Bennett had envisioned a slick, cool, James Bond–like roller coaster of a production. Nunn and Nelson wanted to explore the characters, giving the show emotional depth. They made a major change: Florence, a Hungarian-born British citizen in the London production, would be a Hungarian-born American citizen for the New York version. This meant Paige was out. Nunn replaced her with his friend Judy Kuhn, who had appeared in the Broadway production of Les Misérables.
Rice was furious. He had written Chess for Paige, his lover. And now Nunn tossed her overboard for, Rice and Paige heard, one of his girlfriends. Rumors appeared in New York and London gossip columns that Nunn and Kuhn were having an affair. They denied it, and the papers reprinted retractions. Nunn has never wavered in his denial.
Because of Nunn’s other commitments, Chess had to adhere to a tight timetable, rehearsing in New York in February 1988 for an April opening at the Imperial Theatre. But around Christmastime Nunn “slipped out of contact,” as Vanity Fair would put it in a story about the saga of Chess.17 Nunn had a reputation for mysteriously dropping out of sight. His nickname, in London, was “Macavity”—“for when they reach the scene of the crime, Macavity’s not there!” as T. S. Eliot wrote. And now, on the eve of a $6 million Broadway musical, Nunn had pulled a Macavity. The Shuberts panicked, and announced yet another postponement. The announcement smoked Nunn out of his hideaway, and a conference call was arranged for all the major Chess players—the Shuberts, Robert Fox, Rice, the ABBA boys, and Nunn, whose whereabouts were still a mystery. He was supposed to be in New York right after the holidays to start work on the show. But there were rumors he was in Australia, checking up on a production of Les Misérables.18
Rice took pleasure in baiting him during the call.
“Trevor, where are you?” he asked at one point.
Nunn ignored the question.
A little later Rice asked, “Trevor, if you look out of your window, what do you see at the moment?”
Nunn turned to the subject of the show’s set.
“Trevor,” Rice persisted, “if you look out of your window, can you see a kangaroo?”
Nunn finally admitted he was in Australia, adding that his plane had been diverted from London to New York by way of Australia.
There were expressions of disbelief. Finally, Jacobs asked for a firm commitment from Nunn to open Chess on Broadway in April.
“I will absolutely do the show,” Nunn said.
As Chess started to take shape, Fox noticed a change at the Shubert Organization. Production meetings had always taken in place in Jacobs’s office. They now took place in Schoenfeld’s.
“Jerry was taking over more of the responsibility of the stuff that Bernie used to do,” said Fox. “Bernie wasn’t the vibrant and powerful leader that he had previously been. He was diminished. He was protected by everybody and loved by everybody, but the power had shifted. Jerry was in full control of his faculties, and Chess became very much Jerry’s first artistic endeavor as the boss.”
And the whole enterprise would turn out to be, in Fox’s words, “a fucking disaster from beginning to end.”
The infighting began over the poster art. Nobody could agree on a logo or a design. Nancy Coyne and her team presented ideas, the final image to be decided on by a majority vote. But people kept switching sides, almost, it seemed to Fox, just to annoy someone else in the room. In the end, they settled on the silhouette of a couple holding hands and running against the backdrop of the Soviet and American flags. Later that was changed to the lead actor, Philip Casnoff, draped in the American flag, with the words “Yes! Chess!”
“Yes! Chess!—we were roundly criticized for that,” recalled Rick Elice, who worked on the campaign. “We tried to build it around US versus USSR. Gorbachev had just come in. We tried to make it relevant. Nobody gave a fuck. We couldn’t sell it.”
“We never got anything close to ‘Now and Forever’ on Chess,” said Nancy Coyne. “There was never anything that was distillable. There was never any central message that was coming out of it.”
Nelson and Nunn’s script was, in its attempt to deal with the Cold War, love affairs, infidelities, and the game of chess itself, a muddle. Rice and the ABBA boys grew despondent as the show went into rehearsal, but they did manage to write some new songs, including the fine ballad “Someone Else’s Story.”
