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  Showstopper

  Abigail Pogrebin

  My diary (16 years old)

  October 15, 1981

  Two weeks before opening night:

  Jim Weissenbach is out.

  Jim Walton is in.

  David Cady is now Jerome.

  Steven Jacobs will have David Cady’s roles.

  The first transition is almost totally cut.

  The Polo lounge is totally rewritten.

  Help. Shock. Thrills. Tears.

  [Reader, forgive the teenage histrionics.]

  Two weeks before opening and we have a new lead.

  Four days later in the same journal:

  Constant work.Tension and exhaustion.

  New “Bel Air” tomorrow.

  Some of Donna’s lines are cut.

  There’s a rumor that my entire part is cut.

  The first “Behold the Hills” is out.

  There’s a hysterical new “Radical Chic” dance.

  Opening night is postponed.

  October 20, 1981

  Tonight was the biggest walk-out we’ve had yet.

  October 22, 1981

  The choreographer was fired.

  “Everybody merrily, merrily”

  I have on my wall a large black-and-white photograph of the legendary Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim and the famed director Harold Prince, from the fall of 1981.

  They’re mid-conversation in a rehearsal studio; a lean, young Sondheim is dressed in a sweatshirt with three stripes on the sleeve, sheet music in his left hand, appearing to listen intently. Prince is clearly saying something about the show they’re rehearsing, the stub of a cigarette between two fingers, his trademark dark-rimmed glasses perched, with inexplicable balance, on his high, bald forehead.

  The men appear focused and also intimate—friends and collaborators since 1970, with a track record that includes, at the time of this photograph, several Sondheim classics: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Side by Side by Sondheim, and Sweeney Todd. I bought this image after coming upon it in an art gallery a few years ago. My response to it was immediate, because I remembered clearly the day it was taken. I was at that very rehearsal, and so many others, as one of the twenty-eight cast members in Sondheim’s most infamous, anomalous flop: Merrily We Roll Along, a show that closed after just sixteen performances but went on to become a cult favorite.

  Merrily is the story of three close friends—Franklin Shepard (a composer), Charles Kringas (his lyricist), and Mary Flynn (a novelist/journalist)—and how their devoted troika splinters over time, thanks to compromises and betrayals. The narrative winds backwards chronologically, opening with a tense party scene in the Reagan era and ending with the sweet launch of their friendship (and Sputnik) in 1957. It was conceived originally to have teenagers playing adults at various ages, over two decades, as the timeline rewound.

  I treasure the snapshot not just because it captures two giants whom I’d idolized in my show-obsessed youth, but also because it stands as a relic of their storied partnership, which went awry with Merrily, and which never quite recovered. After the show shuttered abruptly, they wouldn’t work together again for twenty-two years, and even when they finally did, not with the same fanfare and mythology around them.

  I value the picture also because it reminds me of how seemingly perfect moments inevitably fray and dim.

  “One quick ride ...”

  I’m a journalist now; I don’t wear my Merrily credit on my sleeve and, most of the time, I don’t think to mention it to anyone—unless I’m talking to an obvious Sondheim junkie—because it was so long ago, and because I have spent my adult life as theatergoer, not a performer. That piece of the past feels very much like it’s passed.

  But recent events have brought it all back—the magnitude of the experience, the profuse fondness of our cast, the shock of the smashup, and especially the saliency of the show’s material. Its story and lyrics were about aiming boldly, getting shot down, success, settling, and ultimately losing track of what really matters. The themes didn’t really resonate when I was in the show: At sixteen, I’d yet to become jaded or thwarted by severe disappointment. Merrily’s failure was the first time, really, that I saw a “sure thing” stumble.

  But then, of course, growing up has a way of introducing all the lessons that Merrily portended. Despite all the blessings in my life—more than I can name without feeling superstitious—by now I've seen my share of letdowns: collapsed friendships, over-dramatic breakups, the shoals of parenting, goals thwarted or never tried.

