Homeward Bound (56 page)

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Imagine the scene in that Hell's Kitchen playground in 1959: a couple of kids looking for trouble, a couple of other kids more than happy to provide it. The neighborhood boys against the invaders; white skin against brown; the Irish against Puerto Rican, Micks against Spics. It's about turf, about keeping the outsiders where they belong—nowhere near here. Move the setting, and even if the faces and details change, the story remains the same: about anti-Semitism, about slavery and Jim Crow and South African apartheid, too; about purity, authenticity, and the promise/threat of assimilation; about the politics of folk music in Greenwich Village and the politics of folk music in England; about the generation gap in the 1960s and apartheid in South Africa; and about rock 'n' roll and Broadway, too; about who you think you are and who you know you aren't. “I was in some fights,” Paul had claimed of his own delinquent ways back in the studded-leather days of Baldies, Demons, Vampires, and Norseman. And as
The Capeman
headed to its playground rendezvous, Paul's blade was sharpened, oiled, and ready for action.

“I couldn't care less what the theater community, or whatever it is that they call themselves, think about this [
The Capeman
],” Paul snapped to
Vogue
's Bob Ickes. “I didn't write it for Broadway. I wrote it for me.” Paul had been dropping similar bombs since he started talking about the early reaction to
The Capeman
, but never so bitterly. Set into type in the pages of a popular national magazine, Paul's dismissive words ignited all of the anger that had been gathering around the play. The families of the victims, flanked by leaders of victims' rights groups, complained and led demonstrations. Still, some Puerto Rican immigrants and their families anticipated that
The Capeman
would be an enormous breakthrough: a showcase for their joyous culture and difficult history in America. But other Nuyoricans, as they had come to call themselves, saw yet another version of the violent stereotype that had reigned since Leonard Bernstein's
West Side Story
. As Vampires leader Tony Hernandez tells Agron in the play, “What home of the brave? This is a fuckin' war zone!” Indeed. Soon after, complaints from the cast and crew bubbled into view, with one anonymous source telling the
New York Post
that the atmosphere inside the production had become “almost intolerable.”

Could anyone make it stop? Paul's old friend and super-successful director Mike Nichols spent a day or two watching rehearsals and meetings, coming back with a frank and useful opinion that prompted quick action. Paul and his theatrical partners tossed
The Capeman
's directorial keys to Jerry Zaks, a top-drawer Broadway director whose ten-year hot streak of smash productions included the likes of
Six Degrees of Separation
,
Smokey Joe's Cafe
, and Neil Simon's
Laughter on the 23rd Floor
. Zaks greeted the beleaguered cast and crew with thousand-watt gusto: “You are the best of the best!” he proclaimed. “This will be a fantastic show!” Twenty years later, he looks back and laughs. “I was very sick at the time,” he says. “I had a very bad case of hubris.”

The scheduled January 3 opening was pushed back another four weeks to give Zaks enough time to tighten some scenes and fix a few others, but soon enough it was 8:00 p.m. on January 29. The lights went down, the curtain came up, and
The Capeman
came to life.

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The first act began with Agron as a child, an open-eyed Puerto Rican boy with no idea where New York City was, let alone what lay in store for him there. He was soon joined by Blades as the grown-up Salvador, just out of prison and addressing his mother. “There's a truth that still needs to be spoken,” he sings, and a moment later Anthony as the teenage Sal appears, running around a playground in the company of some other boys, joined by Blades's late-life Salvador, both describing the sweep of their existence with the lyrics of “I Was Born in Puerto Rico.” A flashback showed Agron as a small boy in Puerto Rico, a spirited child with a sunny smile. Yet when his mother decides to move to New York, she takes him to visit a santero who looks into his eyes and sees only darkness. Indeed, Agron will be battered, he will be tormented, he will be seduced, he will commit a horrible deed and spend the rest of his life paying for it. Blades and Anthony were in top form, the younger performer doe-eyed and spring-heeled, an innocent from the toes of his sneakers to the highest notes in his sweet tenor vocal range. Blades played the older character in shades of quiet anger, persistent faith, and moral confusion. The world had set him up: the cruelty of the nuns and his wicked stepfather; racism, poverty, and classism. Society spent his first fifteen years dehumanizing him, then threw him into a prison because they thought he'd done something inhuman? In his mind, the Salvador who committed the murders no longer existed. He spent twenty years in prison growing into a man who had nothing to do with that bloody night in the playground. And maybe the younger Sal wasn't really to blame, either.

