Monday 23 September 1985: The TWA flight scheduled to depart Heathrow will be delayed by an hour, so I sit slow-motioning by the departure gate. I seem to go into a trance once I enter an airport building. My breathing slows down as if to reduce my pulse rate, a way of combating anxiety, for this summer has had more than its fair share of planes dropping out of the sky. I try to muster some enthusiasm for the trip, but fear the invitation is a generous but token gesture on behalf of the management, for The Wind opens on Broadway in early December, and I assume the script and lyrics are already cast in stone, which I fear may cause the show to sink like one. Nearly two years have passed and I feel distanced from the whole project. ‘Distance’ being the operative word, I suppose. And talking of operative, my stomach feels like it’s been kicked. Nobly, I decide to forgo cocktails and spirits on the flight, and eight hours later in the back of the luxury limo wonder whether, nobly, I should have forgone the beer and wine as well.
The script waiting for me at the Excelsior Hotel on West 81st Street makes for a disappointing read. Some of the songs that worked well in Washington have been cut and replaced by new songs and lyrics that do not spring from the Wild Wood, as well as a long soliloquy for Ratty about his leaving home when young. For reasons that may have been financial or because the actors weren’t available, the show didn’t get a run out in those small provincial theatres where a good deal of pruning and shipshaping could have taken place, but has been reconstituted to suit the sophisticates on Broadway. I read the script again and decide on my plan of action for the meeting next morning: I will get on my high horse, and fight for Kenneth Grahame and the purity of the book. I will defend the Wild Wood and the creatures that live in it to my dying breath. I will insist on my lyrics being reinstated.
Then I’ll capitulate.
Wednesday 25 September 1985: The ‘Recall Auditions’ are held in a large studio on the corner of Broadway and 19th where I sit at a long table with the new director, Ed Berkeley, two guys from the Johnson-Liff casting agency, the choreographer Randolyn Zinn (now there’s a name to plié with), as well as Bill and Jane, various assistants and their assistants. Of the original cast only Vicky Lewis is retained as Ms Mole; the other principals – Toad, Badger and Ratty – are advised to seek alternative employment. As usual, everyone has their own plans for the evening, so I drift back to the hotel and listen to the tape of Bill’s new songs. The show is too far down the line now for me to save the Wild Wood, so I push my high horse out of the window on the twenty-seventh floor, order room service and settle down to work on a lyric about Toad doing the cancan. It’s just another day for a jobbing lyricist.
On Monday morning I turn up to watch the singers and dancers audition for parts in the chorus and it’s mind-boggling, because each one comes over like a star, and it’s fascinating to see how Vinny Liff of the casting agency assembles a group that, hopefully, will spend the next six to twelve months together. The secret lies in his little black book of backstage gossip:
We can’t use Larry, he’s HIV positive. And Pierre may be as well.
Karen’s recovered, but she’s still carrying a torch for Toni.
If you choose Mark, you can’t have Meryl because of what happened in Philadelphia.
Chico and Robert have had a major fallout, so it’s one or the other.
Joleen may be pregnant.
Errol is still doing coke, and Esther’s weight loss could be pathogenic.
I had fondly imagined that the best singers and dancers would be chosen, but as they are all multi-talented and equally gifted, the deciding factor proves to be their social and, hitherto, private lives. It’s a revelation, but one that should come as no surprise if you think about it. At one point the ethnic mix required by law was mentioned and I piped up with the theory that as most of the cast would be wearing masks or heavy make-up, nobody would be able to spot the difference between whites, blacks and hispanics, but an assistant’s assistant explained, as a mother might to a wayward toddler, that I was missing the point. Before leaving I enjoyed the excitement as the successful auditionees were given their contracts. Pink ones for small parts and members of the chorus worth $600 a week, and white ones for principals, upwards from $1,200.
At 10.30 the following morning we go to view the Nederlander Theater on 41st and Broadway, formerly known as the Billy Rose Theater and before that the National, home to many a Rodgers and Hart musical, a huge 6,000-seater. Unfillable, surely, why can’t we find a neat little theatre off-off-off-off Broadway, about the size of the old Traverse in Edinburgh and let the show run for twenty-seven years? Although I suspect that Bill and Jane might agree, there seem to be dark mutterings of the producer’s licence running out, so it’s make-or-break time for them. I am cheered, though, on leaving, to see that people are already queuing up for tickets. (Well, one old man with Rastafarian dreadlocks curled up with a bottle of wine on the step by the front entrance, but that’s a start, surely?)
Wednesday 2 October 1985: The budget can no longer afford shiny black limos for limey poets to swan about in, so I take a yellow cab to JFK airport like common-or-garden people do. The driver does nothing but moan about the long drive back, about the rain and the traffic jams, about the hurricane and about the fact that there will be no incoming flights for hours and therefore no passengers to pick up. Encouraged, I throw in a moan about the size of the Nederlander and the problems we might have filling it, but he’s so ‘me, me, me’ that I get no sympathy.
I wish I could have stayed on longer for the start of rehearsals, but that means a lot of hanging about, and I’ve got to be back for Book Tower, the kids’ programme I’m presenting for Yorkshire TV. In retrospect, I wrote some good lyrics under pressure, but had the usual problems getting them past Jane, who on one occasion raised objections to the word ‘spleen’ I’d used in a verse, to rhyme with ‘tureen’. ‘No one here will know what a tureen is,’ she argued, ‘and anyway, there’s no such word as “spleen”.’ She was surprised when Ed explained the meaning, having assumed that it was Liverpool slang, but even so I fear it will be shuffled off to the Great Couplet cemetery on the borders of New York State and Massachusetts.
