Showstopper (3 page)

The afternoon Hal lost his cool over the clunky stadium seats in Eugene Lee’s set.

The rehearsal when Sondheim introduced Charley’s new song, which he and Lonny had rehearsed alone: “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” (The song would become a regular showstopper.)

The day when Sally Klein (playing Beth, Frank’s first wife) lost the song that would become
Merrily
’s signature—“Not a Day Goes By”—to Frank Shepard because she sang it feebly and Jim Walton sang it better. (Carly Simon later recorded it.)

The eleventh hour when a stranger—an actual bona fide
adult
(sacrilege)– was added to the cast to portray a senior Frank delivering a commencement speech.

The slow drip of watching my part, Evelyn, being whittled away.

“How can you get so far off the track?”
    In hindsight, it’s hard to believe we remained entirely optimistic, but we did. These guys were too big to fail.

We were happily ensconced in the Alvin Theatre on West 52nd Street, where
Annie
had played four years earlier. My dressing-room mirror was alongside Tonya Pinkins’ and Donna Marie Elio’s (now Asbury)– two of my greatest pals in the troupe.

The first preview, October 8, 1981, was charged;
Merrily
’s overture is one of the most rousing and gorgeous ever written, and we were all trembling backstage as we listened to it, poised in our red graduation robes. (There was a lot of playful groping under those things.)

But as the evening evolved, seats began to empty.

    By the second act, we were singing to people’s backs walking up the aisles to the exits.
    Previews got extended.

My father used to pick me up at the stage door. Often he would stand in the wings, watching us sing the penultimate number: “Our Time.” We were all positioned on the scaffolding set, looking out at the starry sky, vowing to be “the names in tomorrow’s papers.”

There were fifty-two preview performances until the moment of truth: opening night, November 16.

“When does it disappear?”
    The flower deliveries overwhelmed the dressing rooms and our mirrors became obscured by telegrams and notes. Hal wrote genial congratulations to every one of us, and Steve’s accompanying card simply said, “Ditto.”

The audience actually stayed in its seats and stood cheering for our curtain call.

I remember getting dressed for the big after-party, and cannot fathom why I thought it was stylish to don a black-ribbon choker with a rhinestone star at the neck. The pictures of me in the limousine (rented generously by Mom and Dad) are cringe-inducing. My black velvet dress was from Macy’s and my heels were lower than they should have been. But I felt high as we drove the short distance to the Plaza Hotel with my family.

Hours later, the
New York Times
’ review dealt a death blow—from a critic who is arguably Sondheim’s greatest critical champion. The first line of Frank Rich’s appraisal read as follows: “As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He continued, “What’s really being wasted here is Sondheim’s talent” and declared our cast “dead wood.”

The other notices weren’t much better.

    When we all gathered backstage before the next performance, Hal reassured us that it wasn’t over.

But it was.

We closed twelve days after we opened, singing “Our Time” from our platform perches, tears strangling our voices and smudging our makeup.

“It’s our time, / Breathe it in: / Worlds to change and worlds to win. / Our time, coming through. / Me and you, kid, me and you.”

We couldn’t self-medicate afterward (was I even drinking alcohol yet?) because we had to get up the next morning at dawn to record the cast album for RCA Victor.

It was another pinch-me experience—standing with earphones on our heads, microphones at our mouths, Sondheim behind a glass booth, conferring with producer Thomas Z. Shepard and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick. Paul Gemignani was our steady skipper, with his usual baton and boots, revving the orchestra and whispering with Steve.

It was a long, mournful day, but it gave us all an incomparable sendoff.

The last song we recorded was “Our Time.”

“Years from now, we’ll remember and we’ll come back, / Buy the rooftop and hang a plaque: / This is where we began / Being what we can.”
As Jason Alexander later told a reporter, “We were a mess.”

