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Everything Was Possible
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Praise for Everything Was Possible
“Well, I thought I wouldn’t get around to finishing the book until I returned from Vienna, but of course I should have realized I couldn’t put it down! . . . It is handsome and exciting. So, Ted, well done! I guess you really were our Boswell.”
—Harold Prince
“It’s not only the best book about the musical theater I’ve ever read, it was so vivid that I couldn’t wait to see how everything turned out.”
—Stephen Sondheim
“What a treasure to have your wonderfully written and insightful book. And though I wonder if perhaps one shouldn’t know too much about how musicals (like laws and sausages) are actually made, I can’t think of a more accurate and informative account.”
—Stephen Schwartz
“Just wanted to add one more voice to the flood of congratulations you’ve so justly received. I expected it to be informative and important, but frankly, was unprepared for how emotional and purely enjoyable a read it was. Congratulations from one more fan.”
—David Henry Hwang
“I couldn’t put it down and most of all, it actually made me want to direct another musical.”
—James Lapine
“With your brilliant eye you have caught the various creative characters and their working methods so accurately and laid out different people’s perspectives, including your own, in a way that a reader can still judge the facts and, therefore, the show’s strengths and weaknesses for themselves. I wish some of my productions had the good fortune of a ‘Ted Chapin’ in attendance to observe and unravel the extraordinary alchemy that happens when a special musical comes alive.”
—Cameron Mackintosh
“Being a fly on the wall with you and watching my greatest Broadway heroes break open the traditional musical to create something startling and new inspired me to do better. Your book challenges me to nurture a new musical that’s unlike anything that came before it. A musical that breaks boundaries, surprises audiences, and takes the art form I love so much to new places. As I approach any new work, I’m always asking myself, ‘are we aiming high enough?’”
—Jeffrey Seller
“This is as good a book as anyone has written about the process of creating a new show. Are you absolutely sure you were only in college at the time? Bravo!”
—Gregory Mosher
“It is one of the most enjoyable theatrical volumes that I have ever read. I had no idea that you were connected with Follies, but how amazing that you were able to so vividly reconstitute its gestation.”
—Michael Feinstein
“It’s wonderful, so detailed and personal and thoroughly captivating. I’m sure it’s already becoming required reading for anyone foolish enough to want to pursue this crazy business! Thanks for reminding me of why I wanted to be part of this madness. Bravo, Ted.”
—Howard McGillin
“It’s difficult to put the Broadway experience into words. Hands down, this is the best recent book about what it is like to work on a Broadway musical.”
—Todd Haimes
“Oh my God!!! What a wonderful time I had reading your book. It made me laugh to remember and cry from the thrill of being there together.”
—Paul Gemignani
“You brought it all back; the joy, the anxiety, and exhilaration. No one but Samuel Pepys and you could have had the persistence to have written such a detailed journal. Formidable! There is nothing like it out there.”
—Joanna Merlin
“And—dear Ted—I enjoyed Everything Was Possible immensely. I learned so much from your fine masterful action-packed narrative—I never knew that world so closely before. One laughed, one almost cried, one was incredulous. A quite marvelous book, if I may say so.”
—Shirley Hazzard
Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies
by Ted Chapin
Copyright © 2003 by Ted Chapin Foreword copyright © 2003 by Frank Rich
All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Permission to reprint previously published material may be found following the index.
9781476849218
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Chapin, Theodore S.
Everything was possible : the birth of the musical Follies / Ted Chapin ; foreword by Frank
Rich.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-55783-653-1
I. Sondheim, Stephen. Follies. 2. Musicals—New York (State)—New York—Production and direction. I. Title.
ML410.s6872c53 2005
792.6’42—dc22
2005001847
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Table of Contents
1 “... Walking Off My Tired Feet”
2 “Hats Off, Here They Come, Those Beautiful Girls”
3 “Girls Looking Frazzled And Girls Looking Great”
4 “But Every Height Has A Drop”
5 “Clicking Heels On Steel And Cement”
6 “Why Am I Here? This Is Crazy!”
7 “Everybody Has To Go Through Stages Like That”
8 “That’s What You’ve Been Waiting For”
9 “The Choices That You Make Aren’t All That Grim”
10 “I’m So Glad I Came”
11 “What Will Tomorrow Bring?”
