You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (28 page)

“The performing thing was a big thing. It’s all one memory of Cy at the piano underscoring what you were saying as a joke,” Newman remembered. The results of Coleman’s impromptu songwriting about topics as simple as a lost dog would leave the group “screaming on the floor.”
10

In late 1974 Newman was approached by Wynn Handman, who was the artistic director of American Place Theatre Off-Broadway, an organization committed to nurturing new talents. Handman had, as Newman described it, “a very good idea for a revue about our future and knew I loved to put things like that together. I love the challenge of that sort of thing.” Handman had already talked to some writers about contributing to the show, and Newman began to discuss it with people she knew, including Peter Stone. Eventually, Newman recalled realizing “I need songs. And then, I thought Cy and Betty and Adolph; they’ve never done anything together. So I talked to them all, and they said, ‘Sure!’”
11

During this first-time collaboration, the trio developed the working habits that would be their norm for nearly twenty years. They would always work closely together, experimenting with ideas in a free-form way. “Cy’s improvisations were insane,” Newman recalled, adding, “Adolph would say that they would have to say, ‘Stop, Cy. Play that again.’ Because so much came out of him. So much music and such original stuff that they took to having a tape recorder around, telling him, ‘Play it once more for the tape recorder.’”
12

Newman added, “Because it just came bubbling, bubbling, bubbling out of him—the music—that’s why he was such a great musical performer, jazz performer. He was filled with it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I know a lot and have known a lot of great, great composers, and most of them have a lot of that, but he had that extra performing thing.”
13

Eventually the writers came up with a trio of songs for
Straws in the Wind
. The most unusual, at least for Coleman, was “Simplified Language,” a meditation on what a future without gender in people’s vocabulary might be like. The underpinning of Coleman’s melody is one of his favorite styles, a march, but it’s written to be performed at double tempo to match Comden and Green’s linguistic playfulness, resulting in what might be considered the composer’s first patter song. The other tune that made it into
Straws
was “The Lost Word,” a driving, melancholy waltz, in which Coleman’s knowledge of and facility with Viennese traditions resulted in a superlatively moving lament to another notion that might disappear in the future: love. The trio’s third song for the show, “Goin’ Home,” found them working in yet another vein as they crafted a comedy tune that might have been perfect for Al Jolson, had he ever needed to play an extraterrestrial leaving Earth for his home planet.

Straws in the Wind
eventually grew to include numbers by Stephen Schwartz (then of
Godspell
fame and later the man behind
Wicked
), Billy Nichols, and the team of composer Galt MacDermot (
Hair
) and lyricist Ira Gasman, who would, because of this show, come to be one of Coleman’s collaborators.

Between songs,
Straws in the Wind
had traditional revue sketches from not just Stone but also future Oscar and Tony Award winner Marshall Brickman, as well as sequences more literary in style, notably an extended monologue from novelist Donald Barthelme.

The show enjoyed a monthlong run, but Newman opted to not have it open to the press (an option available to all artists working at American Place Theatre). “It was my call, which to this day I rue, not to allow critics in,” Newman mused. “It was so full of talent, but I did not feel that I had done my job well. Not that it wasn’t well directed. I just didn’t think it hung together, and that’s the problem with a revue, and I was a fool because it was so full of wonderful stuff. But at that time, I guess I was vulnerable enough not to do it.”
14

Despite the lack of critical assessment at the time the songs debuted, they would later come to garner praise once the lyricists included them in their show
A Party with Comden and Green
in early 1977. At this time, as critics assessed some of their most famous numbers, they also admired the show’s lesser-known titles, like “Simplified Language” and “The Lost Word.” A
Variety
review deemed these two “outstanding.”

Beyond resulting in three specific numbers,
Straws in the Wind
gave Coleman yet another avenue for future Broadway collaborations in a post–Dorothy Fields world.

