Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (19 page)

Peter Asher, my manager, thought it was a great idea for me to do
Pirates
, although he was understandably concerned that it would disrupt the safe routine of an album and several tours a year, and might have a negative effect on the momentum he’d been able to build into my career.

Drawing on his own theater experience, he tried his best to give me a crash course in theater etiquette and protocol so that I wouldn’t offend the others through simple ignorance. The most important thing, I gathered, was to never be late. Being late is a tremendous imposition on cast and crew, who don’t enjoy twiddling their thumbs while waiting for a self-absorbed, unprofessional rock star, and can run up the bill in a budget that is already stretched taut. It is guaranteed to create resentment.

The first day of rehearsal, I was careful to leave in what I thought was plenty of time to get a cab and make it all the way from West Seventy-First Street to the Public Theater in Greenwich Village. The whole island wasn’t that big, so how long could it take? But the cabbie realized that his passenger in the backseat didn’t know the city, and he took an extralong route. I was fifteen
or twenty minutes late when I finally arrived—completely embarrassed. It earned me a serious scolding from our stage manager and didn’t happen a second time.

Just before I met Rex Smith, who had been cast to play opposite me in the part of Frederic, I was introduced to a life-size cutout photograph of Rex clothed in little more than his considerable male pulchritude. It had somehow appeared near the door of the rehearsal room. I suspect Rex was writhing, but he didn’t crack. He was so handsome that I was inwardly groaning and hoping he wasn’t loaded with glamour-boy attitude. He wasn’t. He was eager and exuberant, a little naive, extremely candid, and had great instincts. I decided to like him.

A rehearsal room is a volatile space. It generally contains little more than the appropriate number of chairs and the talent that people bring with them. If their talent is compatible and synergistic and a clear idea emerges, the work will feel effortless. With great luck, it can become ecstatic.

Sometimes, no matter how carefully selected the cast or musicians, how brilliant the writer or director, it can become less than the sum of the parts. At this point, the work becomes morbidly effortful. Anguish descends like a leaden slime, and the participants can’t wait to be finished and out of that room. It is hard to overstate just how embarrassing and miserable this feels, even when no one is particularly to blame. I am not religious, but a rehearsal room can seem like a hallowed space; a place for transformation. A performer enters it at his peril. Rex understood this. As we were walking into the rehearsal room at Joe Papp’s Public Theater, he took my hand, his eyes wide with anticipation and excitement. “This is like going into church,” he said.

The first thing we did at rehearsal after introducing ourselves and the characters we were playing was to sit down and sing the whole show through, from beginning to end. This was
thrilling, as there are several standout choral pieces, and we got to hear how the vocal ensemble—with its more natural approach to singing the Victorian melodies—was going to work. Wilford and Bill decided to add another song for me to sing and asked if I could suggest something from another Gilbert and Sullivan show. I could! “ ‘Sorry Her Lot’!” I shrieked. “It’s from
Pinafore
! I already know it!” I sang it for them. It was a perfect fit for the spot they had in mind. I was delighted to get to sing the song I had loved since childhood. I couldn’t wait to tell my sister.

The next few days found us on our feet and “off book,” with a chance to see what moves choreographer Graciela Daniele had cooked up. Tony Azito, who played the constable, got up and did a wonderfully rubber-jointed dance to accompany his lament to constabulary duties. His reedy voice had echoes of Berlin cabaret mixed with the asceticism of monastic chant. I was breathless.

Kevin Kline began to demonstrate some hilarious physical schtick he had worked out to make his character seem dashing, bold, and hopelessly confused all at once: Errol Flynn with a touch of dementia. I can see fragments of Kevin’s Pirate King layered into the send-up of Keith Richards in Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, the character he created for the movie
Pirates of the Caribbean
.

Rex was rightfully in Kevin’s thrall, so his character followed the Pirate King around the stage like an eager puppy dog. This set up a most charming dynamic between the two male heartthrobs, and they never had to compete with each other.