“We felt very encouraged by that song,” said Fox. “We thought it would add a fantastic new element to the story and we kind of all convinced ourselves that somehow the miracle was gonna happen. And then the moment you walked into the Imperial Theatre and saw these towers and how ugly the fucking production was, it was perfectly clear that the miracle was not going to happen.”
Nunn and Robin Wagner’s new set featured several moving towers resembling chess pieces that were operated by computers when “computers were in the dark ages,” said Fox. But they never worked. “We ended up putting men inside of them, but because they couldn’t see, they kept bumping into each other.”
“The set was a nightmare,” said Rice. “It looked like an underground car park. And there was one scene in an underground car park, and that scene looked great. But the rest of it didn’t quite work.”
Schoenfeld watched the first long, tortured preview, the color draining from his face. The color returned at the end of the show, but it was an angry red.
“You schmucks!” he screamed, his wrath turning on Nunn. He started firing off notes about the production, most of which Nunn ignored. Rice, dejected, began to withdraw from the scene. “Nineteen eighty-eight,” he said, “was the worst year of my life. My father died, and I was almost broke because of the money I’d lost on Nicholas Nickleby.” Ulvaeus and Andersson, meanwhile, started hiding out in Nancy Coyne’s conference room. They couldn’t face what was onstage and vowed never to do another musical.
The Shuberts were pressuring Nunn to cut the show, which was running over three hours. Nunn ignored their entreaties, doing his best to shield his hard-working actors from the offstage strife. But at the critics’ preview in April, Nunn sensed they were in for some rough treatment. “I stood at the back of the theater and watched Frank Rich and his girlfriend talking and giggling through 70 percent of the show. So the writing was on the wall.”
The opening night party took place at the United Nations in an atmosphere that was “like a morgue,” said Fox. As the producer climbed into a limousine to go home, a press agent handed him Rich’s review. He read it in the car and “started laughing like a lunatic, because if you’re going to get a bad review, this one is it.”
“Anyone who associates the game of chess with quiet contemplation is in for a jolt at Chess,” Rich began. “For over three hours, the characters onstage at the Imperial yell at one another to rock music. The show is a suite of temper tantrums . . . . If contentiousness were drama, Chess would be at least as riveting as The Bickersons. That the evening has the theatrical consistency of quicksand—and the drab color scheme to match—can be attributed to the fact that the show’s book . . . and lyrics . . . are about nothing except the authors’ own pompous pretentions.” As for the music, Rich said it was “a sometimes tuneful but always a characterless smorgasbord of mainstream pop styles.” Rich administered the coup de grâce in the final sentence: “War is hell, and for this . . . trapped audience, Chess sometimes comes remarkably close.”
Looking back on the review almost twenty-five years later, Nunn said, “I think that Frank Rich’s dismissal of the score as Europop should be quoted in fifty years’ time the way that somebody came out of Guys and Dolls and said, ‘Not a tune in it.’ It should be their shame forever. It’s a disgrace, an absolute disgrace. Chess has the most extraordinary musical theater score.”
Faced with an onslaught of bad reviews (Rich was not alone), the Shuberts did what they could to save the show. Schoenfeld was reluctant to close a musical that had become “near and dear to him,” said Fox. They made a TV commercial, they took out billboards in Times Square, the
y changed the ads. To save $25,000 a week in overtime, they wanted to take twenty minutes out of the show after it opened.
At yet another contentious meeting, Schoenfeld pressed Nunn, who always dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, to spend a few more days in town cutting the show. “I can’t,” said Nunn. “I’m leaving for London and I have to go home and pack.”
“Pack?” Tim Rice exclaimed. “What do you have to pack, Trevor? A T-shirt and another pair of sneakers?”
Nunn cut the show, but it didn’t matter. The box office was collapsing. The Shuberts closed the show on June 25, 1988, at a loss of $6.2 million.
“Chess is one of the few shows I have not gotten over,” Schoenfeld wrote in his memoir, Mr. Broadway.19 For the next twenty years, he nursed plans for a revival. He even flew to Stockholm in 2002 to see a revised version.
