You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (29 page)

As rehearsals progressed, Stewart honed sections of the book and Coleman tweaked the music. Unlike Coleman’s previous shows, there wasn’t any furious writing of new material. And only one song was jettisoned, a bit of Christian pop that was to have been performed as the two couples ate their Christmas Eve meal before the anticipated exchange of spouses.

Eventually the show reached Philadelphia (after a two-week delay to accommodate the transition between directors), and it offered two preview performances at the Forest before officially opening on March 22.

Reviews were supportive, if not overly enthusiastic. One in
Variety
on March 23 offered, “Where everybody ends up is hardly a surprise, but amusing single entendres and ingenious production gimmicks get you there.”

Compared to Coleman’s previous experiences out of town, his work on
I Love My Wife
in Philadelphia was relatively easy. There were no substantial rewrites, just judicious pruning and gentle revisions, and after the show’s three-week tryout,
I Love My Wife
returned to New York and the Barrymore Theatre, where it opened on April 17.

It had been a particularly hard year for musicals, and for most of the season Broadway houses had been filled with special engagements featuring performers such as Shirley MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, and Barry Manilow. New musicals had been disappointing, and even revivals of seemingly indestructible titles had lukewarm receptions. New productions of both
Guys and Dolls
and
Fiddler on the Roof
failed to last for a full year.

Broadway was eager for a hit, and in
I Love My Wife
, with its gentle, audience-friendly take on the sexual revolution, critics and audiences alike found a tuner they could embrace. The morning after the opening the love notes to
Wife
started to arrive, starting with Clive Barnes in the
New York Times
, who called it “bright, inventive, amusing and breezy” before singling out the importance of the show’s conceit: “What Mr. Coleman and Mr. Stewart have done is breathtakingly simple, but no one—so far as this aging memory can recall—-has ever done it before. . . . The musicians are welded into the play, as a kind of Greek chorus.”

In the
Daily News
Douglas Watt offered similar accolades before concluding, “Musical comedy is back. Hooray!” And in the
New York Post
Martin Gottfried, though not necessarily as charmed by the show as some of his colleagues, devoted space to discussing the fact that Coleman had written the show’s orchestrations and arrangements: “Orchestrators can, and too often do apply their own sounds to composers’ music and make them sound common. Coleman’s orchestrations are exactly in his music’s spirit, of course, and bring out just what he was trying to do.”

And, indeed, Coleman’s work was meticulous in this regard. A few months after the show’s opening, he described how he built “Hey There Good Times” to emphasize its feel-good qualities: “I began with the bass because the bass is the bottom and gives you the tone. Then I added the banjo, which gives it a nice old-time feeling of nostalgia and comfort. The next thing I thought necessary was rhythm—you want that beat to get stronger, so I brought in the drums. Last was the piano, to emphasize the melody.”
20

There were those who had troubles with the show, notably once the weeklies came out. In his review in the May 2 issue of the
New Yorker
, Brendan Gill took issue with the whole affair, calling it “a monotonous and mildly unsavory series of variations on a single witless joke.” In his
New York Magazine
review Alan Rich decried it as being “a tepid knee-slapper.”

Perhaps the difference in the tone of the reviews was a matter of timing: when the critics from the dailies reviewed the show, many hadn’t taken in the musical that opened within days of
I Love My Wife
, the megahit
Annie
, which bowed on April 21. In the face of this genuinely family-friendly tuner, the genial and even schmaltzy sexuality espoused in
Wife
must certainly have been a bit of a head-scratcher. Even the dailies had noted that
I Love My Wife
seemed to be a bit behind the times; after all,
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
had brought the idea of wife swapping to movie screens around the country in 1969, and even the sitcom
All in the Family
had tackled it in 1972 when that show’s female lead answered a personal ad, not understanding what was meant by the word “swingers.”