Our Major-General Stanley was George Rose. British born and a seasoned theater professional to the tenth power, he humbled us all with his lightning-speed patter songs. These had been prepared to a perfection I wouldn’t have thought possible well before rehearsals ever started. He was dazzling.

Patricia Routledge, another immaculately skilled product of
the British musical theater, sang and acted Nurse Ruth’s batty Victorian songs and manner with great naturalness and seamless comedic skill. I overheard her say something to Kevin one day when they were rehearsing a scene, she being the seasoned pro and he the new rising star. She said, “Kevin, what do you think we are trying to do with this scene?” Kevin answered, “To make it funny?”

“No,” she replied in a somewhat severe tone. “We don’t need to make it funny. We need to make it clear. If it is clear,
then
it will be funny.” I thought this was brilliant advice, and so did Kevin. I try to apply it to everything I sing. For instance, if one is singing a sad song, it is better to tell the story as clearly and simply—even as journalistically—as one can. It will have a stronger effect on the listener and seem more emotional than a teary, overwrought delivery.

Finally, the female chorus of Mabel’s giddy sisters emerged as an amalgamated star in its own right. Wonderful comedy bits and singing that traced a bipolar flip from angelic sweetness to brassy belting erupted from them on a nightly basis.

With a cast as strongly professional and charming as this one, I figured the show would run like a locomotive, and as long as I didn’t fall down on the stage, I would be carried along by sheer momentum. Because my lines were all sung, I hadn’t quite realized that I was acting and my performance still needed some fleshing out in order for Mabel’s character to emerge.

Wilford was the kind of director who left his actors alone to do their work, but I didn’t know anything about acting and was feeling rudderless. One day we were rehearsing outside in the full sun at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where we would open soon. The combination of that summer’s record-breaking temperatures and brutal humidity left me yearning for the relative comfort of the dry heat in Arizona. Keith David, Juilliard trained in acting and one of the strongest pirate voices, asked me what I thought was uppermost in Mabel’s mind. “A sno-cone!” I responded
desperately. Keith was thoughtful. Then he said to me, “Mabel wants Frederic. There is no heat in her world. Only Frederic.” I looked over at my big black Akita dog, Molly, who was panting in the shade at the side of the stage. Molly and I had been in the park for about a week, and she had become very interested in the squirrels. When she saw one, she developed an intense concentration that saturated and molded her whole body. She pricked her ears and cocked her head and surrendered her entire fuzzy self to one impulse. I decided to use that. I morphed myself into a canine soprano, and Mabel was born. When Robin Boudreau, one of the girls in the chorus, remarked to me one day that pets and their owners often resembled each other, I knew I was there.

Mabel was also somewhat pigeon-toed, while I am more duck-footed. The cooler side of Mabel’s nature must have been alarmed at the desperate, hurtling motion in Frederic’s direction, so her feet kept trying to turn around and run the other way. An odd little collection of quirks and impulses like these began to sprout and grow in me, in what I imagine was the most rudimentary beginning of the craft of acting. Rudimentary was as far as I ever got, but it was enough to carry me around the stage for the entire year that I stayed with the show.
Pirates
opened on July 15, 1980. It was my birthday.

People routinely describe the Public Theater summer productions in Central Park as magical, and though this may seem a well-worn expression, it is quite accurate. Shape shifting and transcending mundane states are regularly associated with the concept of magic, and with good theater, that is precisely what you get. For me, there was an added element of time travel. Night after night, I waited to go on at the side of the stage in my Victorian bonnet and white summer frock, a soft breeze ruffling my skirt, the moon sailing sweetly overhead. Beyond me was a large pond that made a lovely natural extension to our painted
sea. On the opposite shore was a weather station housed in Belvedere Castle, a Gothic-style observation tower built in 1867. Just beyond the tree line was the still-intact Art Deco silhouette of the Manhattan skyline of the 1930s. It sometimes felt like Fred Astaire himself could have burst out of that skyline with his top hat and cane and tap-danced on the moon.

