You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (38 page)

Scenic designer Robin Wagner remembered that the genesis of the new venture came about after he and Coleman had been talking about Wagner’s fondness for the score: “One day, Russell Baker was in town, so Cy said, ‘Why don’t you come up and let’s have a conversation with him.’” The three men met, and Baker admitted that “he’d never made a nickel in the theater, but he still liked it.”
14
Baker also alluded to the fact that he’d been thinking about writing something satirical about his experiences on
Home Again
, and from this a new show, a bit of metatheatrics extraordinaire, was born. Baker would write a book for a musical about a show that was having a rough time of it on the road. The musical-within-the-musical would use songs from the earlier Coleman-Fried-Baker collaboration, and for sequences about the creators of the fictional musical Coleman and Fried would write new material.

First announced as
Baker’s Broadway
in October 1984, the show would go through another three titles over the course of the next three years; its final working title was
13 Days to Broadway
. During that time Coleman and Fried developed a dozen or more new songs for the project even as they reworked some of their previous efforts.

In the latter category was “America Is Bathed in Sunlight,” the wistful and leisurely paean to life as it once was that opened
Home Again
. For the new show, the song once again was a focal point, but in the most ironic of ways. As the fictional creators of the musical-within-the-musical struggle to figure out what’s going wrong, they identify this number as the one that’s killing them. They shift it around from one act to another, and then, in a fit of desperation, decide that it’s just the wrong style. So the fictional composer reworks it. For this Coleman wrote “America Variations,” recasting the song as a gospel number, a stylized version that might have been composed by Philip Glass, and, in a fit of desperation, a song to be intoned by a barking dog.

The new songs, which were among some of the most musically jocular that Coleman had turned out in several years, included “Ain’t Show Business Grand?,” an ironic toast to the industry that fused the sounds of pop with the Golden Age of Broadway; “Critics,” a delicious patter song about the men and women who pass judgment on shows; and “Money and Manure,” a paean to the art of producing that, by combining elements of country music and Alpine yodeling, musically captured both the lowbrow origins of the show’s backers and their highbrow aspirations. This last song was also a bit of an inside dig at the men who produced
Home Again
. As Fried recalled, during the tryout period of the show, “Irwin [Meyer] had been going to Switzerland a lot.”
15

By the end of 1984 the new musical had gained a director, David H. Bell (then artistic director of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.), who would be staging a workshop production of it. By the spring of 1985 it was on track for a Broadway premiere in the fall. “The workshop production this winter was very successful. We’re just waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to clear us so we can raise the money,” Coleman said.
16

As Coleman had by now discovered time and time again, the matter of raising the money proved to be more difficult than he expected, and after his optimistic announcement that the show would be on Broadway before the end of the year, it went into stasis for nearly two years. During this time he, Baker, and Fried—and Wagner, who had signed on as a coproducer and director—continued to refine and workshop the show.

13 Days to Broadway
resurfaced in mid-1987. At that point it was to have a tryout at the Drury Lane Theatre just outside of Chicago; after this, under the direction of Coleman’s longtime collaborator Layton,
13 Days
was set to transfer to Broadway. Unfortunately, as Wagner recalled, “We got in with some crazy lady whose name I can’t recall, who kept promising like a quarter of the dough, and we were all working to raise money,” adding, “Finally, it came down that we got our portions. . . . But she never did.”
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It was at this point that the production got shelved.

In the midst of this process Coleman was back on Broadway with a revival of
Sweet Charity
, which had been restaged and rechoreographed by Bob Fosse and starred Debbie Allen in the title role. Allen got her start in Broadway shows like
Purlie
and
Raisin
and went on to achieve national celebrity thanks to her work in both the movie and television series
Fame
, playing the sensitive but stern dance teacher Lydia Grant. The show had what
Los Angeles Times
writer Paul Rosenfeld called a “dry run for a possible Broadway return” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles during the summer of 1985.
18
It was during this time that Coleman began to work with Fosse on changes for the production that was roughly marking the twentieth anniversary of the show’s debut.

