Happy 50th Anniversary to KELLY- Page 2

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 7:03pm

The set design is very cool yes, but it feels completely off from the costumes, and much more metaphorical. Of course, I didn't see it in person so it may have had a completely different feel.

Thanks for the correction, NoName3. I didn't like it the first time I heard it so I haven't listened to it since.

PS: I love your new profile picture, Mr. Nowack.

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:13pm

Here is what I could copy from Second Act Trouble:

The musical comedy Kelly opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on Saturday, February 6. The New York drama critics unanimously condemned it as one of the worst musicals they had ever seen. Walter Kerr, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, spoke of it as "a bad idea gone wrong." Howard Taubman, the critic for the New York Times, called it "wooden and hollow... without freshness or imagination." It closed after a single performance, costing the investors roughly $650,000. Nobody on Broadway could remember such a spectacular disaster within the recent history of the theatre. On Monday, February 8, the morning of the play's collapse, David Susskind, the television impresario and the most eloquent of Kelly's three producers, spoke to newspaper reporters of his grief. To the New York Herald Tribune, he said, in part: "I have never been so shocked, so surprised in my life. I believed in Kelly. I believed in the cast. I believed in the staging... the songs. Then I saw the reviews. They raised a huge unanswered question mark in my brain. What happened to my taste? Did I put on something crass? Could I be this wrong?" Such a confession would have seemed improbable to him in October 1964, when, prior to the first rehearsals, Susskind's press agent came to the Saturday Evening Post with a proposition for an article about the making of a Broadway musical. The press agent, Jack Perlis, announced that Susskind would welcome the presence of a writer during all phases of the production. No producer had ever before suggested such a thing, Perlis said, but no producer had as much courage as Susskind. Considered in retrospect, the events leading toward that last catastrophic weekend in New York possess a dramatic form that divides, without any pedantic unities, into four acts. ACT I The Brooklyn Bridge, Sunday, October 25, 1964, Early Afternoon Seen from a distance in the clear light of an unseasonably warm afternoon, the men and women grouped on the pedestrian walk of the Brooklyn Bridge seem as luminous figures in a Renoir painting. The chorus girls, dressed in costumes of the 1880's, carried parasols. The men in striped blazers and derby hats had brought picnic baskets and mugs of beer. They stood in a small circle, listening to a trombone player try the opening bars of a tune called "Everyone Here Loves Kelly." When he had got it right, the girls put aside their parasols and danced, kicking their legs high in the air. The press agents, who had arranged the entertainment for the benefit of newspaper photographers, then began to push everybody else out of the way. "Behind the cameras, please," they said, "everybody behind the cameras." Joseph E. Levine, a heavy man with alligator shoes and a dark silk suit, smiled fondly at the dancing, pleased that he had managed to borrow the Brooklyn Bridge for a publicity stunt on behalf of his new play. Derived from the legendary exploit of Steve Brodie, the play was about a young man who jumps off the bridge around the turn of the century. "Showmanship," Levine said, watching some bewildered pedestrians walking across to Flatbush. "This is what I call showmanship." Joseph E. Levine had started as an importer of low-brow foreign films in the late Fifties, with titles including Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, Hercules, Jack the Ripper, and The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah. He started to move into more classy fare with the Katharine Hepburn-Ralph Richardson Long Day's Journey into Night in 1962, but it wasn't until 1967 when he hit the A-list, as executive producer of The Graduate.] Levine had been brought into the venture by David Susskind and Daniel Melnick, Susskind's partner in his television enterprises, and between them they had raised $450,000 for the play's production, a sum they then thought adequate to the purpose. Of that original money Levine put up $250,000; Susskind and Melnick persuaded a small group of investors to put up another $150,000; and Columbia Records, in return for the rights to the record album, had advanced $50,000. None of the producing partners had ever before attempted a Broadway musical. (Television producer David Susskind had produced three Broadway plays. The first two, in 1956 and 1958, had lasted 5 performances each; the third, Peter Glenville's production of Rashomon (1959) starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, achieved a certain degree of prestige though it lasted only twenty weeks. He moved into films with greater success, co-producing Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962).] When the photographers had taken enough pictures, the chorus girls put on fur coats, and everybody went back to the yellow tent set up on a traffic island at the Manhattan end of the bridge. The press agents, among them Jack Perlis, encouraged any stragglers with promises of more music and beer. "Titans," Perlis said, speaking of Susskind and Levine, "these men are titans, giants of the entertainment industry, the Barnums of today. Whatever they do, they do big. I promise big action." The Amsterdam Roof Six Weeks Later The first rehearsals took place in an old theatre on the seventh floor of the New Amsterdam movie house at Broadway and 42nd Street. Drafty and dimly lighted, the theatre had once been used by Florenz Ziegfeld for some of his smaller productions. Herbert Ross, the director and choreographer, sat in a wooden chair placed on an old burlesque runway. A tall, lean, awkward and flatfooted man, he sat with his right leg folded under his left, wearing a loose sweater and steadily smoking cigarettes. Although he was well-established as a choreographer of television shows and Broadway musicals, Kelly was the first musical that he had ever directed. I Kelly was Ross's tenth of thirteen credited Broadway musicals. Ross almost always received strong personal reviews, but each of his musicals failed. While Kelly was the first new musical he directed, he had already earned a reputation as a play fixer. "If Herb is such a great show doctor," his wife Nora Kaye once asked, "why do all the patients die?"] During those first weeks, gradually giving substance to his visions of space and movement, he seldom raised his voice, preferring to speak to the company with light sarcasm. His horn-rimmed glasses and the deep lines in his gentle face gave him the appearance of a university professor. "You're doing this like a bunch of drunken old ladies, for heaven's sake," he would say to the dancers; or, "Don't just sit there like an Equity member, Leslie, react." Other than Ross's bored, calm voice, the only sound in the theatre was that of the rehearsal pianist playing the same tunes over and over again on the upright piano to the left of the stage, and the dancers counting to themselves as they waited to make their entrances. The girls wore their long hair pinned up in brightly colored scarves. Moose Charlap and Eddie Lawrence attended every rehearsal, both of them pacing nervously up and down the aisles, watching their play from different angles. They had written Kelly five years before, in nine days and nine nights of fierce inspiration. They had been unable to get it performed, however, because the producers to whom they brought it had wanted to make unacceptable changes in the script. Conceived as an ironic farce, the play concerned a young Irish immigrant (Hop Kelly) who, before the opening curtain, has tried and failed in three attempts to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge. The action takes place along the Bowery during the late 1880s. A sarcastic and cocksure youth, Kelly had offered to jump from the bridge in a moment of braggadocio. A group of gamblers took him up on the offer and squandered large amounts of

