Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books)

BOOK: Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books)
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Praise for
Everything Was Possible
“Well, I thought I wouldn’t get around to finishing the book until I returned from Vienna, but of course I should have realized I couldn’t put it down! . . . It is handsome and exciting. So, Ted, well done! I guess you really were our Boswell.”
—Harold Prince
 
“It’s not only the best book about the musical theater I’ve ever read, it was so vivid that I couldn’t wait to see how everything turned out.”
—Stephen Sondheim
 
“What a treasure to have your wonderfully written and insightful book. And though I wonder if perhaps one shouldn’t know too much about how musicals (like laws and sausages) are actually made, I can’t think of a more accurate and informative account.”
—Stephen Schwartz
 
“Just wanted to add one more voice to the flood of congratulations you’ve so justly received. I expected it to be informative and important, but frankly, was unprepared for how emotional and purely enjoyable a read it was. Congratulations from one more fan.”
—David Henry Hwang
 
“I couldn’t put it down and most of all, it actually made me want to direct another musical.”
—James Lapine
 
“With your brilliant eye you have caught the various creative characters and their working methods so accurately and laid out different people’s perspectives, including your own, in a way that a reader can still judge the facts and, therefore, the show’s strengths and weaknesses for themselves. I wish some of my productions had the good fortune of a ‘Ted Chapin’ in attendance to observe and unravel the extraordinary alchemy that happens when a special musical comes alive.”
—Cameron Mackintosh
 
“Being a fly on the wall with you and watching my greatest Broadway heroes break open the traditional musical to create something startling and new inspired me to do better. Your book challenges me to nurture a new musical that’s unlike anything that came before it. A musical that breaks boundaries, surprises audiences, and takes the art form I love so much to new places. As I approach any new work, I’m always asking myself, ‘are we aiming high enough?’”
—Jeffrey Seller
 
“This is as good a book as anyone has written about the process of creating a new show. Are you absolutely sure you were only in college at the time? Bravo!”
—Gregory Mosher
 
“It is one of the most enjoyable theatrical volumes that I have ever read. I had no idea that you were connected with
Follies,
but how amazing that you were able to so vividly reconstitute its gestation.”
—Michael Feinstein
 
“It’s wonderful, so detailed and personal and thoroughly captivating. I’m sure it’s already becoming required reading for anyone foolish enough to want to pursue this crazy business! Thanks for reminding me of why I wanted to be part of this madness. Bravo, Ted.”
—Howard McGillin
 
“It’s difficult to put the Broadway experience into words. Hands down, this is the best recent book about what it is like to work on a Broadway musical.”
—Todd Haimes
 
“Oh my God!!!
What a wonderful time I had reading your book. It made me laugh to remember and cry from the thrill of being there together.”
—Paul Gemignani
 
“You brought it all back; the joy, the anxiety, and exhilaration. No one but Samuel Pepys and you could have had the persistence to have written such a detailed journal. Formidable! There is nothing like it out there.”
—Joanna Merlin
 
“And—dear Ted—I enjoyed
Everything Was Possible immensely.
I learned so much from your fine masterful action-packed narrative—I never knew that world so closely before. One laughed, one almost cried, one was incredulous. A quite marvelous book, if I may say so.”
—Shirley Hazzard
Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical
Follies
by Ted Chapin
Copyright © 2003 by Ted Chapin Foreword copyright © 2003 by Frank Rich
All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
 
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
 
Permission to reprint previously published material may be found following the index.
9781476849218
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Chapin, Theodore S.
Everything was possible : the birth of the musical Follies / Ted Chapin ; foreword by Frank
Rich.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-55783-653-1
I. Sondheim, Stephen. Follies. 2. Musicals—New York (State)—New York—Production and direction. I. Title.
 
ML410.s6872c53 2005
792.6’42—dc22
2005001847
 
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To the gentlemen and ladies of
Follies
, 1971
Life was fun, but oh, so intense.
Everything was possible and nothing made sense
Back there when one of the major events
Was waiting for the girls upstairs.
 
