Broadway's Most Wanted (5 page)

It’s hard to imagine how important this type of consistency was before the advent of computer software programs made everyone a cubicle copyist. How important was it? So much so that the Tony Awards Committee, in 1976, voted her a special Tony “for outstanding service to the musical theater.”

At the 1988 Tony Awards, Stephen Sondheim, accepting his award for Best Score for
Into the Woods,
thanked his orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, and his conductor, Paul Gemignani. Then, as an afterthought, he thanked Paul Ford, and a shriek of joy went up from the audience. Who the mad screamer was we may not know, but Ford has been getting even better response to his name in recent years. Paul Ford is a rehearsal pianist.

Ford (no relation to the fine character actor of years past who shares the same name) is Sondheim’s pianist of choice, a valued member of the legendary composer/lyricist’s inner creative circle. The rehearsal pianist is often the first line of communication between the composer and the rest of the world, helping to shape the score as the composer and director hear it played in rehearsal. Tempos, textures, even phrasing are aided greatly by the presence of a good rehearsal pianist.

The rehearsal drummer is elemental to a choreographer, helping to create rhythms that eventually serve as templates for the dances in a show. Perhaps nowhere was the need for a competent rehearsal drummer greater than for the seminal “workshop” musical,
A Chorus Line.
And
A Chorus Line’s
rehearsal drummer was Robert Thomas.

The director and choreographer of
A Chorus Line,
Michael Bennett, met Thomas when they both worked at the June Taylor Dance Studio, Bennett teaching classes, Thomas laying down drumbeats for dancers. Soon, Thomas was helping Bennett develop the patterns that served as the bare bones for the supreme choreographic achievement that was
A Chorus Line.
Bennett respected his drummer so much that, as
A Chorus Line
became a phenomenon Thomas was promoted to Musical Coordinator, serving as a liaison between Bennett and his many touring companies.

If you saw a Broadway musical in the recent past, chances are the sets and the deck (stage floor) were built by Feller Scenery Studio. The late Peter Feller’s family, scenic carpenters and engineers for generations, literally have sawdust in their veins.

Peter Feller ran Feller Scenery Studio in the Bronx, and his father, Peter, was a stagehand at the Metropolitan Opera House. (His son, also Peter, owns Feller Precision, a theatrical engineering company that takes up where Feller scenery leaves off.) Master director Harold Prince talks with admiration about rehearsing
Follies
on the built set at Feller Studios, which saved countless
hours of adaptation to the severe rake, or tilt, of the stage. Prince also waxed poetic about Feller’s help in adapting the Broadway Theater for the revival of
Candide
in 1974: “There’s no question but that we couldn’t have gotten
Candide
on without Peter Feller’s help,” he wrote in his book
Contradictions.
Had every director working with a Feller-built set written his own book, we’d have many, many more tributes of this nature.

The role of the Dance Captain in a musical is a slightly precarious one. The Dance Captain must maintain all the choreographer’s steps and be the choreographer’s last word when questions arise during the run of the show. This normally occurs while he or she is dancing in the show at the same time. So, while dancers see the Dance Captain as staff, choreographers see him or her mainly as a dancer. The Dance Captain, therefore, must command respect from both sides.

Niki Harris is Tommy Tune’s Dance Captain of choice. She came on board with him on his great
A Day in Hollywood/A Might in the Ukraine
and has been with him on the line ever since, creating goodwill while maintaining some of the best-choreographed shows of recent years. The people who matter have noticed, too. The actor Walter Willison, who danced with her in
Grand Hotel,
has stated publicly, in
Theater Week
magazine, that she “has a fabulous set of gams.”

The Production Stage Manager, or PSM for short, is the eyes and ears of a musical, both in rehearsal and performance. The PSM runs and times rehearsals, coordinates
production and rehearsal schedules, and juggles egos, all the while maintaining a script full of technical cues that would make a military strategist weep. One of Broadway’s busiest and best is Steven Zweigbaum.