20.
I Love My Wife

After
Straws in the Wind
concluded its limited Off-Broadway engagement, Coleman spent time pursuing a career as a soloist with symphony orchestras. He made his debut with the Milwaukee Symphony in November 1974 and followed it with an appearance in New York at Town Hall with the American Symphony. Similar engagements in 1975 took him to work with pops groups in Syracuse as well as Pittsburgh, where he appeared with legendary conductor Arthur Fiedler. He also took part in a series of New York concerts that were part of the world-renowned Newport Jazz Festival.

He also returned to the studio to record his first LP in eight years. The album,
The Party’s on Me
, took its title from the last song he’d written with Dorothy Fields, and as the LP’s cover art—a woman dancing hip to hip with the silhouette of another figure in front of what looks to be a mirror ball—seemed to indicate, much of the music on the album drew inspiration from America’s latest craze: disco.

In addition to a funked-up incarnation of the song that had been added to
Seesaw
for its national tour, the album contained covers of Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” and Neil Sedaka’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” along with a couple of original Coleman tunes: a Muzak-y “Cote d’Azure” and a number that he was prepping for the next Shirley MacLaine special that he was working on, “Bring Back the Good Old Days.” This latter tune, paired with “Chloe,” a disco cover of the 1920s tune from Gus Kahn and Neil Morét, was released as a single by the album’s label, RCA. Coleman’s impeccable piano work and the sharply intelligent arrangements he and Mike Berniker had created for the “Chloe” sparked with both listeners and dancers, putting the single briefly on
Billboard
’s “Disco Action” chart and later into the paper’s Easy Listening Top 50.

In many respects Coleman’s work on this LP seemed to be setting the stage for his next Broadway project, which began to come into focus just as “Chloe” was charting. The musical, slated to bring Coleman back together with Michael Stewart and producer Joe Kipness, would be an adaptation of a hit comedy from France: Luis Rego’s
Viens chez moi, j’habite chez une copine
, which translated roughly to “Come Up to My Place, I’m Living with a Girlfriend.”

Stewart, who had a house in the south of France, had traveled to Paris to see the show and was struck by what he saw there: “I found a packed house and a very mixed audience. There were families, kids, some very elegantly dressed people, others in jeans, and even a half row full of nuns, which surprised me, as I’d heard the show was about two ordinary middle-class couples (the guys were moving men) who live in a small suburb on the outskirts of Paris and decide that the four of them [want] to try a communal marital relationship.”
1

Stewart was impressed not only by the diversity of the audience that had come to see what he described as “a musical comedy about sex that wasn’t in the least bit sexual. It was completely a family show.” Furthermore, he was taken in by the production overall. “The musical numbers were handled in a very unusual manner. Not so much to forward the plot but to comment on it. Whenever they’d come to a musical number, one, two, or three of the guys would bring on their instruments, whoever was singing the number would go to either the right or left portals, unhook two microphones, they’d do the number almost as a sort of vaudeville presentation, and then go smoothly and lightly back into the plot.”
2

Stewart was so enamored of the show that he “called up Joe Kipness, one of Broadway’s most adventurous producers . . . and persuaded him to come to Paris and see the show. Kippy doesn’t know a word of French, but he could understand all of the laughter around him and agreed to get things moving.”
3

With Kipness involved and having determined to adapt the show for American audiences, creating “an X-rated musical for the entire family,”
4
Stewart then turned to Coleman, who came on board because the idea of it appealed to him. “It used a revue format but it wasn’t really a revue.”
5

That spring Stewart and Coleman completed work on the adaptation, resetting the action in Trenton, New Jersey. They also rethought the plot, so that the musical centered not on two couples’ communal life together but on their attempts to join the ranks of the sexually liberated with a little wife swapping. “There’s an innocence in these four people,” Stewart said, “like all of the people I’ve ever written about.”
6

And as the piece evolved, the importance of the musicians in the show expanded. They weren’t just a group who were called onstage to accompany the characters when a number began. In Stewart and Coleman’s adaptation of Rego’s script, they became characters in the show, old high school pals of the central characters who, along with playing music, delivered lines and sometimes served as stagehands.