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:14pm

money on his three losses of nerve. As the play opens the gamblers are ready to bet on him once again, but this time, to insure their investment, they intend to make him party to a fraud, by means of a complicated scheme to throw a dummy off the bridge. In his first appearance on stage, however, Kelly sings a soliloquy in which he reveals hope of regaining self-respect by honestly risking death. The dramatic action depends on the ensuing conflict between Kelly and the gamblers. (The action also involves several subplots, including Hop's love for a gambler's daughter.) At various intervals the characters pause, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht, to sing songs intended as commentaries to the audience. These dealt with such themes as social injustice and the falsity of romantic love. Both Lawrence and Charlap thought of the play as an artistic statement about modern life, not as a Broadway entertainment. They were thankful that in Susskind and Melnick they at last had found producers with the courage to present such a play. "Those other guys," Lawrence said, referring to other producers, "wanted to change the kid into some kind of knight in shining armor, like a crummy love story." A man in his early 40s, nearly always dressed in a well-fitting tweed jacket and a soft hat slanted jauntily across his eyes, Lawrence had a cold and self-contained manner, as if he never quite heard what anybody said to him. Although known principally as a nightclub comic and as an author of comedy sketches for television, Lawrence had also studied painting for four years after the war with Fernand Leger in Paris, and he believed that an artist's work was inviolable. Kelly was his first full-length play. I Lawrence was best known on Broadway for his role as Sandor, the featured comic, in the 1956 Styne- Comden-Green-Robbins-Fosse musical, Bells Are Ringing.] Charlap, more excitable and intense, had composed the music for three Broadway shows, among them Peter Pan. A small man, almost bald, he walked with a bounding gait and spoke in a quick and husky voice, generally accompanied by violent chopping motions in both hands. ICharlap had indeed composed Peter Pan for Jerome Robbins and Mary Martin in 1954, but half of his score was thrown out during the tryout (and replaced with new songs by Styne, Comden, and Green). Charlap's retained tunes included "Tender Shepherd," "I Gotta Crow," and "I Won't Grow Up." His other two musicals, written with lyricist Norman Gimbel, were the quick failure Whoop-Up and the even more disastrous Conquering Hero.] "The play is something I believe in," he said "It thumbs its nose at cliche. I'm not attempting to speak to the 12-year-old mind.... This is 1964; so it's against sentimental.... Give it the bitter chop; no perfect fifths or octaves.... At least let me be wrong on my own terms.... I hope I still believe in it when it gets to Broadway." On the afternoon of the third day, Daniel Melnick came confidently forward out of the gloom of the darkened theatre, his overcoat draped across his shoulders. On his way across the stage he paused to kiss two chorus girls lightly on their foreheads. Under the overcoat, the collar of which was trimmed in fur, he wore a double-breasted cashmere sweater with suede buttons. "Ask any question you can think of," he said, introducing himself. "With any luck you will be able to write a textbook on how to produce a play in the American musical theatre." Although Levine had contributed the major amount of money, he had entrusted the production to Susskind and Melnick. At the age of thirty-two, Melnick had been Susskind's partner for the past year in Talent Associates-Paramount Ltd., a company that packages and sells television shows and which, as he explained, concerned itself with "all media on both coasts." Of Lawrence and Charlap, he said: "Eddie and Moose, of course, are insane." He intended the remark as a high compliment, meaning to suggest that the richness of their talent surpassed the understanding of ordinary people. Susskind appeared later that evening. He wore an old raincoat and walked with the rolling gait of a sailor or a prizefighter. "We're not remote, entrepreneurial figures," he said, "we're gutty, rich, virile, accessible." Laughingly he remembered the numerous auditions for prospective investors, many of whom had been confused by the unconventional aspects of the play. "Overbred society people," he said, "...the critics had not yet told them what to think." The Cort Theatre, A Week Later On Monday, December 14, the company moved to West 48th Street because Ross wanted to try the dance numbers on a larger stage. The scene was nearly identical to the one on the Amsterdam Roof: steam pipes against a brick wall behind the stage, the same harsh light, the same drafts. The cast, after a month of rehearsals, had become bored. When not called upon to perform, the dancers and actors sat listlessly on folding chairs, reading newspapers, working crossword puzzles, talking about clothes and love affairs. "What do you mean, does she know him?" said a blond girl waiting to sing, "of course she knows him, she's been living with him for a week." The stage had been marked out with strips of tape to indicate the eventual placing of the props and scenery. Randy Brooks, the stage manager, was beginning to note the necessary timings; how long for platforms to rise into place; how long for each scene, each crossover, each song. Susskind and Melnick now came to every rehearsal. Often Susskind sat by himself in the back of the theatre, staring at the stage with fierce concentration. Late one afternoon he confessed to a suppressed ambition to become a choreographer. He spoke also of his fondness for the timelessness of the theatre, a remote and far-off place wherein only the imaginary was real. "The musical comedy is the only generic American art form," he said. "I would like to have one continually in rehearsal. It's great therapy to come and watch the singing and dancing, away from Madison Avenue and the money worries and the bureaucrats." Melnick had taken to sitting directly behind Ross, whispering in his ear, giving advice about the movements of the dancers, or the placing of the sets, or the reading of particular lines. As the rehearsals continued, Ross sometimes spoke to the company with a harsh edge in his voice. "Listen, people," he would say, "this is not important dialogue, so please just don't let it lie there." The actor with whom Ross was most concerned was Don Francks, a Canadian nightclub and television entertainer playing the role of Hop Kelly. Although not much past the age of 30, his gaunt face was marked with deep shadows. He had quit school at a young age and wandered around the world, shipping out as a seaman on a freighter to South Africa, working in an iron foundry in British Columbia, traveling to Mexico on a motorcycle. Melnick had promised him that with Kelly he would be discovered as a sensational star in the United States, another Robert Goulet. I Goulet, also of Canadian stock, w<' launched to stardom in the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot. f Usually he came to rehearsal dressed in soft leather boots and tightfitting suits of his own design. He seldom spoke to his colleagues, preferring to inscribe his passing thoughts and fancies in the large black notebook that he carried with him everywhere. Waiting his turn to perform, he would decorate the pages of the notebook with drawings of flowers, like illuminations in a medieval manuscript. At times Francks put his inspirations into prose, and at other times into poetry. At the end of the rehearsal on Thursday night, Ross, Melnick, Susskind, Lawrence and Charlap gathered in the 11th row to

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:14pm

consider the possible elimination of a song sung by two actors playing the parts of Frank and Jesse James. (One of Lawrence's subplots involved the robbery of the Bowery Savings Bank by the James brothers.) "Let's be realistic, gentlemen," Melnick said, "it's not coming off, and we cannot hold onto the dream." As soon as Charlap understood the intent of the conversation, he began to twitch nervously. Susskind put his arm around him, seeking to comfort him. "Moose, Moose," he said, "stop that nonsense. Nobody's going to hurt you." "I won't cut it," Charlap said, "I'm sorry; I simply won't do it." So saying, he got up and walked out of the theatre. By the following afternoon, Susskind and Charlap had temporarily resolved their differences. But thereafter, if ever Susskind put his arm around Charlap's shoulder, the color would drain from Charlap's face, and his eyes would assume a glazed expression. The rehearsals proceeded without incident for the rest of the week, and on Sunday the cast presented a run-through of the entire play for an audience of about one hundred friends and relatives. The friends and relatives did not laugh much, nor did they applaud in a way that could be thought heartening. "I remember in Paris once, after a performance like this," Lawrence said without explanation, "the audience yelled `author, author,' and the actors brought out a gorilla." The audience's lack of enthusiasm had a depressing effect on Ross, who sat slumped in his seat in the last row, his face in his hands. "There isn't a page of dialogue that works," he said, "not a line." Melnick, however, managed to interpret any apparent failure as an inconsequential illusion. Of the audience's response on this occasion, he said: "They're interested. They're intrigued, but they're too respectful. Like it was a poetry reading or an evening at the Ninety-Second Street Y.M.H.A. The love scene is too honest." Much later that night, after long and involuted conversations in the men's room, everybody agreed that except for a few minor troubles in the first act, the play was in remarkably good shape. Ross, having regained his composure, expected slight changes in Philadelphia. "For what we have got to say," he said, "maybe we could cut twenty minutes; nothing's so good that it can't be cut." "The wonderful thing about this show," Melnick said, "is that everybody is working together. There is none of that terribleness, that viciousness, those cliques common to most musicals. What we have here is a unity." En route To Philadelphia, December 22, 1964, Late Morning The talk in the car, a long Cadillac with two telephones, devolved largely on deals: for books, movies, plays, people, television rights and common stocks. Joseph E. Levine, his hat placed firmly on his head, his hands spread motionless on his knees, sat on the back seat with Susskind. Melnick sat in front with the driver. They talked with the largesse of Monopoly players exchanging railroads and utilities. Levine was in a contented mood. His most recent film, Marriage Italian Style, had opened the day before in New York to rave notices and was expected to gross several million dollars at box offices across the country. The Carpetbaggers continued to earn record sums, and in London everybody said that Carroll Baker would attract additional millions in Marlow. For a man who had started out in Boston fifty-nine years ago with no money and no prospects, and who had, among other things, sold plastic statuettes of Daddy Grace on the streets of Harlem, Levine had come a long way. I "sweet Daddy" Grace was a flamboyant evangelist and founder of the United House of Prayer for All People.] As the car moved slowly through the Lincoln Tunnel, Melnick explained that they might have trouble selling tickets to Kelly because Don Francks, in the lead, was an unknown name. "He's not a star, Joe," Melnick said, "in Kansas