“Bob felt that a revival should not just be a museum piece but should have some surprises in it for the audience,” recalled stage manager Craig Jacobs, who added, “and while the original
Sweet Charity
was three hours long, he wanted this version to be two and a half, which is why [“Charity’s Soliloquy”] was cut.”
19

Fosse’s work, as well as that of Allen, received glowing reviews in Los Angeles, and in January 1986 the official word came that
Sweet Charity
would be returning to Broadway. “We think it has Cy Coleman’s best score and that it was a little ahead of its time originally,” said Joseph Harris (who had been one of the musical’s original producers and was also a backer of the revival) when the announcement was made.
20

By the time
Sweet Charity
opened on April 27, the changes to Coleman’s score were not substantial, but they were distinct. Besides omitting “Soliloquy,” Coleman substituted the film version of the title song over the version that had originally been heard on Broadway, and there were some new orchestrations. Fosse and Coleman discussed one other change to the music—a wholesale revision of “Rhythm of Life,” the song Fosse had fought in the original production—but that idea was dropped during the course of rehearsals.

The show opened at the Minskoff Theatre to favorable if not glowing notices on April 27. As they had for the original production, the raves went to Fosse for his dances and, generally, to the show’s star. Critics continued to have problems with Neil Simon’s book: in the
New York Times
, Frank Rich called it a “hapless script.”

As for the score, reviewers admired both Coleman’s music and the ways it had been tweaked for this new production. In his May 20
Wall Street Journal
review, Edwin Wilson wrote, “Cy Coleman’s driving, upbeat score is probably his best, and he has made subtle changes in the orchestrations that update them without in essence altering them.”

When it came time for the Tony Award nominations, the show garnered five, including ones for performers Michael Rupert and Bebe Neuwirth, who played, respectively, Charity’s beau Oscar and her best pal, Nickie. It ended up winning four, including best reproduction (play or musical), and settled into the Minskoff for a run that lasted just under a year.

Following its Broadway closure, the production embarked on a national tour with a new star, Broadway veteran Donna McKechnie, who had won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Cassie in the original
A Chorus Line
. The venue from which the tour launched was the National Theater in Washington, D.C. Fosse and Coleman traveled to supervise the final rehearsals for the show. Shortly before the curtain went up on the production, Fosse suffered a fatal heart attack while walking from his hotel to the theater. He was sixty years old.

It was an extremely hard blow for Coleman, who said, after learning of Fosse’s death, “Bobby was too alive to be dead.”
21
That night Coleman went out with stage manager Jacobs, producer Harris, and some other members of the show’s business team. Jacobs remembered, “We all went to Levitt’s Grill and told Bob Fosse stories. Cy was very moved that night. He broke down a couple of times at the bar.”
22

Coleman’s assistant Terrie Curran recounted the two men’s close, jovial relationship. “They were always arguing about putting an act together, and Fosse would say, ‘Feet and Fingers.’ And Cy would say, ‘Fingers and Feet.’ It was always an argument about what the title would be.”
23

She also described how deeply Coleman felt Fosse’s passing. “About a year [after I had started working for him], his mother died. And that was the first time I ever saw him cry. And there was that once and only one other time I ever him saw cry again—and now it wasn’t sobbing, it was just tears—was when Fosse died.”
24

Unfortunately, it was a loss made all the more intense by the fact that it came just three days after Coleman’s longtime friend and collaborator Michael Stewart died of pneumonia. By this time Stewart and Coleman had reconciled, and with Bramble they had begun work again on the musical
Nothing but the Truth
. In fact, the three men had completed a draft of the show, replete with eleven new songs.

At the time there were no plans for moving forward with the project, and Bramble recalled that after Stewart’s death, “it just got put away. And then Cy said, ‘You know, we really ought to look at that again,’ and that would have been sometime after 1997.”
25
It was a gap of ten years, which was becoming a standard in the development of some of Coleman’s musicals—a sign of changing times in the ways in which shows reached Broadway and the evolution of Coleman’s workload.