The
I Love My Wife
cast members recognized the good fortune they had in the timing of their opening. “Fortunately, we opened just before
Annie
,” recalled Naughton. “
Annie
sort of sucked a lot of air off of the street in terms of PR and so on, but we got in just under the wire and declared this kind of terrific little hit.”
21

And it wasn’t just the show itself that was a hit. So was its title song, thanks to a record cut by Frank Sinatra backed by a sumptuous Nelson Riddle arrangement, that was released well before the production opened. The single did so well that
Billboard
’s review of
Wife
began with a reference to how it had opened “riding a crest of pre-opening publicity created by Frank Sinatra’s tuneful version of the title song.”
22

Sinatra wasn’t the only one crooning the tune. It became part of several cabaret performers’ club acts during the first months of 1977, and Coleman’s work as publisher-promoter resulted in a couple of other singles, including another of the title song from guitarist Tony Mottola and one of “Hey There Good Times” from pianist Michael Corey. Coleman also worked to get other recordings, and just before opening,
Billboard
reported that “Everybody Today Is Turning On” was “being recorded separately by Pearl Bailey and Ethel Merman.”
23

Neither of these ever made it to stores, nor did a proposed version of “Someone Wonderful I Missed” that Peggy Lee was reportedly scheduled to release, but the show did get a cast album, after some furious bidding (theoretically) inspired by the 30,000-plus copies Sinatra’s single sold. Eventually Atlantic Records released the LP, and Coleman lavished extra time and money on it, paying the cast for two sessions to create an album that “could compete with any pop album on the market.”
24

His exacting work paid off and spawned a new slew of praise for the music. “Cy Coleman’s score and Michael Stewart’s lyrics come across even brighter and wittier than they do on the stage,” was Jerry Parker’s response to the LP when he reviewed it in
Newsday
on November 20, 1977.

John S. Wilson’s lengthier assessment of the album in the
New York Times
on October 10 noted: “The singers gain in vocal presence [on the record] and, in the process, several songs emerge in clearer terms than they do on stage. . . . There is a deeper, warmer charm in the country flavor of ‘Someone Wonderful I Missed’ . . . and the easy, 1940’s pop style of ‘Lovers on Christmas Eve.’”

Unlike Coleman’s previous shows, most of which had opened in the winter,
I Love My Wife
opened in the spring, just weeks in advance of the awards season for theater, so it wasn’t long before
I Love My Wife
could be advertised as one of the year’s Tony Award–nominated musicals. In all, the show picked up six nominations, including Coleman’s fourth for best score, and when the prizes were handed out in June, director Saks and performer Lenny Baker won in their respective categories. Other honors came in as the show settled into its run at the Barrymore. Gleason nabbed a Theatre World Award for an outstanding debut performance, and with the Drama Desk Awards Coleman received the award for outstanding music and the production’s musicians were honored as a whole as outstanding featured actor in a musical.

On the heels of its opening came word that
I Love My Wife
would be produced in London’s West End, and in October the show opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre (where
Sweet Charity
had played ten years before), marking the first time that Coleman had a show simultaneously playing on both sides of the Atlantic. Saks and White reprised their duties as director and choreographer for the production, which featured Ben Cross (a few years before his
Chariots of Fire
fame) and Liz Robertson (who had starred in the West End
A Little Night Music
) as Wally and Monica and Richard Beckindale (a favorite on British television thanks to shows like
Rising Damp
and
Porridge
) and Deborah Fallender (who would go on to have a substantial television career) as Alvin and Cleo.

The London critics were less enthusiastic about the show overall than their American counterparts, but Coleman’s work continued to receive accolades for its diversity and unity. Robert Cushman wrote in the
Observer
, “Through rock, country, cod ballad, straight ballad, military march, buck and wing, and barrelhouse sing-along, Mr. Coleman manages to keep faith with each convention while adding to it a beat, a lilt, a rhythmic pattern or a sense of fun that is entirely his own.”
25

The U.K. production of
Wife
only managed to reach 401 performances, at which point the Broadway production was still enjoying its healthy run, thanks in part to the arrival of two stars, the brothers Tom and Dick Smothers, whose work on television, notably their own comedy show in the mid-1960s, had made them household names. They were joined by two new female leads. Barbara Sharma, who had been in both
Little Me
and
Sweet Charity
as featured dancer, took over the role of Cleo, and Janie Sell, whose credits included a recent revival of
Pal Joey
and Stewart’s
George M!

