You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (34 page)

It was a comprehensive vision meant to evoke the grandeur of a big-top entertainment, and one that greatly expanded on what Bramble had originally envisioned: a vest-pocket musical intended for a company of three principals and an ensemble of nine. In fact, Gordon remembered that originally “they wanted to do it in a very small way, like at the Brooks Atkinson. I remember that was one theater we looked at, rather than a regular musical theater house. . . . It was supposed to be small house, big concept that would be just like a circus exploding out of the theater. And then it evolved into a bigger show.”
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To bring this larger show to life visually, the creators originally turned to Oscar and Tony Award–winning designer Tony Walton, who had a friendship with Coleman that dated back to the early 1960s, when Coleman’s first musicals were being produced on Broadway and Walton’s first wife, Julie Andrews, was astonishing audiences in shows like
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
. In addition, Walton was the scenic and costume designer for
Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue
, which Layton directed.

At the time Walton was working on two films and did not believe he would be able to add a theater project to his docket, but he agreed to a meeting with the director. Walton recalled, “Joe said, ‘I just need to sit down with you and describe the show, because it’s going to be the simplest musical you’ve ever had to tackle in your life.” During the course of the meeting, Walton had an assistant take notes as Layton described the show and its requirements, and as Walton remembered it, “[My assistant] had just completed a whole yellow pad by the time Joe arrived at the end of the first act. So I said, ‘Joe, would it be alright if I just did the poster?’”
21

David Mitchell, whom Layton had chosen as the scenic designer of
I Love My Wife
, would ultimately be the one who created the flexible circus-inspired environment for
Barnum
, enhancing the audience’s sense of the musical’s immediacy by extending the stage of the St. James out over the orchestra pit.

Even Coleman’s music seemed to reach out and surround theatergoers. Not only did members of the orchestra file into the aisles during each performance, but also two pianists were placed in boxes on either side of the stage. Ted Kociolek, who began his relationship with Coleman’s shows on
I Love My Wife
, for which he joined the production as second pianist and later helped assemble the bands for the show in other cities, remembered what it was like to be a musician working on
Barnum
: “I just loved playing it. Because you’re right there in the audience’s lap. There were other people, literally, in the boxes.”
22

For costumes Layton turned to Theoni V. Aldredge. At the time she was one of Broadway’s most sought-after designers because of her astute ability to combine elegance, showbiz flair, and down-to-earth naturalism, qualities that were in evidence at the time in her designs for
A Chorus Line
and
Annie
. For the show’s orchestrations Coleman once again turned to Hershy Kay, who served in the same capacity for
On the Twentieth Century
.

As for the company beyond Dale and Close, it included, in other principal roles, Terri White, a vet of Broadway’s
Ain’t Misbehavin’
, who played Joice Heth, one of Barnum’s first attractions; Marianne Tatum, who made her Broadway debut as a teenager in
Half a Sixpence
and went on to a career that encompassed other Broadway and Off-Broadway work, as well as seven seasons at the Houston Grand Opera, as Jenny Lind, the Scandinavian singer whom Barnum billed as “the Swedish Nightingale”; and Leonard John Crofoot, who had toured with Carol Channing in
Hello, Dolly!
and appeared on Broadway in shows like
The Happy Time
and
Gigi
, as Barnum’s superstar, General Tom Thumb.

Beyond these five the show was filled with young artists, many of whom, like Teirstein, came to the show with circus experience and were making their Broadway debuts. Among the future headliners in the company were Terrence Mann, who would go on to starring roles in
Cats
,
Beauty and the Beast
, and
Les Misérables
, and Sophie Schwab, who, billed as Sophie Hayden, ten years after
Barnum
would win accolades while starring in a Broadway revival of Frank Loesser’s
The Most Happy Fella
.

The company assembled for rehearsals in February and found that Coleman and Stewart had outfitted Bramble’s book, which had changed in subtle but significant ways since the composer first saw it, with fifteen numbers. For this show, more than for his past three, the composer drew liberally, and admittedly, from his trunk. The tune of Jenny Lind’s arialike “Love Makes Such Fools of Us All” was “When Did You Know?,” which was to have been a ballet in
Sweet Charity
but ultimately was only heard as a piece of underscoring. One of Barnum’s biggest numbers, “Out There,” used a driving melody that Coleman had written for “Charge,” a duet sung by the strong-willed title character of
Eleanor
and her bombastic uncle, Teddy Roosevelt.

Additionally, Coleman expanded on snippets of music from his work on
Compulsion
as well as from an unused idea for
Little Me
and even a cut song from
On the Twentieth Century
, which has the beginnings of “Join the Circus” running through it.

But the
Barnum
score wasn’t merely a patchwork of unheard or little-known Coleman. It contained a wealth of music that Coleman wrote specifically for it, ranging from “Black and White,” an extended ensemble number that evoked memories of songs by both Fats Waller and the songwriting team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, to the John Philip Sousa–like march “Come Follow the Band,” to the George M. Cohan pastiche “Bigger Isn’t Better,” with its direct musical sampling of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (the tune that Coleman had played over thirty years before when he made his radio debut).

The show also contained music specifically created for the talents of its performers, particularly leading man Dale. “I remember telling him and Mike that in the script there was mention of Barnum’s Museum in Lower Broadway, and wouldn’t it be great to list as many items as possible in a patter song,” Dale recalled. “I told them that I would be able to sing the song very fast, as I had once been a pop singer and had done some ‘scat’ singing in my early days. I then sang a very fast number to them made famous by Annie Ross called ‘Twisted.’ Two or three days later they came up with ‘The Museum Song.’”
23

Barnum
, nontraditional to start with, given its environmental and circus nature, needed a similarly unconventional rehearsal period, starting with where the company worked on the production: the unused ballroom at the then rundown McAlpin Hotel at Herald Square. It was a space that was large enough and high enough to allow for the performers to not only work on the scenes and songs but also the show’s circus elements.

