Everything Was Possible Read online

  My fall semester’s experience had been extraordinary. I was part of a group, and a motley group we were, of thirty undergraduates from all over the country participating in the inaugural semester of the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It was designed as an intensive program in which students would have nothing but theater thrown at them all day long, seven days a week. Courses were taught by professional theater practitioners in all kinds of disciplines; we had to take every one, regardless of what we thought our ultimate career goal might be. We designed sets; we studied acting. We put on kimonos and practiced Japanese theater techniques. Someone from Joseph Chaikin’s innovative Open Theater had us twist into athletic clumps. The two design teachers, David Hays and Fred Voelpel, were working on a new Broadway-bound musical entitled Two by Two, so we piled into a bus and went to see a dress rehearsal at the Shubert Theater in New Haven. We came to New York for a week to see shows and meet with actors, directors, and producers—including Hal Prince and Michael Bennett. Friday afternoons were set aside for puppetry, since Margo and Rufus Rose, the originators of Howdy Doody, lived nearby. For them we suffered through a series of visiting puppeteers who attempted to teach us what one referred to as “the most basic of all art forms because there is nothing between the creator and his art.” We were, however, won over the day a gangly, soft-spoken Jim Henson arrived with a duffel bag full of his creations for a new children’s television show that had just gone on the air. They were the Muppets from Sesame Street and he simply told us: “These are my friends.” We were enthralled. Somehow going straight back to an undergraduate collegiate program of directing and acting in one-act plays at a college that didn’t have a theater department and only a 2,000-seat proscenium auditorium known mostly for the American Dance Festival felt like an inevitable letdown. Working on Follies, I imagined, would provide a great decompression chamber. And I promised the college that I would gear up for a senior year in which I would stay on campus and do all the right things.

  I had become a big fan of three of the creative artists who were collaborating on Follies: composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, producer-director Harold Prince, and choreographer-director Michael Bennett. I was staggered by their work on Company, the musical they had all produced the season before and which I had seen at an early preview matinee. Everything about the show struck me as new, vital, interesting, bold, contemporary—and wildly exciting. It told a story in a nonlinear way that still made logical sense. The characters and the relationships were modern and understandable. Something about it made me feel for the very first time that a musical could really be a serious work of contemporary theater. I couldn’t quite explain why, but it made a connection for me both emotionally and intellectually as no other show had. I knew I wanted to be around the people who were creating this kind of theater. I had talked my way into attending the recording session of the original cast album of Company—an event captured brilliantly on film by D. A. Pennebaker (if you focus over Hal Prince’s shoulder to the wavy hair and the plaid sport jacket in the background, you can see me lurking). I was just hell-bent determined to be part of their world. I hungered for the opportunity to watch them work. I knew that Follies was their next project. And I wanted to be there.

  I was lucky in one important respect. My father, Schuyler Chapin, had made his professional career in the arts, from concert management through running the classical division of Columbia Records, to general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, eventually becoming New York City Commissioner for Cultural Affairs. In him, I had a resource to be used—carefully—to help make connections. He had helped me get my first job as a production assistant in 1967, when I was sixteen. It was on the original production of Peter Ustinov’s antiwar play The Unknown Soldier and His Wife, which was produced as part of Lincoln Center’s Festival ’67, one of the projects that fell under his general responsibilities as vice president for programming for Lincoln Center. The show was produced by Broadway’s Alexander H. Cohen, whom I met at a family dinner. “So which one of you is coming to work for me?” he had asked. I piped up. He told me to write to his assistant, which I did, and became the production assistant, at seventy-five dollars per week. Originally only the gofer, when the rehearsals moved into the Vivian Beaumont Theater, I became the assistant to the director, John Dexter, as well. Dexter was a brilliant, demanding, and acerbic Englishman—just trying to keep on his good side was a task unto itself. A New York Times profile appeared at the time titled: “The Geometry of Pleasing Mr. Dexter.”

  A slightly rumpled figure hung around the theater during rehearsals, sitting in the auditorium, coming and going as he pleased. He didn’t say much; he just sat there, unobtrusively, watching. He was Stephen Sondheim. Dexter was scheduled to direct Sondheim’s new musical, The Girls Upstairs, which was to be produced the following season. They had worked together once before on Do I Hear a Waltz? an unhappy collaboration of a musical based on the Arthur Laurents play The Time of the Cuckoo with music by Richard Rodgers. But Dexter had been signed for the new show, and he invited Sondheim to hang around. Dexter described The Girls Upstairs as “a brilliant study in nostalgia with a breathtaking score.” This was 1967, when Stephen Sondheim was known primarily as a lyricist, having written the words to Leonard Bernstein’s music in West Side Story and to Jule Styne’s music in Gypsy, both of which, of course, were big hits. He had then written both words and music for A Fanny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which, though successful, failed to gain him recognition as a composer. His contribution wasn’t even nominated for a Tony Award. The prevailing opinion in the theater community was that his music wasn’t up to his lyrics, which were acknowledged to be brilliant. But he persevered, and his next effort was words and music for Anyone Can Whistle, an innovative, original story dealing with the question of insanity, which lasted only nine performances. It did have a champion, however, in Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, who felt so strongly about the show that he made an original cast album on the day after the show closed. The failure of Anyone Can Whistle threatened the future for Sondheim the composer. But after Do I Hear a Waltz? he swore he would never write only lyrics again. According to Dexter, The Girls Upstairs would show the world once and for all that Sondheim was as good a theater composer as anyone.

