You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (41 page)

Once the reviews began appearing, it became clear that many critics had been as taken with the show as the opening-night crowd. In the
New York Times
, Frank Rich lavished praise on the show: “This is an evening in which even a throwaway wisecrack spreads laughter like wildfire through the house.” As for Coleman’s score, Rich said it was “a delirious celebration of jazz and pop styles sumptuously orchestrated by Billy Byers,” adding, “The effect is like listening to ‘Your Hit Parade’ of 1946, except that the composer’s own Broadway personality remakes the past in his own effervescent, melodic style.”

Clive Barnes wrote in the
New York Post
: “Taste, resonance and imagination—these are the three prime characteristics of the new musical ‘City of Angels.’” And for
USA Today
David Patrick Stearns, in a decidedly mixed review, wrote: “The show sounds like nothing Coleman or anybody else has written for Broadway.”

Dissatisfaction among the reviewers ran deeper than Stearns’s mixed notice. Howard Kissel, in the
Daily News
, admitted, “I want to be supportive about ‘City of Angels.’ Not because I enjoyed it. But because I know the American musical is in trouble.” A second opinion in this paper came a few weeks later, and on December 22 Doug Watt’s review ran under the headline “‘Angels’ is Heavenly.” In it he praised everything from Gelbart’s “dazzling book” to Coleman’s “large and exceedingly versatile score.” Watt also proclaimed that Zippel was “Coleman’s smartest lyricist since his work with Dorothy Fields and Carolyn Leigh.”

In many respects, some of the reviews confirmed the fears that Coleman had about the show before its opening. He knew that he was “going to do a jazz score with a completely different sound from even the Broadway jazz I’ve written. . . . I wanted to score this like a film and avoid conventional 32-bar songs.” The composer simultaneously worried that “doing something different is often not recognized and my constant nightmare is that everyone will pick on it. . . . I don’t wish them to begrudge us what we’ve done.”
41

Regardless of any of the negative reviews, the praise from the
New York Times
was all that was necessary to ensure the show’s health at the box office. Ironically, it would also have meant that the show’s cast recording would have been released by RCA.

While the show had prepared for its opening, the label sent a proposal to the producers and creative team. In it, Rosenfield recalled, “Everything was negotiable within the realm of reasonableness, except they put in one line saying, ‘If the reviews aren’t good (Frank Rich,
New York Times
), then we have the right not to record it.’”
42

Having a clause that gave the record company the ability to reconsider after opening was not unusual, but citing one specific review as grounds for it was extremely rare. Rosenfield continued, “Word came back through David to me that Cy said, ‘No. That’s an insult to say that it all hinges on one man. You can’t do that.’ But also word came back from Cy saying, “Take that out and we’ve got a deal.’”
43

The language was not taken out, and then came opening night and the
Times
review. The following day Rosenfield heard that RCA was trying to salvage the project, and late in the day he spoke to Zippel. “I said, ‘So they think they’re going to make this album.’ And David said, ‘It’s going to Columbia.’”
44

The cast album, like the show itself, broke with tradition: it was produced over the course of several weeks rather than in just one or two days. Harrell recalled, “I talked Cy into doing four days with the orchestra in session with no singers, and they played through I would say maybe seventeen of the show’s twenty-two charts. There were a few that Cy said, ‘You gotta really do this live. So don’t track it.’” According to Harrell, what this meant was “the engineers had time to digest what the orchestra was supposed to be and get it all set. . . . It was really clean, and you can hear Billy Byers’s every little nuance, which usually when you’re trying to do a whole album of a show in one weekend, everything gets mishmoshed together.”
45

The care lavished on the album went well beyond the time allotted for its recording and mixing. Coleman, whom Zippel likened at one point to a “musical dramatist,”
46
created a new musical sequence for the beginning of the recording. “He set that album up so that no matter who you were, if you heard that opening part, then you know where you’re headed,” said Harrell, adding, “That’s very sharp.”
47

As with his past cast recordings, the one for
City of Angels
allowed journalists to wax eloquent about Coleman and Zippel’s achievements after having had the chance to digest the score after repeated listens (a luxury not afforded to a theater critic, who gets only one chance to experience a score before casting his or her opinion). In the May 6 edition of the
New York Times
Stephen Holden wrote, “Coleman’s score, with lyrics by Mr. Zippel, is a spirited pastiche of 40’s and 50’s pop-jazz and film noir movie music. It casts knowing winks at everything from the 50’s jazz trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross to the score for the 1956 film ‘The Man With the Golden Arm’ and pumps into it all a healthy dollop of traditional Broadway brassiness.”