12 “In A Great Big Broadway Show!”
To the gentlemen and ladies of Follies, 1971
Life was fun, but oh, so intense.
Everything was possible and nothing made sense
Back there when one of the major events
Was waiting for the girls upstairs.
—from “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs”
Foreword
More than three decades after its premiere, Follies remains the most elusive of landmark Broadway musicals. Set at a reunion of onetime Follies performers on the eve of the destruction of their old theater, it is a show for which the word “problematic” could have been coined. Its theatricality is lavish but its mood is downbeat. Its storytelling plays tricks with time that are poetic to its fans but disorienting gimmickry to less sym
pathetic onlookers. The principal characters are narcissistic, unpleasant, and prone to onstage nervous breakdowns. Yet the Stephen Sondheim songs they sing are now classics of the musical-theater repertoire, full of heart even when they delineate arid, disappointed lives.
From the start, critics have been divided about Follies, passionately pro or con but rarely on the fence. The original production, though running well over a year at the Winter Garden, lost its entire investment. Major revivals in London (1987) and New York (2001) were also commercial failures. Each of them used revised versions of the original James Goldman book, and to this day there is no agreement as to what constitutes the “definitive” text. In each rendition, Follies draws new adherents, but also new detractors. Is it really a great musical, or merely the greatest of all cult musicals, the most fabulous of self-indulgent failures? Or might it be still unfinished, awaiting the perfect script revision, the radical new staging no one has yet thought of? Could one stroke of luck finally make the whole elaborate edifice fall into place as triumphantly as the Follies scenery descends in the fabled “Loveland” sequence?
In the pages to come, Ted Chapin doesn’t try to answer these unanswerable questions, which is one of many reasons his memoir is so illuminating. He really does take us all the way back in time to 1971 when he was a twenty-year-old college student hired as a production assistant—i.e., a gofer—by the director Harold Prince. Follies was not a legend yet; it was another big new Broadway musical in a day when every season still boasted a number of big new Broadway musicals. Sondheim, Prince, and Prince’s codirector, Michael Bennett, were rising young Turks and not yet the theatrical establishment they would become. Working from the detailed diary entries he kept at the time, Chapin resists superimposing the future of his characters and their project onto their past. He simply wants to tell us in real time how the show was put together from earliest conception to opening night (a story that is anything but simple). While he saw nearly everything and seems to have forgotten nothing, he never pours on the retrospective sentimentality that warps most backstage stories and those of Broadway musicals in particular. Nor does he gild his account with all the critical and cultist filigree that has attended Follies ever since. If there has ever been an account of the creation of a major Broadway production as complete, candid and apocrypha-free as this one, I have not found it.
What Chapin couldn’t know in 1971 is that he was capturing not just the assembling of one particular show but a representative example of a dying breed. Everything was still possible on Broadway, but just barely; nothing in Follies made economic sense. Original new musicals with 28 musicians in the pit, 140 lavish costumes, and casts of So would soon be abandoned by the commercial theater. (Bennett’s subsequent hit, the 1975 A Chorus Line, was developed Off Broadway and was the antithesis of Follies in scale.) And while certain chapters in the Follies story are eternal—the chaotic rehearsals, the clashing temperaments, the opening night party clouded by mixed reviews—much of the production process that Chapin charts here was already on the brink of extinction. He was an eyewitness to the last gasp of a low-tech Broadway, where script changes still had to be laboriously mimeographed (rather than Xeroxed, word-processed, faxed, or e-mailed), where orchestra parts were still copied by hand, where weak singing voices could not yet be rescued by body mikes, and where unfathomably complex scenic and lighting effects were not yet guided by computer. Toss in a company as eccentric as it was large—with a vividly drawn cast ranging from insecure B–list Hollywood stars and ancient Broadway hands to neophyte Vegas showgirls—and you have a poignant snapshot of a showbiz civilization as distant from our time as 1971 was from the heyday of the Ziegfeld Follies.
Like Ted Chapin, I was also a minor college-age footnote to the Follies story (due to circumstances he’ll explain), but we would not meet each other until many years later. Once we did, I came to admire him for his management of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization but never imagined that he might also have been a first-class journalist. Then again, his account of what he saw in 1971, written from the deep perspective of an observer who is now the same age or older than many of the principals in his narrative, cannot accurately be called journalism. It is history, and everyone who loves the musical theater will be the wiser for it.
