Showstopper Page 3

  “Some roads you really fly …”

  By the time the performance day arrived, I was in full-fledged diva mode, barely speaking to my family. (“Have to save the voice.”)

  The cast had been instructed to dress in black tie and we looked spanking, albeit a little less spry, as we did vocal warm-ups backstage. I remember Tonya Pinkins, always a spiritual presence, leading us in a blessing of sorts as we stood together in a circle, arms entwined.

  The first trumpets of the overture sent the audience into paroxysms of applause.

  When we walked onto the stage in single file, the cheering was honestly thunderous. It was hard to keep composure.

  What a night. I don’t think anything misfired. It felt magical and weirdly logical—as if the leading players had waited all this time to grow into their roles and their stories. Whereas before, the concept of kids playing jaundiced adults hadn’t gelled, now the lines of experience made all the difference.

  By the time we got to “Our Time,” all our faces were wet with feeling, fully aware that the lyrics had been prescient: “Years from now, we’ll remember and we’ll come back, / Buy the rooftop and hang a plaque: / This is where we began / Being what we can.”

  It honestly shot through my mind as I stood there, singing my guts out: Had I become what I could? I never had given a thought, at age sixteen, to where I’d be at age thirty-seven. How had I grown, changed, coarsened? Who had I helped or hurt along the way? How much of this story had I ingested and confirmed?

  A glimpse of my husband in the audience made me feel clear again: With David, I had found a kind of stability and sanity I might not have had in a theater life. He was not just my emotional home but a steadying girder after more than a few turbulent relationships and detours. We now had two children, two careers, many friends, furniture, and very little uncertainty. I don’t think it was any accident that I opted for sureness. The side of me that will always be transported by certain music, that cries in romantic movies and underlines favorite passages in novels is balanced by the side of me that doesn’t want too much passion or volatility too much of the time. For me, the theater was synonymous with hot-bloodedness and capriciousness. It represented risk in the best sense and the worst. Ultimately, I was more comfortable out than in.

  Something both settled and clicked simply by having my husband and his parents in the audience. It was an “outing” of who I’d been, juxtaposed against who I am, an acknowledgment that I would always carry both people.

  My twin sister, Robin, was crying more than I, grasping exactly how tender and nostalgic this revival was, being catapulted back to those months she lived every summit and nosedive with me more closely than anyone else in my life.

  But the most affecting tears were Sondheim’s. During the curtain call, he was urged up on stage along with his old comrade, Hal Prince. Their fierce, prolonged embrace carried the weight of their rupture and the triumph of this resurrection.

  “Some are bumpy …”

  My voice never recovered from that night. All the throat specialists who have examined me since—in order to understand my intractable hoarseness, which started right after the Merrily concert—have surmised that the four days of solid singing (and straining), after years of rusty disuse, added up to what they called the “precipitating event” which fried my chords. I now have permanent, rigid cysts inside each vocal fold and the pornographic pictures to prove it. (The color photographs—obtained by sliding a gag-inducing metal probe down one’s esophagus—look disquietingly vaginal.)

  The medical verdict is this: When I make sound, my vocal folds don’t meet, the way they’re supposed to. It’s exacerbated by the fact that I’m an “effortful” speaker—not exactly a demure conversationalist—which means I’ve spent years essentially “heaving” my thoughts out, instead of just sharing them.

  After spending too much money on a vocal therapist, I decided that, for the cash, I’d rather get a massage once in a while. I also was bored by the inane vocal exercises (“Molly makes more money...”). After lame attempts at avoiding the “bad” foods which apparently spike acid reflux—i.e., every food I like—I gave up and went back to caffeine and spicy tomato sauce.

  The upshot is that I’m left with a physical, raspy remnant of a memorable night.

