You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (39 page)

The reviews did nothing to stop audiences from showing up at the Coconut Grove. Business was good, and after the theater’s subscribers had seen the show, single tickets sold briskly. Nonetheless, there were reports saying that the notices were “prompting talk of major revisions following the show’s close [in Florida].”
13

Hotchner and Coleman did start the process of revisions, going so far as to give the show a new name,
Welcome to the Club
. “We changed the title because we thought the first was a bit too abrasive,” Hotchner said, adding, “Of course, people collapsed laughing when they knew what the show was about. . . . But if you didn’t know, it sounded tough.”
14

With the announcement of the show’s new name came the schedule for its Broadway debut. The writers believed that it would be playing in New York by the fall of 1988, featuring many of the performers who had been working on the show from the beginning. Then came delays.

“The Coconut Grove people were going to co-produce, but they were so busy with their season,” Coleman said,
15
so he and Hotchner began the process of producing it themselves, hosting backers’ auditions.

One person who attended one of these events, held at Coleman’s townhouse, was Bill Rosenfield, who was just beginning his career at RCA Victor, where he would eventually rise to the level of senior vice president. “Cy put on an extraordinary presentation. You would have thought that
Welcome to the Club
was the wittiest, most urbane, smartest, most melodic, fantastic, funniest musical ever written, because he (and I saw how he did this over the years with other shows) compressed it down to twenty-eight minutes, and it was all boom-boom-boom-boom. And if you’re two and a half feet from watching Cy Coleman’s hands on a piano, you think, ‘This is Michelangelo.’”
16

Getting
Welcome to the Club
to Broadway was not, however, a matter of just giving Coleman a chance to display his virtuosity at the keyboard; it was also a matter of demonstrating the finesse with which he was adapting to the changing route that a show took to Broadway. Ever since
A Chorus Line
was developed through a series of workshops at the New York Shakespeare Festival, stagings where the writers could revise on the spot or overnight were taking the place of out-of-town tryouts, where so much revision work was traditionally done. They weren’t just happening in New York but around the country at other nonprofit theaters, which were looking to find the one musical that would provide financial security during lean times and underwrite their production of less-mainstream work.

It was a new dynamic, and one that Edwin Wilson examined in the
Wall Street Journal
. In his story he pointed specifically to two of Coleman’s shows,
Club
and
13 Days to Broadway
. “Mr. Coleman has a number of projects in the works, but two in particular illustrate the circuitous and improvisational thing that a Broadway ‘tryout’ can now become.” Wilson even went so far as to describe Coleman’s and other writers’ shows as projects that were “circling in the hinterlands like so many airliners stacked up above a permanently fogged in Kennedy Airport.”
17

Coleman might not have used the airport analogy to describe the dexterity with which he was navigating the changing landscape of producing a musical, but he certainly would have agreed with Wilson’s use of the word “improvisational.” He was doing everything and anything to get the production on, recognizing that things had changed dramatically in the thirty or so years since
Wildcat
premiered: “People used to be able to buy you on reputation, but they don’t anymore. So you have to play the piano in your living room.”
18
Elsewhere he remarked about
Welcome to the Club
, “Ironically . . . it’s easier to get backing for a $5 million musical than one that costs $1.5 million.”
19

A trio of men did ultimately join Coleman and Hotchner as producers of
Welcome to the Club
, which was budgeted at $1.5 million, about one-fifth of what new musicals on Broadway were costing at the time. To Coleman, working on a tight budget was a good thing. “You’re watching every expenditure. . . . You know that old phrase about counting coffee cups? Well, we’re counting coffee cups. But because of that, everybody works harder.”
20

Its funding secured, the show booked a theater (the intimate Music Box, built by Irving Berlin to house his own revues) and set an official opening date. It also got a new director, Peter Mark Schifter, who had made his Broadway debut with Albert Innaurato’s offbeat comedy
Gemini
in 1977; it went on to have a run of over four years, after which Schifter established a career directing television and opera; with
Welcome to the Club
, he was returning to the Broadway fold.

The show also had a new headliner: Avery Schreiber, the popular comedian, who, after a start in Broadway shows like
How to Be a Jewish Mother
, became a fixture on television in everything from
Love, American Style
to
The Love Boat
.
He took over the role previously played by Parry. Of the performers who were in the previous incarnations of the musical, only two remained: Sokol and Sharon Scruggs, who played the part of the country singer in the White Barn production. Other new members of the company were Jodi Benson, whose voice would achieve international fame with the release of the animated feature
The Little Mermaid
at the end of the year; Terri White, who had been in Coleman’s
Barnum
; and Scott Waara, who would go on to win a Tony a few years later for his work in a revival of Frank Loesser’s
The Most Happy Fella
.

