough onstage not to feel insecure, and stop worrying about it,” Reams says.

Musically, the part wasn’t ideal for her. Herman’s score is available in several keys to accommodate the vocal demands of different Dollys (including the non-belter Mary Martin), but Madeline, like many another
middle-aged soprano, worried about her upper register. To those accustomed to hearing her in lyric roles of greater musical complexity, her trained voice makes one realize how much Dolly’s songs depend on a big, brassy belt to put them over, and Madeline simply didn’t have one. At the same time, her insistence on lower keys deprived listeners of the pleasures of her upper register. But she effectively reduced the risk for herself, and Reams describes her as “very secure about singing.”

The technical rehearsal was completed in a single night (from 3:00 p.m. to midnight on Monday, July 20), “which was herculean,” Reams says. Although the rest of the cast wasn’t in costume, Madeline wore hers, to learn when and how to change. She never heard the orchestrations played until a run-through on the afternoon of opening night, July 21. That night, when a young actor forgot his line in the first scene, Madeline ad-libbed, “Ah! Don’t say a word, Mr. Kemper! I know what you’re going to say: You want to know why. Well, let me tell you why!” Delighted, Reams ran backstage at intermission to congratulate her. “That’s the way she worked,” he says. “She’d get into the scene and she listened.”

During rehearsals and after hours, Reams and Madeline spent a great deal of time together. “We’re about the same age,” he says (in fact the difference is just a little more than one month). They became friends, and at one point, Madeline told him, “Before I knew what was what in show business, you’re exactly the kind of man I used to fall in love with.” Even today, he describes their relationship as “a love affair, without the sex. We were mad for each other, and it was a good combination of people.”

Schuck has told author Richard Skipper that he didn’t feel Madeline came fully into the role until the end of the run in Atlanta.
¹⁰
It seems that Madeline needed a few performances to persuade her of something that everyone in the
Dolly
company had been telling her: Audiences were coming to see a star named Madeline Kahn.

From Atlanta, the production moved to the Municipal Theater Association of St. Louis, better known as the Muny, an amphitheater that Reams describes as “Ten thousand people on a hillside, in the heat!”
¹¹
Madeline flew out on Monday, July 27, without a break from the final Atlanta performance; the show opened in St. Louis the same night. Reams didn’t join them, and the next morning Madeline called him to report a few changes. In the “Motherhood March,” she had interpolated “Ah! Sweet Mystery,” getting a huge reaction. “But it’s all right!” Madeline assured him hastily. “It was a song of the period!” Reams was laughing so hard he barely heard her. “Everything you told me to do gets a
laugh every night,” she told him. “I’ve never had that kind of confidence before, and it’s wonderful.” She even grew more comfortable with her fans. When one young male admirer at the Muny gushed how much he loved her, Madeline didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, really?” she said. “And how long have you been a homosexual?”

A fuzzy archival VHS recording of one performance in St. Louis reveals a relaxed, radiant star, connecting with a public far from New York and Hollywood, and having a great time doing it. Schuck delivers a winning performance as Horace, blustering lustily and giving Madeline plenty to play off of. And to top it off, she looks smashing in her gowns.

Dolly
ended its St. Louis run on Sunday, August 2. The next day, Madeline flew to Kansas City, rehearsed again in the afternoon, and opened that night at the 7,958-seat Starlight Theatre. Days off seem to have been anathema to the producers, and the
Dolly
cast rehearsed and/or performed every day between July 11 and closing night in Kansas City, August 9. According to Madeline’s appointment book, Kansas City was “
HOT
” throughout closing weekend, too. Nevertheless, she told Reams, “I’m having the best theatrical experience of my life playing this part.”

Reams regrets that she didn’t capitalize on the experience. Relatively few people saw her in
Dolly
, and her only other appearance in musical comedy was the one-time-only benefit performance of Sondheim’s
Anyone Can Whistle
, in concert in 1995. A reading of Herman’s
Dear World
with the Roundabout Theater in 1998 was her last theatrical outing of any kind. A number of other vehicles would have suited her vocally and appealed to her tastes: Weill’s
Lady in the Dark
or Rodgers and Hart’s
Pal Joey
from the classic repertoire;
Into the Woods
or almost anything by Sondheim in the modern rep. Indeed, Madeline’s beautifully nuanced performances of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” at an AIDS benefit (1997, under Fred Barton’s direction), and “Getting Married Today” at a Sondheim gala (1992) can be construed almost as auditions—especially in the latter case, with the composer sitting in the audience.
¹²

But musicals still involved enormous psychological and practical complications for Madeline.
On the Twentieth Century
was almost universally viewed as
her
failure, and it had long since become Broadway legend. She’d redeemed herself only after phenomenal effort, and she hadn’t banished fears about her ability to deliver consistent performances eight times a week. Singing had always reminded her of Paula, increasingly a source of concern, and Madeline was at an age when most lyric sopranos begin to think about retirement. With musical comedy as with opera, it’s possible that an attractive engagement might have persuaded her, but
television and film yielded concrete offers. She would manage to apply elsewhere—immediately, and close to home—some of the lessons she learned on the road with
Hello, Dolly!