26.
Welcome to the Club

During the course of the nearly yearlong run of the revival of
Sweet Charity
on Broadway, the
New York Times
profiled Coleman in an article titled “Cy Coleman, Composer with a Knack for Juggling.” Journalist Dena Kleiman outlined the multitude of writers with whom he was currently working and also talked to a number of them, including Betty Comden, who commented on his propensity for working on multiple projects: “It’s maddening at times,” she said, but added, “When he is doing something, his concentration is total.”
1

Coleman never made it to the point of total concentration on one other project from the first half of the 1980s, a musical about Julian Eltinge, an exceptionally brilliant female impersonator who was the toast of New York—and later Hollywood—during the earliest years of the twentieth century. In fact, in 1912 his success in Manhattan resulted in the Liberty Theatre’s (later incorporated into the AMC Theatre Complex on Forty-second Street) being rechristened the Eltinge Theatre.

Coleman first conceived the show in the early 1970s, and as he was formulating his ideas, he met, through Carolyn Leigh, a young playwright, Allan Knee, who would go on to pen the book for the musical
Little Women
and the play
The Man Who Was Peter Pan
, which served as the basis for the film
Finding Neverland
. At the time Knee was working with both Leigh and Lee Pockriss on a project, and like them, Coleman recognized potential in Knee. When the composer asked him if he might be willing to draft a book about Eltinge’s life, Knee agreed.

Knee completed the script, sent it to Coleman and then heard—nothing. That is, until the early 1980s, when Coleman called to talk about the show. “I said, ‘This is embarrassing, Cy. I no longer have a copy of what I sent you.’ I had lost faith in it when he didn’t respond to me.” Coleman told Knee that he still had a copy, and Knee picked it up in Coleman’s offices. “I was afraid to read it. What had I written ten years ago?” As he read it on the subway, Knee realized that he still liked what he had written. “So I called him up and said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to come in and talk to you.’ So I went in, and he said, ‘I’d like to commission you to write the book for the musical.’”
2

Knee accepted and began reworking his original script. Then, as he recalled, “I would come in like once every two weeks with expanded material, with developments. I would read the scenes aloud, and he would start improvising. This was all terrific. And I’ve never met anyone who wrote as magnificently as he did. He wrote a musical theme for Julian that was so beautiful and so full of pain at the same time.”
3

Coleman planned to treat this theme as a motif for the title character, varying it throughout the course of the musical. Alongside this instrumental, Coleman sketched out how the rest of the show would be built. It would be a combination of book songs and diegetic music-hall numbers, the latter actually being sung by the characters as part of their lives.

Despite his meticulous planning, however, Coleman never wrote anything beyond this central melody, and Knee grew frustrated. “I would do all of this work from this meeting to that meeting, and he would have done nothing. What he would do when I would get there is his noodling, and then, when I’d get there for the next meeting, he’d be in the same place.”
4

Coleman did set up a meeting with lyricist Sheldon Harnick to discuss the possibility of his joining in on the show, but Harnick, despite his fondness for working with Coleman, declined. Coleman also reached out to a young lyricist, David Zippel.

Originally trained as a lawyer, Zippel had been writing lyrics with various partners for years at this juncture, notably Wally Harper, who had had his musical
Sensations
published by Coleman, and in 1977 the two men had brought a song they had written to Notable Music for publication. Beyond this contact with Zippel, Coleman had been told about Zippel’s talents from both his attorney, Albert DaSilva, whose son had been a friend of Zippel’s at school, and
Barnum
coproducer Judy Gordon. Both DaSilva and Gordon thought the two men should be working together.

