Jack in the Box, page 11
The daily mail was suddenly dropped unceremoniously onto my desk, from which I extracted, near the bottom, a manila envelope addressed to me, and whose return address in the upper left corner bore the astonishingly handwritten name Sondheim! Inside was a script titled Getting Away with Murder, and the authors were none other than Stephen Sondheim and George Furth? What the f…?
Inside I found a brief note from Steve basically quoting the last lines of the play Tea and Sympathy:”Years from now … when you talk about this … and you will … be kind.” I summarily closed the door to my office and read straight through a rather wild, often very funny farce-murder script that revolved around cleverly disguised characters all based on the seven deadly sins in what was clearly their group therapy session. It was not written as a musical, although the authors were certainly famous for a few of those, to their credit. This non-singing, non-dancing effort seemed a possibly risky departure. But it read most promisingly, although you can’t always tell. Needing to believe more than my eyes, I called my loyal friend André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, who explained that, yes, indeed, they had done an informal reading of the script, and although they weren’t planning on producing it themselves, he thought it might have what we in the theatre often refer to as “legs.”
Are we all tracking this? The very day, almost the very hour I learn that we’ve lost the rights to Carnival!, along with all the glamorous plans attending its premiere to the benefit of my theatre, a brand-new script arrives authored by none other than Steve Sondheim and George Furth! Is it a musical? No, it isn’t, but, quite honestly, it could have been a Finnish haiku and my response would have been the same: We’ll do it! Because, come on … substituting a spoken Sondheim for a missing musical Merrill seemed not only providential to me, but heaven-sent as well. Out of the frying pan and …
… well, right back into a slightly different frying pan, as it turned out. André Bishop was right: the play did have promise, but would it get sufficient treatment before making its eagerly awaited debut? Steve resided in Connecticut and Manhattan. George lived in L.A. They had amused themselves with this exercise by doing a draft, and sending it back and forth across the continent to each other, awaiting notes, revisions, and subsequent progress mutually acceptable enough to return, like literary echoes. But in the normal course of events, collaborators on all the shows of which I’ve been aware or a participant usually wrote together. I mean, in the same room. That was how it worked. Getting my two authors together was to prove akin to getting away with murder: far easier in conception than in reality.
We more than got away with something very much like murder at the Globe. A sumptuous and imaginative set by one of my favorite designers, Douglas Schmidt, helped a great deal, as did appearances by several Globe favorites, and a vivid and committed company led by John Rubinstein, but so far as the board was concerned, and with regard to the gala evening and all, you really cannot beat sitting in an outdoor tent with a band so loud you either learn to read lips immediately or you’re deaf for life, and there at the center table—dammit!—are, indeed, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. I mean, what a night! The play was fun. The board was dazzled, and the coffers decently replenished.
And what did we think of it—Steve, George, and I? I don’t recall ever discussing it then or since, which may not indicate the highest of recommendations. Steve seemed genuinely pleased, almost surprised, and with one of his most enthusiastic financial backers, Roger Berlind, present among the merry throng, it was not long before our play was being touted for possible inclusion in the next Broadway season. I couldn’t have been more amazed, but rather than a modest venue like the Promenade, on the Upper West Side, which no longer exists, we were to be plunked down in the middle of the Great White Way. Schmidt’s gorgeous Globe set turned out to be, alas, a bit too wide for our theatre, the Broadhurst, and monitors and cameras had to be installed under the boxes so everyone could at least see every angle, but that’s not the kind of detail one likes to offer as suggesting a guaranteed success.