Furthermore, the cast took part in actual circus training. “One of the first days of rehearsal, we went over to Big Apple Circus and actually worked on real circus trapezes and ropes and things,” recalled Tatum, who also remembered that Layton insisted that “everyone else in the whole company had to learn how to juggle, and I remember being very grateful that I was exempted from that.”
24

After the training away from the McAlpin, Layton also instituted “play time,” when, according to White, the members of the ensemble “all pulled out their toys, their single ladder and passing clubs, and so on.” Layton, along with Coleman, would watch what they were doing, and then White recalled, “Joe would say, ‘Cy, I need music for a scene change going into Susan B. Anthony,’ and then Cy, just watching the flow of the passing and how the clubs moved, began connecting the music to the movement on stage.” It was in this manner that Coleman wrote music, based on the opening number “There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute,” to create the underscoring for a crossover into a restaurant. White marveled, “It was just craziness as far as I was concerned.”
25

Coleman’s ability to improvise on the songs he had written was demonstrated time and again during rehearsal and then in the theater itself one day during a lunch break, when sound designer Otts Munderloh asked him to go to the calliope onstage and begin playing. White was in the house when it happened: “He just sat there and played the entire score like circus music. It was like magic on the stage, and him just glowing being able to do this. . . . He never stopped or said, ‘Now I’m going to try this.’ He just went from one song to the next to the next to the next, and then, after like fifteen minutes, he got up and said, ‘Okay. I’m done.’”
26
Munderloh captured what Coleman had performed, and it became the preshow music.

Layton also infused the process with a liberal dose of improvisation. “Joe was someone who wasn’t a great planner. I mean, he planned but not in the way that Gower Champion planned. Joe did a lot on his feet. And often the things that he did on his feet were the best,” recalled Bramble, who pointed to Layton’s handling of Chairy’s death in the second act as a particularly apt example.
27

Bramble had written the scene so that it included a duet reprise of “The Colors of My Life,” during which Barnum charmed his dying wife by magically producing enough flowers to create a bouquet. After this she was simply led offstage by the White-Faced Clown. One day, Bramble recalled, “something popped into [Joe’s] head as he was doing it. He said to the stage manager, ‘Go get me the jugglers. Go get me anyone who can juggle.’”
28

Layton then proceeded to stage the reprise so that while Dale and Close sang, the ensemble members appeared and began to juggle. Late in the song Chairy, who had long eschewed Barnum’s profession, took three of the balls and began juggling herself, suggesting that she had finally understood her husband. Then, as the song ended, “She tosses the balls to Barnum who begins juggling as Chairy and six jugglers exit.”
29

In the process of adding a circus-performance aspect to the song, Layton had found a metaphorical way of bringing the couple closer together spiritually than they had been throughout the rest of the show, which only made her exit from Barnum’s life all the more poignant. Bramble looked back on Layton’s work with this scene admiringly: “He created that moment, which was just gorgeous.”
30

Not everything about rehearsals and the company’s arrival at their preview period was as much fun as “play time.” One exceptionally difficult day was the first orchestral play-through, the moment when the company hears for the first time the score as it will be played in the theater. As Bramble recalled, “It’s usually the most thrilling moment on a musical. And we went to Carroll Music and the orchestrations were unusable. Hershy Kay had had a stroke, unbeknownst to any of us. . . . It was all ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and demented. It was the work of a damaged mind. When it finished, everybody was just so heartbroken.”
31

Coleman scrambled to salvage this portion of the show. Bramble remembered, “Cy called every orchestrator who was in the metropolitan area that weekend and just handed out the songs, and said, ‘This is what we have, and this is what the lineup is.’ It was Bill Byers. It was Phil Lang. It was Larry Wilcox. It was Michael Gibson. I can’t think if there were others.”
32

These rush reorchestrations occurred in the days leading up to what was to have been the first preview on April 5, but this performance, as well as several subsequent ones, were canceled. When the cancellations were announced in the
New York Times
on April 4, the reason cited was: “A spokesperson for the production said the transit strike had delayed completion of the work on the production.”

Indeed,
Barnum
was facing problems beyond the orchestration debacle. Gordon recalled, “The costumes weren’t ready for our first preview, because the workers couldn’t get to their workrooms to work on the costumes.”
33
But even with the delay, some of the clothes didn’t arrive at the theater on time.

Bramble described what awaited audiences when the first performances were offered: “Most of the musicians sat in view of the audience (because the band was onstage) and holding their instruments for most of the performance. . . . As the arrangements were finished, they went into the show, but we started with a lot of the show being played with two pianos and half costumes.”
34

There were other problems as well, notably the show’s length: two and a half intermissionless hours. “The show, I originally wrote it in one act, and I still believe that it could play more effectively in one act than it does in two because the story isn’t that big. It’s not a strong enough plot to take the break at the interval and come back and do a second act. But I had to give in on that because there was just too much else going on. But we did play the first preview—we played a few previews—with the show in one act.”
35

Barnum
might have been shortened during rehearsals, but according to Bramble, there were numbers that “Cy wasn’t willing to cut until he saw how they played.”
36
Coleman eventually gave in, not just on the song that he had hoped might become a stand-alone hit, “At Least I Tried,” an anthem that Barnum delivered just after he realized his affair with Lind had been a mistake, but also on “Now You See It, Now You Don’t,” a tune that showed how he outschemed a rival to acquire the American Museum. “Share and Share Alike,” a slight number performed by conjoined twins that was intended to illustrate how inextricably linked Barnum’s life was to the circus, also went.