You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (20 page)

Casting was completed while Fosse was bringing Simon on board and Coleman and Fields were finishing the score. Verdon would be joined by Helen Gallagher and Thelma Oliver, who would play Charity’s best friends, Nickie and Helene, respectively. In addition Gallagher, who picked up a 1952 Tony Award for her performance as Gladys Bumps opposite Harold Lang in the title role in a
Pal Joey
revival, and who appeared in other shows like
The Pajama Game
and
Hazel Flagg
, would serve as Verdon’s understudy. Oliver, who was getting her Broadway bow, had a number of Off-Broadway credits, including the musical
Cindy
. In addition, she attracted considerable attention for her performance in the movie
The Pawnbroker
, which starred Rod Steiger.

The
Sweet Charity
cast also included John McMartin, who worked with Fosse on
The Conquering Hero
and
Pleasures and Palaces
, as Charity’s love interest, the nebbishy Oscar; James Luisi (who’d just been on Broadway in Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim’s
Do I Hear a Waltz?
) as Vittorio Vidal, the Italian film star who shows Charity an evening of kindness after meeting her outside of a discotheque; and John Wheeler as Herman, the guy running the Fan-Dango Ballroom, where Charity works. The company also featured a former Miss America, Sharon Ritchie, as the film star’s fiery on-again-off-again girlfriend and Ruth Buzzi (who would soon be known throughout the country through her work on Rowan and Martin’s
Laugh-In
) in a variety of comic roles.

As rehearsals began, Simon was still in the process of revising the book. Thelma Oliver recalled, “Right at the beginning, there were a lot of line changes that came. Almost at every rehearsal we were getting new lines, and mostly for the principal characters, including us, Charity’s sidekicks. There were actually three of us to begin with, and in a matter of a few days they whittled it down to just Helen Gallagher and myself.”
9

Simon’s book revisions meant that Coleman and Fields were also changing and cutting their own material. One of the most notable alterations after Simon became involved was the elimination of a scene set at a carnival where a hypnotist took Charity back to her childhood. It was a scene Fosse had adapted directly from
Cabiria
, and Coleman and Fields had penned a charming number for it, “Pink Taffeta Sample Size 10,” which poignantly underscored Charity’s intrinsically hopeful nature.

Another song that was jettisoned as Simon reworked the book was “Free Thought in Action Class,” an ensemble number set at the 92nd Street Y, where Charity went to better herself intellectually. When she got to the Y, she overheard Oscar ask which room his class was in and decided she’d follow him, but before she did, she wanted to know what it was about. The receptionist described a self-analysis discussion group in which people are pushed into saying whatever comes into their minds.

For this scene Coleman and Fields had written a comic choral number, but in Simon’s revision to the script neither Oscar nor Charity reached the class. Instead, the playwright imagined, based on his own experience, that the two got stuck in an elevator, causing Oscar’s claustrophobia to kick into high gear. The result was a new song entirely, “I’m the Bravest Individual.”

Simon’s earliest rewrites contained another new scene that inspired one of the show’s signature numbers. When they read what Simon had written for Charity as she luxuriated in the apartment of the Italian film star, they wrote, in short order, “If My Friends Could See Me Now.” Another early change to the score came without prodding from Simon. Coleman and Fields, realizing that “I Can’t Let You Go,” a number that they’d penned for Vittorio was overly syrupy, wrote a new one with more emotional and musical weight, “Too Many Tomorrows.”