The Sisters Rosensweig
(1992–93)

AS MADELINE TURNED FIFTY, SHE RECEIVED ONE OF THE BEST BIRTHDAY
presents anyone could have given her: Wendy Wasserstein’s
The Sisters Rosensweig
. “I have known many actresses whose career opportunities diminished because they made the grievous error of growing older,” Wasserstein wrote in the preface to the play, published in 1993. “Therefore I deliberately set out to write smart and funny parts for women over 40.” Recalling the first preview, just days before Madeline’s birthday, Wasserstein explained,

To my mind,
The Sisters Rosensweig
was my most serious effort—a one-set, non-episodic play, complete with unities of time, place, and action, deliberately set on the eve of a momentous historical event, and even with the pretense of echoing those three far more famous stage sisters who yearned for Moscow. But just five minutes into the first act, the audience was rapidly chuckling, and by the time Dr. Gorgeous entered in her shocking-pink fake Chanel suit and vinylette Louis Vuitton luggage, they were convulsed with laughter. André [Bishop] tapped my shoulder. “Wendy, what is happening here? I’ve never seen anything like this.”
¹³

Very few people had. Madeline played Georgette “Gorgeous” Teitelbaum, the middle Rosensweig sister, and audiences responded to her with laughter and much more, as the play charged through previews, a smash-hit run at Lincoln Center Theater, and a transfer to Broadway. One of the most significant artistic achievements of her career,
The Sisters Rosensweig
brought Madeline widespread recognition that—no matter how funny Gorgeous might be—her talents extended far beyond comedy.

If the playwright was at first surprised by the reaction to Madeline’s performance, the play’s director, Daniel J. Sullivan, says that’s in part because Bishop, then artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, tended inadvertently to make Wasserstein nervous during previews. Beyond that, Wasserstein’s closeness to the material made it more difficult for her to anticipate how her play would affect others. Minutely concerned with character and larger questions of identity, much less concerned with conventional notions of dramatic conflict, the script contains a number of autobiographical elements. Like the eldest Rosensweig sister, the late Sandra Wasserstein Meyer was a twice-divorced cancer survivor, a top executive with a multinational bank who lived for a time in London. Like the youngest, Wendy, who died in 2006, was a writer, single, and prone to emotional entanglements with gay or otherwise unavailable men. The middle sister, Georgette “Gorgeous” Wasserstein Levis, focused on her husband and children, and lived in New England. (Their brother, Bruce Wasserstein, was a successful financier who died in 2011.) All of them grappled as adults with the expectations of their mother, Lola Shleifer Wasserstein, just as the three Rosensweig sisters—Sara, Gorgeous, and Pfeni—view their lives through the perspective of their mother, Rita, who has died before the play begins.
¹⁴

Madeline had considerable reservations about the venture. Apart from her usual ambivalence about new projects, she worried that she’d been asked to read for
Sisters
only because of her reputation as a comic. She saw Gorgeous depicted in the script as a stereotypical suburban yenta, designed to be treated with condescension and played for laughs, and she wasn’t interested in that kind of characterization. “I think it may have to do with the fact that I’m a Jewish woman, and I’m very sensitive to doing stereotype sketches of Jewish women,” she told the show’s stage manager, Roy Harris, in a long interview in 1993. “And, right off the page, I thought that the role of Gorgeous had the danger of being that. When I first read it, I couldn’t imagine a real individual saying those words unless she was campy. And I didn’t want to come to Lincoln Center, be in a new play with all these talented people, and be the campy one.” For the reading in February, she based her characterization (“a surface version,” she called it) on women she’d known “who are very likable, very intelligent, but do have some of these stereotypical qualities.”

Afterward, people came up to her saying, “You were so funny. You have to do this part.” “I was? I do?” Madeline thought. After reading again for Wasserstein and Sullivan, this time focusing on Gorgeous’s
more serious aspect, “mostly I decided to play Gorgeous because everyone thought I should do it,” she told Harris. “I take my cues from the universe, too, not only from inside myself.”
¹⁵

Gorgeous was “a part that calls for dimensions I have never used before,” she told the
New York Times
. “The comedy is there. But underneath it is a real burden this character carries. The way she carries that burden, the way it is revealed and what it takes to reveal it—well, I can only do that now because I have grown as an actress and a human being. I couldn’t have done this when I was younger because I just didn’t have the compassion. Unfortunately, it seems to come with age.”
¹⁶

Wasserstein’s association with Bishop dated back to his tenure at Playwrights Horizons, where he produced the plays that immediately preceded
Sisters Rosensweig
:
Isn’t It Romantic?
(1983) and
The Heidi Chronicles
(1988), the latter directed by Sullivan.
Heidi
went on to Broadway, winning the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989.
¹⁷
Coming after that success,
Sisters Rosensweig
is unevenly written, it must be said, and the character of Pfeni, the author’s stand-in, is especially undeveloped.