I’m not crazy, in retrospect, about the scenes in Miss Saigon that conveyed, accurately enough, the putrid atmosphere of the bars. I hurled everything I knew about staging at a script that had very little in the way of stage directions; the result had a relish that sometimes crossed the line into vulgarity. Clubs, bars and brothels have become staples of musical theatre. Some shows are aware that they aren’t necessarily good news for the women who are supposed to work there, but musicals always want it both ways. What’s not to like, they say, about a beautiful chorus girl in a bikini? Though please feel free to deplore the men who pay for her.
Alain and Claude-Michel wrote initially in French; the American dramatist Richard Maltby Jr. collaborated on the English lyrics and brought to them an authentic anguish for the survivors, Vietnamese and American, of a catastrophic conflict. It was an achievement to make a massive piece of popular musical theatre out of wounds still fresh, less than twenty years after the end of the war. And in Jonathan Pryce’s irresistible performance as the Eurasian bar owner who put poor Lea to work, there was a caustic savagery that elevated the whole show. When it was time to take it to New York, there was never any debate about who to take with it: Jonathan and Lea were integral to its success. Nobody anticipated the response of the American Actors’ Equity Association, who refused to give Jonathan permission to appear on Broadway. “Equity believes the casting of Mr. Pryce as a Eurasian to be especially insensitive and an affront to the Asian community.” Cameron threatened to withdraw the show. Broadway bigwigs, all of them white, blew out suffocating clouds of hot air. Should Shylock be played henceforth only by Jews? Should Caucasian actors never play Othello?
Damn right they shouldn’t, would have been my answer to that in 1991, but l ducked behind the parapet, and nobody asked me. In London in the late 1980s, there were fewer actors of South East Asian descent than there are now. We persuaded ourselves that there was nobody more suitable to play the Engineer, a small-time Vietnamese crook with a European father and Asian mother, than European Jonathan Pryce. His success in the part spoke for itself, but it should have occurred to us that on Broadway, the much larger community of Asian American actors would want a crack at the part. I can’t pretend I was torn: Jonathan was my friend, he was tremendous, and I didn’t want to do the show without him. And meanwhile, more than thirty Asian American Equity members, already cast in other roles, stood to lose their jobs if Cameron cancelled the show. The union didn’t hold out for long. Jonathan played the part and stormed Broadway as he had the West End. Miss Saigon ran in New York for ten years, but if Equity lost the battle, it won the war: Jonathan’s successors as the Engineer on Broadway, and everywhere else the show played, were all Asian.
Twenty years later, at the Park Theatre in north London, I saw Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, an articulate spokesman in 1991 for the Asian American theatre community. His 1988 play, M. Butterfly, was an ironic counterpoint to the orientalist fantasy that submits the exotic Eastern woman to the dominant Western male: the fantasy, it must be said, at the heart of both Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon. In Yellow Face he replayed the Miss Saigon casting saga, and put a character called David Henry Hwang on stage to write a new play about it. By the end of the play, as sharp and provocative as anything I’ve ever seen about racial identity, he had asked the audience to believe that a patently white actor was in fact Asian, so that he could “take words like ‘Asian’ and ‘American,’ like ‘race’ and ‘nation,’ mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean anymore.” The least I could do was arrange for it to have a run at the National.
Some shows want to imitate reality, some create their own. During my first months at the National, Owen McCafferty wrote Scenes from the Big Picture about a particular community in Belfast, and Kwame Kwei-Armah wrote Elmina’s Kitchen about a particular community in east London. At the top of the agenda of both plays was the authentic representation of their communities. They were cast accordingly. But the onus is on directors and producers to justify racially specific casting. The classics, in particular, belong to all of us and their performance is a collective act: a community of actors plays to a community of spectators. If a director decides that a play’s naturalism is its defining feature, that The Cherry Orchard requires a literal and exact portrayal of early-twentieth-century provincial Russia, the production must make the argument for racially exclusive casting through its undeviating naturalism. But most productions of the classics aren’t so rigorously naturalistic that they justify excluding actors merely because of their colour. If a production asserts confidently enough the principle that anyone can play anyone, the audience will have no difficulty accepting it.
And we can at least agree that a show where people sing and dance as a means of communicating with each other is playing fast and loose with reality. If merry townspeople dance ballet in the streets because they’re happy that June is bustin’ out all over, their stage world is hardly a literal reflection of the real world.