Such instincts for fitting the songs to the needs of the show was something that Oliver recognized from the first day of rehearsals: “That’s when I thought, ‘My god, this stuff is really soulful.’ I was surprised that it wasn’t typically showy show tunes. It had some real ‘ummph’ to it. . . . And it made it so easy for me to actually just sink into the character.”
10

But even with daily changes, rehearsals never became as tense as they were during
Little Me
. “[We] avoided almost all of the problems of musicals in trouble,” Simon wrote in his memoir. Even when Fosse and Verdon would develop new routines ad hoc, a generous, collaborative spirit prevailed. As Simon described it, “Cy Coleman often sat at the piano improvising variations on the themes of the score so to fit Bob’s need in creating a dance.”
11
Performer Oliver, too, remembered Coleman’s energy for whatever might be needed: “He was just an amazing light. He was always like that. He never changed. No matter what kind of changes he had to make. He just never stopped being that bundle of joy.”
12

An overall sense of congeniality did, however, vanish when it came time for the performers to don the lavishly conceived and delicately created costumes by Irene Sharaff, who had just picked up her fourth Oscar for the epic
Cleopatra
(Sharaff would eventually have five Academy Awards, her last being for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
).

The stories about Fosse’s reaction to some of these ensembles (and the fate they fared as the dancers performed in them) are legion. Perhaps the most famous involves what happened when the ensemble stepped onto the stage for “Rich Man’s Frug,” a number that had been conceived along the lines of “Rich Kid’s Rag” to mock the upper classes at play. Fosse took his inspiration from watching people at the hot club of the time, Arthur’s, which was run by Richard Burton’s ex-wife, Sybil Burton.

For this number, dancer Lee Roy Reams remembered, “[The costumes] were different colors and different styles, as normal people would be in a disco, and they were beiges and browns, but they were silk mohair. And we started dancing that number and we did the first big plié and you just heard [makes the sound of fabric ripping]. All the seats of the pants went out. The jackets all ripped. And the girls, because of that step where they lean back, their dresses had all of this trim, they were getting their heels caught in the dresses, and they had hand-painted tights from Paris that were like paisley and everything. One plié and the knees came out. We finished that number and we looked like we had just gone through a war. The clothes were just all ripped, and Fosse was going crazy.”
13

Something needed to be done, and Verdon came up with the solution. During rehearsals, she had been wearing a black shift, a slip really, that would look chic and also be functional for the number. Again, one of the potentially apocryphal stories about the
Charity
rehearsals goes that she taught the seamstresses how to quickly whip up similar garments on their sewing machines.

When talking about his mother and the potential veracity of the tale, Verdon’s son, James Henaghan, said, “She would do things like that. She knew that stuff. That’s kind of the amazing thing about her. That she knew how to do the costumes. She knew what kind of shoes would work. She knew that if a costume designer brought in a costume and said, ‘Here it is,’ she would look at it, and if she knew the dance, she knew whether or not it would work. And she would be able to not just say, ‘I don’t like it, it’s not going to work’ but rather, ‘You know you have to cut it this way, and the seam needs to be here.’ So I can imagine the tale being quite accurate.”
14

With costume issues mostly solved, as well as the potentially thornier issue of who would receive credit for writing the book (it was given solely to Neil Simon), the musical departed for its first tryout engagement at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia. After three previews the show opened on December 6, and the following morning raves began to pour in. Among them was Jerry Gaghan’s in the
Philadelphia Daily News
, where he wrote that it was “the most enlivening first night of the season.” Of Coleman and Fields’s work, he said that “[they] have turned out not only songs with chart potential . . . but they have furthered the action with bright patter numbers.”

In the
Evening Bulletin
the day after the Philadelphia opening, Ernest Schier ended his enthusiastic notice with “‘Sweet Charity’ is a dizzy, dancing valentine and never mind that it isn’t the right time of year. It’s always the right time for a bright, cheerful show.”

On the day these reviews ran, the rush on the box office was so great that police had to be summoned to control crowds at the Shubert, where, according to a report in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, “two patrolmen stayed in the lobby to supervise the lines of buyers.” Once the show had become a standing-room only event, the producers even stopped running ads, because there was no need to promote a show for which no seats were available.

Along with the praise the show received came some cautionary notices about its shortcomings. In his AP review Norman Goldstein wrote, “Hopefully the expected Christmas trimming for ‘Sweet Charity’ will make it a polished gem before it gets to the renovated Palace Theater in New York next month.” Heedful of his words, the creators embarked on the task of honing the show.