The show’s plot, style, and setting gave Coleman the chance to write a score that spanned the gamut of music, similar to what might be found by spinning a radio dial from one end to the other. Coleman himself said that the show’s music was “a hybrid,” adding, “But a hybrid is what I am. Beethoven, jazz, Broadway, TV—it all mixes up into who I am.”
7
Indeed, the score to
I Love My Wife
has something for just about all musical tastes, from country (“Someone Wonderful I Missed”) to light contemporary pop (“Love Revolution”) to barbershop quartet (“A Mover’s Life”) to honky-tonk (“Hey There Good Times”).

In a couple of instances Coleman looked backward to his previous work when developing the score. One song, “By Threes,” was actually one of his old jazz instrumentals from the 1950s, “One-Two-Three.” Another, “Scream,” used a melody that he originally devised for
Eleanor
.

Eventually, the show had a bountiful seventeen songs, each in a different style yet seemingly cut from a similar piece of musical cloth thematically. And in Stewart’s first outing as both book writer and lyricist, Coleman found a partner who, as he said, “didn’t worry about writing like everybody else. He was fearless and smart.”
8

While the men worked, the search for a director was under way, and by August Joe Layton had been signed to direct and choreograph. Layton’s career on Broadway stretched back to the early 1950s, when he made his debut as a performer in the original cast of
Wonderful Town
. Since then he had established himself as a choreographer and director, working on shows ranging from
The Sound of Music
(where he provided musical staging) to
Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue
, which he entirely staged. Along the way Layton picked up a pair of Tony Awards for his dances, the first for Richard Rodgers’s
No Strings
and the second for
George M!
, a bio-tuner about George M. Cohan with a book by Stewart, John Pascal, and Francine Pascal.

Once script, score, and director were in place, casting began, and by September the eight-member company had been assembled. The actor-singers for the show were two Broadway veterans, Lenny Baker and Ilene Graff, who played husband and wife Alvin and Cleo; and two performers making their Broadway debuts, James Naughton and Joanna Gleason, who played the other couple, Wally and Monica.

For the musicians Coleman assembled a group that included bass player John Miller (who had worked with Coleman on the LP
The Party’s on Me
), guitarist Michael Mark, pianist Ken Bichel, and drummer Joseph Saulter. Because of the demands that would be placed on them, the musicians had to go through an audition process similar to that of the actors: reading lines, singing sample numbers, and even performing some simple dance steps. Miller joked about his memories of the audition. “They wanted us to do what in the business one would call choreography, but with musicians. I think they just wanted to know that we knew what our left leg was and what our right leg was.”
9

Miller, who had been specifically called in by Coleman, remembered being offered the gig of bass player and music director at his audition and later asked Stewart about his hiring: “I said to Michael Stewart, ‘Michael, why did you guys give me the gig?’ He said, ‘It’s very simple. When I had envisioned the role of Harvey, I envisioned a kind of short, kind of balding guy with glasses and a beard. Kind of above it all, within it all, and kind of like a jazz sage kind of guy. When you walked out on the stage, I turned to Cy, I said, ‘I don’t have to [see anyone else], even if this guy can barely carry a tune, can barely speak, he’s the perfect guy.’”
10

Once the company was formed, however, the production hit a snag. The cast was told that a backer had withdrawn support of the show’s relatively small—just $350,000—capitalization, and that the tryout, which had been set to begin at Philadelphia’s Forest Theatre on December 20, was scrubbed. All of the performers were asked to put a hold on their schedules until new financing could be secured. They agreed and even took part in backers’ auditions for the show, which were held in Coleman’s and Stewart’s apartments.

After the show opened, Coleman described the process of raising money for the production: “It turned out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Michael Stewart and I took this show to producers. Nobody was interested. Somebody would open a wallet on a street corner, and we’d stand and sing the songs. We had dinners all over Manhattan.”
11

By the beginning of 1977, however, their efforts had paid off. Terry Allen Kramer and Harry Rigby (who had backed
John Murray Anderson’s Almanac
, the show with Coleman’s first Broadway song in it) signed on as the show’s producers, and a new timeline for the musical fell into place. Following a four-week rehearsal period,
I Love My Wife
would play a three-week engagement in Philadelphia before opening on Broadway in March.