And in a review in the
Washington Post
on June 15, Joe Brown said, “Thanks to some creative editing and production, Cy Coleman’s period-evocative tunes and David Zippel’s playful lyrics can stand alone when separated from Larry Gelbart’s sly script and Robin Wagner’s neato color-vs.-black-and-white setting.”

The release of the album timed out so that it was available as the Tony voters considered the plethora of nominations that the musical had received—eleven in all, including one for best musical. The chief competition
City of Angels
faced was
Grand Hotel
, which had garnered one more nomination, in the choreography category—unsurprising since
Angels
had no traditional dance numbers. In fact, Coleman had eschewed them. Fred Barton recalled the composer mentioning this while they were prepping the Los Angeles production of the musical: “I told Walter Painter [who was responsible for musical staging of the show] from the get-go ‘I don’t want to see one pointed toe!’” Barton added, “That was typically demonstrative of how Cy knew what he wanted and told who it was what he wanted and done.”
48

When the Tonys were presented,
City of Angels
and
Grand Hotel
split the awards almost evenly, but it was
City of Angels
that triumphed in the major categories. It won for score and book and took home the prize for best musical. In addition, Naughton was named best actor in a musical, and Graff received the prize for featured actress in a musical.

After this,
City of Angels
settled in for a comfortable run that extended into early 1992. The show would go on to have a national tour featuring Barry Williams (best known as oldest son Greg on television’s
The Brady Bunch
) as the detective, and in 1992 Blakemore would reprise his work as director on a production in London’s West End. Before that would happen, though, Coleman was off to his next musical. In fact, it was a show that for a while looked as if it might give the composer two openings during the 1990–91 season.

28.
The Will Rogers Follies

C
ity of Angels
hadn’t even finished a full week of previews when Mervyn Rothstein announced in the
New York Times
that a backers’ audition for
Ziegfeld Presents Will Rogers
would be held at the renowned 21 Club before the end of the month. This report about the musical, which would have music by Coleman, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a book by Peter Stone, also included the news that “the planned opening for the show, which has been in the works for three years, is early May.”
1
Indeed, the show had been in development for a while, and unlike many of Coleman’s other projects, where he had been part of the creative team from the outset, this one had started without him.

The piece was the brainchild of producer Pierre Cossette, who began his professional life as a booking agent in Las Vegas and transitioned to producing, becoming the man who brought the Grammy Awards ceremony to television in 1971. In the mid-1980s he was exploring the possibility of making a foray into the theatrical world. As he recalled in his memoir, “I had become convinced that the moment was right to break the British hold on the Broadway Musical Theater. My passion was to produce an Americana-style show that would counter all the British fare.”
2

Cossette had seen the one-man play
Will Rogers’ USA
—which, starring James Whitmore, had had a one-week run on Broadway in 1974—and felt then that the story of the great American humorist deserved a grander treatment onstage. As he contemplated a show that might rival such imported fare as
Cats
and
Les Misérables
, Cossette remembered the solo show and decided that a musical biography of Rogers’s life and exceptional career would be ideal for his purposes.

Born in 1879, in what was then known as Indian Territory and later became the state of Oklahoma, Rogers became one America’s first media celebrities in the initial quarter of the twentieth century, with a career that encompassed vaudeville, Broadway, movies, radio, and even journalism, thanks to a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Part of Rogers’s appeal was his ability to spin both ropes and a good phrase. Among some of his most famous adages were “I never met a man I didn’t like” and “Be thankful we’re not getting the government we’re paying for.” Rogers’s life ended early and tragically: he was killed, along with aviator Wiley Post, in a plane crash in 1935.

After negotiating the rights for Rogers’s life story, Cossette turned to James Lee Barrett, who had written the screenplays for
Shenandoah
,
The Green Berets
, and
Smokey and the Bandit
, among others, to do the script. For the score, the producer tapped “top country composer and songwriter John Durrell.”
3
As for a star, Cossette engaged singer-songwriter John Denver, whose career was almost as extensive as Rogers’s. Denver’s hits included “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and as an actor he had starred in the popular movie
Oh, God!