Both rehearsals and previews for the show were, as White called them, “hard.” She cited a number of factors that made the process problematic: “I think there were difficulties between A. E. Hotchner and Cy, and they were competing about who would make the story work.”
21
Coleman himself, touting the show just before its opening, was even willing to say that the process had been rough: “I have never done a show that wasn’t made in the preview period. Never. This is when we work. This is when it happens. This is where a show is pulled together. This period is for people who do not panic under fire.”
22

Throughout the workshop process Coleman, as both composer and co-lyricist, had been adding and deleting numbers from a score that had become as eclectic as the one he had written for
I Love My Wife
. Just as that show referenced everything from barbershop quartets to the gentle sounds of 1970s pop, the music in
Welcome to the Club
traversed a wide range of musical genres. There was one of Coleman’s sly Latin numbers, “Rio,” for the druggist’s fantasy about escaping to Rio to be rid of his wife and his debts. For the insurance salesman and his wife Coleman penned “Piece of Cake,” a red-hot-mama number worthy of Sophie Tucker.

Coleman continued to refine his score during the three weeks of Broadway previews. Four songs were cut, including the original title number, “Let ’Em Rot.” Another four new songs were inserted, and Coleman finally found a spot for “Love Behind Bars,” a bluegrass number that he had written for the show but never used.

Making the show work meant changes not only to the material but also to the cast itself. During previews actress Scruggs was let go. As Sally Mayes, who was hired as a swing, remembered, “As I was going into rehearsals, it became apparent to me and I think everybody else that I was really right for the part that I was swinging.” One day Schifter called for an understudy rehearsal, and Mayes, who was doing her first Broadway show, didn’t realize it was unusual. She remembered being warned by one of her fellow swings, “You better know your shit.”
23
Indeed, the rehearsal was an audition of sorts to see if Mayes could assume Scruggs’s role. Mayes proved herself and took over.

In addition to extensive rewrites and this one piece of recasting,
Welcome to the Club
faced a leadership crisis, epitomized by what happened when Mayes first went on. After the performance, Mayes remembered, “Director Peter Mark Schifter, God bless his soul, came into my dressing room and gave me about twenty pages of notes. The next day I went onstage, and I didn’t get one laugh and nothing worked.” Mayes remembered what happened afterward when Coleman visited: “Cy said, ‘Did you get a lot of notes?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Throw them in the trash. Do what you did before.’ So I did, and the laughs came back.”
24

Throughout it all, stage manager Craig Jacobs recalled, the crises were showing “Cy at his best, as always. If you wanted a new song, it was there in five minutes.”
25
Coleman’s willingness to do whatever it took even extended to performing. According to music contractor John Miller, “For the first week of previews, we didn’t have an overture. When the house lights would go down, Cy would run into the pit, and he would just improvise for about three to five minutes on some unbelievable, great version of all of the tunes. And each time it would be completely different, and each time it would be better than the time before.”
26

Welcome to the Club
, finally with an overture, opened at the Music Box Theatre as originally scheduled on April 13, and the reviews were generally as dire as they were when the piece was known as
Let ’Em Rot
in Florida. In his
New York Times
review, Frank Rich wrote, “[The show] is embarrassingly out of touch with the present-day realities of men, women, sex, marriage, and divorce. . . . Mr. Hotchner’s book seems to have wafted down from a mysogynist [
sic
] time warp where women are all castrating kvetches and the ideal marriage resembles the one embalmed on top of a wedding cake.”

Ironically, in a season that also included Peter Allen’s
Legs Diamond
, a musical about the gangster that lasted only sixty-four performances;
Senator Joe
, a musical inspired by the life of Senator Joseph McCarthy, which closed in previews; and
Chu-Chem
, billed as the first Chinese-Jewish musical, which eked out sixty performances,
Welcome to the Club
was heralded by Clive Barnes in the
New York Post
as “the best completely new musical of the season.” But he quickly added, “There have been bad seasons for the Broadway musical in the past. . . . But this is ridiculous.”