  “Making you feel merrily …”

  On March 15, 2010, at Avery Fisher Hall, Broadway luminaries such as Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, and Audra McDonald gathered to honor Sondheim’s eightieth birthday. In a gala concert directed by Lonny Price, LuPone belted out “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, Peters and Patinkin reprised their glorious duet “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George, and Elaine Stritch brought the house down with “I’m Still Here” from Follies. But to me, the most stirring moments came from Merrily: Peters’s rendition of “Not a Day Goes By” was achingly apt because she had lost her husband five years earlier in a plane crash. “Not a day goes by, /Not a single day / But you're somewhere a part of my life, / And it looks like you’ll stay.” The song has also served, very personally through the decades, as a kind of recurring anthem—not just for people I once loved, but for that unmistakable feeling of being achingly missed.

  The other Merrily snapshot was Jim Walton’s rendition of “Growing Up”—a song that was added to a 1985 production at the La Jolla Playhouse. Jim took the stage in his tuxedo, still suave despite less hair. He sat at the grand piano and played the song simply, looking exactly as he used to when he tickled the keys as Franklin Shepard on our stage.

  “So old friends, now it’s time to start growing up.

  Taking charge, seeing things as they are.

  Facing facts, not escaping them

  Still with dreams, just reshaping them.”

  “Still with dreams.” How could we all not see our older selves in those words? “Still with dreams, just reshaping them.” What else is life, it struck me, than adjusting your expectations … still hoping but not too hard, chastened by realism and less time left; no chance of being a wunderkind anymore, no longer believing miracles might happen; “seeing things as they are.”

  Paul Gemignani was, as always, the titan in a tux, swaying slightly with his back to us, guiding the august Philharmonic Orchestra with a sure hand. I had the urge to hug him (all of us always had that impulse,) and then felt silly for thinking it; he probably wouldn’t recognize me today.

  My sister, Robin, had invited me to this concert: As a culture reporter for the New York Times, she often covers Lincoln Center and attends their special events. She and I could barely look at each other during the two Merrily songs. They brought us both back and, for me, they dislodged unsettling questions that mercifully receded, unanswered, as soon as the music stopped:

  Where was that unrestrained, emotional part of me now? Does maturity ultimately come down to being overscheduled and sensible—settling into a routine that is certainly interesting and fulfilling but lacking flashes of magic?

  Why did these songs jolt me back to that moment when the future looked wide and delightfully indeterminate?

  Had I known what I had when I had it?

  “How does it happen?”

  In 2010, Sondheim published a lush, rapturously reviewed retrospective of his entire canon—or the first half (the second is to come)—called Finishing the Hat. Show by show, he explained the original concept for each production, its evolution, which songs got added or scrapped, which lines he rewrote for later productions. The book is a priceless record and dissection of the Sondheim library.

  It also gave me a long-awaited explanation. Until I opened the oversized blue cover, I had never understood how Sondheim himself diagnosed Merrily’s ills. I’d heard the theories of many armchair critics—the inverted timeline was confusing, the humor wasn’t humorous, Franklin Shepard was unsympathetic and his Hollywood “sellout” unconvincing. (What’s so wrong with seeking movie jobs if you’re an ambitious composer?) But this was the first time I absorbed the idea t
hat Sondheim thought the problem was, to a great extent, us: his gung-ho band of unseasoned gypsies.

  “What we envisioned,” Sondheim writes, “was a cautionary tale in which actors in their late teens and early twenties would begin disguised as middle-aged sophisticates and gradually become their innocent young selves as the evening progressed. Unfortunately, we got caught in a paradox we should have foreseen: Actors that young, no matter how talented, rarely have the experience or skills to play anything but themselves, and in this case even that caused them difficulties.” (He excepted Jason Alexander.)

  Also notable to me was the revelation that Sondheim and Furth were as blindsided as we were when the reviews were “merciless,” to use Sondheim’s word. “We fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters,” he writes. “By the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show.”

  But my biggest takeaway from his book was a gratifying one: confirmation that the exhilaration we all felt at the time was shared by Sondheim himself, even during the hardest stretch, maybe because of the struggle itself:

  “I speak for myself, but I suspect Hal would agree—that month of fervent hysterical activity was the most fun that I’ve ever had on a single show,” he writes. “It was what I had always expected the theater to be like.”