The Smothers Brothers’ presence didn’t translate only to ticket sales. It also meant that the show underwent some changes. They brought their knack for improvisational comedy to the production, and there were moments when they would simply ad lib. “‘We don’t do it as often as we could,’ Dick Smothers said, ‘but we try to draw on our own relationship, and use it to set up a relationship between the characters.’”
26

Similarly, the addition of performers who were not necessarily singers into the show meant that it also began to change musically, and Miller noticed. “The Smothers Brothers came in, and you know with their experience there were certainly musical ideas that they had that they knew were going to work for them.” Concerned, Miller called Coleman, saying, “I’m calling as the music director. It’s my job to tell these people ‘No. Here’s the way it goes, and here’s the way it has to be sung.’ I kind of assume that’s what you entrusted me to do as music director.”
27

Miller recalled Coleman’s response: “Cy said something like, ‘I trust the music director to let the Smothers Brothers have the show run for six more months. Let them do whatever they want to do.’”
28

Miller did, and the Smothers Brothers continued with the show into the spring of 1979 and later toured extensively with it. When it came time for a new Broadway cast, the producers opted to take the show in a new direction and announced that Jimmie Walker (who had become an instantly recognizable star thanks to his portrayal of J. J. Evans on the sitcom
Good Times
) would head an all–African American cast.

Walker eventually withdrew during rehearsals, but the idea of an all-black cast took hold, and as
I Love My Wife
entered its third year at the Barrymore, it boasted a new above-the-title star, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who had played Freddie Washington on the sitcom
Welcome Back, Kotter
and was making his Broadway debut as the goofy Alvin. At his side were Broadway vets Hattie Winston as Cleo, and Marjorie Barnes and Larry Wiley as Monica and Wally.

The reconfiguring of the show’s ethnicity unfortunately did not spur ticket sales, which even with the Smothers Brothers in the show had begun to dwindle. Shortly after the new cast took over,
I Love My Wife
closed after 857 performances. By that point it had spawned productions in cities such as Madrid, Johannesburg, and Tokyo, among others. But more important, during the show’s two-year run another Coleman show reached Broadway, winning him his first Tony Award. He also watched a second musical collapse while wending its way to New York and was at work on a third that looked as if it would be ready for production by the end of the year.

21.
On the Twentieth Century

When Michael Stewart approached Coleman about collaborating on
I Love My Wife
, the composer was also in talks with Betty Comden and Adolph Green about an idea that would allow them to continue the collaboration that had begun with
Straws in the Wind
. They were all eager to do a full musical, as the lyricists remembered: “The first time we sat down to write something with him things started to happen. He had imagination, individuality and a head full of exciting musical ideas.”
1

In 1976 they were still in the process of brainstorming, but there was one idea to which they kept returning, albeit reluctantly: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1932 comedy
Twentieth Century
.

The farce, set aboard the fabled train that whisked passengers from Chicago to New York in the span of sixteen hours, centered on a onetime giant of the theater, producer Oscar Jaffe. Down on his luck, desperate for a hit, he boards the train with the intention of convincing Lily Garland, a screen star whom he had catapulted to fame on the stage, to make her return to the theater in his next show. The fact that they had had a prickly romance when they originally worked together doesn’t help matters any, nor do a host of complications that arise en route.

Comden and Green were the ones who initially gravitated toward the material, but Coleman demurred: “I knew there was a certain perception that the show should have a 1920s score. I didn’t mind doing a period piece, but it was not a period that I wanted to do. I felt it was too boxlike and confining musically.”
2

They discussed a number of other properties that might make sense and even considered creating a completely original musical, but somehow
Twentieth Century
kept coming up as they talked. Nevertheless, Coleman remained resistant to the idea.

Then, according to Comden and Green, “One day, working with Cy, we improvised a musical sequence that was highly flamboyant verging on the operatic. We laughed, dismissed it as ‘too much,’ and then suddenly realized that that was really the way Oscar and Lily should sound. In fact, it was the way the entire show should sound. We felt we had the key.”
3

Having moved beyond the hurdle of what the show should sound like, the process of adapting the original began. Comden and Green, working as the show’s book writers as well as its lyricists, knew they had to streamline the original: “It seemed wildly verbose with a lot of subsidiary characters.”
4

They cut out some roles entirely, such as a pair of actors from Oberammergau who were passengers on the train, refugees from a lost production of that city’s legendary history of a seventeenth-century passion play. But with the excision of these roles, they had to enhance another character that would provide Oscar with the necessary inspiration for luring Lily back to the stage. So they built up the role of a religious fanatic who was also en route to New York. They changed the character from a man to a woman and gave her the fanciful name of Letitia Primrose. It was through her presence that Oscar hit upon the idea of having Lily make her theatrical comeback as Mary Magdalene. Another terrific bit of recrafting was the name change they made for Lily’s dim boyfriend from Hollywood. In the play he’d been an agent named George Smith. For the musical Comden and Green turned him into a preening young leading-man type named Bruce Granit.

