by Twyla Tharp
Changes had to be made, and I would have three weeks in Chicago and only three rehearsal days in New York to make them before the first previews prior to our Broadway opening.
I was not a novice at the art of change. I knew the repertoire of tweak and cut and add and replace and reposition. I had been doing this for years.
What made this especially challenging is that there were so many different areas to look at. Was the problem in the music? I cut one song, thought about putting in three or four others, wound up adding one. Was the problem in the narrative? I simplified the story and pushed one character forward, so that more of the show revolved around him. To do that I had to shrink another character who had functioned almost as a narrator in one incarnation, like the Stage Manager in Our Town. Was the problem scenic or visual? We’d had some wig problems early on that made it hard for the audience to recognize the characters from one scene to the next, but the wardrobe and scenery now seemed pretty much okay. I’d replay the entire show in my head at night and wonder, Is the wrong song playing here? Is the wrong character in this scene? Are they coming in the wrong door? Are they doing the wrong steps? Everywhere I looked, I thought, Hey, let’s fix that.
The wonderful and scary thing about solving creative problems is that there isn’t one right answer. There are a thousand possible answers, but the valuable and practical thing to do is fix the things you know how to fix. That’s why a failure of skill is unforgivable: If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.
Fortunately, I had more than just the skill to choreograph. Most of the decisions that had to be made now were directing and editing choices, and I could do that, too. During the sleepless nights in Chicago when I reran the show from memory, I looked for the changes that would bring Act One into tighter focus and let Act Two run as gloriously as it had from the start. I was tempted to believe that the scenes worked fine in their current order—just because I had seen them that way for so long now (see repetition, above). But I needed to resist that temptation. It was time to clean the slate and look at everything fresh.
My support came from my routine, my sustenance from my rituals of self-reliance. I made it a point of honor to be at the gym, two blocks away from my hotel room, each morning at 7:00 A.M. for a two-hour workout. I needed the routine not just for endurance, it was also important for me to believe that I was still in shape, that my body functioned. If everything fell apart and I was wiped out, I could always go back to dancing. At night after each show, with my mind still racing, I would follow the same comforting heat ritual, pouring myself into a hot bath and letting my brain go blank.
The producers, to their credit, were supportive. While I was making changes onstage, they could have made the ultimate change: fire me and bring in another director to save the show. But they didn’t. They rallied around us. We were all in this together, paddling a leaky canoe in a choppy stream heading toward New York City. Our mantra was “Stay in the canoe.”
When I was making all these changes, in effect I was scratching again, trying to claw out an idea that would clarify the show for the audience. To some degree, the scratching and changes worked. The show was getting better. It wasn’t frozen yet, but at least it was Jell-O.
I also listened to people I trusted. One friend told me she had sat next to a woman at a performance who put her hands over her eyes for one song and then over her ears for another. My friend asked the woman at intermission, “What’s going on? Don’t you like it?”
“Oh no,” said the woman, “I like it. I just don’t know where to get my information.”
This was echoed by another friend, a major director, who told me, “You’re doing too much, trying too hard. Make each scene about one thing, not three things.”
Making the changes was a brutal process. When you cut and replace words on your computer, the words don’t have feelings; they can’t talk back to you. It’s the same when you work with film at an editing bay or with acrylics at an easel. Film and paint don’t cry “foul.” But I was dealing with human beings. When I enlarged a part or cut a role, people’s noses got out of joint.
One of the most important changes was to scale back the lighting on the band; we had to make it clearer to the audience that the dancers were the story. Musicians are usually the coolest of pros, but they howled when we took the spotlights off them. Still, they understood that it was in their interest (spelled j-o-b-s) for the show to work. They accepted the change as gracefully as could be expected.
From my life in the dance world, I understood the diva mind-set of gifted performers. I was asking a huge amount from them. They had to rehearse all day to learn the material we were changing, then had to pour their hearts out at night onstage in the old show that had received those terrible notices, at least until the new version was ready to be unveiled. For every cut I made in a dancer’s role I tried to make it up in another part of the show.
This was dangerous work, a high-wire act. When you make a change, it has to be a win-win change. You have to hack out something that doesn’t work and replace it with something that does. I knew that I would only get one chance to make each change for the better. If I tested out a change, dismissed it, and went back to the old way, I’d start to lose the cast’s trust. Hadn’t that come out because it wasn’t working? What makes it any better now? I didn’t need the perfect solution to every problem, but I did need a workable solution—a lot of them.
Even after we had cut secondary characters, taken out several songs, and centered the show’s conflicts on just a few characters, the audience was still confused. At this point, bless their coal-black little hearts, the critics turned out to be enormously useful. My son, Jesse, back in New York, did a marvelous thing. He knew I couldn’t stomach reading the reviews too closely, so he read them all and took out the venom, concentrating on the substance of the critiques. He charted their comments, and when we found more than two critics citing the same problem we said, “Okay, this is a hot zone.”
