Chapter 32

Not every show is going to work, and in a long career you have to expect disappointments. If you have a bunch of years where everything succeeds—I had five hits in a row—then sure as night follows day, there is going to be a disaster. Well, from Merrily in 1981 through Grind in 1985, I had five Broadway flops in a row. I picked them. Are you steeled when disaster strikes? I was bummed out the morning after a flop had opened, but I went back to work on a new project, not knowing at the time that I would be working on my next flop. And that uncertainty is the nature of the work, the adventure of the work: not even after decades in the theatre do you know how your new show will be received. Over a long career, there are lessons to be learned, and sometimes they are never learned.

I took a break from the theatre when in 1981, David Gockley, the artistic director and general manager of the Houston Grand Opera, offered me Willie Stark, the eminent composer Carlisle Floyd’s adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The material follows loosely the career of Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, a dynamic and ruthless politician. I liked the material and jumped at the opportunity to work at an opera house in a city I’d never visited.

Our Willie was Timothy Nolen, a singer with first-rate acting chops. The set, designed by Eugene Lee, was a permanent structure of stairs leading to the state capitol. Embedded in the stairs at various points were old console radios, different but large, and capable of serving as pedestals for speeches and as benches for citizens to sit on to listen to Willie’s voice. They were the only props on the stage. The material was terrific. Floyd, the composer of the classic Susannah, had delivered a complex and beautifully realized score. I thought it might work on Broadway, and I invited the Shuberts to come down to see it. And here’s something I never learned: when I direct a new opera, I tend to think it can make it to Broadway. That’s not why I take it on, but undoubtedly I blur what belongs on an opera stage with what is right for Broadway.

Memorably, I got to meet Robert Penn Warren and in fact hold his hand onstage during the opening-night bow. The show went well in Houston, and then even better at the Kennedy Center.

Then followed A Doll’s Life. Betty Comden and Adolph Green offered me many suggestions for musicals. Wouldn’t you know that the one that grabbed me was the idea of following Nora Helmer after she slammed the door on her husband Torvald and child at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House? We observed a terrified but resolute woman leaving her overbearing husband and going into the world by herself to find work, to make a single home for herself, and ultimately to find friends and even a lover. Of course, it was a feminist tract, and that element appealed to all of us. Larry Grossman wrote the music, which was varied and excellent, as were Comden and Green’s lyrics. I asked Tim O’Brien and Tazeena Firth to design it, which they did with great imagination. The show began with a rehearsal of Ibsen’s play on an empty stage with a ground cloth on which tape indicated entrances, exits, tables, chairs—the usual process when rehearsing a play. At the end of Ibsen’s play, when Nora slammed the door leaving her family, the ground cloth slowly moved upstage and flew along the back wall. It was stunning to observe as the show shifted into reality. Appropriately, I thought, I’d used Munch’s famous paintings of the three women on a bridge (and even provided a bridge) to enhance our vision of Norway. It was an abstract element that remained unexplained, as did other Munch references.

We rehearsed in New York but opened at the Music Center in Los Angeles for a long run. Audience response was good, but reviews were mixed. We moved to New York, where they savaged us. There is a temptation when you work on a flop not only to criticize the material but also to find a reason for its failure with the critics and the public. In this case, I was certain that at that time feminism was a controversial subject and the critics took issue with it. And also I believed that they would not accept such a serious musical from Comden and Green. At one point, Nora went to work in a herring factory, and while I thought that was appropriate, there is something about the authors’ reputation for lighthearted and exuberant comedy that made that incident seem ludicrous. We ran on Broadway for only eighteen previews and less than a week after the opening.

Briefly, a word about critics. I learned a long time ago not to write to a critic or to protest a negative review. You cannot win that battle. While we were out of town with A Doll’s Life, Michiko Kakutani, a reporter and subsequent literary critic for the New York Times, came up to see the show and to talk with some of us. This was unusual, as in those days newspapers did not generally report on out-of-town tryouts because of the gentleman’s agreement, a perfectly correct one, that you let people alone while they are working on a show. She watched some rehearsals and interviewed us; she seemed friendly, but she definitely was not. She did a hatchet job on us, writing that the show was in deep trouble. We had gotten killed by the New York Times before we even came to New York. Lesson: no matter how enticing an offer is proffered to visit you in advance of your opening (press agent: “It will be good for business!”), don’t believe it.