Unfortunately, Denver was not satisfied with Durrell’s work. Furthermore, Cossette came to realize that what Barrett had written was not at all appropriate for the stage. “So, there I was, holding the rights to produce
The Will Rogers Follies
starring John Denver, forced to start from scratch with a new writer and a new composer.
4

At this juncture Cossette went to Peter Stone, whose career as a writer for both stage and screen dated back to the early 1960s. His work in New York had garnered a Tony Award for the musical
1776
, and in Hollywood he had won an Academy Award for
Father Goose
, which Coleman had scored. Stone met with Cossette but didn’t find the idea for the show all that appealing. He told Cossette, “Frankly, I know Will Rogers’s life, and there’s nothing in it except his career and the things he said.”
5
Nor did the general idea of an onstage biography interest him: “You either have to lie and that doesn’t serve history very well, or you end up with something strange but not very compelling.”
6

On reflection, however, Stone—much as Coleman had done with
On the Twentieth Century
—found a way into the material. He thought of Rogers’s time in the
Ziegfeld Follies
in the 1920s and began to imagine having Rogers’s life unfold onstage as if presented by the great showman. Armed with this conceit, Stone met with director-choreographer Tommy Tune, with whom he had worked on
My One and Only
. Tune, of course, burst onto the scene with his dances for—and Tony-winning performance in—Coleman’s
Seesaw
. Since then his ascendancy among the creators of new musicals on Broadway had been steady, and he had directed and choreographed
A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine
,
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
, and
Nine
, picking up an additional five Tony Awards.

Tune had the same initial reaction as Stone to the idea of putting a biography of Rogers onstage: “Rogers’s life is not musical and he didn’t have a highly conflicted life—he became a great man and died tragically.”
7
But after listening to Stone’s concept, Tune saw the possibilities and was immediately interested.

Tune’s involvement meant that Cossette had rebounded. In addition to a book writer, director, and star, the producer had a composer, because Denver had signed on to write the show’s songs. His busy schedule, however, began to cause delays in the project’s evolution, and Stone came to realize that Denver might not want to write the music. He brought the issue up. “I said, ‘Look John, maybe this is something you should star in but not write the score for.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’”
8

Cossette had already reached that conclusion, and to forestall further delays he had started talking about the piece with Coleman, who gravitated toward the idea and subject, suggesting that he write the score with Comden and Green. Since their time together on
On the Twentieth Century
, the trio had been hoping to find another show, and in absence of that they collaborated on the occasional song—for instance, they contributed a number to
Diamonds
, an Off-Broadway revue about baseball that Harold Prince directed in 1984, and they worked on a pair of songs for
Magic Me
, a special benefit concert.

After Denver’s departure as composer, the quartet of writers started in on the show in earnest, and by March 1987 things were looking promising enough that word of the show’s development could be shared with the press. “It’s being slowly simmered,” reported Enid Nemy in the
New York Times
, “and has already entailed many, many months of work. Even under the best of circumstances, it probably won’t go into rehearsal until early next year.” In addition to announcing the writers and directors, Nemy reported that the show would most likely be a vehicle for Denver. As Stone put it, “We’re about midway through writing and organizing the material, and there are about half-a-dozen songs written.”
9

Denver’s involvement with the show, however, would come to a complete end in short order. After the writers presented him with their songs, Stone recalled, “He wanted to change a lot of the lyrics and said, ‘This is an old-fashioned show.’ We said, ‘No this is a new-fashioned idea that’s never been tried before.’ What he was talking about, I think was that the music was not rock. I sort of made a hard shove, because that seemed to be what he wanted, and he separated himself from it.”
10

But the star’s departure did not kill the show, and the team continued to refine what they had even as Coleman continued working on the other musicals on his docket. By February 1989 the complete first draft included an array of sixteen numbers.

As 1989 progressed Coleman saw both
Welcome to the Club
and
City of Angels
reach Broadway. During the same time, Tune—with Stone’s assistance as show doctor—shepherded the musical
Grand Hotel
to Broadway (which opened just as
Angels
was starting its preview period). As the two shows settled into their runs, Cossette began the process of raising money for
Ziegfeld Presents Will Rogers
.

Stone remembered, “Cossette had originally said to us, ‘I don’t know how to produce a show, but I can raise the money in twenty minutes.’ The first backers’ audition was at 21, very expensive, a hundred people invited, and I don’t think we raised a dollar and a half.”
11
Undaunted, Cossette scheduled two additional presentations, each, like the first, featuring Coleman, Comden, and Green as the performers of the musical material. Cossette’s efforts were greeted with similarly disappointing results financially.