Sunday 10 November 1985:
Here I am,
48 years of age
and never having gone to work in ladies underwear
Never run naked at night in the rain
Made love to a girl I’d just met on a plane …’
Arriving in New York still hungover from yesterday’s birthday celebrations and hopeful that I can be of use, because this time the producers were very keen to have me here. In fact, one of them rang me over the weekend to see if I could fly out right away: ‘We need your input, Raaajer.’ Unfortunately, I had to be in Leeds filming Book Tower until yesterday. In the production office there is good news and bad news. The good news is that NBC will be filming a couple of songs from the show for the Macy’s Christmas party and parade. Four minutes’ worth of free advertising on a show watched by 70 million! Who cares about the bad news? I hear you ask. The bad news is that Ed is a worried man. The first half is overrunning and the cuts being suggested are cosmetic rather than drastic, and at the stage in rehearsals when he should be in sole charge, it appears to be a case of direction by committee. ‘I can’t work with the rewrites,’ he yells at Renny. ‘They’re unsayable by actors.’ So the reason I’m here is to rewrite the rewrites, and at this late stage to join Ed in his battle to recapture the spirit of the original Washington production.
The following morning Bill takes me aside for a little tête-à-tête in which he explains that the show will be re-anglicised when it moves to Europe, but this is America and over here audiences become irritated by too many foreign references. Foreign? England? Surely not. Spend the afternoon gazing blankly at Jane’s lyrics for one of Toad’s songs, in which he sips camomile tea, performs yoga and beats himself with strips of cactus.
Wednesday 13 November 1985: All hands trooped down to Macy’s for their Christmas party, where the cast sang one of Bill’s new songs, ‘Christmas Carol’, probably for the last time in public because Ed wants it cut from the show. The champagne flowed and it was fun to watch Jerome Robbins flitting about like a small silver rabbit as people tried to cage him in conversation. Almost every single person I spoke to said, ‘Hey, I love your eye-glasses!’ which made me think it must be time for a new pair, but it was party time so I recalled the question-and-answer session after a children’s poetry reading in Hong Kong some months before, when a boy had stood up and asked, ‘Mister Roger, why do you wear green spectacles?’ to which I had replied, ‘Because I’m short-sighted.’
This probably wasn’t the most suitable occasion to talk business but time was short, so I cornered Renny and offered to work on the script and do all the rewrites that Ed wanted, and to do it for free, gratis. ‘It won’t cost you a cent and I don’t want a credit, or points, I just want the show to work.’ Renny listened, admired my glasses and said he’d get back to me.
Saturday 16 November 1985: I’m leaving this afternoon and probably won’t be back before the show opens, and as I haven’t heard back from Renny I write a letter to Bill wishing him and Jane all the luck in the world, suggesting a few alterations to the lyrics and urging them to have faith in the director.
At 5.45 it’s out into the swishing rain and a cab to the Carey bus terminal opposite Grand Central. On the way we pass the Nederlander, which is a buzz of activity with lights and billboards going up and posters already proclaiming the advent of a brand-new musical for Broadway: The Wind in the Willows.
The plane is delayed by fifty minutes because the baggage handlers don’t like being out in the rain. Good flight except for a group of Zambians in the row behind who fart silently and venomously throughout. Whether singly or communally I was never to discover. Arrive Heathrow 9 a.m.
Postscript: Hilary was working at the time as an assistant producer on BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World and had arranged to have a week off so that we could attend the opening on 14 December, and consequently I booked a room at the Excelsior and flights with People’s Express airline. But only provisionally, for after returning home there had been an ominous silence from across the Atlantic, no phone calls, faxes, nada, so I rang Renny to learn that Ed Berkeley had been sacked and replaced, and that the opening had been postponed until the following week.
My waters told me that the wind that was about to blow through the willows was a hurricane, so I decided to give my first ever, and no doubt one and only, Broadway opening night a miss. I cancelled the flights and hotel room, and took Bran for a run in Princes Park, where I kicked leaves joyously, as if my X-rays had proved to be clear and I had nothing to worry about.
Wednesday 1 January 1986: Instead of going to New York, Hilary and I went to Liverpool and checked in at the Adelphi where a telegram arrived on Saturday night with news that the show was closing the following day after only four performances. In retrospect there had been a great deal of time and energy wasted, working in some cases with people whose enthusiasm was greater than their talent. But there were good people, too, and clever ones, and I’d hugely enjoyed my trips to the US, where I had gained some insights into the workings of theatre and into the human heart. I may have missed out on earning $6,000 dollars a week, but on the credit side I gained four box files of unusable scripts and three exercise books filled with song lyrics. Variety magazine signed off its review with: ‘Mean old Broadway is the wrong arena for this anthropomorphic fantasy, but smaller musical theaters and children’s theaters might please their audiences with it.’ And here comes the lining (though copper rather than silver), the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation bought the rights and a version of the show is occasionally performed in the States as well as over here. Poop Poop!
At that awkward age now between birth
and death I think of all the outrages unperpetrated
opportunities missed
The dragons unchased
The maidens unkissed
The wines still untasted
The oceans uncrossed
The fantasies wasted
The mad urges lost.