The songs were generally beautiful; so many of them really do stand up to Paul's greatest works. Bob Crowley's sets were quietly spectacular, particularly the setting for Salvador's New York: the street corners, housing projects, and buttonhole playgrounds a geometric wonder of triangles, rectangles, and distorted perspective. There were video screens, photos, and film clips of the real Agron and the New York City of the rock 'n' roll 1950s. The show's first act zipped by in a rush of songs, colors, and motion, all of it bedazzling and all of it cursed. The Vampires were beautiful, mordantly funny, and lightly sinister. They danced and sang their way from the projects to a gleeful shoplifting expedition at a clothing store to the chain-linked concrete grounds of Hell's Kitchen, where the steps became a frantic death ritual. The knife tore into flesh, blood flowed, and as Salvador sang in “Adios Hermanos,” the song that closes the first act, “it's time for some fuckin' law and order.”

The second act began with a video montage of headlines describing Agron's progress through the next fifteen years: the death sentence; the pleas for clemency from Eleanor Roosevelt, among many others, that convinced New York governor Nelson Rockefeller to reduce the sentence to life. If the first act was a 1950s delinquent fantasia gone bad, the second was a 1970s sociologist's lecture on the social and economic factors that can transform an innocent boy into a killer: the physically abusive stepfather who wielded God like a cudgel; the racism faced by all new immigrants; the poverty it creates; and the street violence that is echoed by a vengeful justice system. Being locked in a cell opens Agron's mind and then frees his soul as he explores poetry, philosophy, and leftist political theory. The New York State Department of Corrections dressed prisoners in white, which gave Agron a saintly look underscoring his spiritual rebirth and, more important, the fact that he had always been a vessel that others used to carry their shame, their schemes and hatreds. The musical visited the families of Agron's victims and registered the never-ending tragedy of their lives, but the socioeconomic biases facing the Irish immigrants pale in comparison to those that shaped Salvador and his people.

Here again Salvador Agron feels like a vessel, only now he's carrying Paul Simon's fears and fantasies: the innocent youngster wounded by circumstance and fate, hardened by his subculture, made into a celebrity, and then made to pay for other people's inability to understand who he really is. Asked to summon sympathetic or even apologetic words for the parents of his victims, Agron can only say that if they treat him in a forgiving manner, he'll treat them humanely—which doesn't really cut it when you're addressing the parents of the children you've been convicted of murdering. Yet with so many political and economic factors working against him, how can Agron accept full responsibility, let alone apologize for anything? With no redemptive breakthrough available in his true story, the play digs deeper into its spiritual narrative. Did the young Agron ever have the power to change his fate or did the santero's vision mark him for life? Was his inability to atone for his crimes balanced by his subsequent ability to comprehend the forces that slipped the blade into his hand? When the world failed him, Agron pinned his hopes to the spirit of St. Lazarus, to whom Jesus restored life after four long days in his tomb. For a while it seemed that the saint had done his job, but when Agron's heart froze in place two days before his forty-third birthday, he was locked into his tomb, just as the santero foretold.

Paul had reinvented himself continually since he was fifteen years old, and though he had taken himself further than anyone might have imagined, he still could not land the jump to Broadway—possibly because he never really wanted to. He'd gone in with no idea how Broadway worked and every confidence that he didn't need to find out. As if he had discovered a new door, locked it shut, and then put his head down and tried to sprint through the solid wood. You didn't need to be a santero to predict how that was going to end.

“But he can't leave his fears behind.” St. Lazarus sang those words during
The Capeman
's final performance, just sixty-six nights after it opened. “Phantom figures in the dust / Phantom figures in the dust.”

 

CHAPTER 23

THE TEACHER

The Capeman
made its premiere in front of an audience packed with investors, families, and celebrities including actors Julia Roberts, Mark Wahlberg, and Jimmy Smits,
Saturday Night Live
star Molly Shannon, and comic actress, director, and old friend Penny Marshall. Salvador Agron's sister Aurea was there, accompanied by four of her children and a grandchild. The audience stood and cheered at the end, and then the cast, crew, and a mob of friends walked the short distance to the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where the opening party was soon in high gear. The guests juggled plates of paella and champagne glasses, while Tito Puente's band played and the months and years of anxiety melted away, at least for a few hours. Paul, the
New York Times
Style section reported, showed up with his usual baseball cap “look[ing] almost happy.” His moderate cheer wouldn't last much longer.