  The Girls Upstairs had its genesis when Sondheim approached James Goldman about writing a musical together. Sondheim had read Goldman’s play They Might Be Giants and felt he would be a good collaborator. Goldman had been contemplating a play about a reunion, and that led to discussions about a musical centered on a high school reunion. The focus shifted to ex—Ziegfeld Follies girls when an article about a gathering of Ziegfeld alumnae appeared in the New York Times. Inspired as well by the actual tearing down of the Ziegfeld Theater in 1966, the show they began to write told the story of a group of ex—Follies girls attending a party in the “Follies” theater the night before it was to be torn down. It evolved into a murder mystery, more of a “who’ll do it,” than a “who done it,” as old jealousies among two ex–Follies girls and their husbands came to the surface. Finding a producer took several years, and in the interim Sondheim and Goldman collaborated on a television adaptation of a John Collier story titled Evening Primrose for ABC Stage 67, a bold series of specials, including original musicals created especially for television. In June of 1967 The Girls Upstairs was scheduled for the coming Broadway season, to be produced by David Merrick and Leland Hayward. The plan ultimately fell through, and a year later the show found its way into the hands of Stuart Ostrow, an innovative producer who was making something of a specialty of producing oddball musicals. He announced The Girls Upstairs for the 1969–70 season and hired Joseph Hardy to direct, fresh from Off-Broadway’s successful You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. At one point both The Girls Upstairs and Company were scheduled to open in the same season. But the Ostrow production plan also fell through.

  Harold Prince: Producer, codi
rector.

  Harold Prince knew about The Girls Upstairs. He and Sondheim had been friends for years. He was a very active producer, having been responsible for several important hits, including West Side Story, The Pajama Game, and Fiorello! with partners, and then, on his own, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof. But as Sondheim wanted to be a composer, Prince wanted to be a director. When the opportunity arose to take over a musical in trouble entitled A Family Affair, written by John Kander and the brothers Goldman, William and James, he jumped. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to turn it around. His next venture as a director was She Loves Me, a chamber musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff, which he was also producing. Although not a financial success, it did garner a loyal following, but the direction was hardly mentioned in the reviews. He was then hired to direct Baker Street, a large musical based on Sherlock Holmes stories produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Cohen was known for extravagant spectacles (mostly bad), interesting theater pieces imported from England (mostly good), and an extraordinary and tasteful series of comic evenings with conveniently late curtains under the banner of “The Nine O’Clock Theater.” For Baker Street he had hired the legendary director Joshua Logan, but when Logan left the project, Cohen approached Prince. Although Prince initially saw the show as a moderately sized musical, Cohen wanted it to be an extravaganza. I saw Baker Street during its pre-Broadway tryout and loved every minute, including its jubilee parade of marionettes devised by Bil Baird. When it came to Broadway, Cohen did everything imaginable to convince New Yorkers that it was the biggest hit of all time. He plastered Manhattan with billboards, some painted on blank sides of buildings never painted before or since, a couple of which remained well into the 1980s. The marquee of the theater had color photographs of his three stars—Fritz Weaver, Inga Swenson, and Martin Gabel—appearing, alternately, as reflections in a huge Victorian looking glass. He even played an extra performance one week, thus allowing him to claim in an ad that the show had achieved “the largest gross for a week of performances in Broadway history.” The fact that there had been an extra performance was never mentioned. As it would turn out, Baker Street didn’t set the world on fire, and it didn’t do much for Hal Prince’s career as a director. It looked as if the best producer for him to work with was himself. And that’s what happened with Cabaret.

  When I saw Cabaret, I was floored. Among other things, it was really interestingly directed. The theater community noticed and began to take Prince seriously in that role. The show was a marvel—a musical that really had something to say and said it in a dramatic and stylish way not normally associated with musicals at the time. The show was set in a cabaret—mostly—or was the theater itself a cabaret? It featured a bizarre emcee who charmed us and then turned on us. The creepiness of the milieu matched the creepiness of the story, in which multiple realities existed at the same time. The score was influenced by the popular German music of the 1930s, and the cast even included Lotte Lenya, whose style and persona were so keenly linked to the era and its sound. She was singing new songs written in the style of her late husband, Kurt Weill. It felt authentic, it was theatrical, it was compelling, and it was brilliant. The same team followed the success of Cabaret with a less interesting musical adaptation of Zorba the Greek, titled Zorbá.