Nonetheless, critics were able to get past the show’s book to appreciate Coleman’s music, even if the compliments came backhandedly. In
Newsday
, Linda Winer wrote, “It has music by the ever-engaging tunesmith Cy Coleman. Under the cover of sweet, old-fashioned melodies, however, lurks a show that, for starters, is really stupid about women.” Similarly, Rich opined, “This Coleman project has a better score than the material merits.”

A notice announcing that the show would close on April 15 was posted but then withdrawn. After one more week, however,
Welcome to the Club
shuttered on April 22, having played twelve regular performances. On some levels, Coleman saw its short run coming. He knew that in the event of negative reviews, they didn’t have the money for advertising, and that then “you hope that word of mouth will do it.”
27

By the time the Tony Awards were announced, the lackluster season prompted the elimination of both the best book and the best score categories, meaning that neither Coleman nor Hotchner could even receive a nod for their work. The show was remembered in a pair of categories: Scott Wentworth was recognized as a featured actor, and Schifter received a nod for his direction. In a season that included two hit revues,
Jerome Robbins’ Broadway
and
Black and Blue
, neither man won.

After this,
Welcome to the Club
lapsed into the kind of obscurity that’s afforded to Broadway musicals that last less than a month. In hindsight, cast members contemplated what might have caused its failure. Actress White hypothesized that there was a conflict between the subject and the way in which it was presented: “I think the problem with the show was alimony jail. It’s a subject that no longer exists, but they were trying to do it in the present day. But no one even knows about alimony jail anymore, so it was battling against itself from the very beginning.”
28
Mayes recalled, “I was kind of green, so I didn’t really realize quite how misogynistic it was,” and then added, “If it had been done in the ’60s, it would have been a different thing. . . . It would have been better received.”
29

As for Coleman, the idea of the show and his score stuck with him for the next decade or so, and it was a work to which he would return. Before that, not surprisingly, there were other tuners that needed his attention, and these had happier endings than the one that met
Welcome to the Club
.

27.
City of Angels

Coleman didn’t have much time to worry about the quick demise of
Welcome to the Club
, because he had another show that was already hurtling toward its opening. “It’s all signals go for the musical-comedy thriller” was the way Enid Nemy characterized the pending arrival of
City of Angels
on July 29, 1989, in the
New York Times
. In fact, things were so certain for this musical that Nemy was able to report the date of its first preview (November 14) and the theater it would play, the Virginia (later rechristened the August Wilson Theatre).

When the announcement was made, Coleman had been working on the musical for over two years with two men: book writer Larry Gelbart and lyricist David Zippel. For Coleman, of course, the idea of a detective musical had its genesis a bit further back, when he, Michael Stewart, and Mickey Spillane had discussed the possibility of doing a musical with sleuth Mike Hammer at its center.

The composer had put the project aside for a while but then revisited it, eventually reaching out to Gelbart, who recalled in his memoir
Laughing Matters
that he received a call from Coleman in 1987 about the project. It must have come earlier, however, because in the January 29, 1986 issue of
Variety
, a report on Gelbart’s many upcoming projects included a mention of the musical he was working on with Coleman: “Gelbart has also completed the book, Cy Coleman the music, for the Broadway legiter ‘Death Is for Suckers.’” Regardless of when the call came and how far in the writing process either man was at the time of the
Variety
story, Gelbart believed that Coleman’s concept for “a musical based on the private eye movies of the forties . . . was the perfect idea.”
1

By the time Coleman turned to Gelbart, the playwright and screenwriter’s deft comedy skills were recognized on both coasts. In New York he and his cowriter Burt Shevelove had picked up a Tony Award for the book for
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and
Sly Fox
, Gelbart’s adaptation of Ben Jonson’s comedy
Volpone
, had enjoyed a healthy run on Broadway in the mid-1970s, starring, among others, George C. Scott.

In Los Angeles and Hollywood Gelbart’s work had garnered him two Academy Award nominations (for
Tootsie
and
Oh, God!
) and a host of Emmy Award nominations—along with one win—for the television series
M*A*S*H
. And even though they had not worked together, there was a mutual admiration between the two men before Gelbart wrote his first words or Coleman his initial notes.