Zweigbaum made his musical stage management debut with
Shenandoah
in 1975 and since then has rarely stopped working. In addition to running rehearsals and calling cues for the show when it opens (which most PSM’s do a few nights a week, turning it over to assistant stage managers the other nights), Zweigbaum coordinates touring companies of several shows as well. His most recent project has been
The Producers.
That’s no vacation.

The job of a musical contractor is vital to the production of a musical: Fill the pit orchestra with the best players you can, see to it that they maintain a good relationship with the conductor and the actors, and make sure they get paid on time. Not as easy as it sounds. For many years, Seymour “Red” Press has been the go-to guy when musicians are needed.

Press lists over 100 New York shows to his credit, and that’s likely no exaggeration: His first Broadway show as a contractor was 1978’s
Ballroom.
He serves as “Musical Coordinator” as often as he contracts the players, which means producers have as much faith in him as the music men do.

Vincent Sardi opened his first restaurant in 1921, on West 44th Street, right in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. The family moved the restaurant to its current
location, 234 West 44th, in 1927. Since then, Sardi’s Restaurant has been synonymous with Broadway. From opening nights to the caricatures on the wall to the upstairs bar, Sardi’s is as colorful as Broadway itself.

Vincent Sardi was a Sicilian kid from Queens who opened his restaurant in the middle of the Jazz Age, although it was never a speakeasy. His restaurant’s popularity with a certain crowd of first-nighters, who all had their own tables, cemented the “Opening Night at Sardi’s” tradition. He was honored at the very first Tony ceremony in 1947, and stars still ache to be caricatured and put up on the walls of this New York institution.

New York’s legendary Main Stem, Broadway has long been the rainbow’s end for musical theater, hence the not-quite omnibus title of this book. Here are ten shows devoted to that magical talisman, the city on the Hudson.

The great songwriters Leonard Bernstein (the music) and Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the words) either together or separately wrote several musical paeans to New York. These titles are a quick trip through musical greatness:
West Side Story, Bells are Ringing,
and their first show together,
On The Town.

Wonderful Town,
scored by the three, gets the nod here as an almost perfect example of the musical-comedy genre and a perfect love letter to New York. A superb adaptation of the play
My Sister Eileen, Wonderful Town
tells the story of the Sherwood sisters, bookish Ruth and gorgeous Eileen, who have journeyed east from Columbus, Ohio, to 1935 Greenwich Village in search of fame, fortune, and fellas. Written in an unheard-of
five weeks, the show featured a fine score and an unmatched star performance by Rosalind Russell as would-be writer Ruth.

The show that many call the last great musical of the twentieth century,
Ragtime
is a sweeping adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow’ novel of the same name, and is structured similarly. Doctorow’s typical epic sweep, combining ordinary people and the famous folk with which they interact, is cleverly adapted into musical form by librettist Terrence McNally, composer Stephen Flaherty, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens.

The tony, all-white suburb of New Rochelle, home to an affluent white family, is invaded by the real world, i.e., racism, humanity, inhumanity, and other people. Whites, blacks, immigrants, and their mutual experiences, creating the tapestry of Americana at the beginning of the twentieth century, are handled with superb taste and style in this grade-A adaptation.

Say “Broadway author” in a word association test and nine out of ten will answer “Neil Simon.” Check. And does any Broadway composer say “New York City” more than Cy Coleman? No. Check, again. So they collaborated on a musical (with the smarty-pants lyricist Dorothy Fields) and created a sweet New York cocktail (a Manhattan?) called
Sweet Charity.

Adapted from the Fellini film
Nights of Cabiria,
Charity is a big-hearted dance-hall girl who loves neither wisely nor well. She hooks up with all manner of New York types, from a swingin’ playboy to a nerdy corporate schlub. Her adventures include a downtown
rave-up (“Rhythm of Life), presided over by Big Daddy Johann Sebastian Brubeck, and a parade through the city streets (“I’m a Brass Band”).

