Everything Was Possible Page 5

  But the Follies sequence was nowhere near completed, nor was its shape determined. It would clearly have songs. In fact, Steve had finished one the day before, “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow,” played it for the creative staff, and everyone had liked it except Hal. But more songs had to be written. (There were still five songs for this sequence that hadn’t been started—“Love Will See Us Through,” “Buddy’s Blues,” “Uptown, Downtown,” “Live, Laugh, Love,” and “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a Boston replacement.) Since the Ziegfeld Follies also contained sketches and routines, the inclusion of such material was being contemplated and discussed at length in phone calls and in conversations behind closed doors. Gene Nelson’s character, Buddy, the traveling salesman, might do his “turn” in the form of a Will Rogers—style comedy monologue. Librettist James Goldman, a tall regal-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses and a distinguished gray-flecked beard, had come to the rehearsal hall to discuss this. I was called into the room and given a task: go to the New York Public Library and research jokes. Goldman sat there while Hal went over what he wanted me to find—“Old jokes about family life . . . the guy lives in Phoenix, so there should be stuff about Arizona . . . the West . . . unhappy suburban life . . .the country lub . . . the washing . . . sex . . . budgets . . . the bucolic life . . .” and so on. Goldman remembered a joke book from his childhood, Through Missouri on a Mule by Joe Miller. (It turned out to be full of racist humor.) Hal wanted me to find an actual Will Rogers monologue so he could examine its shape. And he didn’t want me to edit anything: “Even if it’s a Milton Berle joke, don’t throw it out.” Goldman sat there silently, puffing away at a cigarette. After a pause, he smiled and said: “The only reason you’re doing this is because I cannot write jokes.”

  The next morning I was on the way to the library’s main branch on Forty-second Street when I ran into playwright John Guare on the subway. His play The House of Blue Leaves was in rehearsal for its world premiere production at the Truck and Warehouse Theater on East Fourth Street. He was a friend of Prince and Sondheim and was a big fan of Follies. He told me which other branches of the New York Public Library were likely to be helpful and gave me John Lahr’s telephone number, saying that he was very knowledgeable about vaudeville, having recently completed a biography of his father, Bert Lahr. I spent most of the day gathering a whole bunch of corny jokes, writing them down on a yellow legal pad. (This was before libraries had accessible photocopying machines.) I went to rehearsal, gave them to Hal who checked off the ones he was interested in, then went home, typed out a list, and brought it down to Goldman’s house on West Eleventh Street. I shoved the papers under his door. A nine-page version of a monologue for Buddy was presented to Hal a few days later, went into his master script, and was never heard of again. Buddy ended up with a song, “Buddy’s Blues” (or, as it was alternately titled, “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me-Oh-You-Do-I’ll-See-You-Later Blues”), in which, he drove a toy car between two girls impersonating Sally, his wife at home, and Margie, his mistress on the road. Initially, the two girls were played by men in drag.

  Michael Bennett and Bob Avian continued working with the dancers through the week. From what I could see, it looked as if the main body of the complicated dances had been worked out ahead of time, but the choreography would change as the steps were being taught. The constant seemed to be “Who’s That Woman?”—partly, I realized, because Michael wanted his dancers to know the routines when the principal actors arrived. He knew it would be helpful for the “old broads” to have all the dancers available to help them go over the steps. And was he ever proved right!

  Watching Michael work was a lesson in collaboration. He usually sat in front of the wall of mirrors facing the dancers, with Bob Avian dancing the principal’s role. Bob would demonstrate the steps. Then Michael would get an idea. He’d jump up and work it out, extending or modifying it, all the while watching himself in the mirrors. Then he would sit down and watch Bob execute it again. Other dancers in the ensemble would throw in ideas as well, but a clear hierarchy started to become apparent. Some had clearly worked with Michael before. Two were his assistants, Graciela Daniele and Mary Jane Houdina. Daniele, who has gone on to have a distinguished career as a choreographer and director, was more “upscale,” both in person and in dancing style. Gorgeous, slightly exotic, and often wearing a colored scarf around her head, she was not intimidated by Bennett in the least. He relied on her for lyrical steps, and as rehearsals progressed he put her in charge of many of the older members of the company who needed hand-holding. She would also dance the role of Young Vanessa in the ballroom-dance specialty “Bolero d’Amour.” Mary Jane, who had known about Michael since they both grew up in Buffalo, was clearly the tap-dance assistant who provided different tap steps. She was a no-nonsense gal, also not intimidated by Michael. When tap steps were being created, she often stood right by Bob’s side. Clearly, the final decisions were always Michael’s, but he accepted ideas freely.