So here I am back in New York in June 1992, a year after Miss Saigon opened on Broadway, in an apartment at the top of the Pierre Hotel (jacket and tie obligatory). Propped up on a sofa is Dorothy Rodgers, the ancient widow of the composer Richard Rodgers. Her daughter Mary, also a composer, sits beside her. The sons of Oscar Hammerstein, Bill and Jamie, both theatre directors, sit opposite. Mrs. Rodgers is breathing oxygen from a cylinder, and she’s on the warpath, because she’s found out that I’ve asked Clive Rowe to play the part of Enoch Snow in the National Theatre’s production of Carousel, the most moving and beautiful of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. It’s another attempt at a casting veto, but this time I’m leading the charge against it, swollen with self-righteous zeal.
Carousel is happening because Richard Eyre, the director of the National, sees no reason why the great musicals of Broadway’s golden age shouldn’t be treated the same way we treat Shakespeare: as classics, ripe for new discoveries every time they’re done. I’ve asked to do Carousel because it’s haunted me ever since I saw the movie at the Gaumont, and because I’ve already seen it completely renewed by Steven Pimlott, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, so I know it will reward any amount of exploration. I’ve spent months casting it. It’s been almost impossible to find someone to play its leading role, the fairground barker Billy Bigelow. But Mr. Snow, the fisherman, is a piece of cake. I’ve known Clive Rowe for ages, though never worked with him. He’s warm, funny, plump, and he has a tremendous tenor voice.
But the Rodgers and Hammerstein families have discovered that Clive is black, and apparently they’re having none of it. They think because Mr. Snow is an “insider,” Clive would be “inappropriate.” They think that the character’s name would become a joke. So I do what Cameron Mackintosh did: I threaten to cancel the show if I can’t have him, though in truth it would be Richard Eyre doing the cancelling and I’m riding a high horse as June blossoms all over Central Park outside poor Mrs. Rodgers’s window. Mrs. Rodgers accuses me of blackmail: the oxygen cylinder is no handicap to her fierce indignation. But I’m Daniel, certain of my cause. It takes me a while to notice that there’s only one antique lion in the den. Mary Rodgers and Jamie Hammerstein are beaming their approval. They couldn’t be happier. Nobody has any problem with Clive except the furious octogenarian: Mary and Jamie can’t wait for their fathers’ shows to be claimed by a new generation. As Mary takes me to the door of the apartment, she tells me not to worry, they had to give the old lady a chance to say her piece. In fact, she promises me, her mother is looking forward to coming to London to see the show.
Clive Rowe gets to play Mr. Snow; his fiancée, Carrie Pipperidge, is white. A couple of columnists looking for copy try to make a fuss, but nobody sane has a problem, because Clive is irresistible in the part. It’s not that people don’t notice: of course they do, and they’re not stupid, so they don’t think we’re trying to pretend that coastal Maine in 1900 was a multiracial paradise. Instead, they agree collectively to sus
pend their disbelief, which is one of the things that audiences like doing best. When the production is remade for Broadway in 1994 with an American cast, Mr. Snow is white but this time Carrie Pipperidge is black: a Juilliard graduate called Audra McDonald comes in to audition, and I know almost from the first note she sings that I’ll never stop boasting about being in on the start of her career. Audra comes back to sing for Mary Rodgers and Jamie Hammerstein, takes a deep breath, and faints dead away. She recovers, and out pours a stream of golden sound, even more golden because she means it. Mary and Jamie are ecstatic.
But Mrs. Rodgers never makes it to London, because a few weeks after I steam sanctimoniously into her apartment to tell her how to do her husband’s show, she dies.