Stephen Sondheim’s first Broadway musical would have been
Saturday Night,
with a book by Julius J. Epstein, adapted from Epstein’s play (co-written with his brother Philip)
Front Porch in Flatbush
. Unfortunately, producer Lem Ayers died in 1952, and the production stalled. Following an abortive attempt to resuscitate the show in 1959,
Saturday Night
languished in the Land of Could-Have-Been. Forty years later, New York got its first full look at
Saturday Night,
at Second Stage off-Broadway. A youthful tale of idealism and friendship, it concerns a tight knot of twenty-somethings investing in the stock market, with that crazy Brooklyn Bridge linking them to their dreams. Several fine songs, including the clever “Love’s a Bond,” and the Whiffenpoof-junior “It’s That Kind of a Neighborhood,” gave a glorious look back through the hourglass into the early career of the Promethean career of Stephen Sondheim.

Penny Marshall’s hit 1987 film
Big
is a body-switch comedy about a Jersey boy who wishes he could be tall, then wakes up and finds himself in an adult’s body. The basis of the film is his quest to adapt to the adult-sized world and its attendant, adult-sized problems, while he searches for a return to his old self. Nine years later,
Big
was made into a musical of the same name. The film’s success, however, was not duplicated by the musical.

An outstanding, fly-on-the-wall book by Barbara Isenberg,
Making It Big,
chronicled the show’s every step, from early rehearsals to post-Tony letdown. The musical seemed to ignore (or was unable to duplicate) the strong emotional pull the film had, and, like the film, its strongest moment (an extremely easy scene to musicalize) came in the famous scene at New York City toy store FAO Schwartz, in which man-boy and toy tycoon dance on the big piano on the floor, to David Shire’s clever variations on “Chopsticks.”

Perhaps the greatest musical ever written, the “Musical Fable of Broadway” scores on every conceivable level. A priceless adaptation of stories written by New York’s chronicler supreme, Damon Runyon (who hailed from another Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas), particularly the short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” Frank Loesser’s score is one of the greatest ever and is more than matched by the hilarious book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.

Everything in this supremely coordinated musical screams “New York City.” Runyon’s dizzyingly colorful Broadway underworld (“Runyonland,” they called the opening sequence) was fleshed out brilliantly onstage by director George S. Kaufman and choreographer Michael Kidd, from the fictional Mindy’s restaurant to the sewers where Nathan Detroit’s crap game rages on, to the Save-a-Soul Mission with its window looking out on Broadway itself.

Tyro songwriter Jonathan Larson added his name to the canons of theater lore when he unexpectedly died
on the opening day of his musical,
Rent,
at the New York Theater Workshop off-off-Broadway. The buzz surrounding the show and the circumstances became deafening, and Larson’s adaptation of Puccini’s
La Bo-h
è
me
became a hit downtown, then moved virtually intact to Broadway, where it won Larson the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, and the Best Musical Tony.

Rent
takes
La Bohème
and puts a decidedly postmodern, downtown spin on it: Mimi is HIV-positive, the Marcello character (“Mark”) is an experimental filmmaker, landlord Benoit is a profit-hungry real estate developer, etc. The show’s success is largely due to a desire to see the pseudo-hip Alphabet City life onstage. This show is one of the first in a long time to have its own set of groupies, or “Rentheads,” who camp out for tickets and see as many performances as they can.

This landmark 1941 show was among the first to seriously address the social and psychological problems facing women, and it was the first musical to use sessions of analysis as a plot device. Kurt Weill wrote the hauntingly brautiful music to Ira Gershwin’s brilliant lyrics. Moss Hart wrote the coded, subtext-heavy libretto.

Gertrude Lawrence played Liza Elliott, high-strung editor of
Allure
magazine, in personal and professional crisis, unable to make decisions regarding her life, her loves, and her job, afraid the city will swallow her whole. Desperate, she heads to the ofice of Dr. Brooks, who analyzes her. Part of the brilliance of this show was its refusal to play to type: The ultra-glamorous Lawrence had no star entrance or flashy moments, one of her main confidants was a gay man, and all the musical
sequences in the show were dream scenes which illuminated her demons—a “Glamour Dream,” a “Wedding Dream,” and the spectacular “Circus Dream.”