  He doesn’t explain why the charmed run of Steve and Hal ended after Merrily. The reasons don’t appear to include rancor. I never saw them argue in rehearsals or even appear strained, though Jason Alexander said in an interview years later that he did witness tension. Something must have cooled between them, or lost buoyancy. I suspect their separation was intended to be temporary, but it turned into twenty years.

  What our cast did surmise after the closing notice went up was that Merrily’s miscarriage was personally painful for Hal. He seemed to feel, mistakenly, that he’d “let the kids down,” when of course that couldn’t have been further from the truth: He’d given us the ride of our lives. But naturally he’d wanted a triumph for his daughter—the sweetness of their first collaboration deserved a Broadway-worthy happy ending—and it can’t have been easy to break his winning streak. Daisy, of course, couldn’t have been more loyal or uncomplaining. But the disappointment was unquestionably harsh and very public for all of us. There was a shared sense of staggering out into the light—dazed and uncomprehending.

  “How did you get to be you?”

  Lonny arrived at my Upper West Side apartment earlier this year with a much bigger film crew than I anticipated. After a long setup (during which I kept returning to my bathroom mirror to mask the laugh lines in my face with more makeup), we faced each other under hot lights and talked for an hour about Merrily We Roll Along.

  Lonny today looked just as wiry and ageless as ever, though slightly depleted from his rehearsals for an upcoming concert version of Company at Avery Fisher Hall, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Patti LuPone, and Stephen Colbert.

  During Merrily’s incubation, Lonny was the one we all clung to (and over whom many of my cast-mates mooned—I have the diary entries to prove it). He used to tease me constantly and affectionately about being “married” to him (“Where’s my wife, Evelyn?!”) and even insisted that we create a mock holiday card with faux children to give to the entire cast and crew; we posed as “The Kringas Family,” with my little brother, David, then thirteen, playing our “son,” and Joanna Merlin’s younger daughter, Julie our “daughter.”

  Now, here I was, at forty-five, utterly distanced from those teenage years—that pre-real-life moment before I’d ever had heartbreak, sex, or a job—sitting together nearly three, experience-filled decades later, in my own bona fide home with photographs and appliances, my children doing homework in the next room, my husband at the office, two published nonfiction books on my shelf plus various stops along the résumé. Other than our original cast being connected on Facebook (and we are—through supportive updates and excavated snapshots), Merrily was a lifetime away.

  But Lonny brought it all back: the first reading, the last audition, the first rehearsal, opening night, closing night, the album recording, the reunion.

  He asked how the experience had changed me and, at first, I wasn’t sure it had.

  Then I realized how much.

  It was my first proof that dreams can get realized overnight…and be dashed just as fast.

  It was the dividing day between believing idols are infallible…and learning that everyone fails.

  It was a taste of the thrill of professional theater…and a reminder that maybe my skin wasn’t thick enough.

  But above all, it was the moment in my life when I felt airborne. When everything up ahead was bright, and possible.

  “In truth,” Sondheim writes about Merrily, “like the characters in the show, I was trying to roll myself back to my exuberant early days, to recapture the combination of sophistication and idealism that I’d shared with Hal Prince, Mary Rodgers, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the rest of us show-business supplicants, all stripped back to our innocence.”

  I wonder about innocence—when we lose it, if we ever really had it. I look at my 11-year-old daughter, Molly, and she still seems untarnished by deflation or any sense that things might not happen just as she envisions. My teenage son, Benjamin, however, already has an old soul’s perspective on the way life throws up hurdles. If there’s anything I hope my children glean from my Merrily adventure, it is to leap early and fully, before there’s too much at stake—or even when there already is.

  Harold Prince (left) and Stephen Sondheim in rehearsal for "Merrily We Roll Along."Fall 1981. Photo by Martha Swope/(c) New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  Harold Prince, Jason Alexander and Terry Finn in rehearsal. Photo by Rivka Katvan.

  Me backstage. (Personal photo.)

  Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince embracing after reunion concert. Photo by Bruce Glikas for Broadway.com - Sept 2002.