By May 29, 1976, just three months after announcements had been made about the show that would become
I Love My Wife
, Jack O’Brian reported in his syndicated column that Coleman was at work on musicalizing
Twentieth Century
, and within a month the project even had its producers, Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, the men who brought
Little Me
to Broadway.

For the rest of 1976 Coleman worked on both
Wife
and
On the Twentieth Century
, and by the time the former show was in rehearsals, Comden and Green were able to tell reporters during press junkets for their own show,
A Party with Comden and Green
, about their work with Coleman: “The new score is just glorious. It’s given us a new enthusiasm for working in the musical theater again.”
5

Coleman was equally galvanized. Writing in this overblown style took him back to his days as a classical pianist, when he had loved playing Rossini as piano duets. The score, he remembered, “literally poured out. As a matter of fact, I was writing it so fast, I wouldn’t have time to put it on paper,”
6
and as Green’s wife, Phyllis Newman, remembered, Comden and Green were once again diving for their cassette recorders.

As Coleman rehearsed
Wife
and Comden and Green performed on Broadway, they also began the search for a director for their new show. To fill this role they turned to a man who was a legend in theatrical circles: Harold Prince. He had begun his career as a stage manager working for director George Abbott, eventually graduating to producing and then directing. Among the shows that producer Prince shepherded in the 1950s were
The Pajama Game
,
West Side Story
, and
Fiorello!
Shows like
She Loves Me
,
Cabaret
, and
Zorba
, all produced and directed by Prince, were among the impressive additions to his résumé in the 1960s, and then, with the dawn of the 1970s, he formed a relationship with Stephen Sondheim that resulted in
Company
,
Follies
, and
A Little Night Music
.

By the time Coleman, Comden, and Green were looking for a director, Prince was coming off his most recent Sondheim show,
Pacific Overtures
, in which he had lost some of his own money. Since then he had admittedly “shopped around for assignments.”
7
One of these had been the film version of
A Little Night Music
. He soon got the call about possibly staging the trio’s new show.

Prince was intrigued and went to Coleman’s apartment to discuss the project. He arrived aware of the piece’s history. He knew that his theatrical mentor Abbott had directed the original production. Prince had not been around to see that staging, but he had seen the film that it had inspired. Additionally, he had taken in the 1950 Broadway revival starring José Ferrer and Gloria Swanson. “I didn’t think it was a great movie, and I didn’t think the revival was great, but I thought it was fun.”
8

After he heard Coleman, Comden, and Green’s work, he thought that the dimension they had added “was brilliant. They’d made a modern operetta out of it. The score was not a Broadway score. It was larger than life, like Oscar Jaffe. And I thought, ‘That’s interesting, what they have done.’”
9

Beyond the songs, the project held an additional appeal for Prince: “I thought the best part of it is that you have to do a musical on a train. That’s a challenge. Sort of the same thing that challenged me when I did
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, a whole musical in a jail, for God’s sake. Well, a musical on a train, how the fuck do you do that? And that was tempting, plus the three of them are all quintessential professionals and good and the spirit of it was fun. So I said yes.”
10

It was an unusual move for Prince, who had built his reputation on musicals that were darker in tone. Beyond this anomaly, Prince also said, “It’s the only time in my life that I did a show that was finished already.”
11

Casting notices for the show started to appear just weeks before
I Love My Wife
opened on Broadway. Then, in June, the production hit a stumbling block: Feuer and Martin pulled out as producers. A new team came in almost immediately: the newly formed Producers Circle 2, a consortium of theatrical backers with a fascinatingly diverse set of backgrounds. One member had considerable theatrical experience, Robert Fryer, who had coproduced
Sweet Charity
and was now managing director of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The others ranged from Martin Richards, who had started his career as a singer, went on to work in casting at Twentieth Century–Fox, and subsequently graduated to production. Also part of the Producers Circle was Mary Lea Johnson, heiress to the Johnson & Johnson medical-products fortune, and a former actor, James Cresson. The group’s work was not limited to theater; they were also backing films at the time, notably
The Boys from Brazil
and
The Shining
.

One of the reasons for Feuer and Martin’s departure was a disagreement over casting. They wanted a star for the role of Oscar Jaffee, as he was now called in the musical, along with the lines of Alfred Drake, Broadway’s original Curly in
Oklahoma!
, or Danny Kaye, who had starred in musicals like
Lady in the Dark
and
Two by Two
, while Prince was leaning toward a performer with more of a background in nonmusicals.