  Michael Bennett working out a step.

  I watched them working on “The World’s Full of Boys,” an idea for a Follies song. I was amazed at how Michael took clichéd dance steps and placed them in a context in which they felt fresh and made dramatic sense. The song was a can-can (it ended up in the movie Stavisky, where it sounded like a French dance hall tune) that began with Phyllis and the male dancers. She describes how she wants to go on the prowl: “The world’s full of boys who are waiting to be kissed. Oops! There’s one I missed . . .” Bennett had the men dance into a “V” shape with Phyllis at the pivot point down front. Once she has found the boys, and they are in proper formation, she sings about continuing her search. “And then, and when, I’ve kissed them all and satisfied my yen . . .” Bennett had Phyllis simply leave her “boys” in their “V” and saunter away at an angle. Simple, but you got the point that she was never satisfied, that no set formation would ever appease her. She would always go off to find something more interesting. It was appropriate and creative—and surprising.

  Work was also done on “Loveland,” the transition song into the Follies sequence, which was soon to be alternatively referred to as Loveland. It sounded like one of those grandiose Ziegfeld showgirl numbers, as much about introducing costumes and scenery as it was a song—“A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” that kind of thing—and its introduction was the same as “Beautiful Girls,” the first song in the show, also reminiscent of a specific Ziegfeldian style. Even though no one was quite sure how the leading characters would get onto the stage for “Loveland,” it was clear that they would be center stage when the song began and would be surrounded by Follies people, played by the members of the ensemble. The song “Loveland” was also the device that moved the show from the present to the hallucinatory past, from the party event of the play into the fantasy world—not yet determined or designed—of the splintering minds of our lead characters. There was a lot of planned swirling around and posturing à la Ziegfeld. At key moments, six tall showgirls in outrageous themed costumes would be presented, accompanied by platitudes spoken by individual men in the ensemble. Even in the rehearsal room, it looked thrilling. Michael said to his dancers: “My work grows, and often as something is growing I will change large sections, so be prepared.”

  Florence Klotz, the costume designer, brought sketches for Hal and Michael to approve. For “Loveland” her new idea was a cloudlike base for each of the showgirls, which would roll on. Hal quickly dismissed the idea; since the whole set was a series of raked levels, he explained, the idea of a base rolling on with a person standing on it was out. (Rumor had it the Vegas showgirls might be asked to go topless—it never happened.) She also had a series of sketches for the principals. “These sketches are good, Flossie,” said Hal, “but the only problem is that they have got to be related.” “They are,” she said. Hal then brought Michael to look through the sketches with him. “There are some I like very much and there are others I hate.” Michael agreed. The ones that they both didn
’t like were never seen again. After Klotz left, Hal said, “The costumes are the best I’ve ever had for any of my shows.” Clearly expensive, they were a large reason Follies was over budget. Word began to circulate around the rehearsal hall that the original budget of $700,000 was now looking more like $800,000. No wonder Hal seemed agitated.

  Although most of the show would take place in the present and at a party, it was the aura of the Follies that was most intriguing. Any show set within earshot of Ziegfeld demands a certain kind of opulence. If you have showgirls, they have to wear showgirl costumes, and they’d better be spectacular. Since Follies made thinly disguised Ziegfeld references, there was a lot of research available. Books and magazines had photographs of the very shows used for inspiration, and many of the showgirl costumes ended up exact copies of specific dresses. Of course the art of stage costuming lies in assimilating research and creating a unique vision. The task of costuming Follies was given to a seemingly unlikely candidate. Every era on Broadway seems to have a reigning designer who does the shows with the flamboyant costumes, and they tend to win Tony Awards; examples include Alvin Colt, Freddy Wittop, Theoni V Aldredge, Willa Kim, and William Ivey Long. Florence Klotz wasn’t yet one of them, but to be fair, she had never been given an opportunity to show what she was capable of. Follies was to provide her entree into that group, and she was to win the first of her many Tony Awards for the show. She was also part of the Harold Prince family, having designed a few of his productions. She was also Ruthie’s life partner.