The reviews were excellent.
Unfortunately, they were in Swedish.
* * *
I. Jacobs would later claim, in Martin Gottfried’s Fosse biography, All His Jazz, that his remarks to Gerard were off the record. “Bullshit,” said Gerard. “Nobody knew better than Bernie when talking to a reporter what was on the record and what was off the record.”
II. Fenton had a good contract, and has made millions from the success of Les Misérables. Several years after the show opened, Fenton self-published a book of poems about the Philippines called Manila Envelope. He advertised it in the Evening Standard, offering it for twelve pounds. Kretzmer sent in the mail order. The book arrived with a handwritten note from Fenton: “Dear Herbert, Thanks for the moola!” “We were all making too much money by then,” said Kretzmer. “More money than was good for us.”
III. Dick Wolf, the head of Jujamcyn Theaters, left the company after losing Phantom to the Shuberts. His replacement was Rocco Landesman, who produced the musical Big River. At Jujamcyn, Landesman went on to coproduce The Who’s Tommy, Into the Woods, Guys and Dolls, and Angels in America. In 2009, Barack Obama appointed him chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Dick Wolf returned to the box office as treasurer of the Shubert Theatre until his retirement in 2014.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little
Chess was painful, but Schoenfeld and Jacobs could, in the summer of 1988, console themselves with numbers released by the League of New York Theatres and Producers. Broadway raked in $253 million in the 1987–88 theater season, the highest take in its history. Attendance was on the rise again, up to 8.1 million, a 16 percent increase over the previous season.
The majority of the revenue came from the megamusicals—Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express. Which led to carping that the nonmusical, American play was in trouble on Broadway. Plays were no longer profitable on Broadway, and the theater audience was being conditioned to buy the musical spectacle, some producers complained.
There was some truth in the charge. Plays didn’t generate nearly the return of musicals. But that was always the case. And, looking back, the 1980s were hardly a terrible time for the straight play on Broadway. David Mamet, Harvey Fierstein, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Lanford Wilson—all emerged as Broadway names in the eighties. Neil Simon reached his artistic high point with a trilogy of successful plays—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound. And August Wilson became a major figure in American literature with plays such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Fences, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
Off Broadway was thriving as well, with the rise of companies such as Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Circle Repertory Company Lincoln Center, under the direction of Gregory Mosher, was producing such works as The House of Blue Leaves, Swimming to Cambodia, a hit revival of Anything Goes, Sarafina!, and Six Degrees of Separation. And the Public Theater, flush with profits from A Chorus Line and led by the indefatigable Joe Papp, remained the leading nonprofit theater in the country with a roster of shows that included Cuba and His Teddy Bear, The Normal Heart, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Colored Museum, Talk Radio, Plenty, and Serious Money.
The Shuberts did not take the lead in producing many straight plays, but the foundation gave enormous amounts of money to nonprofit theaters in New York and throughout the country. And when an Off-Broadway or regional theater hit moved to Broadway, the Shuberts often put up a substantial chunk of the money. They helped finance Glengarry Glen Ross, The Heidi Chronicles, Master Harold . . . and the Boys, ’night, Mother, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, The Gin Game, and As Is—and usually booked them into their theaters.
The Shuberts were making money in other ways as well. A significant source of income came from air rights. New York City landmarked most of the theaters in Times Square after the Morosco and Helen Hayes were torn down. The Shuberts and the Nederlanders objected. Landmarking meant they could not alter their buildings in any way—or use them as anything but legitimate theaters. To compensate the theater owners for these constraints, the city granted them the right to sell the air above their buildings to real estate developers. That didn’t amount to much at first, but in the late eighties and early nineties, skyscrapers began sprouting up in Times Square. Developers paid the Shuberts and the Nederlanders millions of dollars for the right to build higher and higher.I
At the close of the eighties, Schoenfeld and Jacobs could, from their offices above the Shubert Theatre, look down on a thriving theatrical empire, much of which they built. Well, Jacobs could. Schoenfeld’s office had no windows. He’d hired a designer to block up the window in his office and install soft lighting.