  The New York Times reported in the spring of 1969 that Prince would produce and direct a new musical titled Threes, based on several short plays by George Furth about a bachelor and his married friends. The score would be by Stephen Sondheim, the man who had originally sent Furth’s plays to Prince. The Times piece spoke of a new-style show, and who knew what that would mean? Prince and Sondheim had certainly worked together before, but never as director and composer. Few knew at the time that their friendship actually went back twenty years, to the opening night of South Pacific, when they met for the first time, Prince having come as a guest of the Richard Rodgers family and Sondheim having come with his Doylestown family friends Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein. It proved to be a pivotal event for the two young enthusiasts, who obviously shared a passion for the musical theater and wanted to be part of Broadway. They had remained friends through the years and had been working toward collaborating at what they both wanted most to do. This new show sounded as if it might be the right project.

  Indeed it was. Threes became Company. Its premiere in April 1970 was greeted with the kinds of intelligent cheers reserved for something truly new and exciting. Some carped that the show was antimarriage and didn’t add up to much, but for those of us who flipped, it was a moment for rejoicing. Suddenly there seemed to be an interesting future for the musical theater. As Richard Rodgers observed toward the end of his autobiography when asked where the musical theater is heading, “One night a show opens and suddenly there’s a whole new concept.” That’s what Company felt like. Prince and Sondheim were suddenly a collaborative team to reckon with. Their own individual talents were singled out, but something about their collaboration made people feel the American musical theater had been set on a path to the future.

  No one knew it at the time, but, in fact, Prince had agreed to produce The Girls Upstairs next if Sondheim would agree to write Company. That was actually the only way he could get Sondheim to agree to do Company. So on the Sunday following the opening of Company, the News of the Rialto column in the New York Times was titled “It’s Those ‘Girls’ Again” and contained the news that the show would be “available early next spring following rehearsals in December or January.”

  The important third member of the Company team was its young choreographer Michael Bennett. Bennett had been quietly working his way up through the ranks, from dancing in Broadway choruses to dancing in the youthful television series Hullabaloo, and then to choreographing Broadway musicals. He had done four so far, and had received Tony nominations for them all. Promises, Promises had been the one for which he was the most noticed. His energetic dances matched the spirit of a show written by the then enormously successful pop songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. I enjoyed Promises, Promises, but it didn’t feel special to me. So I was unprepared for my reaction to his contribution to Company. I had never seen anything quite like it. With a cast made up almost entirely of non-dancers (his muse, Donna McKechnie, was the only bona fide dancer in the group), he managed to keep a fluidity to the movement in and around Boris Aronson’s multileveled steel and chrome set so there was no discernible seam between dance and other stage movement. His use of standard dance steps performed by non-dancing actors felt appropriate, dramatic, and almost political. Case in point: during “Side by Side by Side,” a song about having a partner, there was one section in which each married couple did a little time step, in turn—first the husband, then the wife. The couples were lined up across the stage, and alternated—first from extreme stage right, the next one from extreme stage left, working to the lead character, Bobby, who was in the center. When his turn came, he did the husband half and then pointed to where his wife should be, and there were simply four empty counts of nothing. It was funny, it seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was totally appropriate. The audience wasn’t prepared for it, yet it told us everything we needed to know about how single and alone that character was, especially as the rest of the company continued to dance cheerily on with their partners beside them while Bobby just stared at the empty spot on the stage.

  Once I knew that the same team would be doing another show, I wanted to be there, so I wrote Hal Prince a formal letter asking if I could observe the rehearsal period of Follies. I had met him through my parents as well as having seen him during the week when the National Theater Institute had come to New York. One of the shows we saw was Company, and afterward we all went back to George White’s apartment to meet with both Hal and Michael Bennett. Hal wrote back, urging me to meet with his trusted associate and right hand, Ruth Mitchell, who didn’t seem overly thrilled with the notion. After some gentle coaxing, I was given the green light, but I w
as told that I would have to be Ruth Mitchell’s general assistant as well. I was soon to learn that two other people had also been given permission to observe rehearsals—a young playwright named Carole Wright, who had won an established position of “observer” through the New Dramatists, and Larry Cohen, the New York–based theater critic for the Hollywood Reporter. He was planning to write a book about the making of a musical. Carole didn’t appear to be too interested in the process and stayed close to Jim Goldman on the rare occasions when she was around. Cohen came and went, and he and I became friends. He started out knowing no one, but as the rehearsal period progressed he established a friendship with Michael Bennett. When he realized that would give him a bias were he to follow through on his plans to write a book, he abandoned his project. He and Michael remained friends and colleagues after Follies. I’ve stayed in touch with him through the years. He has become a respected screenwriter, and we worked together when he wrote the teleplay for the ABC-TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.