  Her costumes for the chorus in “Loveland” were Dresden milkmaids and their lads, in pastel pinks and yellows with lots of gold trimming and big white shoes. Three Las Vegas showgirls, each six feet tall, had been cast specifically for this moment, and they, along with the three tallest dancers from the ensemble, would wear enormous, pastel “love-themed” costumes with tall headdresses. These showgirl dresses ended up being so large that they couldn’t be moved around backstage at either the Colonial Theatre in Boston or the Winter Garden in New York, so they had to be dead hung from the fly floor in the extreme corners backstage, three to a side. Each performer would have the skirt lowered onto her just before her entrance—which she had to make sideways.

  The palette for the costumes for the entire show was carefully chosen. Black and white were for the ghost figures. The Follies sequence began in pastels and worked up through bright colors to fire-engine red. By the end, every member of the chorus was in red—top hat, jacket, trousers, and shoes—with white vests, ties, and shirts or blouses. Ben, who had the final Follies number, was entirely in formal whites—tails, hat, cane. The men’s modern-day clothing, always a challenge to designers, was in subdued dark colors. Everything, including all the men’s suits, was color. The only people wearing black in the present were the players in the stage band who wore tuxedoes. The women’s present-day costumes were as stylistically diverse as their colors.

  Of course the costumes had to complement the palette of the scenery. When Hal Prince found the photograph of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the Roxy Theater, he took it to Boris Aronson, the seventy-year-old scenic designer with whom he had worked on his last four shows. Aronson was having something of a renaissance under Prince. Following a long and varied career, he had found something new and imaginative in his decadent and theatrically twisted scenery for Cabaret. He then came up with the ultramodern, chrome, glass and shiny-black urban environment of Company, which was so modern and new that many felt it had to be the work of a young artist. It was simply Boris Aronson being inspired. Independently, he had also seen the Swanson photograph, and when he heard Hal describe a show that took place in an empty theater, he was excited. “An empty stage is a gold mine, a concept that really fascinates me,” he was quoted as saying in The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (by Frank Rich and Lisa Aronson) —“a chance for Cubism of the highest order—and not just for the sake of abstraction, but based on something real.” He drew a preliminary, atmospheric sketch for the Follies set that captured the essence of the photograph, adding a broken catwalk above, abstract pieces of ripped scenery hovering in space, staircases leading nowhere, pieces missing from the proscenium arch, and a main stage area that looked as if things had been simply left behind. Ghostly figures, including one far upstage that looked just like Gloria Swanson, lurked in the shadows. The set became refined in each successive drawing, but it never lost the impression of that first sketch. It looked less like a theater being torn down than a theater that had just been neglected for a very long time. Nothing was entirely intact—walls were crumbling, remnants of old drops hung down, piles of bricks and rubble were strewn about. And despite the existence of the original color photograph of the Roxy Theater, in which the gold filigree and the red brick were as striking as Gloria Swanson’s black evening attire, for Prince and Aronson, this was the black-and-white version. Everything in Aronson’s design had lost its color. Of course, it was actually shades of gray, black, and white, but the impression was of shadow, and empty space. We were never shown how far the wrecker’s ball had gone until the final image of the show, in the early morning following the party. There was also no furniture; although the event of the play was a party, only a buffet table would ever make its way onto the set. Whenever anyone sat, it was on some piece of the set.