Gelbart had first encountered Coleman in the 1950s during the heyday of his work as a nightclub pianist. In a 2002 BBC Radio 2 documentary,
The Cy Coleman Story
, Gelbart recalled, “What struck me about Cy’s playing, then as now, was a slyness in his music, a humor. The music was surprising in the way that humor is. Chord changes seemingly within chord changes. His was an arresting mind in terms of how he heard music internally and then expressed it outwardly.” For Coleman, Gelbart was an ideal collaborator, because “a lot of people don’t have the same feeling [as I do] for music, and Larry’s exceptional in that. He was a musician, a clarinetist and a saxophonist.”
2

Zippel came to the project after Gelbart and Coleman had begun. The lyricist had campaigned to be a part of the team back when Coleman suggested they collaborate on the aborted
Julian
. Zippel told Coleman he didn’t feel he was right for this show, but having read a report about the detective musical, he also said, “
That
is the perfect thing for me.”
3

The lyricist recalled that Coleman responded, “Well, we’re talking to a lot of big shots for that one, but I’ll think about it.” After this, Zippel said, “We didn’t talk for a couple of months, and then I got a call saying if I wanted to come in and write on spec that we would sit down and talk about the show. Then, Larry, he, and I would start, and we would write three songs, at the end of which we would decide whether or not we would all move forward together.”
4

Zippel agreed to these terms, and the three men met. Zippel said, “Larry had outlined the detective part of the show. At that point, he hadn’t come up with the idea of telling two stories at once, so Cy wrote a complete melody, which he gave to me. The scene that we imagined it would be a part of was the scene where the missing girl was found naked in the bed of the detective. And the first thing I did was write the lyric to the melody of ‘Lost and Found.’”
5

Both Coleman and Gelbart liked Zippel’s work, and so they moved forward. Zippel recalled the next lyric-writing assignment was for “a song for the detective’s girlfriend to sing in a nightclub. The idea was that it was one of those truly romantic torch songs, and I had the idea that she was singing the lyrics but they were reflective of how the detective felt about her. And they liked that idea. Cy sat down at the piano and just played what became ‘With Every Breath I Take.’ While we were in the room, I heard the title line [in Coleman’s melody] and I said, ‘With every breath I take,’ and he loved the idea, again very enthusiastic.”
6

Zippel penned a lyric for this song quickly but then thought, “Oh my God. That came too easily,” so he wrote numerous other versions just to be safe. When it came time for Coleman to consider them, Zippel made sure the first one he had written was on top of the sheaf of lyrics he presented. The composer played through the melody using Zippel’s initial version and immediately liked it. Zippel remembered, “Cy just said, ‘This is terrific! Let’s call Larry and play it for him!’ And from then on, I was in. There was never a look back.”
7

As the collaboration progressed, Zippel recalled, “Cy and I started to get a little ahead of Larry, and we had a meeting where Larry said, ‘I love where you guys are going. I love where the score is going. It’s innovative. It’s different. But I feel like I’m just writing a spoof of a detective novel, and I think I can come up with something that would make it more interesting, and it will give me a chance to break some new ground in the way that you guys are. So give me a couple of more months.’”
8
Gelbart characterized the block he was feeling at the time slightly differently. “However affectionate of a parody of a private-eye show it was, it wasn’t even holding my interest.”
9

Coleman and Zippel agreed, and Gelbart returned to his home in California. A few months later, he called and said, “I’m ready. Come out to California.”
10
The songwriting team flew out, and Gelbart told them about his idea of telling two stories concurrently. One would be the private-detective tale that they had been working on. The other would center on the process that a novelist was going through to get this private-eye yarn turned into a movie in 1940s Hollywood; as Gelbart put it, the musical would be “the private life of a private-eye writer.”
11
Coleman believed that it was once Gelbart hit on this idea that “Larry had discovered a way for him to have as much fun as I was having doing the music.”
12

Energized by the turn the project had taken, the trio spent the next ten days working the plot and the story out. What emerged was the story of a writer named Stine who had written a novel about a detective named Stone. Stine’s book was being turned into a film, and in the process it was being altered. Despite Stine’s gut reactions against what was happening to his book, he was constantly agreeing to the changes, even when they damaged the integrity of the tale.

Beyond the dual storytelling, the team came up with a scheme for double-casting the show, so that the people in Stine’s life were also the characters in the book and its film version. Stone’s secretary, Oolie, for instance, would be played by the same actress who was playing the secretary to the Samuel Goldwyn–like movie producer with whom Stine was working. Similarly, the actress playing Stine’s wife would also portray Stone’s girlfriend.

With their new outline a bicoastal collaboration began. Gelbart faxed new scenes to New York and Coleman and Zippel sent tapes to Gelbart. Sometimes, in a burst of enthusiasm, they couldn’t wait for a tape to cross the country, so they would simply play what they’d just written to Gelbart over the phone.