The one thing all the critics agreed on was that the show lacked an effective opening number. The time had come to tackle that problem at last.
Once you climb out of denial, it’s easy to see what you need to do. I had been so hell-bent on breaking the status quo and flouting convention with Movin’ Out that I had failed to see how convention might be my salvation. Going back and reviewing the opening numbers for dozens of successful musicals (scratch in the best places), I found that many of them used the ancient device of a prologue to introduce the characters. That would be our answer: a prologue. At this point, a new muse, Serendipity, dropped into our lives. Actually, she came first to Santo Loquasto, my production designer. Santo was in a supermarket when Billy Joel’s song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” came over the store’s sound system. As he walked the aisles of the store, Santo noticed that the 4/4 beat of the song perfectly matched the rhythm of the opening to a twenty-year-old dance of mine called Ocean’s Motion, which was set to Chuck Berry songs. It takes an extraordinarily perceptive colleague to pick up on a similarity like this; this was not the first time I was thrilled to have Santo on my side. I checked it out, and Billy’s song and the old steps fit together beautifully, and even better, it had roles for five principals, just what we needed. I pulled out a tape of Ocean’s Motion, taught the steps to the cast, and—voilà!—we had a new opening number for all twenty-four dancers, taught and staged in one three-hour session. We finally had an opening that let the audience shake hands with the dancers.
We still had the problem of setting the audience’s expectations before they walked in the door. That word musical was in the way. But what else could we call it? The audience was loving what we were doing now, it was blowing them away, and maybe we don’t want to call it dance, but what else is it?
It was Billy who broke the logjam on this issue. “Why not just call it its title?” he asked. “Then we won’t have to call it anything.”
And so Movin’ Out, The New Broadway Musical became, simply, Movin’ Out.
And in the end, it was all worth the effort. The audience, which had loved Act Two all along, was no longer confused by the beginning. The reviews in New York were much more fun to read than the ones in Chicago had been.
In the end, grueling as it was, my fast turn with failure was an empowering experience. When Movin’ Out “failed” in Chicago, I had two ways to respond: (a) stay in denial, bring the show “as is” to New York, and take my chances that the New York critics would miss the flaws that the Chicago reviewers so obviously picked up; or (b) dig in and fix things, see the out-of-town reviews as a blessing, a reprieve, a miracle shot at getting a second chance.
Obviously, I took the latter course. But the same goes for you. Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Until you’ve done it, you’re missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.
exercises
31 Give Yourself a Second Chance
No matter who you are, at some point you will present your work to the world—and the world will find it wanting. Patrons shrug. Critics hiss. Audiences stay away in droves. Even loyal friends avert their eyes.
Incredibly, there is good news here. Sometimes you will fail, but the world will give you a second chance to get it right.
This happens every day in the film business. A film director gets to shoot a scene over and over again until he is satisfied. If he’s still not satisfied the next day, he can rewrite the scene and shoot it again. If an actor isn’t working out, the director hires someone else. Later on, he gets a few more second chances in postproduction. He can cover up his sins by editing and re-editing. He can alter the entire mood of a film by replacing the music score. He gets yet another chance when the finished cut is shown to preview audiences. With so much money on the line, film people like to test the market—and sometimes the director will accept the audiences’ comments and make more changes. In many ways a director’s job is how he uses all his second chances.
When I worked with Milos Forman on Amadeus in 1980, I noted a distinct change in his work habits and attitude in the three years since we had worked together on Hair. Hair had not been a happy experience for Milos. He was tormented by his producers during filming, even though he was fresh off the critical and commercial success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which had swept all five major Academy Awards. The Hair experience ran so counter to Milos’s sense of artistry and control that he would sometimes “nap” for sixteen hours rather than face the bullying producers. Hair did some business (as they say) but it was not the success we all were hoping for.
Milos applied everything he’d learned about power and control on the set of Hair to Amadeus. On Amadeus, he was not only the director, he was also a producer. If it failed, at least he would have the certainty that it was his failure, accomplished without compromises. He stacked everything in his favor: He made sure he had a great story in Peter Shaffer’s original play, which had succeeded with audiences around the world. He had sublime music, all Mozart, to work with. He had great locations in Prague. Many of the actors, from both sides of the Atlantic, were either friends or people who had worked with him before. There were no star egos to deal with. Milos was taking no chances—and the results speak for themselves.
Not every art form offers such comfort, or tosses you a life jacket. A sculptor whose work is deemed a failure cannot go back and rework the metal, clay, or stone. He must absorb the criticism and do better the next time. It’s pretty much the same for painters and photographers. You don’t get do-overs in the plastic arts.