The critics couldn’t have known about one particular issue that needed to be addressed: the demands that the musical was placing on its star, who found herself onstage almost all of the time.

Verdon, who was never particularly assured of herself as a singer, was concerned primarily about the number of songs she had to deliver. She opened the show with “You Should See Yourself,” sang and danced up a storm solo in “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” and had two lengthy ballads, “Where Am I Going?” and the highly praised “Poor Everybody Else.” In addition, she was part of the trio in “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” and shared two duets with McMartin.

The two ballads in succession were the biggest problem, and as Emile Charlap, the show’s copyist, remembered, “Gwen said, ‘I can’t sing both of them.’ She gave them a choice.”
15
Initially Coleman was unwilling to let either of them go, but eventually he conceded to the need for cutting “Poor Everybody Else.” But it was a tune that Coleman held on to, and during the course of the next six years he would return to it as he developed several other properties.

Something was needed to replace it, however, and Coleman and Fields set about developing a new number that would allow Charity to express her ebullience at finding Oscar. The result was “I’m a Brass Band,” a high-stepping dance number that allowed Verdon to take center stage with minimal demands on her voice. By Coleman’s estimate, he and Fields completed the song in just a couple of hours. Fosse staged it as soon as it was written, and, by the time
Sweet Charity
opened Detroit it had what would become one of its signature numbers in place.

Reams remembered the changeover between the numbers: “With ‘Poor Everybody Else,’ she was singing it to herself as she was packing a suitcase, and it was a nice song. But when they did ‘I’m a Brass Band,’ because it was a big musical number with dancing—a big production number—it was much more valuable to the show. . . . The amazing thing is to watch creative people create when you’re there, and how they came up with that song and what it meant, and then watching Bob Fosse choreograph off the top of his head, and us being onstage while he was doing it. I was just overwhelmed by that.”
16

Coleman’s facility at developing new melodies was nothing new to either Fosse or Simon, but Simon had never seen Fields at work on a lyric, and looking back on the evolution of
Charity
he singled her out: “She was tough, all business, and could meet a crisis with the best of them. . . . It was easier for her to rewrite a song than to fight for one. And took less time.”
17

The show faced other challenges in Philadelphia besides the material: an injury. One night, in the scene in which Charity hides herself in a closet while the Italian film star reconciles with his girlfriend, Verdon inadvertently inhaled a feather from one of the costumes onstage. She didn’t notice it when it happened, but a few days later she began complaining of problems breathing, and in short order her voice became raspy and she was feeling incredible discomfort in her throat. It turned out that the feather had lodged itself around her vocal chords, and while it was removed and she was recovering, Gallagher, unrehearsed, had to take over the role.

Verdon returned to the show and played the final Philadelphia performances, and then the company moved to Detroit for the Christmas season. The show officially opened on December 19, and the following morning the company once again found reviews filled with accolades.

Louis Cook, in the
Detroit Free Press
, said, “There are moments during ‘Charity’ when one has that tingly feeling of being present at great instants of theater history.” Jay Carr’s notice in the
Detroit News
sounded a more cautionary note. He found much to admire in Verdon’s work but noted problems with Simon’s writing: “The book’s strength lies in its impudence of viewpoint, but its level of immediacy lags behind that of the lively, spirited dancing.” Interestingly, while both critics cited the numbers that they favored most, neither mentioned either Coleman or Fields by name.

Following the opening the creators set about making their final changes. The process included Coleman and Fields revisiting one of the first songs they had written for the show, “You Wanna Bet?”—a number that had, as Coleman put it in an interview with David Kenney on WBAI in 2004, “a real beat under it.” Coleman said that when he first wrote the music, to be delivered by Oscar, “The guy was very brassy. He was more like a Sinatra character.” But McMartin, who was singing the song, was “more of a shy, inhibited guy. So, Bob said, ‘We’ve got to change it,’ and Dorothy said, ‘The song doesn’t fit him now.’ And I said, ‘Fine, let’s write a new song.’ But Dorothy said, ‘No, I like that melody.’”