by Tom Shea
The director and choreographer of A Chorus Line, Michael Bennett, met Thomas when they both worked at the June Taylor Dance Studio, Bennett teaching classes, Thomas laying down drumbeats for dancers. Soon, Thomas was helping Bennett develop the patterns that served as the bare bones for the supreme choreographic achievement that was A Chorus Line. Bennett respected his drummer so much that, as A Chorus Line became a phenomenon Thomas was promoted to Musical Coordinator, serving as a liaison between Bennett and his many touring companies.
6. PETER FELLER, SCENIC SHOP OWNER
If you saw a Broadway musical in the recent past, chances are the sets and the deck (stage floor) were built by Feller Scenery Studio. The late Peter Feller’s family, scenic carpenters and engineers for generations, literally have sawdust in their veins.
Peter Feller ran Feller Scenery Studio in the Bronx, and his father, Peter, was a stagehand at the Metropolitan Opera House. (His son, also Peter, owns Feller Precision, a theatrical engineering company that takes up where Feller scenery leaves off.) Master director Harold Prince talks with admiration about rehearsing Follies on the built set at Feller Studios, which saved countless hours of adaptation to the severe rake, or tilt, of the stage. Prince also waxed poetic about Feller’s help in adapting the Broadway Theater for the revival of Candide in 1974: “There’s no question but that we couldn’t have gotten Candide on without Peter Feller’s help,” he wrote in his book Contradictions. Had every director working with a Feller-built set written his own book, we’d have many, many more tributes of this nature.
7. NIKI HARRIS, DANCE CAPTAIN
The role of the Dance Captain in a musical is a slightly precarious one. The Dance Captain must maintain all the choreographer’s steps and be the choreographer’s last word when questions arise during the run of the show. This normally occurs while he or she is dancing in the show at the same time. So, while dancers see the Dance Captain as staff, choreographers see him or her mainly as a dancer. The Dance Captain, therefore, must command respect from both sides.
Niki Harris is Tommy Tune’s Dance Captain of choice. She came on board with him on his great A Day in Hollywood/A Might in the Ukraine and has been with him on the line ever since, creating goodwill while maintaining some of the best-choreographed shows of recent years. The people who matter have noticed, too. The actor Walter Willison, who danced with her in Grand Hotel, has stated publicly, in Theater Week magazine, that she “has a fabulous set of gams.”
8. STEVEN ZWEIGBAUM, PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER
The Production Stage Manager, or PSM for short, is the eyes and ears of a musical, both in rehearsal and performance. The PSM runs and times rehearsals, coordinates production and rehearsal schedules, and juggles egos, all the while maintaining a script full of technical cues that would make a military strategist weep. One of Broadway’s busiest and best is Steven Zweigbaum.
Zweigbaum made his musical stage management debut with Shenandoah in 1975 and since then has rarely stopped working. In addition to running rehearsals and calling cues for the show when it opens (which most PSM’s do a few nights a week, turning it over to assistant stage managers the other nights), Zweigbaum coordinates touring companies of several shows as well. His most recent project has been The Producers. That’s no vacation.
9. SEYMOUR “RED” PRESS, ORCHESTRA CONTRACTOR
The job of a musical contractor is vital to the production of a musical: Fill the pit orchestra with the best players you can, see to it that they maintain a good relationship with the conductor and the actors, and make sure they get paid on time. Not as easy as it sounds. For many years, Seymour “Red” Press has been the go-to guy when musicians are needed.
Press lists over 100 New York shows to his credit, and that’s likely no exaggeration: His first Broadway show as a contractor was 1978’s Ballroom. He serves as “Musical Coordinator” as often as he contracts the players, which means producers have as much faith in him as the music men do.
10. VINCENT SARDI, RESTAURATEUR
Vincent Sardi opened his first restaurant in 1921, on West 44th Street, right in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. The family moved the restaurant to its current location, 234 West 44th, in 1927. Since then, Sardi’s Restaurant has been synonymous with Broadway. From opening nights to the caricatures on the wall to the upstairs bar, Sardi’s is as colorful as Broadway itself.