The morning newspapers ran with blood. “‘The Capeman' is a dud,” declared
USA Today.
“A sad, benumbed spectacle,” growled the
New York Times
. “Damp, sputtering logs of received non-wisdom” sniffed the
New Yorker
a few days later. Not all the reviews were quite that brutal.
Variety
pointed out that Paul's score “ranks among the best Broadway scores of this or any recent season, an exquisite glen of salsa, 1950s American doo-wop and Simon's own impeccable artistry.” Dan Hulbert from the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
set the evening into full perspective, praising the score and Bob Crowley's sets before acknowledging that the haters were right. “It's as if the world's best engineers were so busy designing the coolest race car body, they forgot to put in the engine.”

Ticket sales, which had been sinking since
The Capeman
's troubles came to dominate the preshow news coverage, fell by an additional 30 percent. Dan Klores, coproducer and spokesman, said the show, in the highest Broadway tradition, would go on. “We're ready to swing our fists,” he said. “We'll be here for the Tonys.” Yes, the notices had been unkind, but the critics didn't represent the tastes of most theatergoers, he argued, or even Broadway insiders. Surely the real pros would recognize the amount of talent and work that had gone into the show's acclaimed score and sets. And wouldn't they want to draw attention to the work of celebrated non-Broadway, nonwhite performers Blades and Anthony? Possibly, but that would also require the Tony Awards Administration Committee members to forget all the times Paul dismissed their genre for being so predictable and stupid for so many years. Oh, dear. When the investors, already ten million dollars in the hole, pulled the plug on
The Capeman
on March 29, the Tony Award nominations were still five weeks away. It wouldn't have mattered if they'd waited: the show earned a total of three nominations, one for Paul and Walcott's score, another for Crowley's set design, and the third for the year's best orchestrations. It didn't win any of them.

If you watch the New York Public Library's DVD of the original production—part of the organization's collection of recordings of first-run Broadway shows—you'll see one of the show's final performances, a Wednesday matinee less than a week from the show's demise. You can sense the disappointment in the actors' faces, just as you can pick up the excitement in the significantly Latino audience. There is at least one group of grade-schoolers in the orchestra section, and a few organized clusters of Puerto Rican social groups and retirees. When an offstage announcer mentions that the performance will be preserved for the ages on video, there is applause, then cheers. It is, the announcer says, quite an honor. When the curtain rises on a stage full of Latino performers, Latin music, and the vibrant culture of Puerto Rico, the audience cheers again. Heads bob to the familiar rhythms and melodies. Every so often a wide shot of the stage will reveal a beaming brown face, eyes sparkling with bittersweet recognition. Yes, it's a sad and jagged story with an indistinct conclusion, but if all the people who stood up to cheer the final curtain hadn't lived their own version of that story, you have to think they either knew or were related to someone who had.

The end arrived when the curtain came down on the Saturday evening performance on March 29. Paul had kept his distance from the show for most of its run, but he was at the Marquis Theater for the day's 2:00 p.m. matinee, walking the backstage areas, then rallying everyone for a pre-curtain talk. He started haltingly as he thanked the cast, the musicians, the crew, and everyone else for all their hard work. By the end, he was in tears, barely able to get the words out. He left quietly; no one expected to see him at the evening's show. Yet he was back that evening, too, this time in a sharp-cut blue suit and a new baseball cap. The audience jumped to its feet when he came up the aisle to his eighth-row seat, and Paul happily signed his name for all the fans who came to shake his hand during the intermission. He joined Marc Anthony and Rubén Blades for the final bows, and when the cast returned for their bows, more than a few came out with fists held over their heads. Handed a full-size Puerto Rican flag, Anthony wrapped it around Paul's shoulders and stood back to lead everyone in another round of cheers. When the ovation quieted, Paul gestured around the stage and the crowd and shouted back, “If this is a failure, what's success?” That touched off another ovation, another few moments of exaltation, before the house went dark for the last time.