There was, however, a stunning coup de théâtre that closed the first act worthy of mentioning. At the end of that act, at the height of the group therapy session, John Rubinstein took a revolver and shot every other actor onstage, and the curtain came down in silence. Pretty good! The chatter all through the intermission had mostly to do with how we expected to have a second act with only one player remaining alive. And when the second act resumed, and the moment was replayed, illustrating that it was merely John’s character’s fantasy, half the audience howled with laughter, and the other half appeared to immediately tune out, too often groaning their disappointment loudly as they did so. The production played a brief seventeen performances before closing, and yet whenever people discuss Sondheim’s few extremely elegant flops—including Do I Hear a Waltz?, Anyone Can Whistle, The Frogs, even that perennially revived Merrily We Roll Along, which, after one or two more revivals, might find itself transformed to the “hit” column after all—Getting Away with Murder is somehow never mentioned. Until his recent death, Steve and I lived close to each other in Connecticut, seeing each other socially with regularity, and I have to confess, we never mentioned it, either.
Don’t look for the revival. We seriously got away with something more like murder than I care to remember.
But, you know, just try to imagine it: a production of Carnival!, powered by the ravishing skill of Cirque du Soleil soaring overhead, while, below, cushioned in a graceful, familiar score, two far more realistically scarred lovers tenderly find their way to a kind of emotional redemption … Shoulda, woulda, coulda …
But can you blame me?
8
Andrew and the Broken Eggs
As success is never certain, there is something to be cherished in the gift of failure
With Sierra Boggess, Bob Crowley, His Lordship, and Summer Strallen at Wembley Stadium, 2010. As another composer put it: “It started out like a song…!”
1.
No one starts out to do an intentionally rotten production; let’s face it. Each time we sit among our collaborators with shining faces, sharing our vision, our inspiration, our concept for how we will band together and do something truly significant and meaningful, it never occurs to us that it won’t be any good. Period. But still … Sometimes you win one, and occasionally you don’t.
And we rarely talk about it. Rarely dwell on the mess left behind. Get back up on the horse and try not to look back—that’s what we tell ourselves. Hope our precious reputation hasn’t been damaged, so that we can pursue a better tomorrow. And yet, if we’re honest, we probably reflect more often on the failures than the successes. Success really, finally, just feels good. It rarely if ever yields anything we probably didn’t know to begin with, and if we’re riding a wave of goodwill and proper collaboration, well, that’s what we intended all along, am I right? But failure! Contemplating something you are responsible for while it collapses, turns in on itself, melts before an indifferent if not hostile audience, sitting on their hands. That’s a lesson in humility from which one doesn’t recover easily.
But, in truth, ask any director, any playwright, any actor who has faced public humiliation and lived to read about it in the next day’s press. One can usually quote the barbs, the stinging retributions, accurately for the rest of one’s life. It was no less a giant than Sir Tyrone Guthrie who pointed out that since he had never read a criticism of anything he did from which he learned anything valuable, he preferred to receive only good reviews—a dictum I can rarely recall without laughing. Often the negative review only points out the obviousness that the event failed without putting a finger on why it went wrong. The bad review is often a consequence of something deeper than “that performance,” or “that interpretation,” and I find myself retracing my own disasters for evidence of what I must not repeat, at peril to myself and my colleagues.
And do I? I’d like to believe I have at least tried, while in all probability, I’m uncovering yet some other malefaction I have managed to overlook along the way. Reflecting, often with a genuine fondness for the event that pulled me and others down, I’m not entirely sure that my critics, my audiences, and the companies who have experienced them would even agree with me about which were the absolute failures and which the successes. We’ve all “gotten away with it” from time to time; we’ve all had the bizarre experience of watching something flounder—we thought—only to be greeted with a dawn that revealed, in print, that we’d done something acceptable. That’s the roll of the dice, and you can thank whatever theatre gods you honor and move swiftly and silently on.
But if we’re to in some way substantiate instinct as one of our most valuable tools and, as I insist, the true core of the director’s “art,” what do we make of those disasters for which we are completely responsible, able to be laid at the feet of no one but ourselves? We should be grateful that most of our actual failures close mercifully quickly without too many people having suffered them. The hits can often go on for years, spawn national tours, and sometimes live to entertain another day in a completely different production. But what of those miserable little turds we acknowledge as ours?
It may well be that it’s not the production itself that needs to be reevaluated, but some aspect of one’s own initial process that went terribly wrong. When I try with complete honesty to face up to the productions I failed to deliver, I mean no disrespect to anyone who wrote, designed, or acted in them when I offer them up for examination.