Carousel is based on Liliom, a strange, sardonic play from 1909 by Ferenc Molnár, set in and around a dilapidated amusement park on the outskirts of Budapest. Its hero, a fairground barker, beats his wife, dies in a failed robbery and faces his heavenly judges “in the beyond.” He’s sentenced to burn for sixteen years. Given a day back on earth to make amends for a wasted life, he beats his daughter. This bleak cynicism seems a million miles from the optimistic world of Rodgers and Hammerstein, corny as Kansas in August, and gaudy in Technicolor in the movie I’d seen with my gran. In fact, although they relocate Budapest to the picturesque coast of Maine, they stick closely to the dangerous passion of their source. Clive Rowe’s and Audra McDonald’s parts are lifted from Liliom, too: the complacent small businessman who marries his sweetheart and has seven kids. Rodgers and Hammerstein prefer to give Billy Bigelow a third chance of redemption, where Molnár bundles Liliom off to hell after he’s failed his second. And they end the show with a reprise of its famous anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” But it doesn’t wash, because much of the show pitilessly contradicts the song: you’ll often walk alone, you’ll often live alone. You’ll die alone.
Like Jack Buchanan in The Band Wagon, I descended on Carousel to demonstrate that a masterpiece of American entertainment was in fact high art. It was both, of course, but I usually set out to dissolve the boundaries between high art and show business from the other direction.
The original 1945 Broadway production had performed the same balancing act. Its choreographer was Agnes de Mille, one of the great pioneers of American dance. In the middle of the second act, she was given an entire fifteen-minute sequence to herself. On his return to earth after his death and heavenly judgement, Billy Bigelow is forced to watch his teenage daughter ostracised by the local children, and fall for exactly his own kind of fairground rough trade. It’s all danced: a vision of the future beyond speech. Who, I wondered, was as singular as Agnes de Mille? The greatest living figure in British ballet was Kenneth MacMillan. There wasn’t a chance he’d be interested, but he agreed to meet. Although I loved ballet, I hadn’t a clue how to talk about it. Wary behind dark glasses, he let me try. I heard myself making no sense, so I gave up. “Here’s the thing about Carousel,” I cried. “It’s about sex and violence!” The ice melted. “Well, that’s what I do,” said Kenneth. He was underselling one of the most radical careers in British performing arts: he pushed at the boundaries of ballet, spoke through classical dance about desires too dangerous, and love too complex, for words. And it turned out that he’d been waiting for someone to ask him to choreograph a musical. We worked for a year together to integrate our two worlds. Like most trailblazers, he was as bruised as he was bold. He’d grown a skin of mordant wit to protect himself from the keepers of the flame, who are everywhere, and particularly vituperative in the ballet world.
Carousel was designed by Bob Crowley. We spent a week driving down the Maine coast. June was bustin’ out all over, as it often did during the preparation of Carousel, making “the bay look bright and new, sails gleamin’ white on sunlit blue.” There was blue everywhere, most gorgeous on the indigo ceiling of a Shaker meeting house in Sabbathday Lake, built in the early 1800s. A guide called Seth told us it symbolised heaven: Shakers used to dance and sing under it. Bob stole the blue for a vast empty box. It was big enough to make Billy Bigelow feel tiny. “What are we? A couple of specks of nuthin’. ” It accommodated visions of loneliness that recalled Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. But the sap rose in it, too: an ensemble of horny young women and men sang, danced and collapsed on a sandbank, blissed out after a clambake. They were led in London by a renowned actor, Patricia Routledge, and in New York by a renowned opera singer, Shirley Verrett. Art or show business? Neither of them cared.
Julie Jordan was Joanna Riding, reserved, self-contained, lethally drawn to the strutting fairground barker. “What’s the use of wond’ring if he’s good or if he’s bad,” she sang with naked simplicity. “He’s your feller and you love him, there’s nothing more to say.” The melody is gorgeous, the sentiment apparently uncomplicated. The insidious power of the show is that at the dark heart of an abusive marriage is love and forgiveness no less profound for being misplaced. We met some handsome actors with powerful baritone voices to play Billy. I tried to imagine them lashing out at Joanna Riding. I’d have hated them, and hated the show for asking me to care about them, and besides, as actors they weren’t up to her. We went to New York, and met lots more handsome baritones. Several of them looked like fairground rough trade, but only one seemed open to salvation: Michael Hayden, who was short on vocal heft, but when he sang, there was wounded frailty behind the bravado. As Billy, he caused pain because he was in pain.
Every morning before rehearsals, I sat with Kenneth and watched the company take ballet class. I began to learn his language. I watched him create the dance for Louise, the daughter Billy haunts sixteen years after his death, and the wild fairground barker who reminds him of his former self. I watched an unhappy adolescent girl, hungry for love, crazed with desire, hurl herself at a sexed-up boy who sets her alight and throws her aside. Kenneth was the master of sexually charged pas de deux in ballets like Romeo and Juliet and Manon. Now I saw the infinite pain, the hard-won craft, the sweat and the imagination behind them: what art requires.