—Frank Rich
February 2003
Frank Rich is a columnist at the New York Times, where he was chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993.
Follies incarnate: Showgirl Ursula Maschmeyer in her beaded black-and-
white costume—when the curtain rose, she was the only figure onstage.
Introduction
“. . . At Least I Was There”
It is fall 2001. I am standing on the stage of the Colonial Theatre in Boston. A total renovation has recently been completed, timed to coincide with the theater’s one hundredth birthday, and the owners are throwing a party to celebrate. As president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, I have been invited to represent the contributions of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, many of whose shows played at the Colonial on their way to Broadway. Their first joint effort, originally titled Away We Go!, was being performed on this very stage while, out in the lobby, the decision was being made to rename it Oklahoma! That’s the kind of rich history that has been chronicled in a sumptuous new photograph-filled book, whose author is circulating through the crowd. There is a lot of mingling, sipping wine, and munching from the tables of food laid out around the stage.
I walk to the footlights, peering out at the empty auditorium. The cherubs adorning the front of the balconies, the frescoes on the ceiling, and the chandeliers are now gleaming. There is a gentle, elegant sweep to the rows and rows of newly upholstered seats, and over to the sides are the boxes, one on top of another, grand and ornate. Looking down to the orchestra pit, now covered, I think of the songs that were first played there, songs that have become famous.
My mind is on someone specific. A young man, who stood on this stage long before tonight. I can almost see him, that twenty-year-old, who found a way to observe rehearsals and the out-of-town period of a show he hoped—he knew—would be thrilling. Focused enough to keep a diary, he was enthusiastic and green; he kept his eyes and ears open to everything that was going on around him. Naive, but eager to please, he adored every minute.
I am thinking of myself, age twenty, the gofer on Follies.
It’s been thirty years since I was in this theater, but in many ways it feels like yesterday. While the cocktail festivities continue on the stage, I wander surreptitiously up the back stairs to the dressing rooms, all of them now locked, down to the darkness below stage, and through the pass door into the paneled foyer of the men’s lounge. I climb up to the rear of the second balcony—not easy, since a separation of patron entrances was part of the initial design—and look down on the stage framed by the golden proscenium arch. It’s all just as I remembered it. Nothing seems to have changed.
I get back down in time for the formal part of the celebration. A small platform with a microphone has been set up, downstage center, facing upstage. When introduced, I thank the hosts of the party for the meticulous restoration job they have done. I reiterate how important the Colonial Theatre was to the careers of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and to the history of American musical theater. I mention Follies, the Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince, and Michael Bennett musical that played in the theater for four intense weeks during the winter of 1971. Acknowledging that I played a small role in that show’s Colonial Theatre life, I tell the guests that the spot on which I am standing is where a song was first introduced to the world, an out-of-town replacement that soon became one of the staples of the Stephen Sondheim repertoire: “I’m Still Here.” There is a bit of an “ooh” from the crowd. I conclude my remarks and go back to mingling. One stagehand, now in uncharacteristic suit and tie, tells me he has fond memories of Follies. He’s proud of the many years he has put in working at the theater.
In the credits at the back of the Playbill for the original Broadway production of Follies, I am listed as “Production Assistant.” That means “gofer”—the low man on the theatrical totem pole who runs all the errands and does whatever the management asks him to do: go for this, go for that . . . Hence the name. At the time, I was a junior at Connecticut College, which had recently gone coed. I had spent the fall on an experimental off-campus theater program and wasn’t anxious to go straight back to school. The Follies rehearsal period neatly paralleled the second semester, and I felt I could probably sell the college on allowing me to make a credit-worthy independent study of observing the creation of an intriguing new American musical. In order to graduate on time, I would need to get two courses’ worth of credit, so I agreed to keep a journal that I would fashion into a report. It was 1970; colleges then were somewhat in turmoil anyway, and they tended to welcome creative independent studies initiated by students. Thanks to one particularly sympathetic registrar, a holdover from the days of Connecticut College for Women with a twinkle in her eye for show business, my request was accepted. I hadn’t yet quite gotten Harold Prince to agree to let me observe the rehearsals.
Everything Was Possible