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:15pm

they never heard of him... Jesus, what am I talking about, Kansas... they don't know him on Forty-Second Street." "So I'll give him three pictures," Levine said. Susskind reminded Levine that he was to appear the following week on Susskind's television show, Hot Line, together with Isaac Stern, the violinist, and Rise Stevens, the opera singer. "It's a classy guest list, Joe," Susskind said, "you could talk about Kelly." "Will Isaac play `Hearts and Flowers' if I tell him the story of my boyhood?" Levine asked. During the rest of the trip Susskind seldom spoke. Levine and Melnick, however, continued to talk about money. Levine said he had just bought the movie and television rights to Romain Gary's new novel, The Ski Bum. "Did you read the book, Joe?" Melnick asked. "What do you mean, did I read it? I didn't have to read it. I bought it.,, As the car approached Philadelphia, edging through the suburbs on the north side of town, Levine asked a series of questions about Kelly. Being a novice at producing for the stage, he wanted to know about costs, renting theatres, unions, advertising procedures. At the end of this conversation, by way of a joke, he asked, "So when do we close?" Everybody laughed at that, and Levine said that no matter what happened on Broadway, he would make the play into "a helluva movie." In the lobby of the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square, waiting for the bellboy to bring his luggage from the car, Susskind looked with mounting doubts and suspicion at the potted palms. "I hope we're going to be happy here," he said. ACT 11 Philadelphia, The Shubert Theatre, The Following Night The marquee outside the theatre looked like the marquee on a suburban supermarket. The cold and efficient lettering advertised, as if it were the day's special grocery offering, A SMASH NEW MUSICAL COMEDY. The phrase was conceived by Nat Dorfman, a New York press agent assigned by Perlis and Susskind to promote Kelly on the road. The show was to play a preview performance on Saturday, December 26, and on the following Monday, December 28, it would open for the Philadelphia critics and the beginning of a three-week engagement. At 7:30 PM. Wednesday, as a few people stood in line at the box office, the company began its first run-through with costumes, lights, scenery and orchestra. Ross sat in the 14th row, dictating notes to his assistant. Susskind and Melnick took their accustomed positions, directly behind him. To Ross's right sat Freddy Wittop, the costume designer, and Oliver Smith, the set designer. i Wittop and smith had performed the same jobs on Broadway's then-reigning hit, Hello, Dolly'. which also took place in and around New York in the 1880s. i To his left, five rows farther back, sat Charlap and Lawrence. The run-through required the better part of two days. Randy Brooks, the stage manager, stopped the performance every few minutes until he had satisfied himself that the sets worked properly and that the actors knew their exits and entrances precisely. The revelation of the sets and costumes inspired Susskind and Melnick to elaborate compliments. "Smashing, Freddy, absolutely gorgeous," Melnick would say to Wittop. "Ravishing, Oliver, perfectly ravishing," Susskind would say to Smith. The sets had cost almost $100,000. Because several scenes took place in the Bowery, in a lower-class milieu, many of the costumes, which cost another $90,000, had been made to look poor. "They look so good," Melnick said, "as if they came from an Army-Navy surplus store for $3.98." "My rags are chiffon," Wittop said, "otherwise they wouldn't float that way. The idea is poetic dirt, not just a dirty look." Charlap and Lawrence, however, disapproved of both sets and costumes. They would have prefered a bleak stage and abstract sets, something more in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht. "This is too real, too materialistic, too rich," Charlap said. "The imagination droops, and suddenly you're competing with My Fair Lady. In East Germany they would understand how to do this play." "Well, if it's a stiff," Lawrence said, "we can always charge admission to let the people see the sets and costumes." Ross, although pleased with the visual effects, worried about the music. He wasn't happy with Sandy Matlovsky, the conductor, and he thought some of the orchestral arrangements lacked style. Matlovsky had been hired at the insistence, of Charlap, partly because the two men were friends and partly because Matlovsky had conducted the first New York performance of Brecht's classic Threepenny Opera. Imatlovsky did not conduct the first performance, which was at the Empire Theatre in 1933; he conducted Marc Blitzstein's long-running 1954 off-Broadway adaptation. The orchestrations for Kelly were by Hershy Kay, whose credits included Leonard Bernstein's Candide and the 1963 musical 170 in the Shade.] Upon hearing the orchestra play a dance number called "Tough Neighborhood," Ross said, in an aside to Susskind and Melnick, "That's the worst thing I ever heard... it's as if they never saw the parts and telephoned it in!" In a louder voice, to Matlovsky, he said, "Stop it, Sandy, stop it, I'm sorry, but I want it my way, now...it's just terrible." The rehearsal ended at 11:30 PM., the run-through having progressed as far as the last scene in Act I. Ross and the two producers then summoned their authors to a meeting in the basement of the theatre. They had begun to suspect that the character of Hop Kelly was not sufficiently sympathetic or heroic. Earlier that day they had decided to ask Lawrence for three new scenes and Charlap for at least one new song. Although the authors agreed to these requests, they did so with heavy reluctance, doubts obviously beginning to cloud their minds. When they had left, Melnick, who had been a vice president of the ABC television network and there had established Ben Casey, said, "You've got to be a Jesuit or a rabbi to justify all the changes and satisfy the emotional needs of these people... Authors are like children." Susskind thought Lawrence and Charlap ungrateful for his and Melnick's advice. "They ought to be down on their hands and knees for all the creative collaboration they're getting," he said. The Same, Three Nights Later Levine, who had gone back to New York after a press conference that first day, returned to Philadelphia for the first preview. Before the performance he stood unobtrusively in the lobby, watching the audience come into the theatre, listening to the customers talking about their Christmas presents and the unusually warm rain that season. "This week in New York," he said, "I've already had a flop and a hit. Marriage Italian Style is big. Everywhere there are lines, long lines at the box office." The flop was Eugene O'Neill's Hughie, with Jason Robards Jr., a play that Levine had produced with the hope of improving his image among the literati. "I mean, it was art for Chrissake," he said. "The critics are supposed to go for art, aren't they?? I always knew that movie critics hated movies, and so from now on I know that drama critics hate plays." He was especially troubled by the knowledge that the success or failure of a play depended on the opinions of only five or six men in New York. "It's a crap game," he said. "You could take $500,000 to Las Vegas and do as well." He watched the performance from the back of the theatre, leaning against the rail behind the last row of seats, together with Susskind, Ross and Melnick. They watched the audience with the fascination of children looking at lions and tigers in a zoo. Charlap and Lawrence stood off to one side. Of all the people in the theatre they were the ones who most enjoyed the show. Lawrence,