Zippel recalled, “I think Cy kind of felt their fingerprints and them pushing pretty hard, and Cy tended to like things to be his idea, so there was some resistance there.” Eventually, however, Coleman did call Zippel to arrange a meeting to talk about a project. The lyricist accepted the invitation, and “I was thrilled that Cy called me, because he was my hero and someone I admired so much. And I desperately wanted to write with Cy Coleman. It was a lifelong dream from the beginning. Everything he wrote was so good.”
5

After hearing about
Julian
, however, Zippel said, “I was kind of crestfallen when I heard what he wanted to write with me. It was after
La Cage
, so it kind of felt to me like we’d been there already. But I thought, ‘I’m certainly not going to turn him down. Yet.’”
6

At a second meeting, however, Zippel did tell Coleman that he felt he was not right for the project but suggested that there might be another show for them to work on together. Coleman demurred, and Zippel departed.

Knee remembered that after Coleman was unable to bring a lyricist on board for the show, “he turned to his trunk and started bringing out numerous, I mean numerous, trunk songs,”
7
among them, “Pink Taffeta Sample Size 10” from
Sweet Charity
and “That’s What the Poor Woman Is” from
Barnum
. But Coleman wasn’t producing any new material.

After about a year Knee, frustrated about the show from both an artistic perspective and a business one (he still had no written agreement with the composer), confronted Coleman: “‘Cy, I need a contract.’ And he shouted to his secretary, Terrie, ‘Where’s Allan’s contract? Why doesn’t he have his contract? Why don’t you pay him his money?’ He did that three or four times, and I realized he wasn’t going to give me a contract. He wasn’t going to pay me anything for this. This isn’t going to happen. I began to feel as if I was filling in time until he got something going that was going to be lucrative and possible for him.”
8

Knee recalled that the exchange became more heated. “I said, ‘All right, Cy, I’m pulling away from this. I’m not doing any more work.’ And then he really screamed. He really got furious at me. I said, ‘You’re never going to pay me. You’re never going to give me a contract. You’re just going to waste my time.’ And he screamed, ‘If you ever do anything with Julian Eltinge, I will sue you for everything.’ And I said, ‘Do what you want to, Cy. You’re lying to me. There’s not going to be a contract.’ And he never said, ‘Well, there is.’”
9

What Knee didn’t know was that Coleman, who had written the score for his first Broadway musical in just four months, had developed the habit of allowing musicals to gestate for years. Furthermore, and sadly, Knee hadn’t known what Comden and Green learned early on: when Coleman turned to the piano, having a tape recorder at the ready was de rigueur, because, having spent so many hours with notebooks notating music as a child, he had grown to hate writing out his music. To preserve his ideas, an audio recording was absolutely necessary. Thus, the melody Knee so fondly recalled was never captured.

Coleman retained all of the research on the
Julian
project as well as Knee’s scripts, but he didn’t continue with it at the time, nor did he ever return to it. Instead, he turned to other projects and shows, and in the months before Fosse and Stewart died, Coleman was tending to one show—which he had written with A. E. Hotchner and which had its roots in the late 1960s—as it received two important workshop productions.

Hotchner and Coleman had met in the late 1950s, when the composer and actress Sylvia Miles were dating. Over the years the two men had remained close, and ultimately Hotchner shared a play he had written,
Let ’Em Rot
, with his pal. Coleman immediately saw musical potential in the script.

Hotchner based the play on his experiences as a lawyer handling divorce cases in St. Louis. He took the horrible, petty, and sometimes silly fights that he had witnessed couples embroiled in and attempted to mine the events for both comedy and drama, telling the story of a group of men who found themselves in jail because they had not paid their alimony. To Coleman’s mind, it contained “the perfect situations for writing a score: They’re emotional, comic, and comically heavy.”
10

Throughout the years they continued to discuss the project even as both men went on with their own work, Coleman penning musical after musical and Hotchner writing such books as
Papa Hemingway
and
The Man Who Lived at the Ritz
. Then, in the early 1980s, they decided to work on adapting the play into a musical in earnest.

Their first step in the process was opening it up so that it included more female characters and took audiences beyond the jail where the men were being held. What emerged was a show about four very different guys: a Jewish druggist, an African American insurance salesman, a sensitive writer, and a yuppie businessman. To bring women into the picture, Hotchner devised fantasy sequences and flashbacks that featured their wives. Another female character was added to the mix as well, a country singer who eventually joins the men because of her own financial delinquency with her ex.