  What else brought Merrily back to me in the last year?

  The show’s forthcoming thirtieth anniversary this November.

  The myriad birthday celebrations and retrospectives for Sondheim’s eightieth in 2010.

  The publication of Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, the first of two rich volumes in which the maestro deconstructs every one of his musicals. I suddenly had a window into where he felt Merrily had gone wrong, and I was moved to read how strongly the experience had impacted Sondheim himself. It prompted me, after three decades of dormancy, to reflect on what I myself took away.

  The most powerful time-travel moment came last March, 2011, when I was asked by Lonny Price, one of the original leads of Merrily —now an accomplished theater director—to be interviewed by him for a documentary he is co-producing on the making of Merrily. As I began answering his questions about whether the show had informed my approach to life, I was startled to hear myself admit how much it had. The experience taught me that creativity takes audacity, that Utopia materializes, that failure can be survived. It was formative to see that songs—which underwhelmed some critics in 1981—could become classics ten or twenty years later; that a bedeviled flop could become folklore, that art can keep breathing after it’s declared dead, and even come to life again, many times over.

  No one in Merrily has ever put the whole story to paper, but every one of us was imprinted by it. The plot-line came to life before our eyes—not the selling-out so much as the dissolution of relationships and, in any pursuit, the certainty of at last one big fumble. Those of us who watched our heroes build Merrily—and then attempt to save it—were galvanized and startled by their struggle. And as I reconstruct the timeline here, I’m actually aware of how pivotal this roller coaster was in my overall perspective, a definitive lesson—in ways both valuable and invisible to a teenager—in how things can not go your way.

  “How did you get there from here?”

  I became part of the show’s first iteration in 1980—a staged reading of the libretto by George Furth, who adapted Merrily from a 1934 play of the same title by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and who had written the Tony-winning book for Company. Merrily’s casting director, Joanna Merlin—Prince’s trusted arbiter of talent and the original Tzeitel in Prince’s Fiddler on the Roof (starring Zero Mostel)—tapped some of her daughter’s classmates to audition and I was given a small role. Joanna had seen me perform in school productions at Dalton, a private school in New York City, and she’d always been an avid booster of student potential.

  The cast was instructed to show up at the Broadway Theater, whose tenant was Evita—Hal Prince’s latest tour de force, starring newcomer Patti LuPone. The stage was constructed on a rake, sloping down toward the audience, and I remember feeling both unnerved by the excitement and worried about falling off my chair. It was one of those dreamlike scenes—to be in front of Sondheim and Prince, reading the words of the Company author, on the stage of Evita, which happened to be my latest musical-theater addiction. I’d seen Evita countless times in the preceding year, thanks to Prince’s daughter, Daisy, who had become a close friend when I entered the ninth grade at Dalton, the same autumn that Evita op
ened. Daisy had attended the school since seventh grade, but she made me feel like we’d grown up together; musicals became our emotional glue. We shared a delight in theater trivia and an encyclopedic command of lyrics ranging from Brigadoon to Fiorello! Between classes, we would sit on the school fire stairway, singing through every score. Daisy was the first person, aside from my identical twin sister, Robin, who knew—and cherished—as many musicals as I did.

  Some kids liked Fleetwood Mac, some liked the Stones. I loved Sondheim. I sobbed at age ten when Pacific Overtures lost the Tony for Best Musical to A Chorus Line. I considered it an “outrage” that the brilliance of Pacific hadn’t been recognized over A Chorus Line’s sequin top hats, disregarding the reality that Sondheim’s storyline was atypical Broadway fare, i.e., the British invasion of Japan. I was more partial to “Someone in a Tree” than to “The Music and the Mirror.”