Living in such a tightly packed environment, the chances to savor nature’s nocturnal delights are limited mostly to ball games and trips to Coney Island beach. A baseball fan might vehemently disagree with me, but I think these experiences would shrivel next to an evening in Joe Papp’s magic theater in the great outdoors of Central Park.

It had its drawbacks. We were terrorized by lightning, pummeled by wind, and soaked with rain that turned our costumes into Saran Wrap. Then there were the bugs. While singing, we swallowed them nightly, but once, just before the kissing scene I had with Rex at the end of the second act, a huge mosquito got trapped in the gluey layer of my lip gloss. I could feel it struggling to free itself, and when Rex leaned in to kiss me, his eyes were bulging out of his head. He was struggling to keep his composure, and so was I. After our kiss, Rex got to leave the stage, but I had to stay and sing “Sorry Her Lot” from beginning to end with a giant mosquito playing its death scene to the very last row on my lower lip.

One night Papp showed up at my dressing room door with Mayor Ed Koch in tow. Looking back, I am sure that Joe brought him down to see our very successful show and meet the cast in an attempt to get back his funding. At the time, I wasn’t aware of any of these political subplots, but I recognized the photographer he had with him: a particularly aggressive paparazzo who had stationed himself at the Eighty-Second Street entrance to the park. No cars were allowed in that area, so daily I was on foot and at his mercy while he swooped and darted at me, calling me the b-word,
the c-word—any foul thing he could think of to get an emotional reaction and wind up with a more interesting picture to sell. Richard, my bodyguard, would remind me out of the corner of his mouth that his job was to keep me from hitting the photographer with a rock because of the lawsuit it would surely bring. I behaved.

But when I saw the smugly triumphant expression on the photographer’s face as he stood behind Papp and Mayor Koch shooting pictures of me in my bathrobe and pin curls, my face streaked with cold cream, I didn’t behave. My nature being somewhat phlegmatic, I don’t have a particularly short temper. In fact, my temper has a very long fuse. The only trouble is that when it finally ignites, it is connected to an ice-covered volcano. While the volcano was issuing a pyroclastic flow of frenzied activity at the photographer, the icy part of me was calmly and logically explaining to Joe that the fellow had been tormenting me for a couple of weeks, that I didn’t think it was fair, and that I was going to strangle him with his camera strap and then smash the hated camera on the concrete floor, causing the film to roll out and render the photos useless. I believe I was successful in these efforts, as the photos never appeared. I then walked calmly to the showers at the end of the hall to wash off the rest of the makeup and cold cream, and the sticky humidity of the summer night. When I came back, Joe was still standing in the hallway with the somewhat stunned mayor, explaining to him how important it was for actresses to have temperament.

Because of our surprising success in Central Park, Joe Papp started to make plans to move
Pirates
to Broadway in the fall. This seemed like a terrific idea to me, even though it meant leaving behind my barely-moved-into new house, friends, and romantic attachments. Peter Asher, always a more practical
thinker than I was, reminded me that it would also interrupt the lucrative album-tour, album-tour routine that we had settled into so comfortably over the last few years.

Another problem was this: Peter and Joe Papp did not hit it off from just about the first minute they set eyes on each other. This situation eventually improved, as both were men of their word and thorough professionals, but in the beginning, it was awkward. Peter’s refined manner brought out Joe’s inner street fighter. I begged Peter to let me do the first round of negotiating with Papp by myself, and then he could close the deal. This, of course, was a preposterous idea, as artists can’t really advocate for themselves very effectively. I told Peter that I just wanted to move with the show to Broadway and wasn’t trying to get rich doing so. He muttered in response that he didn’t want me to get poor, then threw up his hands and let me have my way.