Vincent Sardi was a Sicilian kid from Queens who opened his restaurant in the middle of the Jazz Age, although it was never a speakeasy. His restaurant’s popularity with a certain crowd of first-nighters, who all had their own tables, cemented the “Opening Night at Sardi’s” tradition. He was honored at the very first Tony ceremony in 1947, and stars still ache to be caricatured and put up on the walls of this New York institution.
It’s a Hell of a Town
10 Fun City Musicals
New York’s legendary Main Stem, Broadway has long been the rainbow’s end for musical theater, hence the not-quite omnibus title of this book. Here are ten shows devoted to that magical talisman, the city on the Hudson.
1. WONDERFUL TOWN
The great songwriters Leonard Bernstein (the music) and Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the words) either together or separately wrote several musical paeans to New York. These titles are a quick trip through musical greatness: West Side Story, Bells are Ringing, and their first show together, On The Town.
Wonderful Town, scored by the three, gets the nod here as an almost perfect example of the musical-comedy genre and a perfect love letter to New York. A superb adaptation of the play My Sister Eileen, Wonderful Town tells the story of the Sherwood sisters, bookish Ruth and gorgeous Eileen, who have journeyed east from Columbus, Ohio, to 1935 Greenwich Village in search of fame, fortune, and fellas. Written in an unheard-of five weeks, the show featured a fine score and an unmatched star performance by Rosalind Russell as would-be writer Ruth.
2. RAGTIME
The show that many call the last great musical of the twentieth century, Ragtime is a sweeping adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow’ novel of the same name, and is structured similarly. Doctorow’s typical epic sweep, combining ordinary people and the famous folk with which they interact, is cleverly adapted into musical form by librettist Terrence McNally, composer Stephen Flaherty, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens.
The tony, all-white suburb of New Rochelle, home to an affluent white family, is invaded by the real world, i.e., racism, humanity, inhumanity, and other people. Whites, blacks, immigrants, and their mutual experiences, creating the tapestry of Americana at the beginning of the twentieth century, are handled with superb taste and style in this grade-A adaptation.
3. SWEET CHARITY
Say “Broadway author” in a word association test and nine out of ten will answer “Neil Simon.” Check. And does any Broadway composer say “New York City” more than Cy Coleman? No. Check, again. So they collaborated on a musical (with the smarty-pants lyricist Dorothy Fields) and created a sweet New York cocktail (a Manhattan?) called Sweet Charity.
Adapted from the Fellini film Nights of Cabiria, Charity is a big-hearted dance-hall girl who loves neither wisely nor well. She hooks up with all manner of New York types, from a swingin’ playboy to a nerdy corporate schlub. Her adventures include a downtown rave-up (“Rhythm of Life), presided over by Big Daddy Johann Sebastian Brubeck, and a parade through the city streets (“I’m a Brass Band”).
4. SATURDAY NIGHT
Stephen Sondheim’s first Broadway musical would have been Saturday Night, with a book by Julius J. Epstein, adapted from Epstein’s play (co-written with his brother Philip) Front Porch in Flatbush. Unfortunately, producer Lem Ayers died in 1952, and the production stalled. Following an abortive attempt to resuscitate the show in 1959, Saturday Night languished in the Land of Could-Have-Been. Forty years later, New York got its first full look at Saturday Night, at Second Stage off-Broadway. A youthful tale of idealism and friendship, it concerns a tight knot of twenty-somethings investing in the stock ma
rket, with that crazy Brooklyn Bridge linking them to their dreams. Several fine songs, including the clever “Love’s a Bond,” and the Whiffenpoof-junior “It’s That Kind of a Neighborhood,” gave a glorious look back through the hourglass into the early career of the Promethean career of Stephen Sondheim.
5. BIG
Penny Marshall’s hit 1987 film Big is a body-switch comedy about a Jersey boy who wishes he could be tall, then wakes up and finds himself in an adult’s body. The basis of the film is his quest to adapt to the adult-sized world and its attendant, adult-sized problems, while he searches for a return to his old self. Nine years later, Big was made into a musical of the same name. The film’s success, however, was not duplicated by the musical.