2. “CONFRONTING THE FLAWED MARBLE”
While I was still artistic director of the Old Globe in San Diego, I became aware of a series of workshops for a musical to be made from Jack Finney’s fanciful novel Time and Again, a remarkably popular work that plays with time travel, in which a contemporary character, living in New York in the eighties, by a mental process he has both studied and practiced, is able to time-travel back to 1882, when he falls in love and carries the reader along on both vivid detail and derring-do that made the novel something of a page-turner. In this case, the projected musical had a lovely, rich score by Walter “Skip” Kennon that had created considerable excitement over a period of years and in workshops among many of my acquaintance, while somehow never making it into production. The lesson to be learned here was one many have succumbed to over decades of disappointment. The musical form is utterly and irretrievably dependent upon its libretto for any degree of success or failure that will befall it. The book may pale in the presence of a dazzling score, but if the premise is in any way false, it will not sustain a score no matter how great the music. In spite of a sensational cast of truly brilliant singers, and the contribution of a young choreographer making her early debut, Kathleen Marshall, who was destined for more secure territory, we could never compensate for a story that professed to be “real,” but in which the single act of time travel was never remotely substantiated in a way that brought a disbelieving audience along later than twenty minutes into the playing time, and we remained inert, to say nothing of exhausted. Had the story been a fable, and not pretended to stand up to scrutiny, as in, say, Brigadoon, we might have been forgiven, but Finney, the original author, himself had not been able to make much of a case for reality, and all the passionate range of music couldn’t justify the exact moment in which we lost the willing participation of our audience. I confess, I was deluded by the wealth of musical material offered to me, and the lure of staging it all with supposed sweep and imagination. I was certain the lushness of the story and the romantic promise of its star-crossed characters would be enough to reward the audience. I was wrong, and realized subsequently, for perhaps the first time, that I must not ever listen to a score before seriously attending to the bone-dry libretto to see if the foundation is both secure and reasonable. Music can be a drug … and once you fall in love with a melody or a song, immediately seeing how wonderfully you might be able to stage it, you are sunk. Once the musical blood begins to flow and the magic arises from that experience, you can never again look back objectively at the naked work itself, and there is literally nothing to be done. I promised then to never allow myself to be tempted by listening to a score before being closeted with the libretto first, and have staunchly maintained that rule ever since, but for one complicated lapse. And, Dear Reader, patience! I’m coming to that …
But before I do, fixing blame is a futile and sad little exercise. Blood under the bridge, we like to say, and who finally cares? Was the theatrical stillbirth of this work my responsibility alone? Of course not, but a director, like a captain of a ship, stands between the event and the unknown, and in my opinion … should know better! The Finney musical could never be deemed a true disaster—the score and the performances were much too rich … more a mixed blessing, but in the case of Time and Again, the flaw in the original marble was so unforgiving that no sculptor could work around it, and subsequent attempts by others proved that sadly to be true. It never rose above the unsolvable moment when the audience stopped believing … Where is Michelangelo when you need him most?
3. “DON’T BE A PAL”
I was approached … no, that’s much too polite and passive a term … assaulted, rather, by a team of producers who had been responsible for the revival of Damn Yankees. They had fallen under the goofy spell of basically a radio comedian named Rob Bartlett, an affable, overweight, self-deprecating fellow who had crafted, from his own experiences, a kind of small comedy about himself, his career, and, to an extent, his propensity for being fairly large, which he’d called More to Love. The producers had the comic, they had a complete belief he was the next big thing, and they were determined to open the new fall season with this production, which, in their opinion, lacked only the right director. They called me. I was not available. I was still artistic director of the Old Globe at this point, and committed to creating a very ambitious production for my own season. The dates overlapped, and even if I had been eager to do the play, which I wasn’t, I simply couldn’t.