“You had no fucking idea what time of day it was in there,” said an old producer.
Across Times Square at the Palace Theatre, Jimmy Nederlander was not in such good shape. He’d missed out on the British invasion, landing only Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express for the Gershwin Theatre. It was not destined to be Cats or Phantom of the Opera. His big show of 1988 was Legs Diamond, written by and starring Peter Allen as the famous gangster. It was a disaster.
He acquired the show in typical Nederlander fashion. Flying home from London on the Concorde, he found himself sitting opposite John Breglio.
“What the hell are you up to, John?” Nederlander asked. “What show you got for me?”
As it happened, Breglio was representing Allen and Legs Diamond. The idea of Peter Allen, who had once been married to Liza Minnelli, wrote “I Go to Rio!,” and performed in a skin-tight gold lamé pantsuit, playing a brutal womanizing gangster from the Prohibition Era may not have seemed ideal casting to many producers.
But it didn’t bother Nederlander.
“I love Peter Allen!” he said. “He’s great. I had him at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Did great business. I want to do his show.”
“But, Jimmy, you don’t know the music,” said Breglio.
“It’ll be good. I’ll do it,” said Nederlander.
They sketched out the deal for Legs Diamond on a Concorde cocktail napkin. Nederlander put up most of the $4.5 million production cost (with a bit thrown in by his friend George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees) and booked the show into his gorgeous art deco Mark Hellinger on West Fifty-First Street.
There was trouble from the start. The choreographer, Michael Shawn, became ill, another victim of AIDS. Marvin Krauss, the general manager, fired him. Shawn sued the producers. The incident, which was picked up by the papers, was an embarrassment to Allen, who was a tireless fund-raiser in the fight against AIDS.
The show played an early preview on November 4, 1988—the night of the presidential election. George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis.
Jon Wilner, who devised the show’s ad campaign, was standing at the back of the theater during the preview. An assistant company manager came up to him and said, “George Bush just won the election.”
“That’s terrible,” said Wilner.
“Not as terrible as what’s going on in
here,” the manager said.
The curtain went up at 8:00—and didn’t come down on the first act until 10:30. At the intermission, there was an exodus from the Hellinger. But the next night, Harvey Fierstein, who’d been brought in to rewrite the script, found reason for optimism. “We must be getting much better,” he said. “Only a hundred and fifty people walked out tonight.”
The opening number was a big problem. No matter how it was configured, Peter Allen could not get entrance applause. Finally, the production team decided to have him ride down from the rafters on a huge Legs Diamond sign and sing a new number, “When I Get My Name in Lights.” Nederlander spent another $15,000 on the sign. Allen, perched on the L, came down beaming and waving, and belted out the number. No applause. Charlene Nederlander, Jimmy’s wife, leaned over to Fierstein and said, “For that, I could have had a bracelet.”
Legs Diamond opened December 26, 1988, to scathing reviews. The show still had a hefty advance sale, so Nederlander decided to fight for it. He told Allen, “You gotta sing ‘I Go to Rio!’ at the end of the show.”
Allen looked at him as though he’d lost his mind.
“No, no,” Nederlander protested. “They’re coming to see Peter Allen. They don’t like the show. Show’s no good. Just do the show in the first act and come out in the second act and be Peter Allen and sing your songs. Make it a concert. It’ll save the show!”
Allen demurred. After the show burned through its advance, Nederlander closed it in February 1989. Allen was devastated. He’d worked for years on Legs Diamond and he loved performing on Broadway. Within a year, he was diagnosed with AIDS, dying in 1992 at forty-eight.II
The failure of Legs Diamond put Nederlander in a precarious position. He needed money. And so he leased the Hellinger to the Times Square Church, a nondenominational, fundamentalist church, for five years for $1 million a year. “There’s no shows being produced,” he told the Times.1 “We have to keep the theaters filled. We don’t have anything on the horizon to put in the theater.”
Razzle Dazzle Page 42