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:15pm

who had bought a new hat for the occasion, carried his script under his arm. He laughed at all the jokes and listened complacently to the songs. Charlap, more nervous, paced excitedly back and forth. "They [the producers] complained that the book doesn't hold," he said. "Well, it holds, it holds like nothing you ever saw before." The audience, however, reserved its warmest applause for the sets and costumes. If the customers had arrived discussing Christmas or the weather, they left talking about the same subjects except for a sympathetic lady in a veil who, expressing the majority opinion, said to a friend on her way through the lobby: "I feel sorry for the cast." Ross, Susskind and Melnick walked back to the Barclay Hotel in the rain, all of them trying to think of something reassuring to say. "I know it's there somewhere," Susskind said. "I hope we don't get good notices," Ross said. "Eddie will be more difficult if we do... it's a question of major rewriting." `At least we now know the things we thought were bad are really just as bad as we thought," Melnick said. An hour later, at the Variety Club, a bar frequented by traveling actors, the members of the cast comforted themselves with Scotch and variations of the maxim that Philadelphia audiences were always wrong. They ignored the Christmas tree and the messages of good cheer pasted on the walls. "In Philly," somebody said, "they hated West Side Story." "If they liked it," said somebody else, "then we'd really be in trouble." The Barclay Hotel, The Morning of December 29 In a room overlooking Rittenhouse Square, Ross, Melnick and Susskind sat staring gloomily at the Philadelphia newspapers scattered on the floor. Ross sprawled gloomily on a couch too small for his angular figure; Melnick and Susskind lounged in armchairs. In a corner of the room, suffused in cold, bright sunlight, a table had been set up with pastry and coffee. The play had opened the night before, and the reviews were mixed. The Philadelphia Daily News, the least important of the local papers, thought Kelly "a thing of quality... rowdy in humor and blessed with memorable music and engaging dance." But the critic for the Philadelphia Bulletin spoke of "a tedious story torpedoed by indecision and the easiness with which it is led up blind alleys." He described Hop Kelly as "a one-dimensional oaf." The producers chose to believe the worst of the reviews. "This show is an accumulation of non sequitors," Susskind said, "for a hero we have an oaf, a passive iconoclast, a whiner, a cardboard social protest. There is self-pity implicit in his every speech and move." "We have to get a line to the story," Ross said, "and then try to fill in the motivations. It happens all the time, just a matter of making the kid heroic." After an hour of anguished conversation, they decided to cut Frank and Jesse James from the script, to move a successful dance number from the second to the first act and to insist that Lawrence write whatever they told him to write. They also wanted to cut the opening soliloquy, a song for Francks called "Ode to the Bridge." Charlap and Lawrence, accompanied by Matlovsky, the conductor, arrived about noon. They took chairs at the opposite end of the room and refused all offers of pastry or coffee. They looked wary. Susskind began by reading aloud the sentence of the review about "a tedious story torpedoed by indecision." He then said, "Eddie, I agree with that review 100 percent." Lawrence merely stared at him, saying nothing, his mouth drawing into a stubborn line. Charlap and Matlovsky looked at the paintings on the walls. To interrupt the awkward silence, Melnick brought up the subject of the "Ode to the Bridge." "It's no good, Eddie," he said, "it's Gotterdammerung." "Of course, like a bad poem," Lawrence said, "that's the whole point of the joke." "Eddie," Susskind said, "it's a humorless rumination." "I think it's funny," Lawrence said, "and my friends all think it's funny." "Your friends are wrong, Eddie," Susskind said. "I'm not willing to give it up," Lawrence said, "at least not for now." At that, discouraged by the inflexible expression in Lawrence's face, the producers dropped the subject. They proceeded to the faults in Hop Kelly's character. "You've got to make the kid more lovable, Eddie," Ross said. "We've got to understand why the girl loves him." "Have you got that, Eddie?" Susskind said. "Get to the love." "I'm beginning to see the reason for all that love stuff in those old Metro movies," Melnick said. Lawrence then read the three new scenes that he had written over the past two days. The others listened in noncommittal silence. When nobody said anything, Lawrence said. "I don't know what I'm writing anymore." "Eddie," Susskind said, "don't talk like that. You've got a hero, you've got a mission, you've got enemy forces." "Next time," Lawrence said, "we tryout in Hudson's Bay. They haven't seen an actor there in thirty years." Foxy, a Bert Lahr musical that opened in February 1964, had tried out in the wilds of the Yukon Territory. Even so, the show failed in Canada and New York.] Having thus disposed, at least temporarily, of the writing problems, the producers turned their attention to the music. To Matlovsky, Melnick said, "Sandy, let me level with you. I'm not comfortable, I'm worried, I don't think we're on top of the music." "It's not the kind of music that plays itself," Matlovsky said, "the score is like a dead animal." "We've got to have the result, Sandy," Melnick said. From Charlap the producers also wanted a second new song, this one a ballad for the newly lovable Hop Kelly. "It should be a song of self-revelation, discovery, recognition," Susskind said, "the `I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face' ofour show." Although Susskind and Melnick wanted to put all these changes into effect as soon as possible, Ross refused to let them give the new material to the actors until later in the week. "Don't mess around with these people, Danny," he said to Melnick, "they're tired. I'm not going to see the show for the rest of this week, and I don't care what happens on stage. This is only Philadelphia. Who cares what happens in Philadelphia?" As the meeting adjourned, just after two o'clock, Lawrence permitted himself a last wistful remark: "I liked my own show better. It was intimate and small, and now I see it turning into a lavish Broadway spectacle." "Eddie, there's a big hit here," Susskind said. "This is the show you intended to write." "I hate it," Lawrence said. The Shubert Theatre, Five Days Later The first rehearsal with Lawrence's three new scenes, rewritten since the meeting in the Barclay Hotel, and Charlap's two new songs, took place on the evening of January 3. The company would perform this "new" show on the following night. The actors playing the James brothers had been fired on Saturday and already had gone back to New York. On the same day Susskind had gone to London to supervise the filming of a television spectacular, thus leaving the production to Melnick. During its first week in Philadelphia the play had earned $44,000, about $16,000 less than its expenses over the same period. In the revised version of the play, Hop Kelly approached his jump from the Brooklyn Bridge as if for the first time, not the third. He had gained an additional reason for the jump. As he explained to his girlfriend at the end of Act I, "because it's there. If I was in England, maybe I would want to swim the Channel, or if I was in Buffalo, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel." Lawrence, although he had written the lines himself, disliked them. He still came to the theatre every day, not as a matter of interest, but for fear that the producers would change lines without asking him. Watching the new love scene, he said:

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"Smug, smug. My God, that's what I can't stand, that smugness.... Never again, no more Broadway producers. They want to run the theatre like a bargain basement in a department store, trying to sell only what the public will buy. In France we used to sit around and laugh about things like this, but the trouble is that nobody here is laughing except me." Melnick was pleased with the changes. He thought that now the play had begun to take shape, to tell a believable story that people could enjoy and understand. "We took out the hostility," he said to Ross. "It's sensational. Herb, sensational... it moves so fast that if anybody in the audience stops to sneeze, they're lost." The Barclay Hotel, The Morning of January 5th The new material had proved as disappointing as the old. The audience on Monday night laughed weakly at the new jokes and failed to demonstrate any additional sympathy for the new Hop Kelly. Susskind, informed of this disappointment on the telephone to London, demanded improvements; Levine called later in the day from New York giving similar instructions. Sitting in the same chairs as on the previous Tuesday, Ross, Melnick, Charlap and Lawrence shared a common anxiety. They felt a need for strong and decisive action. Ross, who looked cold and tired, sat with his hands concealed in the sleeves of his sweater. "I have something very dramatic," he said, "...it's Ella." Nobody said anything. Ella Logan had last appeared on Broadway in 1947 as the lead in Finian's Rainbow, and her role as the mother of Hop Kelly was to have served as the vehicle for her triumphant return to the stage. "She's a cantankerous lady," Ross said. "She's so vulgar I can't stand it. She's hurting us, and she will definitely have to go." "She's a cancer," Melnick said, "a Trotskyite." Both Charlap and Lawrence, surprised by this suggestion, pointed out that Miss Logan was the nearest person they had to a star, that so far she had received the loudest applause, that many tickets had been sold because of her name, and that, without her, the already small business at the box office might diminish even further. "That's a chance we must take," Melnick said. "If she were fabulous, we might not have the guts to get rid of her, but her part is irrelevant. We can give her lines to the father. She's hurting us, and we've got to be ruthless, just as if she were a song or a dance." "You get a lot of laughs with the mother," Lawrence said. "Two laughs, Eddie," Melnick said. "Nobody understands my jokes," Lawrence said. Without further argument it was agreed to do away with Miss Logan: Melnick said he would tell her on Wednesday night after the performance. Then, taking advantage of this new surge of self-confidence, he telephoned Nat Dorfman, the press agent. "Nat, Nat sweetheart, I'm very disappointed in you.... I'm unhappy, Nat. The word of mouth is not good enough. Not enough people know that we have a very exciting show. Nat, I'm not interested in sympathy. Nat, I want it on the radio." The Variety Club, Wednesday Night The miasma of collective depression settled, like a mist in a swamp, along the bar. The members of the company exchanged rumors, saying that a screenwriter from Hollywood (some said it was the man who wrote The Carpetbaggers) would come east to rewrite the script. Others said that after Boston the show would travel to Toronto in hope of gaining additional time in which to make improvements. Anita Gillette, a small, brown-haired girl with large, soft eyes, sat at a table among several dancers. To Tony di Vecchi, a dancer who kept his money in his shoes, she said, "Tony, am I on the way up or the way down?" "If it's a big hit, honey,"' he said, "you're on the way up." Anita Gillr,ttc, first came to prominence in 1961 when she subbed for Anna Maria Alberghetti in Carnival. (Producer David Merrick, who was battling with Alberghetti, made sure that the press was in the house for Gillette's "triumphant" debut.) Gillette quickly moved into ingenue roles in two big 1962 Josh Logan musicals, All American and Mr. President. Both were dire failures. Kelly came next; Gillette was definitely on the way down.] At around midnight Don Francks passed silently and wonderingly through the room, a riding crop under his arm and his familiar black notebook clutched in his left hand. As the character of Hop Kelly gradually became sentimental, Francks's performance became less convincing. This confused and alarmed him, and so, on this particular night, leaving the Variety Club without saying more than a few words to anybody, he went back to his hotel room and wrote of his disillusion in his usual cryptic style. (The relevant entry in his notebook later read: "Thank you for your plastic flowers; thank you for your rubber fern... the bubbles in my pink champagne have burst.") On his way out of the bar Francks smiled bleakly at Charlap, who, with his wife, sat drinking in the corner of the room under the Christmas tree. (Chmrlap's wife w,is the pop singer Sandy Stewart. Charlap was brooding about the transformation of the play and the arguments won and lost with producers. "The job of the creative man," he said, "is not to let the money men vitiate his work." And then, growing more excited with the liquor and the late hour and the enormity of the injustice he felt inflicted upon him, he quoted at random from the work of Ezra Pound, savagely cutting the air with his hands and mixing up the verses of several poems. "0 helpless few in my country," he began, "0 remnant enslaved, thwarted against the systems.... Go my songs.... I have weathered out this storm; I have beaten out my existence." Ella Logan came in at about two a.m. Round-faced and sly, a woman in her early 50s, she wore a Hawaiian blouse and looked around the room with the exaggerated melodrama of a conspirator in a Shakespearean play. Talking softly among her supporters in the corner of the bar opposite to Charlap, she reported Melnick's visit to her dressing room. That night, she said, he had come to her and told her that her part was being reduced to five lines in the first act and six lines in the second. She interpreted this maneuver as an attempt to humiliate her and thus oblige her, for reasons of her own pride, to quit the show. If she quit the producers could say that she had violated the contract and therefore they were under no obligation to pay her. "But I ain't moving," she said. "I told him very politely I'd speak to my lawyer, and I ain't moving." Mickey Shaughnessy, a tall and florid man playing the part of a prizefighter who befriends Kelly, gave voice to the troubled emotions of everybody present. Although successful as a nightclub comic and a character actor, Shaughnessy had never played in a Broadway musical, and he was unfamiliar with the rules of behavior out of town. He pounded his fist on the bar, glaring at the crowd with fierce, direct eyes. Several people tried to quiet him, but he ignored them, his anger that of a passionate and simple man first encountering intrigue. "I'm sorry, I'm raw," he said. "I'm nightclub. I'm used to telling something to a man's face. We know the play's a bomb. But what is all this whispering and calling everybody `darling'? If this is Broadway, I don't want it... it's untruthful. We've heard rumors of a new writer and new director. Let's go ask Mister Ross or Mister Lawrence or Mister Melnick.... Let's talk to each other." The speech was received in embarrassed silence. Although accustomed to treachery, the other actors were not used to talking about it, especially in the presence of strangers in a bar. Eileen Rodgers, an actress who was cast in the role of a dance-hall queen, began to cry behind her dark glasses, the tears streaming down her face. "I wish I was back in

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Tenderloin," she said. "It was a flop, but at least people were friendly." Featured actress Eileen Rodgers had prominent roles in the two Abbott-Bock-Harnick-Prince musicals, Fiorello! and Tenderloin (see page 18.]> Philadelphia, The Lu Lu Temple, Thursday Afternoon Ross had called the actors together for a line rehearsal in the grand ballroom of the Masonic Temple down the street from the theatre. The uneasiness and anxiety of the night before had now communicated itself to the entire company. It was another unusually warm day. Through the open windows on the south side of the room, a few birds could be heard singing over the noise of the traffic and the rain. Halfway through the third scene in Act I, Jesse White, an actor in the role of Stickpin Sidney Crane, the principal gambler attempting to corrupt Kelly, slammed his script on the floor and addressed Eddie Lawrence. As a younger man White had played in several Broadway plays, but lately he had been working as a movie and television actor, his most famous role being in a series of television commercials for Chun King Chow Mein. White was best known on Broadway as the asylum attendant in the long-running 1944 hit Harvey, a role he repeated in the 1950 film (with James Stewart) and the 1970 revival (with Stewart and Helen Hayes). Character man White hit it big in 1968 when he was hired for a commercial as the Maytag Repair Man, a recurring gig which lasted until 1989.] "How can I say a line like that, Eddie, for God's sake. What does it mean?" he said. "It stinks. It's not funny. If we go to Boston with this stuff, the critics will kill us. We keep hearing that you're going to write new material, but all you do is bring the same old stuff warmed over. I'm out on the stage and nothing happens." "If you don't like it." Lawrence said, "you can quit." He then stood up and walked stiffly from the room, his script under his arm, his mouth set in the familiar obstinate line. He was followed by Eileen Rodgers, again in tears. "I can't stand the screaming," she said, "I can't stand it anymore." Ross allowed the company a ten-minute break and went to comfort Miss Rodgers in the hall. Lawrence had gone back to his hotel. Waiting for the rehearsal to resume, Ella Logan, now frankly outspoken about the faults of the production, whispered to a dancer that Ross had lost control of his actors. "Too many ears," she said, "Herbie has too many ears.... There's something frightfully fishy going on; you can't trust anybody around here. With most plays you never see the producers, but these guys do everything but come in rehearsal clothes." From that moment on she was always to refer to Melnick as "the smiling killer." When the company again assembled for the reading, Ross and Melnick both made short speeches, seeking to reassure the actors. "I know the script is bad," Ross said, "but changes will be made. You must not deteriorate under the emotional strain. It's rough, but that's why we are out on the road." "At this critical moment," Melnick said, "we must not lose faith in Herb. We cannot behave like animals, snapping and snarling to protect individual interests. All of us have to recognize one thing. Eddie may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." He went on to tell Miss Logan that she was a destructive influence, and he asked her to please cooperate. "If the show's a flop," he said. "we'll all go back to television." "You'll go back," Miss Logan said. "Some of us belong in the theatre." The Shubert Theatre, The Next Day Lawrence came to the theatre shortly before noon, expecting to watch the actors rehearse a scene that he had written the previous night. Despite his objection to the producers' intentions, he had agreed to more revision. Before he arrived, however, Ross, acceding to the actors' requests and to his own intuition, had discarded the scene. Instead of following the script, he was conducting an experiment in improvisation, asking the actors to invent their own lines. As Lawrence entered from backstage, a small, precise and well-dressed figure, he saw Ross sitting among four or five actors on folding chairs, all of them staring expectantly into the rafters. He sat down in the third row. "I would like you people to say anything that comes into your heads," Ross was saying. "Don't worry about what it means; just respond to whatever is said to you." Lawrence listened incredulously to the ensuing dialogue. After he had heard a minor actor say, "I don't know how the kid is going to jump off that monster and live," he turned and walked silently away. A few minutes later, however, he could be heard shouting at Melnick in the lobby of the theatre. "This is a disgrace," he said. "These lines will never reach the stage, never. This is worse than Young Doctor Malone, this is sentimental slop. This is abominable." Although his exact words were not distinguishable, Melnick's voice, much softer, could be heard mumbling appeasement. When he returned to his seat in the third row (Lawrence had again withdrawn to his hotel), Melnick was handed a telegram from an associate in his New York office. NOTES FROM THE IVORY TOWER. WORD IN NEW YORK IS KELLY BIG HIT. TEASERS UP. LOOK GREAT. HAVE SEEN ADVANCE SUNDAY AD. SENSATIONAL. The telegram partially restored Melnick's self-confidence. Never again, he said, would he produce a musical comedy under the conditions now imposed on him. He particularly resented the contract he had signed with Lawrence and Charlap; under its clear, Dramatists' Guild terms, not a word of the script could be changed without their consent. Although conceding that Lawrence had seemed a little upset just a few minutes before, he nevertheless thought that both authors would listen to reason at the meeting scheduled for that evening in his hotel room. What with all the money involved, and the chance for a hit and everybody's name in lights, he could not imagine that reasonable men would argue about a few lines of dialogue. "For five hours I'll listen to the charade," he said. "I'll let them catharsize. They'll go along. We'll all be happy together in Boston." INTERLUDE Lawrence and Charlap never went to Boston with the company. On Friday, January 8, the same night that Melnick predicted reconciliation, he received a second telegram, this one from the authors' lawyers, threatening "appropriate action" if he and Susskind continued to permit unauthorized changes in the script. Over the weekend and through the following week the dispute became increasingly bitter. During this period the producers became furtive and shy. Susskind returned from London on Monday, January 11, and rescinded the decision to abandon Miss Logan. Lawrence accordingly proceeded to write her part back into the play. Lawrence's third and last revision went into the play on the evening of Tuesday, January 12. Although satisfactory to the authors, it failed to encourage the producers. During the intermission that night, in a bar adjacent to the theatre, Ross, Susskind and Melnick, their faces strained and tense, avoided looking directly at one another, like suspects waiting to testify before a grand jury. Later that night they confronted their authors in the Barclay Hotel, and presented an ultimatum. Melnick reported the substance of the conversation at breakfast the following morning. "We told Eddie he was written out, that he was dry and had reached a dead end. The hero is still a petulant, mean and whining kid. We told Eddie he needs help, another writer." Lawrence refused the offer, still maintaining that the character of Hop Kelly should be hostile, an anti-hero that the