—from “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs”
Foreword
M
ore than three decades after its premiere,
Follies
remains the most elusive of landmark Broadway musicals. Set at a reunion of onetime Follies performers on the eve of the destruction of their old theater, it is a show for which the word “problematic” could have been coined. Its theatricality is lavish but its mood is downbeat. Its storytelling plays tricks with time that are poetic to its fans but disorienting gimmickry to less sympathetic onlookers. The principal characters are narcissistic, unpleasant, and prone to onstage nervous breakdowns. Yet the Stephen Sondheim songs they sing are now classics of the musical-theater repertoire, full of heart even when they delineate arid, disappointed lives.
From the start, critics have been divided about
Follies,
passionately pro or con but rarely on the fence. The original production, though running well over a year at the Winter Garden, lost its entire investment. Major revivals in London (1987) and New York (2001) were also commercial failures. Each of them used revised versions of the original James Goldman book, and to this day there is no agreement as to what constitutes the “definitive” text. In each rendition,
Follies
draws new adherents, but also new detractors. Is it really a great musical, or merely the greatest of all cult musicals, the most fabulous of self-indulgent failures? Or might it be still unfinished, awaiting the perfect script revision, the radical new staging no one has yet thought of? Could one stroke of luck finally make the whole elaborate edifice fall into place as triumphantly as the Follies scenery descends in the fabled “Loveland” sequence?
In the pages to come, Ted Chapin doesn’t try to answer these unanswerable questions, which is one of many reasons his memoir is so illuminating. He really does take us all the way back in time to 1971 when he was a twenty-year-old college student hired as a production assistant—i.e., a gofer—by the director Harold Prince.
Follies
was not a legend yet; it was another big new Broadway musical in a day when every season still boasted a number of big new Broadway musicals. Sondheim, Prince, and Prince’s codirector, Michael Bennett, were rising young Turks and not yet the theatrical establishment they would become. Working from the detailed diary entries he kept at the time, Chapin resists superimposing the future of his characters and their project onto their past. He simply wants to tell us in real time how the show was put together from earliest conception to opening night (a story that is anything but simple). While he saw nearly everything and seems to have forgotten nothing, he never pours on the retrospective sentimentality that warps most backstage stories and those of Broadway musicals in particular. Nor does he gild his account with all the critical and cultist filigree that has attended
Follies
ever since. If there has ever been an account of the creation of a major Broadway production as complete, candid and apocrypha-free as this one, I have not found it.
What Chapin couldn’t know in 1971 is that he was capturing not just the assembling of one particular show but a representative example of a dying breed. Everything was still possible on Broadway, but just barely; nothing in
Follies
made economic sense. Original new musicals with 28 musicians in the pit, 140 lavish costumes, and casts of So would soon be abandoned by the commercial theater. (Bennett’s subsequent hit, the 1975
A Chorus Line,
was developed Off Broadway and was the antithesis of
Follies
in scale.) And while certain chapters in the
Follies
story are eternal—the chaotic rehearsals, the clashing temperaments, the opening night party clouded by mixed reviews—much of the production process that Chapin charts here was already on the brink of extinction. He was an eyewitness to the last gasp of a low-tech Broadway, where script changes still had to be laboriously mimeographed (rather than Xeroxed, word-processed, faxed, or e-mailed), where orchestra parts were still copied by hand, where weak singing voices could not yet be rescued by body mikes, and where unfathomably complex scenic and lighting effects were not yet guided by computer. Toss in a company as eccentric as it was large—with a vividly drawn cast ranging from insecure B–list Hollywood stars and ancient Broadway hands to neophyte Vegas showgirls—and you have a poignant snapshot of a showbiz civilization as distant from our time as 1971 was from the heyday of the Ziegfeld Follies.
Like Ted Chapin, I was also a minor college-age footnote to the
Follies
story (due to circumstances he’ll explain), but we would not meet each other until many years later. Once we did, I came to admire him for his management of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization but never imagined that he might also have been a first-class journalist. Then again, his account of what he saw in 1971, written from the deep perspective of an observer who is now the same age or older than many of the principals in his narrative, cannot accurately be called journalism. It is history, and everyone who loves the musical theater will be the wiser for it.
 
—Frank Rich
February 2003
 
Frank Rich is a columnist at the
New York Times,
where he was chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993.

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