“Yesterday is done”
    I wasn’t the saddest person in the lot and I’ve ruminated often about why. Maybe because I’d never really believed it could last: The gift was too good to be true from the start, so the brief time we got felt like a windfall. Also, I wasn’t at the point where I’d affirmatively chosen a career in the theater.
Merrily
was a blessing when it landed but it wasn’t my livelihood; at sixteen, I didn’t need a paycheck yet, nor had I expected to reach a pinnacle before paying my dues. For others, there was more at stake—financially and professionally.   They were back to the starting gate.
“Pick yourself a road …”
    It’s easy to be convinced that a balloon as buoyant as
Merrily
stays afloat. But, if I may milk the metaphor, I discovered it can burst in an instant—even careen, irretrievably, out of view.

After it was over, it was just over. No one said, “Wait—come back to the Alvin stage, there’s been a huge mistake.” There was no patron saint to rescue us. We packed up our dressing rooms and hugged the nice guy at the stage door.

I returned to my eleventh-grade classrooms and felt even a little relieved to be back to the old routine of exams, sleepovers, and modest school plays.

We continued to have
Merrily
reunions and picnics (called “Merrily We Eat Along” by the
Merrily Press
), but even they tapered off.

In the spring of 1983, eighteen months after being on Broadway, Daisy and I worked together again—in the school basement: I directed her
in The Fantasticks!
for my senior project. She was a shining Luisa, though still a reluctant lead; I had to nudge Daisy onstage. We were back to our old rhythm.

When I was admitted to college two years later, a surreal moment came when I walked nervously into my first “big” musical tryout—for the Yale Dramat’s production of
Fiddler on the Roof
—and the musical director, Scott Frankel (who, years later, composed the remarkable
Grey Gardens
on Broadway,) surprised me by plunking the five chords that precede the line “Yesterday is done …” from
Merrily.

How did he know?
I wondered.

    After college, I enrolled in earnest acting classes and braved the Actors’ Equity union lines at dawn to get into open calls. (How many buttered bialys did I eat out of tin foil, loitering in the 6 a.m. darkness on West 46th Street?) I scored a few C-level parts—Vivie in
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
on Long Island, and the only non-lesbian role in a Djuna Barnes play in SoHo. But my heart wasn’t where it needed to be to make a real go of it. “You’re auditioning on your knees,” said my acting coach, Gene Lasko. “It’s like you think you’ve failed before you’ve tried.”

He was right. Now that I’d arrived at the age where “getting a part” really counted—for rent and groceries—now that it was the only thing requiring my energy, no longer a matter of juggling multiple deadlines and diversions, the color drained from the career. It wasn’t enough and it was also too much: too much pressure, too much rejection, too much out of my control.

There’s no question that
Merrily
hovered as an admonitory signpost: You have seen your idols trip. This show-business territory will never be safe or assured … Remember what you’ve seen.

“Rolling along …”
    I became a journalist and never looked back. In fact, I was aware of dodging a bullet: I was a type-A approval addict who needed to score goals at regular intervals, not just keep kicking and kicking. I worked for Fred Friendly, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers at PBS, then at
60 Minutes
for Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. After having kids, I switched to print reporting and wrote for magazines and newspapers, eventually publishing two books with Doubleday. For my first book,
Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish
, I interviewed sixty-two public figures about their Jewish identity—or lack of it. The “stars” included Dustin Hoffman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mike Nichols, Larry King, and, in a nice resolution of sorts, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim.
    It’s curious how, as life unfolds, a major chapter gets edited out. My
Merrily
moment became just a footnote, relegated to albums and a few inebriated stories. I remember joking in college that I’d likely one day be a doddering old lady telling my grandchildren, “Your grandma was once on Broadway!” And that’s exactly what will come to pass if my two kids, Benjamin, 14, and Molly, 11, bless me with descendants.

When my kids were little, I took them to shows whenever possible and, naturally, I’d recounted the
Merrily
fairytale to my husband, but he and our children had never seen me perform—other than the requisite birthday toasts (which I spend way too much time conceiving).