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audience comes to admire despite his unattractive manners. On Friday, Melnick reported that he and Susskind were determined to do whatever they wanted to do with the show, even if it meant getting rid of Lawrence and risking trouble with his lawyers. The play had continued to suffer at the box office, and they already had been obliged to raise another $100,000 to pay the show's expenses, first to Boston and thence to New York. "It's incredible," Melnick said, "that guys like Levine and David and myself can be frustrated... wrecked... by these small-time maniacs.... I mean, it's unheard of, fantastic.... The time for pleasantries is past." On January 16 Lawrence and Charlap left Philadelphia. The next morning Charlap telephoned from New York and said that he and Lawrence were through with Kelly. "It's not our show anymore," he said, "it's tenth-rate television jazz." He reported that on Friday his lawyers had filed a demand for arbitration of the dispute. Levine had come to a meeting that night and there had been an unpleasant scene. "The whole thing was like a sordid German movie," he said. "Levine shouted a lot. He wanted to know who the hell did we think we were, for Chrissake, Shakespeare and Beethoven? So I made a speech, sforzando, triple f's, and told them all they really cared about was money, and they didn't care what they put on the stage as long as some sucker paid $9.90 to see it.... These men are not human beings to me anymore, they're beasts. These are the men who will blow up the world." On Monday, January 18, while stagehands were hanging the scenery in the Shubert Theatre in Boston, Lawrence and Charlap asked their lawyers to seek a court order that would enjoin the producers from bringing the show to New York. ACT 111 Boston, The Shubert Theatre, Wednesday, January 20 The tedious, familiar business of a dress rehearsal with stagehands, lighting crew and orchestra began at 1 p.m. The stage was smaller than the one in Philadelphia, and Randy Brooks, the stage manager, had some trouble making the necessary adjustments. The play was to open that night for what was scheduled as a three-week engagement. The cast already had learned a new opening scene written by David Goodman, a comedy writer and a friend of Melnick's, who had secretly been with the show for almost a week. The new scene introduced Hop Kelly as a frankly sentimental Irish kid trying to make a success of himself in the tradition or Horatio Alger. Whereas in Lawrence's play the boy had been booed and jeered at by a crowd of townspeople when he first came onstage, he was now welcomed with friendly cheers. His father proudly announced him to the people milling around on the Bowery as an idealistic young man. The father's line read: "Clear the road for Hop Kelly, clear the way for the hero of the world." Melnick, sitting in the middle of the theatre with Ross and Susskind, explained that the tangled affairs of the production had assumed "nightmare proportions." In order to forestall the authors' demand for arbitration he and Susskind had sought and won a temporary stay in Supreme Court in New York. This stay would postpone the court hearing until the following week. Throughout the rehearsal he was called away to the telephone, presumably to talk to lawyers, and he begrudged the time thus wasted. "The worst of all this," he said, "is that it prevents me from doing the creative work on the show." Both he and Ross thought that the new scene, together with some other dialogue supplied by Goodman elsewhere in the play, immensely improved the character of Kelly. "Until I heard these new lines," Ross said, "I never realized how dreadful Lawrence's stuff was." He half expected Lawrence and Charlap to appear at the theatre that evening and to come running down the aisles, yelling that this was not their play. "I've been through that kind of scene before," he said, "and it's not particularly pretty." I Ross is presumably talking about Hot Spot, which he doctored in 1963. Ross's highly-praised assist on that show might well have led to the Kelly assignment; Hot Spot composer Mary Rodgers was Melnick's sister-in-law. I Nat Dorfman arrived about 3 p.m., his arms filled with press releases. He squinted in the dim light, looking for Eddie Lawrence. The producers usually informed him of events three or four days after the fact, perhaps on the theory that if a press agent knows too much he becomes confused and ineffective. At the end of the rehearsal, on the way to his hotel for a vitamin shot, Melnick said that the advance sales had been disappointing and that other prospective investors were coming up from New York that evening to look at the play. !Could these he the same "vitamin shots" that Alan Jay Lerner was taking during the creation of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (see page 25, which opened later that year?) "We desperately need good reviews," he said. "If not... Acapulco." The Shubert Theatre, Later The Same Evening Levine arrived only a few minutes before the opening curtain, accompanied by a retinue of his vice presidents carrying dispatch cases. Throughout most of the performance he remained in the lobby, seated heavily in a red-plush chair, receiving bulletins from Susskind and Melnick. He had come from Hollywood that afternoon, and he looked tired. "This is not a business for sissies," he said. "This is much tougher than the movie business, and that ain't no lead-pipe cinch." Although he had originally promised the cast a large party in Boston to celebrate his triumph in his home town, he felt obliged to cancel it for fear that the show might fail. He did not want to stand around among a crowd of old friends, all of them obviously struggling to think of some hopeful remark. "Like those terrible Hollywood previews," he said. "Everybody knows the movie's awful, but nobody knows what to say." A look of remembered pain drifted across his face. "Someday I'd like to try to produce one of these musicals by myself. You know,. .without any partners." Every now and then Susskind or Melnick came out of the theatre to inform Levine of the developments within. Toward the middle of the first act, Melnick appeared and said, "They love it, Joe. It's great, it works." Two scenes later, Susskind said, "If only we had thrown those nuts out three weeks ago; now the script illuminates the characters instead of obscuring them." Levine remained of the opinion, however, that the play should be funnier. "More jokes," he kept saying, "there ought to be more jokes." When it was over, and before they went back to their hotel to talk to the prospective investors, Levine stood in the lobby with his arm across Melnick's shoulders. "Mister Melnick and Mister Susskind have done a lot of fine work, and they have a lot at stake," he said, carefully avoiding the word "we," "and Mister Melnick, I'll tell you something, you put this show in shape in three weeks and get some laughs and you'll be the new boy wonder." Melnick smiled at that and said that if the play was the success he thought it was, he would gladly give some of the profits to charity. Enchanted once again by his own euphoria, he left the theatre in an elated mood, explaining that he had to go back to his hotel to "juggle the balls in the air" among the investors from New York. The actors and dancers, however, returned to their hotels, feeling depressed. To them the applause had sounded thin and perfunctory. Only a few of them bothered to stay up for the reviews. To her agent in New York, Eileen Rodgers sent a postcard on which she had scrawled the single monosyllable, "HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!" Boston, The Ritz Hotel, The Afternoon of January 21