It’s the same in the dance world: No do-overs. You mount your ballet, the audience applauds or yawns, which determines whether the work gets mounted again. A hit can be revived season after season. A flop is forgotten within a week.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could predict and preempt a work’s less-than-favorable reception, if we could give ourselves a second chance before we find out we really need it?
Well, actually we often can. Before I sent this manuscript to my publisher, I showed it to twelve trusted friends, and factored their comments into the text. Where more than one of them was confused by a section of text, I reworked it to make it clearer. By building failure, or at least the prospect of failure, into the process, I gave myself a second chance.
By acknowledging failure, you take the first step to conquering it.
32 Build Your Own Validation Squad
We all seek approval and validation for our efforts. In the beginning we desperately seek the approval of others—of anybody—to assure us that we’re on the right path, that we aren’t wasting our time, that we haven’t made a monumental error. But that neediness fades as we get older and more confident. We become a better and clearer judge of our own work. If a piece is good, we know it before the public applauds and the reviews come in. If it’s bad, we know that, too. As Montaigne said, “We easily confess to others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty. But an advantage in judgment we yield to none.”
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that it is all right to be a self-contained, solipsistic, don’t-give-a-damn-what-anyone-thinks egotist operating under the credo of “As long as I like it, it’s good.” That way lies madness, or at least embarrassing self-indulgence. But there comes a time when you have no choice but to trust your judgment above all others’. As Billy Wilder once said, “If I like something, I am lucky enough, fool enough, or smart enough to believe that other people are going to like it too.” Circular logic? Yes. But at least you are drawing the circle.
As we mature, we need to build criticism into the working process, as we do with failure. For a long time now I’ve had my own validation squad, a small group of people I invite to see my works in progress. I trust them to look at my crudest, clumsiest noodlings and reward me with their candor. I put a lot of faith in what they say. My criteria for these validators are very basic: I pick people who (a) have talents I admire greatly (so I know they have judgment), (b) happen to be my friends (so I know they have my best interests at heart), (c) don’t feel they are competing with me (so I know they have no agenda no matter what they say), and (d) have hammered my work in the past (so I know they are capable of brutal honesty). I don’t want my feelings spared; I want an honest answer to the eternal question “Do we care?” If you choose your validators, you never have to look at them and wonder “Who died and made you God?” Because you did.
Look around you. Who are the brightest, most talented people you know? Choose them, “qualify” them (in the same way that a salesperson “qualifies” customers by determining if they have the money to buy, a need for the product, and the authority to make the buying decision), and then get them involved. All you need are people with good judgment in other parts of their lives who care about you and will give you their honest opinion with no strings attached. The last point is crucial: All things being equal, the validation that matters most is the kind that comes with no agenda.
Chapter 12
the long run
I was fifty-eight
years old when I finally felt like a “master choreographer.” The occasion was my 128th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, created for American Ballet Theatre. For the first time in my career I felt in control of all the components that go into making a dance—the music, the steps, the patterns, the deployment of people onstage, the clarity of purpose. Finally I had the skills to close the gap between what I could see in my mind and what I could actually get onto the stage.
Why did it take 128 pieces before I felt this way? A better question would be, Why not? What’s wrong with getting better as you get more work under your belt? The libraries and archives and museums are packed with early bloomers and one-trick ponies who said everything they had to say in their first novel, who could only compose one good tune, whose canvases kept repeating the same dogged theme. My respect has always gone to those who are in it for the long haul. Wh
en people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.
The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti set out to define the patterns of our creative lives. Marchetti totaled up the cumulative production of creative works by more than a hundred recognized geniuses and found in it an S-shaped curve that mimics the growth curve of all natural life. The curve is flat when there is no productivity; it gets steeper as productivity increases. He charted everyone from Botticelli to Bach to Shakespeare to Einstein to Brahms, comparing their output against their progressing age. He found that, on average, creative production is limited in our youth (when we are learning), hits full stride in our prime middle years, and trails off in our later years when we become exhausted of ideas, energy, and motivation. Here’s his chart for Mozart:
Mozart’s an intriguing example because he wrote a lot of music (626 compositions by most counts), and it’s all been cataloged, as if expressly for chartmakers like Marchetti, by Ludwig Köchel—from Mozart’s earliest symphony, listed as K. 1, to his final D minor Requiem, K. 626. (Köchel listed forty or so minor compositions that may be works of other composers, but his is the universally accepted catalog of Mozart’s output. Not everyone cares: Professional musicians generally refer to Mozart’s delightful A major piano concerto as “the A major,” concertgoers know it as his twenty-third, while only the serious librarians among us call it K. 488. Film buffs may recall it as the Köchel listing a dying Ali MacGraw struggled to remember in her hospital bed in Love Story.)