In 1984 I directed Joanna Glass’s Play Memory, a troubled-family story centering around an alcoholic father and his wife and daughter. I had a marvelous cast—Donald Moffat, Jo Henderson, and Valerie Mahaffey. You could not ask for better actors. We opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton where we received marvelous reviews. Alexander Cohen and his wife, Hildy Parks Cohen, immediately picked it up and took it to Broadway. The notices were mixed. The show was Tony-nominated (for best play), as were some of its performers. Nevertheless, it closed after five performances. This time I explained our failure as diminution of interest in serious theatre on Broadway. Actually, that has come to be true, but at that time it was premature.

Now I was approached by Steve Martin (another Steve Martin) for advice. He and his colleagues wanted to produce Diamonds, a revue celebrating baseball—our national obsession. I encouraged them. In fact, I asked them why they hadn’t asked me to direct it. It had not occurred to them that I’d be interested, but I was.

There is a lot of existent material about baseball that would fit into the revue form. For example, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s “Who’s on First?” Among their friends was Alan Zweibel, a first-rate writer of comedy and a baseball fanatic. There were others—Harry Stein, Joe Stein’s son; John Lahr, the longtime theatre critic for the New Yorker; and Roy Blount Jr., a staff writer and editor for Sports Illustrated. I also invited some of my friends who I thought might be interested in contributing material to the project. All in all we had fourteen book writers, eleven composers, and eleven lyricists, including Alan Menken, John Kander, Cy Coleman, Gerard Alessandrini, Craig Carnelia, Larry Grossman, and Jonathan Sheffer. Among the lyricists were Howard Ashman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Fred Ebb, Ellen Fitzhugh, and David Zippel.

There was a cast of ten protean performers, including Loni Ackerman, who had just come from playing Eva Perón for years; Jackée Harry, who went on to TV stardom in Sister, Sister; Dick Latessa, with whom I worked in Follies and who won a Tony Award for Hairspray; and Chip Zien, with whom I’m working on Candide as I write this.

We gathered the material and looked for an offbeat space, settling at Circle in the Square on Bleecker Street. I used an environmental staging for the show, seating the audience on three sides; there was a baseball diamond in the middle and a small stage on the fourth wall. Tony Straiges, who designed Sunday in the Park with George beautifully, took on our show and delivered a happy setting for a happy revue. My old standby Judy Dolan designed the costumes and Ken Billington the lighting. Paul Gemignani was our musical director, and Ted Pappas choreographed with humor and exuberance (he went on to an estimable career as artistic director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater).

Everything was in place, and once again I had a sensational time. No metaphor for this one, just a whole lot of laughs. I couldn’t imagine it being anything less than a success, which it was not. I have absolutely no idea why. End of chapter . . . well, almost.

In 1984 Fay Kanin, a celebrated film writer who had a hit on Broadway years earlier with Goodbye, My Fancy, sent me a film script which had gone begging and which I found fascinating. It was about a burlesque house in Chicago with black and white performers who socialize backstage but never perform together onstage. There are dangerous confrontations at the theatre and in the city. I decided that script could be shaped into a musical about violence, which had been on my mind for some time.

More and more I was witnessing acts of violence in our society.—not only on the streets, where road rage was an escalating factor, but also in the proliferation of domestic violence. And this is the lesson I never seemed to have learned: you cannot take a piece of material which dramatizes one event and warp it into something else.

The musical that evolved from this was called Grind. It had a fine score by Larry Grossman and Ellen Fitzhugh, containing one of the best opening numbers of any musical I’ve ever directed: “This Must Be the Place.” But I wasn’t focused on Fay Kanin’s screenplay, which presented an interesting story in an even more interesting setting; I was focused on the epidemic of violence in our society. It remained for Sondheim and Weidman to succeed brilliantly with that subject in Assassins. Once again I was maneuvering to jam a round peg into a square hole. Grind closed after seventy-one performances on Broadway.