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The reviews were as bad or worse than those in Philadelphia. Although three of the critics faintly praised the show, calling it "colorful" and "appealing," the most influential critics in Boston, Elliot Norton on the Record American and Kevin Kelly on the Globe, damned it unequivocally. Norton described it as "the noisiest musical of the season, a rattling cover for emptiness." Kelly spoke of "a conventional piece of razzmatazz." Again, as in Philadelphia, the producers had chosen to believe the worst. In the room overlooking the Boston Public Gardens, the trees already blurred in the gathering dusk, they sat around in the familiar attitudes of defeat and disillusion, Ross on the sofa, Melnick and Susskind in armchairs. On a tray against the wall were the glasses and the liquor bottles left over from the preceding night. "I'll give you the bottom line first," Melnick said. "We close here Saturday and open in New York a week from tomorrow night." He explained that the reviews in the Record American and the Globe foretold financial disaster in Boston. The investors from New York, after staying up to read the papers, and having learned of the impending lawsuit, had refused all offers of a deal. Levine had declined to advance additional money, and at 10 o'clock that morning he had departed for a week's vacation in Jamaica. To Susskind he had said, "David, this is Chicago, and I get off at Chicago." Levine's defection left Susskind and Melnick in an embarrassing situation. Lacking sufficient money to support the play for its three-week run, they finally decided to fold the show and accept their loss. But then, after long and complicated discussion, they reversed the decision on the ground that if they failed in Boston the gossips back in New York would say that Kelly had been the worst disaster since the Chicago Fire. Whereas if they could at least survive for a few weeks in New York, everybody would forget about it and dismiss it, in Susskind's phrase, as "just another rotten show." i This turned out to be a grave miscalculation. In the prior decade, dozens of musicals had folded on the road, some of them far worse than Kelly. By coming into town so spectacularly, Kelly became Broadway's most legendary flop ever. For twenty-two months, that is, until Breakfast at Tiffany's (see page 42) made a brief appearance next door at the Majestic.] Having reached this conclusion, Susskind had been on the telephone all afternoon in search of $50,000, enough to pay their costs for another week. To raise this money, Susskind had determined upon a plan to promise, for the same investment, equal shares in several of his other productions. "These money worries sap the creative juices," Susskind said. "I mean, you're always asking yourself if you can get out of town alive. What kind of life is that?" "If we believed in God," Melnick said, "we'd pray a lot." The telephone continued to ring throughout the rest of the evening. First it was Don Francks. Melnick spoke to him in his most ingratiating voice. "You were beautiful, sweetheart," he said, "touching, great, terrific, very moving.... Goddard Lieberson (the president of Columbia Records) saw the show last night, and he says you are the best talent he has seen in the last ten years." After he hung up, Melnick said, "I thought I'd better come on strong before he had a chance to complain about anything. If he leaves, we're dead." Balanced on a desk was a design for the cover of the record album that would be issued if the show was to have even a modest success in New York. Susskind looked at it accusingly. "Someday that could be a collector's item," he said, "the only one of its kind in the world." The longer he considered the possibility, the more depressed he became. "We haven't got a Chinaman's chance," he said. "I don't believe in miracles or fantasy or magic. There is only truth, and the truth is that this is a bad show. If I thought I could fool Kerr and Taubman and the other critics so easily, I would lose all respect for the American theatre." Melnick, still possessed by his vision of fortune and success, wanted to rewrite the entire show in a week. Two television comedy writers were on their way from California, and he thought the miracle might yet occur. Lying on the floor, his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling, he said, "This is wild, this is radical, but what about a new number for the opening of Act Two? Let's fantasize for a second." Ross, looking at his shoes, said, "There's no content, Danny, nothing. Just a lot of sweat and movement to conceal a lack of content." "I keep asking myself," Melnick said, "how could these two schlemiels conquer us? It must have been colossal ego on our parts to think that we could work with these people." At this point the telephone rang again, and it was Charlap. He and Lawrence had come to Boston that afternoon, and they wanted to see the performance that night. Susskind told him he could go to the theatre, but he must not speak to anybody in the company and he could not speak to Susskind or Melnick. 'All communications must be in writing, Moose," Susskind said on the phone. "I don't want to talk to you... nothing verbal, Moose." Hanging up, he said, "The profundity of this experience, this trauma, this holocaust... the reason that the world will go up in a puff of smoke is because people don't love each other, they enjoy each other's misery. Moose and Eddie no doubt have their arrogance intact. All that stuff about Brecht, for God's sake. If they wrote My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle would have a cleft palate and a limp." A few minutes later his daughter called from the University of Wisconsin. Susskind told her that the reviews in Boston had been mixed, that the schedule had been slightly changed, and that the play would now open in New York two weeks sooner. When he put down the telephone, he said, "You know what she told me? She told me, 'Don't worry, Daddy. You can always come here and teach English!"' Shubert Theatre, 20 Minutes Later Half an hour before the opening curtain the cast assembled backstage to hear their fate. Their faces already made up for the performance, the girls wearing partial costumes or old dressing gowns, they gathered in a circle around Susskind, Ross and Melnick. The bored stagehands listened from a distance. "Well, I guess I'm elected because I'm on a panel show and should be used to this kind of thing," Susskind said. "...you all open in New York next Friday. We believe there are enough individual excellencies to warrant opening where it counts." Susskind then nodded at Ross. "I think the producers have made an extraordinary decision," Ross said. "They are... we are, out of money. It will cost another $50,000 to open in New York. I can only admire them for their decision." "Which really means," said Eileen Rodgers, "that we don't have a fighting chance." At that several people began to talk at once, arguing with one another, their voices beginning to get loud and edgy. Almost everybody, impressed by Susskind's courage and generosity, thought Miss Rodgers unappreciative. "Please," Susskind said, holding up his hand for silence. "I would hope this is what you want, if not...." He was interrupted before he could finish, everybody pressing forward to congratulate him and shake his hand. "Elliot Norton hated Oklahoma!" somebody said. "Who cares what they think in Boston?" The Ritz Hotel, The Next Night Mel Brooks and Leonard Stern, the television writers from Hollywood, had arrived that afternoon from California; that evening they had seen the show for the first time. Neither of them had read the script. At 11:30, their observations scrawled on large sheets of paper or the backs of envelopes, they went up to Susskind's suite to