Kenneth seemed to work to a secret deadline, constantly pushing himself to get ahead. In the middle of the penultimate week of rehearsals, he said goodbye to us for a couple of days: he wanted to supervise the dress rehearsal and opening of a revival of his ballet Mayerling at the Royal Opera House. The night before he was due to return to us, I was listening to the midnight news on the radio, and heard that the great choreographer Kenneth MacMillan had died suddenly, backstage, during the ballet. I was poleaxed: I had known him for little more than a year, but it felt like he’d be a friend and mentor for years longer.
A few days later, his wife, Deborah, and teenage daughter, Charlotte, came to watch a run-through of Carousel, one of the bravest and most generous things I have ever witnessed. They helped a stunned company realise what we had: Kenneth had choreographed nearly everything, and in the magical Act 2 ballet, he never stopped speaking to us.
Kenneth’s ballet wasn’t the only thing in Carousel that reduced audiences to tears, nor was ours the only production to do so. It’s an infallibly moving show. I’ve never heard such unrestrained sobbing in a theatre. During Billy Bigelow’s short life, “If I loved you” is as far as either he or Julie Jordan are prepared to go in opening up to each other. She squeezes out “I love you” only over his corpse. When he comes back to earth, at last he replaces “if” with “how”: “How I loved you.” A thousand people every night told me I wasn’t alone in devoting too much of my life to emotional self-defence. They wept as much as I did when a man found a way, if only after his death, to say what he never admitted, even to himself. As Joanna Riding forgave Michael Hayden, the audience wept for the pain they’d caused and for the pain they’d suffered. They recognised themselves and each other, which is one of the reasons they come to the theatre, and why theatre is worth making. “Two little people, you and I, we don’t count at all,” sings Billy, the first night they meet. But on stage, their little lives become legend.
The more shameful, then, that Billy Bigelow’s absolution culminates in a lie. In Carousel as in Liliom, when he meets his teenage daughter, Louise, he loses patience with her and hits out. It doesn’t hurt her, because although she doesn’t know it, he’s only a ghost. She tells her mother about it, and asks her, “Is it possible, Mother, for someone to hit you hard like that—real loud and hard, and it not hurt you at all?” Her mother replies: “It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.” It’s presented as a climactic act of grace, but it’s bullshit. Why didn’t I tell old Mrs. Rodgers, while I was on her case, that I wasn’t going to be responsible for putting it in front of an audience? I suppose because I told myself that, like too many victims of domestic violence, Julie Jordan has no alternative but to lie to herself. But it’s not just Julie saying that violence doesn’t matter: it’s the show. I should have cut it.
Carousel speaks of joy, too, particularly through the rapturous young New Englanders who keep it afloat as its protagonists fall apart. Sprawled on the beach after their real nice clambake, the New York company were all people who knew how to give you a real good time. One of them, a gentle Texan with brown eyes, used to look at me like he knew my secrets and none of them bothered him. He got to know a lot of them, and they didn’t.
“Why would you want to base a musical on so perfect a movie?” I asked the producer who approached me, a couple of years after Carousel, about a new Broadway musical based on the 1957 movie Sweet Smell of Success. “How do you make a musical out of such a venomous story?” But I wanted to work with the great American playwright John Guare, who would write the book; and I wanted to work with Marvin Hamlisch, who with A Chorus Line had composed one of the soundtracks to my youth. My initial scepticism evaporated when I went to Marvin’s apartment on Park Avenue to hear the opening number. The heavy curtains were drawn, apparently to keep out the afternoon sun, but as he started to play, a long leg snaked out from behind them, followed by another, and then a third. They belonged to three dancers, who sold Marvin’s song as if they were already on Broadway. The number was fabulous. The dancers were fabulous. Marvin was fabulous: music made flesh. Sitting at the piano, he could have seduced the Pope. He probably did, as he was always flying off to play for some world leader or other. I was snared. The producer later did time for fraud, unrelated to Sweet Smell of Success, which took four years to develop and didn’t make him a cent.
Balancing Acts Page 25