An outstanding, fly-on-the-wall book by Barbara Isenberg, Making It Big, chronicled the show’s every step, from early rehearsals to post-Tony letdown. The musical seemed to ignore (or was unable to duplicate) the strong emotional pull the film had, and, like the film, its strongest moment (an extremely easy scene to musicalize) came in the famous scene at New York City toy store FAO Schwartz, in which man-boy and toy tycoon dance on the big piano on the floor, to David Shire’s clever variations on “Chopsticks.”
6. GUYS AND DOLLS
Perhaps the greatest musical ever written, the “Musical Fable of Broadway” scores on every conceivable level. A priceless adaptation of stories written by New York’s chronicler supreme, Damon Runyon (who hailed from another Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas), particularly the short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” Frank Loesser’s score is one of the greatest ever and is more than matched by the hilarious book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.
Everything in this supremely coordinated musical screams “New York City.” Runyon’s dizzyingly colorful Broadway underworld (“Runyonland,” they called the opening sequence) was fleshed out brilliantly onstage by director George S. Kaufman and choreographer Michael Kidd, from the fictional Mindy’s restaurant to the sewers where Nathan Detroit’s crap game rages on, to the Save-a-Soul Mission with its window looking out on Broadway itself.
7. RENT
Tyro songwriter Jonathan Larson added his name to the canons of theater lore when he unexpectedly died on the opening day of his musical, Rent, at the New York Theater Workshop off-off-Broadway. The buzz surrounding the show and the circumstances became deafening, and Larson’s adaptation of Puccini’s La Bo-hème became a hit downtown, then moved virtually intact to Broadway, where it won Larson the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, and the Best Musical Tony.
Rent takes La Bohème and puts a decidedly postmodern, downtown spin on it: Mimi is HIV-positive, the Marcello character (“Mark”) is an experimental filmmaker, landlord Benoit is a profit-hungry real estate developer, etc. The show’s success is largely due to a desire to see the pseudo-hip Alphabet City life onstage. This show is one of the first in a long time to have its own set of groupies, or “Rentheads,” who camp out for tickets and see as many performances as they can.
8. LADY IN THE DARK
This landmark 1941 show was among the first to seriously address the social and psychological problems facing women, and it was the first musical to use sessions of analysis as a plot device. Kurt Weill wrote the hauntingly brautiful music to Ira Gershwin’s brilliant lyrics. Moss Hart wrote the coded, subtext-heavy libretto.
Gertrude Lawrence played Liza Elliott, high-strung editor of Allure magazine, in personal and professional crisis, unable to make decisions regarding her life, her loves, and her job, afraid the city will swallow her whole. Desperate, she heads to the ofice of Dr. Brooks, who analyzes her. Part of the brilliance of this show was its refusal to play to type: The ultra-glamorous Lawrence had no star entrance or flashy moments, one of her main confidants was a gay man, and all the musical sequences in the show were dream scenes which illuminated her demons—a “Glamour Dream,” a “Wedding Dream,” and the spectacular “Circus Dream.”
9. NEIL SIMON’S THE GOODBYE GIRL
The title is actually longer than the run of this show, which started with a fine pedigree, but somewhere went very wrong. Neil Simon adapting his very funny (and stage-smart) hit film, Tony-winning pros David (City of Angels) Zippel and Marvin (A Chorus Line) Hamlisch to score it, and Bernadette Peters and Martin Short to star as a fading Broadway hoofer and an up-and-coming thespian.
So. Santo Loquasto’s sets were mainly interiors, and too cartoonish at that, and the book and score never rose to the occasion offered—a sexy musical comedy about two lonely people against the big backdrop of New York Show Business. Simon himself opined that the only good thing about the show was Short’s performance, and Simon later rewarded Short with 1999’s revival of Little Me, for which Short won a Tony.
10. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Like the great film that inspired it, 2002’s Sweet Smell of Success was a poison-pen letter to New York City— this “Dirty Town,” as lyricist Craig Carnelia called it. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music, and John Guare adapted the cynical screenplay to the stage.