Sadly, once rehearsals were under way,
I Love My Wife
had to overcome another hurdle: the loss of director-choreographer Layton. “One day we came in to work, and they said, ‘Joe has been in an accident,’” Graff recalled. “They said that he had fallen from his loft and broken all the bones in his body and would not be continuing and that we were going to get a new director and a new choreographer.”
12

“I remember that morning terribly well,” said Naughton. “It was 10 o’clock in the morning down at the Ukrainian Hall on the Lower East Side, and all of a sudden we didn’t have a director. . . . We hung around trying to figure out what to do. Finally, an hour or two later, and I was sitting next to Cy as he was trying to find someone to come in. He put in a call to Gene Saks, who was living in California then with his wife, Bea Arthur. And, in fact, it was very funny. If you remember, Bea Arthur had a very deep voice, and Cy rang. . . . I remember him going ‘Hi Gene, it’s Cy!’ And then he said, ‘Oh, hello, Bea.’”
13

Saks had a reputation for his work in comedy, having directed the film versions of Neil Simon’s
Barefoot in the Park
and
The Odd Couple
and such light Broadway fare as Bernard Slade’s
Same Time, Next Year
and Simon’s
California Suite
. In addition, he had helmed the original production of Jerry Herman’s
Mame
, with Angela Lansbury.

After the phone call, Saks flew to New York to take a look at the piece. He later told reporters, “I’d been working with Cy on another musical that’s still in development. . . . I thought I owed him at least a trip to New York to listen.” Saks looked at what the company had worked on so far and, as he recalled, “Something happened to me when I saw the four young performers and four musicians who are the cast. I couldn’t get them out of my mind.”
14
It was enough for him, and soon he—along with choreographer Onna White, with whom he’d worked on both
Mame
and the musical
Half a Sixpence
—were on board.

It was an awkward time for the company. “None of us was really off book yet, and we had a long way to go,” Naughton said, “but all of a sudden we were in the position of having to audition what we were doing, what we had, for prospective directors.”
15

Nevertheless, a bond between Saks and the performers developed quickly, and by the end of the rehearsal period the cast had gained tremendous respect for Saks and his work. “He was heaven. Gene was one of those directors who makes you feel smart and funny because he responds to what you are doing. He laughs. To make him laugh is a great pleasure,” Gleason explained. “Gene also knows comedy and timing down to the millisecond, and Gene knows what is true to a character and what isn’t true to a character. He knows when you need to respond and when you don’t need to respond, even physically. His comedic gifts are prodigious.”
16

Graff looked back on the process of working with Saks and one particular contribution he made in the use of the musicians: “It was Gene’s idea to put them in the wacky costumes, so in my number, in ‘Love Revolution,’ they were devils, because they were the ones who were putting all of these naughty ideas in my head. And it was terrific.”
17

Graff’s respect for Coleman and his work was equally profound. “Cy was a musician. He knew everything there was to know. And I’m not a good musician, but I come from music, and so there was a kind of respect for my—as much as it was, which was not great—musicianship. But he knew that I came from music and that I understood what he did was good and that it was special and that if we needed to change a chord, we didn’t have to go to the arranger and say, ‘How do you do that?’ He knew how to write a great melody. The chords were interesting, the rhythms were fascinating, so you got the whole package.”
18

Miller’s memories of Coleman’s musicianship echoed Graff’s. “What was so interesting for musicians playing Cy’s music is that what would seem so complex a harmonic structure, how you’re in one key and then, all of a sudden, without anything jarring, you’re in the key that’s the diminished fifth of the beginning chord. So, for musicians playing his stuff, there would always be this—especially when we’d hear Cy play it the first time—there’d always be this look we’d give each other, ‘How did this guy get from here to there, having it seem so bloody seamless?’”
19