Alongside this lackluster fund-raising Cossette, Tune, and the team also began to consider who might be able to take the title role in the show. It was Cossette’s wife, Mary, who suggested they consider Keith Carradine. “He’d be the perfect one,” she said. Carradine had some Broadway experience. He had appeared in
Hair
during its original run at the Biltmore Theatre, and in 1982 he had starred alongside the great theatrical couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in the play
Foxfire
. Carradine’s primary credits, however, were on the screen, and his work there was significant. He had starred in films like
Welcome to L.A.
,
The Duellists
, and
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, as well as Robert Altman’s
Nashville
, in which he performed his original song, “I’m Easy,” a tune that won him an Academy Award. When he was approached about auditioning for the role, Carradine agreed to come to New York; he later admitted, “I was quietly wishing for [the part].”
12

The day of the audition arrived, and Carradine found himself on a Broadway stage with the entire creative team in the house. “I stood up on the stage and did what was required of me: sang a couple of songs and did a little bit of a monologue from the show. And then Pierre Cossette, who was producing and who had invited me in for the audition, asked me to go ahead and tell some stories, or tell a story that he had heard me tell before. It actually was a story about John Wayne on the set of
The Cowboys
.”
13

After that, he remembered, “I met everyone. I mean, I said, ‘Hello’ to everyone before the audition and then, after the audition, they were all really cordial and sweet and basically, I mean, I was sort of told right there and then that I had the role.”
14
A slightly more dramatic account of the afternoon appeared in the
New York Times
just before the show opened. “‘Halfway through the audition,’ Mr. Cossette said, ‘Tommy stands up and says, ‘That’s Will Rogers, and that’s the end of it.’”
15

Carradine’s casting meant that there was now a star of significance to present at backers’ auditions. To appear alongside him at such events playing Rogers’s wife, Betty, Coleman turned to one of his leads from
City of Angels
, Dee Hoty, who recalled: “Cy said he wanted to talk to me about a show he was writing about Will Rogers. He played me the songs. He didn’t have anything written down.” She liked what she heard, and eventually Coleman provided her a tape of the melodies and a lyric sheet. Hoty said that she spent her vacation in 1990 on the beach “trying to scan the words to the music” in preparation for a backers’ audition that would be held at Tavern on the Green.
16

Having Carradine and Hoty perform at this event was shrewd, but it did, according to Stone, ruffle feathers among the writers: “Betty and Adolph were upset. . . . They wanted to do their own songs. I went to them quite honestly and said, ‘Look, one of our problems is that you’re Comden and Green, you’re performing artists, and when you get up to sing they’re seeing you as Comden and Green, not as the characters in the play.”
17

Stone’s instincts proved to be on target. Carradine’s and Hoty’s work was enough to secure the funding for the show, with people like longtime Coleman supporter Martin Richards, his partner Sam Crothers, and theater owner James M. Nederlander coming on board, as well as Japan Satellite Broadcasting, which invested nearly one-third of the show’s $6.25 million budget. The deal was an historic one, and when the details of it were made public, it warranted coverage on the front page of
Variety
. In return for the investment, the company “won exclusive electronic rights for Japan and Southeast Asia, including limited broadcasts of a video of the show, a possible homevideo and dibs on first-class and touring rights for the region.”
18

With these investments it was now possible for a theater to be booked and an opening-night date to be set. The show would open on May 1, 1991, and, like Coleman’s
Sweet Charity
twenty-five years earlier, it would play a newly refurbished Palace Theatre.

Tune, who had used a workshop-like rehearsal process in the development of
Grand Hotel
, decided to bring
Ziegfeld
to Broadway in a similar manner. A three-week workshop was scheduled in December 1990, during which the creators could determine the sort of structural and musical revisions they would like to make based on the casting and the show’s needs. After this, a more traditional rehearsal period would begin with the revised material.

Beyond Carradine and Hoty, who landed the role she played at the backers’ audition, the company included Dick Latessa, who had a line of Broadway credits that stretched back to the late 1960s, among them the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s
Follies
, and would win a Tony Award in 2003 for
Hairspray
. He was on board to play Will’s father, Clem. In addition, Cady Huffman, who had appeared in one incarnation of Coleman’s
Let ’Em Rot
, was cast as “Ziegfeld’s Favorite,” the Follies chorine who was not so subtly having an affair with the impresario.