A story of ruthless ambition run amok, a young press agent is willing to do anything to anybody to curry favor with star columnist J.J. Hunsecker, who still manages to make the young man’s life a living hell. Despite a commanding, Tony-winning performance from John Lithgow as Hunsecker, Sweet Smell failed, probably because its film noir, wormy-Big-Apple outlook was not exactly what Broadway audiences wanted to see after 9/11.
We Shout, “Look Out, Yale!”
10. Musicals about Sports
Though not necessarily mutually inclusive (except for Show League softball), the worlds of sports and musicals have much in common: brightly-colored clothing, legions of fans who take their passion far too seriously, corporate-sponsored homes, and scantilyclad women for those not interested in the business at hand. Here are ten musicals all about sports—the athletes and the games.
1. DAMN YANKEES
The story of Joe, a middle-aged couch potato who’d sell his soul to the devil to see his Washington Senators win the pennant over those “damn Yankees,” this cheery 1959 show gave the songwriting team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross their second consecutive smash, hot on the heels of The Pajama Game a year earlier.
The Senators, of course, are a hapless nine (presaging Gotham’s own original Mets) rejuvenated by the arrival of “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.,” the rein carnation of our old couch-bound Joe. Under the eyes of George Abbott and Bob Fosse, the Senators roared to the flag despite the presence of Ray Walston as “Mr. Applegate,” old Scratch himself, and the star turn of Gwen Verdon as Lola, his first-string home-wrecker, sent by Applegate to tempt Joe to distraction.
2. TOO MANY GIRLS
Three Eastern lads with gridiron skills and their prepphenom friend Manuelito (a young Desi Arnaz) journey west to Pottawottamie College in Stop Gap, New Mexico, at the behest of a rich man intent on providing bodyguards for his spoiled, beautiful daughter.
A fairly run-of-the-mill 1939 Rodgers & Hart college musical, Too Many Girls was best as a showcase for its young stars, notably Eddie Bracken, Van Johnson, and the aforementioned Desi Arnaz. Young Arnaz literally stopped the show during the production number “Spic and Spanish” by coming onstage in his football uniform, with his conga drum strapped to his chest, and drumming up a storm.
3. THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton’s musical from 2000 is set during the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Soccer (“football” in British parlance) is the “beautiful game” in question, serving as a refuge for the young heroes from the Catholic-Protestant violence engulfing the Ulster region. The young soccer players hope that their playing skills will serve as their ticket out of the Troubles, yet they know that the tribal nature of the game they love too easily echoes the sectarian violence ripping their country, their loves, and their lives apart. The Beautiful Game has, of this writing, yet to play New York.
4. THE FIRST
Musical bios about famous people don’t usually
work, and baseball isn’t a sport easily adaptable to the stage. So a musical about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier with the Montreal Royals and the Brooklyn Dodgers may not have been the best idea of the 1981-82 season, at least not in the pedestrian version offered in The First. Part of what makes biographies hard to musicalize is the believability of famous people singing, and while Robinson himself, played ably by David Alan Grier, may have been a legitimate character for musicalization, it was harder to buy Dodgers Manager Leo Durocher and team owner Branch Rickey as singing characters. The libretto for The First was written by ABC-TV critic Joel Seigel, which placed the broadcast and print media who covered the show in a fairly uncomfortable position: that of reviewing the work of a fellow critic.
5. CHESS
Another pre-sold hit from Britain, this 1986 musical used a Soviet vs. American chess masters’ match as a metaphor for the Cold War diplomacy between the countries, with some star-crossed romance thrown in for those unmoved by either sports or politics.
With a score by Tim Rice (the lyricist for Evita, The Lion King, etc.) and the B-Boys of Swedish supergroup ABBA, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ujlvaeus, the show was to be directed by the great Michael Bennett, who bought a million pounds’ worth of video monitors to be used as scenic elements, effectively dwarfing a score which he saw as often unstageable. Trevor Nunn took over the direction when Bennett became ill, and it became a long-running hit in London. The show made it to Broadway, heavily revised, for a short run in 1988.