One actor he considered was Alan Bates, who did indeed audition for the team. “We had a private call at Cy’s apartment,” said
On the Twentieth Century
choreographer Larry Fuller. “Cy played for him. It was just Betty and Adolph and Hal Prince and me, sitting in Cy’s living room with Cy at the piano, which makes it more nerve-racking for the actor, as opposed to being at an aesthetic distance on a stage or in a big rehearsal room where you’re not right on top of them. You could hear—well, not literally—but it seemed like you could hear the change in his pockets shaking, he was so nervous.”
12

The team had to pass on Bates because he wasn’t up to the score’s vocal demands. A similar fate was in store for an actress who auditioned for the role of Lily Garland: Meryl Streep, who had yet to make the transition from her stage career—which included having just starred on Broadway in the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht musical
Happy End
—to her incredible one onscreen. Fuller recalled their post-audition discussion of the future star: “She didn’t have the high Cs, and Betty and Adolph wanted the operetta voice, and so they were very disappointed to have to say, ‘No, we can’t use her.’”
13

Eventually the role of Oscar went to John Cullum, who had picked up a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of the psychiatrist in
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
and had won a Tony for his performance in
Shenandoah
. Madeline Kahn, who had been an early favorite for the part, was cast as Lily. Kahn had begun her career on the stage, appearing in the last of Leonard Sillman’s
New Faces
revues in 1968; Richard Rodgers’s musical about Noah,
Two by Two
; and David Rabe’s drama
In the Boom Boom Room
. Since this last show she had worked primarily as a film actress, notably in Mel Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein
and
Blazing Saddles
. Her screen successes had been followed by a period of self-assessment. “I went into seclusion for . . . well, let’s see now . . . about a year, in 1975, and it lasted a year and a half. I was very confused. I called a stop to everything. I had to see where I was.”
14

When
On the Twentieth Century
began rehearsals, the company also included Kevin Kline, who had been a member of John Houseman’s company of Juilliard graduates, the Acting Company, and had appeared on Broadway in the short-lived musical
The Robber Bridegroom
, as Lily’s boyfriend. For Letitia Primrose, a role that for a while was rumored to belong to Mildred Natwick, Prince lured comedienne Imogene Coca, a staple of 1950s and ’60s television, back to the stage.

Supporting roles in the musical were filled by a host of Broadway vets. George Coe and Dean Dittman played Oscar’s protégés, Owen and Oliver, and George Lee Andrews (who would eventually have an extraordinary run in Prince’s production of
The Phantom of the Opera
) got one of his first Broadway credits in the small role of a theatrical producer who was working against Oscar. Prince also cast Judy Kaye (an actress with whom he had been hoping to work for some time) in the relatively minor role of Lily’s maid, Agnes. In addition, Kaye was on hand to serve as Kahn’s understudy.

As for the design team, it included scenic designer Robin Wagner, who was responsible for giving
Seesaw
its innovative look, and costume designer Florence Klotz, who worked with Prince on his last three Sondheim musicals, winning Tony Awards for each. Wagner was responsible for bringing the art deco majesty of the train to life, creating an ingenious progression of units that allowed the show to shift seamlessly to spots both in its interior and exterior. He even devised a way in which audiences could experience, as if from a distance, the train’s journey on the tracks. Wagner’s gleaming sets were complemented marvelously by Klotz’s detail-rich costume designs, which had period flair and made the glamour of the central characters palpable.

The creative team also included a new collaborator for Coleman: orchestrator Hershy Kay. Kay had been working on Broadway for over thirty years, and his involvement with shows like Leonard Bernstein’s
Candide
, Marc Blitzstein’s
Juno
, and Jerome Moross and John Latouche’s
The Golden Apple
—all of which were operatic in nature—made him the ideal choice for this new show.

Given the size, scope, and technical intricacy of the production, rehearsals for the principals were conducted on an exact replica of Wagner’s set, which was installed in one of two rehearsal rooms inside the Minskoff Theatre. Cullum vividly recalled, “It had all of the dimensions and the levels, and the train was there, and all the compartments were there, so we had a perfect set to work with.”
15

Prince had the principals on this recreation of the set on the first day of rehearsals, and at the same time Coleman began to work with Kahn on her songs. Larry Fuller remembered, “So, the first day of rehearsal, I happen to be in earshot when Hal told Cy to take Madeline in the small vocal room at the rehearsal studios . . . and go over her part of the score, which was considerable.
16