With the reworked story in hand, Hotchner and Coleman began to contemplate whom they should have as a lyricist, and they were about to ask Carolyn Leigh to join them when she died unexpectedly. At this juncture, Coleman remembered, “We decided to begin pulling out ideas for lyrics ourselves. They started to develop and became so organic to the book that we decided to keep going.” The men would not try to write a song per se but rather began to craft numbers out of existing situations, almost like dialogue, and as Hotchner recalled, “Cy, who knows song form so well, was able to shape the songs as the lyrics evolved.”
11

By early 1987 the show had reached a point where they needed to see how it played in front of an audience, and so they scheduled a workshop production at the Actors Studio Writers and Directors Wing. There were three performances. The event attracted the likes of Bob Fosse, Gene Saks, and David Merrick, all eager to experience Coleman’s first musical as both composer and co-lyricist.

Also among the audiences at the workshop were representatives from Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theatre in Connecticut, which was founded in the mid-1940s as a place for artists to hone their work free of the pressures of the commercial world. Based on what was onstage at the Actors Studio, it seemed like
Let ’Em Rot
was a perfect candidate for the theater, and so the piece was put on the White Barn schedule for the summer, where a group of artists worthy of a Broadway production came together for a series of three performances.

Directed by Morton Da Costa (who been mentioned as a possible Coleman collaborator ever since
The King from Ashtabula
in the late 1950s), the company for the White Barn presentation included Marilyn Sokol, an actress-comedienne whose versatility had been demonstrated both on Broadway and off, as well as in films such as
The Goodbye Girl
and
Garbo Talks
; and William Parry, whose Broadway credits stretched from
Rockabye Hamlet
to
Sunday in the Park with George
.

Given that Coleman was a member of Broadway’s establishment, it may have seemed curious for an institution like the White Barn to be developing his work. To forestall any criticism, press representative Richard P. Pheneger made it clear that the show fit squarely into the theater’s mission. He told the
New York Times
, “The show needs work and they wanted a place to try it out without critics—to get some indication as to what it needed to make it viable for Broadway.”
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Once again the workshop attracted some heavy hitters in the American theatrical community. Theater owner James Nederlander took in a performance, as did some members of the artistic and management team of the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida, which specialized in the development and presentation of new musicals. They too were impressed by the potential they saw in the tuner and began the process of adding it to the theater’s 1987–88 season.

Let ’Em Rot
eventually was slated for a late-winter run in Coconut Grove. A new director, Frank Cosaro, helmed this production, and it had choreography by Baayork Lee, who had been brought into
Seesaw
by Michael Bennett and later was one of the central performers in
A Chorus Line
. Corsaro came to the production with an impressive string of Broadway credits. He staged the original production of Tennessee Williams’s
The Night of the Iguana
, starring Bette Davis. In the realm of musicals, he was the man who brought Scott Joplin’s ragtime operetta,
Treemonisha
, back from obscurity with a production that debuted at the Houston Grand Opera and then transferred to Broadway.

The company in Florida once again included Sokol and Parry, along with another actor who had been appearing in the workshops, Ron Orbach, who was just beginning his career. New to the company were Martin Vidnovic, who won a Drama Desk Award for his work in the musical
Baby
and received a Tony nomination for his work in the 1981 revival of
Brigadoon
; and Cady Huffman, who, like Orbach, was at the start of her career. Huffman would eventually win a Tony for
The Producers
.

In Florida, the show was for the first time open to the critics, who were less than charmed. The March 2
Variety
review described it as having “tunes and lyrics [that] strive for the slickness of cocktail-party satire. The gloss is an inconsistent veneer used to hide the show’s vaudeville and locker room underpinnings.” Furthermore, the critic pointed toward a sexist tone that ran through the show, noting that only after rewrites would it be possible to “minimize Hotchner’s failure to beat a sex discrimination rap.”