Once they had completed the new two-tiered version of
Death Is for Suckers
, the men began to contemplate who would produce and who would direct. For the former category, Coleman approached an old friend, Nick Vanoff, a television producer with a long line of credits in variety shows like
The Sonny & Cher Show
. Vanoff had also been behind the television specials for the Kennedy Center Honors, and he came to the table with some Broadway experience, including a couple of comedian Jackie Mason’s shows in the mid-1980s. Zippel recalled that “Cy pitched the idea to Nick, and he liked it immediately.”
13

Another man who came on board early to produce was Roger Berlind, who had Broadway credits dating back to the mid-1970s, when he was an associate producer on Richard Rodgers’s
Rex
. Since then the shows that he had brought to the Great White Way ranged from dramas like Peter Shaffer’s
Amadeus
and Edward Albee’s
The Lady from Dubuque
to musicals like
Sophisticated Ladies
and
Nine
.

Before the show reached opening night, it would gain another three producing partners, including two of the three theater owners on Broadway: the Shubert Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters. It marked the first time that the companies had worked together.

In addition, and in a sign of how corporate influence was infiltrating the world of Broadway, the name of the Japanese company Suntory International was also above the title. The show was one of four that the liquor company would invest in during the season as it sought to carve a niche for itself both in the United States and Japan, backing Broadway shows as well as supporting nonprofits ranging from Carnegie Hall to the Audubon Society.

As for the director, the men knew that they would need someone who could handle not just the musical aspects of the show but also its intricate plot line. The name they eventually came up with was that of Michael Blakemore. They thought of him primarily because of his work on Michael Frayn’s
Noises Off
, a play that has come to be regarded as the quintessential backstage farce, in which audiences experience—to hilarious effect—how the personal travails and petty bickering between the actors and the technicians of a small theater company affect what takes place when they are working onstage.

What the creators did not remember was that in addition to
Noises Off
, Blakemore, early in his career, had directed Peter Nichols’s
The National Health
. Like the musical they had written, Nichols’s play followed two story lines as it skewered the British health-care system, placing events unfolding in a real hospital alongside those in a soap opera that glamorized the medical system.

They sent a copy of the script off to Blakemore, who recalled, “So the book arrived, and it was called
Death Is for Suckers
, and I thought this was such an appalling title.” Beyond his dislike of the title, Blakemore admitted, “I was also skeptical about whether a private-eye musical could work at all.”
14
Nevertheless, based on his respect for and knowledge of both Gelbart’s and Coleman’s work, Blakemore started to read and didn’t stop until he had finished the entire thing.

Feeling the show was “infinitely wittier and more intelligent than the books of most musicals,” he then let his agent know that he would be interested in pursuing the idea of directing the show. The four men met in New York, and after this preliminary meeting Coleman and Zippel, eager to secure Blakemore’s services, flew to London so that they could play the score for him. Blakemore remembered how “they hired a hall in West Hampstead with a piano, and I went up there and sat on a bench or a chair while the two authors (composer and lyricist) sang me the score.” The director also joked that it was at this moment “I felt at last I’m in show business.”
15
It was enough to bring Blakemore on board to the noir musical.

Even though he had officially committed only after Coleman and Zippel’s performance, Blakemore recalled that he had already begun to visualize what he could do with the musical: “Often with scripts you like an awful lot, you really start directing them the minute you start reading them.”
16

One notable instance involved a scene in which audiences would see the author at work on his screenplay side by side with the scene he was writing. When the author makes revisions, Gelbart indicated, the actors in the detective story should start over. Blakemore drew inspiration from his experience doing sound editing on a film to expand upon that idea: “They used to do a thing called ‘rock and roll,’ where they’d run the film forward and then, in order to do it again, they have to run the film backward.” When this would happen, Blakemore explained, “the actors move backwards and they speak the dialogue, so it comes off like some kind of weird Scandinavian. And so I thought we could do that there, and that’s indeed what we did, and it got the first really deep laugh in the show.”
17

Beyond such specifics, Blakemore had a vision for the overall look of the show: “When I read the book for the first time, I immediately thought that I could do the film in black-and-white and I could do the Hollywood part of the story in color.”
18
Ironically, this was something that had occurred to the writers as well, but as Zippel recalled, “Another interesting thing was, we had the idea of doing the black-and-white and color. But we didn’t pitch it to him because we wanted to see what he would come up with.”
19
It was a harbinger of the unity of vision that would shape the entire show, down to its title.