  On a typical Friday night in ninth grade, Daisy would say, “Should we grab dinner, see a movie, or go to Evita?” It was exactly that casual for her—going to a hit Broadway show. She had a perpetual backstage pass, which, for me, opened the proverbial candy store. I felt like the luckiest friend in the world to be able to breeze through the stage door of the Broadway Theater and be escorted to sit on the balcony steps. We were decidedly theater geeks, gaga over Mandy Patinkin and jazzed to watch—for the umpteenth time—his outraged Che hiss at LuPone’s steely Eva Peron.

  Daisy was—still is—one of those boundless centers of bonhomie. I can’t count the number of sleepovers we had at her family townhouse. After an after-school snack in the street-level kitchen, we’d dispense with our homework in Daisy’s fourth-floor sanctum with its eaves and catty-corner twin beds, listening to records (musicals, of course) and singing along—at Ethel Merman volume. Daisy’s acerbic, hilarious Mom, Judy, would order in deli food for dinner and, over potato salad and sandwiches on rye, we’d deconstruct every show that was running on Broadway and I’d devour every gossipy crumb about the celebrities in the Prince firmament. To hear Sondheim referred to as “Steve” was enough to make my head spin. (There were photos of him all over the house.) Hal would usually arrive home from some meeting or rehearsal, (“Hi, honey!”) and I couldn’t believe I was actually in his home. Every show that Hal (I learned to call him “Hal”) had produced or directed was a landmark: The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, She Loves Me, Cabaret, Candide.

  The Princes invited me to their legendary annual Christmas parties, where an enormous, twinkling tree dwarfed the furniture, and I’d catch glimpses of Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman, Lauren Bacall, and Sondheim himself, milling around with cocktails, laughing breezily.

  When carols were sung, Daisy’s voice was like a clear bell above the din of mangled “Joy To the World”s. She wasn’t just Broadway royalty; she could sing like one of its leading ladies. Her liquid soprano made me realize what a second-rate set of pipes I possessed. Despite all my leading roles in grade-school shows and camp musicals (resume still available upon request), I didn’t have an effortless voice or a trained one. I could “belt” (translation: “push”), sell a song and hit the right notes but, as I got older, the line between gumption and gift became more pronounced. Daisy, on the other hand, had real talent. And she was relatively shy about it—never grabbing the opportunity to dazzle people, sometimes even refusing to sing. When I choreographed Dalton’s production of Oliver! in my senior year of high school—after Merrily was fast becoming a memory—I had to cajole Daisy to get out of the dressing room and go onstage as Nancy; her stage fright could be paralyzing.

  Daisy and I both felt we had something to prove in the original reading of Merrily. Both of us could potentially be dismissed as nepotistic shoo-ins, simply because the director was Daisy’s dad, I was Daisy’s friend, and both Daisy and I were close to the casting director’s daughter, Rachel Dretzin (also a classmate.) There is no question that I got in the door because of my personal ties. But once the game was on and a show was being assembled, Daisy and I were evaluated and tested—exhaustively—along with everyone else.

  “Where is the Moment?”

  The staged reading on the Evita stage felt like the birth of something seismic. We held our scripts in a semicircle, felt the theater lights on our faces, waited carefully for cues. Sondheim played the few dazzling songs that were finished, and the producers and creators laughed at Furth’s jokes.

  Playing Evelyn, wife of writer Charley Kringas, one of the lead characters,, I managed to bring down the house twice: once, when I was weeping at a wedding (progressively loudly and uncontrollably,) and at the end of the show when I delivered my one line: “Oh! You’re with guys!” My hunch is that one line won me the part. It’s therefore pitiful that I never nailed its comedic sweet spot the same way ever again. And once the show was in previews, I lost the line entirely. It was cut, along with my entire role—though I remained an ensemble player—in those final weeks when the chiefs were grappling with how to fix things.

  But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  The scene with my “big” funny line was the last before the finale. Frank, Mary, and Charley are on the roof of Charley’s Manhattan apartment building, watching for signs of Sputnik—the Russians’ first earth-orbiting satellite. Right as the moment climaxes, I burst through the roof door in my curlers and bathrobe looking for my roommate, Mary, discover her with these strange men and deliver that line that was never that funny again: “Oh! You’re with guys!”