Today, years later, that would simply have been that—lesson learned, and a firm “No, thank you” with a postscript of gratitude for being considered would have been enough to end all further consideration. But in those early years, the lifelong trap of wanting to be liked, wanting to be considered a team player, wanting, above all, to seem both approachable and sympathetic to those who had been helpful to me, left me vulnerable to the hammering insistence that, at the very least, I should meet the poor bastard who was meant to be starring, and perhaps even give them the benefit of a few notes. What possibly could be wrong with that?
Try not to get ahead of me here, which won’t be easy … The producers rented a rehearsal hall and planned a run-through of the existing material for an audience of one—me. And the guy was funny. No question about it. He made me laugh, and, unfortunately, they all saw me laughing. “You have to do this,” they chorused. “You’re the only one who can bring this to life; you know you are!” Oh, the litany is too long and too embarrassing to repeat, but I finally showed them the irrefutable fact that I had to be in rehearsal in San Diego with my own company on the very day the production was to open in Manhattan. “Fine,” they crowed. “You can be polished and finished by the third preview, and off you go!” (Damn! I can just feel you getting ahead of me!)
We cast, immediately, bona fide actors to accompany our comic … the late Dana Reeve, widow of Superman Christopher Reeve himself, and no less an experienced, polished second banana than Joyce Van Patten. With a giddy enthusiasm that bordered on mania, the producers had secured the O’Neill Theatre as their venue, and believed it was this work that was perfect to open the brand-new fall Broadway season. A sweet, ineffectual piece that might have done modestly well off-Broadway was summarily thrust into the spotlight, where critics, idle during the inactive summer season, clustered wherever critics vacation while polishing their howitzers for the subsequent season, gathered to await fall target practice. The die was cast.
I did my best, I thought, and remember blessedly very little of any of it, but for the bogus “opening night” dinner the grateful producers threw in a charming Broadway restaurant on the night before the official opening, in order to accommodate my next day’s departure for the West Coast. And yes, of course, the poor play was thoroughly excoriated two days later across the board in the press. And the poster still decorates the famous “disaster wall” in Joe Allen’s restaurant, where similar headstones of theatrical death hang in gruesome testimony to brave persistence of sheer idiocy in the face of reason.
If you don’t believe in the work—truly, honestly, and even passionately—you have no business doing it. Period. You may assume you possess enough craft, enough professional savvy to make something secure, or at least not embarrassing. And you would be wrong! Theatrical success is, as Stoppard hints in Shakespeare in Love, inevitably something of “a mystery,” but one that needs something other than merely an urge to “be helpful.” I had to learn to give up all pretense of social politesse and toughen myself for more truth than I ever had previously wished to acknowledge. Theatre is no province for doing favors. Good people, all with their hopes and their finances on display, need a director equally convinced of the worth of the project, and of every individual sector that makes it tick. Friends are for the off-hours. As I learned to my regret … don’t get into the trenches with a picnic basket!
4. AND FINALLY … “JUST DO IT FOR THE MONEY!”
Just don’t. There is such a thing in the professional theatre as a solid hit, a cash cow, a miracle that runs, if The Phantom of the Opera is any example, for decades. Although long runs have always distinguished the Broadway scene, and musical properties seem to have a corner on that market, in the last twenty or so years we’ve seen several remarkable blockbusters settle into an individual theatre in such a way as to replicate Bloomingdale’s, or the New York Public Library. They appear to be evergreen, so far as the box office and tourism are concerned, although it will be both fascinating and terrifying to see what ensues as the pandemic we’ve just experienced either retreats or transmogrifies into something else. Depending on the lasting effects of such a disaster, it is conceivable that one or more of these musical monuments may end up out in the cold, replaced by newer versions of themselves, all hoping to become similar annuities, capable of even further cycles of renewal. The unimagined danger here would be the occasion of a creative author finally facing his younger self in a ghostly competition. Can lightning strike again? Can one hope to have more than one of these miracles in a career, or would it be safer to just back away, and not try? Shakespeare still had The Tempest waiting. Verdi produced Falstaff at the age of eighty-seven. So it’s possible. Just not likely, we have to admit, not being inclined to tempt fate.