That is, until 2002, when I received an e-mail from Lonny Price, asking me to rejoin the original
Merrily
cast for a special reunion: a one-night-only concert version at LaGuardia High School to benefit Musical Theater Works, which offers topnotch training to New York kids.  

At first, I didn’t take the project too seriously. It sounded like a quaint idea, all of us in the same room again, holding the music in three-ring binders and doing our yeoman’s best to reconstruct our roles, despite years of dereliction. But the production turned out to be a major undertaking, rehearsed over four intensive days of rehearsals, complete with new choreography and direction from Kathleen Marshall (who would go on to fame directing
The Pajama Game
and more recently,
Anything Goes
), emceed by our celebrity alumnus, Jason Alexander, and inspected by Sondheim himself.  

When I arrived at the first rehearsal, the scene was more poignant than I ever expected. Despite everyone’s creases, paunches, and gray hairs (and Daisy’s pregnant belly), our youthful affection was energizing. My lackadaisical attitude did an about-face and I dove into rehearsals as if I was auditioning all over again.

It was a demanding hoot. For four days, we memorized, sweated, and sung, reminisced hungrily, caught up on two elapsed decades: careers, divorces, baby pictures. The only deadly-serious moment was when Sondheim showed up to watch a run-through. He sat just a few rows from the stage with his characteristic bemused grin, and an occasional devastating frown. I’ll never forget the Sondheim Chill when, after one song, I watched him approach the unassuming Jim Walton and say firmly, “Just sing it the way I wrote it.”

“Some roads you really fly …”
    By the time the performance day arrived, I was in full-fledged diva mode, barely speaking to my family. (“Have to save the voice.”)

The cast had been instructed to dress in black tie and we looked spanking, albeit a little less spry, as we did vocal warm-ups backstage. I remember Tonya Pinkins, always a spiritual presence, leading us in a blessing of sorts as we stood together in a circle, arms entwined.

The first trumpets of the overture sent the audience into paroxysms of applause.

When we walked onto the stage in single file, the cheering was honestly thunderous. It was hard to keep composure.

What a night. I don’t think anything misfired. It felt magical and weirdly logical—as if the leading players had waited all this time to grow into their roles and their stories. Whereas before, the concept of kids playing jaundiced adults hadn’t gelled, now the lines of experience made all the difference.

By the time we got to “Our Time,” all our faces were wet with feeling, fully aware that the lyrics had been prescient:
“Years from now, we’ll remember and we’ll come back, / Buy the rooftop and hang a plaque: / This is where we began / Being what we can.”

It honestly shot through my mind as I stood there, singing my guts out: Had I become what I could? I never had given a thought, at age sixteen, to where I’d be at age thirty-seven. How had I grown, changed, coarsened? Who had I helped or hurt along the way? How much of this story had I ingested and confirmed?

A glimpse of my husband in the audience made me feel clear again: With David, I had found a kind of stability and sanity I might not have had in a theater life. He was not just my emotional home but a steadying girder after more than a few turbulent relationships and detours. We now had two children, two careers, many friends, furniture, and very little uncertainty. I don’t think it was any accident that I opted for sureness. The side of me that will always be transported by certain music, that cries in romantic movies and underlines favorite passages in novels is balanced by the side of me that doesn’t want too much passion or volatility too much of the time. For me, the theater was synonymous with hot-bloodedness and capriciousness. It represented risk in the best sense and the worst. Ultimately, I was more comfortable out than in.

Something both settled and clicked simply by having my husband and his parents in the audience. It was an “outing” of who I’d been, juxtaposed against who I am, an acknowledgment that I would always carry both people.

My twin sister, Robin, was crying more than I, grasping exactly how tender and nostalgic this revival was, being catapulted back to those months she lived every summit and nosedive with me more closely than anyone else in my life.

But the most affecting tears were Sondheim’s.  During the curtain call, he was urged up on stage along with his old comrade, Hal Prince.  Their fierce, prolonged embrace carried the weight of their rupture and the triumph of this resurrection.