  Okay, it doesn’t sound so hilarious now, but trust me, it stopped the show. Somehow the theater gods converged on that particular day and made that moment sing.

  “Tend your dream …”

  Once Merrily got the green light and regular auditions began for Broadway, there was already a buzz around Sondheim’s Next Great Work. ABC News had a camera crew ready at the sterile Minskoff Studios, documenting every phase of how a Prince/Sondheim concoction comes to life. ABC’s co-producer was Alexander Bernstein, son of Leonard, who grew close to our cast because he essentially lived with us for so long. (Sadly, the footage is lost somewhere in the archives of ABC News—no one to date has been able to exhume it.)

  The auditions felt epic. There were call-backs and more call-backs. I sang my audition song, “Singin’ in the Rain,” too many times to count. (Jason Alexander’s audition staple was “Feelin’ Good,” and Daisy’s standard was “Someone to Watch Over Me.”) I danced routine after routine, feeling grateful for Miss Rosenberg’s ballet classes at the YMCA and Luigi’s jazz classes on the Upper West Side. I wasn’t the pinnacle of grace, but I was coordinated and could pick up a combination. Merrily’s first choreographer, Ron Field, wasn’t looking for the next Ann Reinking; it mattered more that we appeared young and “real,” not like trained Broadway gypsies.

  As I recall, the creative team had trouble casting the part of the female buddy, Mary Flynn. She had to be hard-bitten but lovable, a bitter alcoholic and a droll den mother. Preferably under the age of twenty. Julia Rosenblum, another close Dalton friend, was in the running early on. She had the acting chops and the vinegary cynicism to pull it off, but not the voice. I remember the producers paid for her singing lessons for a while to see if she could get there, but it didn’t pan out. Julia mourned the missed chance for years afterward.

  “Dreams that will explode”

  I’ll never forget the last long day of auditions: December 2, 1980. As the evening wore on, people kept being let go (“Thank you so much—we’ll be in touch …”), and our final group was conspicuously shrinking. We sat on the floor, leaned against walls, exchanged tense, knowing, can-you-believe-we’re-still-here? looks. Afraid to jinx it, we remained subdued and stressed; but there were uplifting signs that the end was near.

  Finally they called the survivors into the studio.

  Hal Prince said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you’re all in the show.”

  We went crazy.r />
  “The bad news is that we’re not opening till the fall.”

  That was nine months away.

  I could have cared less. The impossible was happening.

  Hal continued: “Everybody, listen. This is important: Please don’t grow.”

  Sondheim added, “And learn how to sing fast.” (I was sure he meant me.)

  Choreographer Ron Field chimed in, “And take dance lessons!”

  I remember a feeling of delirium, like I was shorting out. If one looks back on five “perfect” moments in life, this unquestionably ranks, along with getting admitted to college, getting engaged, and giving birth. Those are the peaks of pure, unalloyed rapture.

  In the months between the last audition and the first rehearsal, our cast drew together — at picnics and what were dubbed “Merrily Waiting Parties,” and over burgers at the theater haunt Joe Allen’s. We were impatient to be together and already in love with the idea of ourselves as a family.

  In the midst of real life (which for me was tenth-grade classes), there were occasional costume measurements, singing lessons, and dance classes—tantalizing nibbles of what lay ahead.

  David Shine (an affable member of our ensemble) became our unofficial chronicler, publishing the pithy Merrily Press—a regular newsletter which updated us on birthdays, dance-class schedules, stage-name changes (“David Margolis is now David Cady”), moving dates (“Jason Alexander is selling a full single bed—box spring, mattress, and frame, a stereo and 2 speakers”), and wedding engagements (also Jason). Annie Morrison—our spicy Mary Flynn– started a “recipe corner” in the newsletter, which featured, for example, her signature gazpacho and a pronouncement borrowed from Sweeney Todd: “God, That’s Good!”