  In its simplest form, the set was a series of three square, raised platforms rising to the rear of the stage in angled perspective, with a corner facing the audience. Each angle was different, giving a sense of false perspective, and they were all floating on a flat-black floor, which was itself raked. Skeletal units, which also looked as if they were crumbling, were stationed offstage right and left, three on each side. They moved in tracks in the floor, on the diagonal. These units, made of structural steel and pipe, included pieces of crumbling walls, staircases (some functional, some not), piles of rubble, and various planks making areas in which small scenes could take place. One series of planks formed an area large enough to accommodate a piano, bass, and drums for the onstage party band. When these units were pulled offstage, the stage looked vast, black, and empty; when they were pulled onstage, the emptiness of the space closed in and shifted, so that scenes could appear to be more intimate. Cleverly disguised within one stage-left unit was a series of levels that created a rubble-strewn staircase used for the grand Follies-style entrance of all the ex—Follies girls at the top of the show during “Beautiful Girls.” As the aged tenor sang “Hats off, here they come, those beautiful girls,” they each made a grand entrance at the top of the stairs and promenaded down. To the audience, it looked like variously shaped older women dressed in a motley assortment of fancy party dresses walking through a junk pile. To them, it was gliding once again down the staircase of their youth. It was a moment that captured the essence of Follies. And it was only the first song of the evening.

  The basic Aronson set during rehearsal at Feller’s Scenic Studio,

  Michael Bennett in the center.

  Even though the Follies sequence was still being conceived and written, Aronson had already come up with some ideas. That there would be such a sequence was known, as was the fact that it would be reminiscent of the old Ziegfeld Follies. The main set was far too big and “constructed” to be moved out of the way, so the challenge was to take over the space effortlessly. The ingenuity was extraordinary: Aronson had designed two pie-shaped small stair units—three steps each—that were hidden underneath the main platforms and which, when pivoted out, joined the top two platforms to make one big, if slightly abstract, round staircase. Then from the flies would come Follies drops, inspired by paper doilies, valentine cards, and certain Fragonard paintings. They would be bright—white with red hearts and cherubic scenes painted in cameos—and their round openings would get larger with each downstage drop, creating an iris of doilies. In front would be a richly textured sky-blue tab curtain. The appearance of all this color was meant to be startling, and it would be. And all the drops hung only over the center po
rtion of the stage with no masking, so the ghostly sides of the stage were never obscured. It was magic.

  Aronson’s presence was felt during the week, though he was in contact only via telephone. Hal had made a decision to lower the entire set, and his designer was not pleased. Originally the set was to begin three inches above stage level, and when Hal realized just how high that would make everything else, he decided to have the basic raked floor start at stage level. Fritz Holt, in his position as production stage manager, was on the phone for an hour and a half discussing this with Aronson. The producer was making decisions about his set that tampered with his artistic vision and he wanted his set left alone. Hal had already explained how nervous he felt the actors, especially the older ones, would be with the multiple levels of the set. Lowering everything would at least mitigate the problem to some degree. In addition, Hal and Michael were a little annoyed at Boris because they had gone to see his new production of Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera, and when the curtain went up they had turned to each other and said: “Oh, my God, it’s the set for Follies.” There were similarities, to be sure, but no one else ever expressed a similar concern.

  I was sent to Aronson’s apartment to pick up some drawings. He lived in an old ten-story apartment building just off Central Park West. Through the ornate iron door of the building I could see one of those old-style elevators built in a cage, with an open staircase wrapped around. Finding the bell was a challenge—it was carefully hidden in a gargoyle rosette. As the elevator descended, a mass of cables hanging down the middle of the cage moved, in both directions, it seemed. The operator looked as if he belonged on an old steamboat, especially when he thrust the lever all the way to one side of the engine-room-style telegraph. As we arrived at the proper floor, he opened the door, then pointed, saying, “Aronson is there.” He waited while I rang the doorbell. Numerous locks were turned, and a serious-looking red-haired woman opened the door—slightly. When I explained why I was there she smiled and through the partly opened door handed me a carefully wrapped roll of tracing paper with the words “Follies—Stage Manager” written on it. “Be careful that it does not fall out,” she said. Later on I found out that this was Lisa, Boris’s wife and assistant. As she closed the door, I noticed Boris himself lurking quietly in the shadows behind her, and then I heard the locks turned once again.