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suggest improvements. Brooks, a small, energetic man with thinning hair, sat in a chair in front of the fireplace. Stern leaned against the mantelpiece. Taller and heavier than Brooks, wearing a goatee and elaborate gold cuff links in his silk shirt, he chewed gun and spoke with slow solemnity. Both men enjoyed reputations as writers for such comedians as Jackie Gleason and Steven Allen. I Brooks had served as a writer for Sid Caesar's Show of Shows, among other television programs. He had written the libretto for two musical failures, Shinbone Alley (195 and All American (1962). In between, Brooks had joined with Carl Reiner for a series of comedy sketches which were recorded as The 2,000 Year Old Man. Stern had written for The Honeymooners and The Steve Allen Show. In 1958, Stern and Roger Price created the word game Mad Libs (while sitting in Sardi's). With an early on-air boost from Allen, Mad Libs became wildly successful, and directly resulted in the formation of the publishing house of Price Stern Sloan. Stern was also, with Susskind and Melnick, a partner in Talent Associates. As one of his first ideas when joining Talent Associates in 1964, Melnick decided to produce a sitcom capitalizing on the James Bond craze. Brooks was hired, and later joined by Buck Henry, to develop the script. Eventually, Stern joined the team: the result was Get Smart. which went on the air in September 1965-eight month :after Kelly opened )nd closed-and continued until 1970. Ross, Susskind and Melnick sat at the other end of the room, like schoolboys waiting for the headmaster to decide their punishment. "OK, you want it straight," Brooks said, "you've got a Chink's chance. As cloying, as horrible, and as saccharin as some of the scenes are, the audience seems to forgive." He recommended getting rid of Ella Logan. "I didn't believe a mother's tears wouldn't work," he said, "but it doesn't. She softens the show. She's out there selling torn rubber raincoats." Ross and Melnick nodded enthusiastically, looking at Susskind with expressions of triumph, reminding him of their opinion in Philadelphia. "She's just dreadful," Ross said. "Everybody who has come from New York says she's killing the show." "It'll be a pleasure to fire her," Melnick said. "OK," Susskind said, "so Ella's out of the show." Brooks and Stern then proceeded to the principal weaknesses of the play. "What we are up against, fellas," Brooks said, "is grievous errors in the structure of the book; too many extraneous characters sing extraneous songs. Moose and Eddie wrote some marvelous stuff, but they only brought you to the five-yard line. No touchdown." "The end of Act One," Stern said, "I don't know where is the commitment." "The first three numbers in Act Two," Brooks said, "are the worst, seventy-five miles an hour into a stone wall. Death. Three losers back to back." "That song," Stern said, "that awful song... what's the name of it?" "`Home Again,"' Ross said. "Yeah, right, 'Home Again,"' Stern said. "Well, it's terrible. What should be an enchanting lyrical moment is a pedantic horror." With these observations everybody expressed wholehearted agreement. Ross slouched deeper into his chair, peering out at Brooks through his fingers. "You have a very incisive mind, Mel," Melnick said "It's fabulous, Mel, fabulous." Susskind asked if there was anything good about the play, and, if so, what to do about it. "The best thing in the show is Don Francks," Brooks said. "What you're bringing to Broadway is a new boy, a new face.... Go all the way with the kid. The love for the kid is the tickets. More love, more tickets." "The boy delivers such a strength, such power," Stern said. Stern wanted to cut three or four songs from the score, but the producers resisted because they then would have a very short musical with little music. "So what," Brooks said. "Light the blaze under Don Francks. A few happy moments for the tired businessman watching some girls jump around onstage, and everybody goes home at ten o'clock. They'll be glad to get the first cabs." As of 2 a.m., after eleven pots of coffee and much more conversation, the producers had agreed to cut Ella Logan and to engage a songwriter to write a song replacing "Home Again." This, with Miss Logan's other song, was the ninth of Charlap's seventeen songs to be cut. The producers also wondered if Kelly's leap from the Brooklyn Bridge at the climax of the second act was properly staged. He accomplished the jump by means of wires, and Susskind had doubts as to the theatrical effectiveness of the stunt. "Sure. Leave it in," Brooks said, "the hippies know he's on wires, but the Hadassah don't know." Ross departed at five a.m., carrying a Napoleon to his wife and leaving Brooks and Stern with instructions to write two scenes in addition and several comedy routines. Stern wandered aimlessly around the room, and Brooks, lying on the sofa, reflectively smoked a cigarette and looked at the first light of a cold, Saturday morning. "Isn't it fantastic," he said to Melnick. "You see things in the last six days that you should have seen a year ago... fantastic. It's the same with all shows in trouble. The same sad tune but different lyrics." ACT IV New York, A Dance Studio on Sixth Avenue, Monday, January 25, Noon The squares of sunlight on the polished floor gave the room a cheerfulness inappropriate to the mood of the people present. Dispirited and resigned, they had returned from Boston in a snowstorm the day before. Nobody expected a long run in New York. Mickey Shaughnessy had engaged a hotel room through Saturday morning. Ross arrived at 12:30, his face announcing him as the bringer of dismal news. He addressed the company from a folding chair placed in the center of a semicircle. "OK," he said. "Almost a total rewrite of the play will be available at four P.M. According to my latest information, we will open this Saturday instead of Friday. Maybe Danny and David can raise an extra $50,000. If so, we can pay for another week of rehearsal, and we will open on Saturday, February 6, but we've got to figure for the twenty-ninth." He announced the elimination of Ella Logan, and then outlined the new play as written by Brooks and Stern. They had begun writing it that Saturday morning in Boston, and had finished late Sunday night in New York. In it Hop Kelly had become the boy next door: fearful, sweet and shy, a kid trying to do something for his sweetheart and his dad. The new comedy routines scattered through the play depended on exchanges such as the following, between two gamblers: First gambler: "You can't welsh on an Englishman." Second gambler: "Why don't you English on a Welshman?" The cast received Ross's information with skepticism, knowing that if there was too much new material, they would not have time to learn it properly, and must therefore give shaky performances on opening night. A few of the actors also complained about the quality of the new lines. "It's Jewish nightclub humor," somebody said, "Catskill stuff." Before any of these objections could develop into extended arguments, however, Susskind and Melnick arrived with more words of hope and assurance. They took chairs on either side of Ross. "I hope this is our last chat," Susskind said, "but I want to tell you the facts of life. At the end of our run in Philadelphia we had used up all our money. We have had, as you know, quite a number of troubles, particularly with Moose and Eddie, who thought they had written the Holy Scripture. But I want you to know that I believe in miracles, and that I am working around the clock to raise another $50,000 so that you people can

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:18pm

have an extra week of rehearsal. I believe that with the new script we now have a strong show." When the producers had left, and while they waited for the new scripts, everybody talked about the departure of Ella Logan. Mickey Shaughnessy, who had become extremely fond of her, had already talked to her that morning on the telephone. He had learned that instead of telling her themselves, the producers had instructed the stage manager to telephone her and tell her not to come to rehearsal. He thought this an abrupt way of firing a person, lacking in courage or courtesy. "I'm a very torn-up guy," he said. "I liked that woman very much, and I wanted to do something to show how I felt about it. But she told me to forget it, that's the way it is on Broadway." The Same, Two Nights Later The afternoon rehearsals took place in an atmosphere of profound discouragement. At about 3 P.M. Ross, together with Susskind and Melnick, had gone to the Dramatists Guild for a meeting at which they hoped to reach a conciliation with Charlap and Lawrence. The authors' demand for arbitration was to be presented the next day in Supreme Court, and the producers feared the judge might close the show before it opened. The company, having heard wild rumors about the court action, half expected the arrival of federal marshals ordering them to quit work. Whenever the telephone rang or the elevator doors opened, everybody looked nervously over his shoulder. Susskind came in about 8 p.m. and

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:19pm

Sorry, it wouldn't let me copy any more. Hope that gives you a good impression of the creation of the show.

[Mr. Nowack]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:33pm

Wow, thanks for that! Quite a fascinating read it seems (though I haven't read much of it yet).

And thanks, I thought I'd give my account's namesake a spin.

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:47pm

and reported that the conciliation had failed, that Charlap and Lawrence, although willing to return to work for the show, had remained adamant in their request that the script be restored to what it had been on the opening night in Philadelphia. "How much endurance is a man supposed to have?" Susskind said. "I wish you could tell what somebody was like by looking at his face. I don't understand what they want. If it's a hit, they get their royalties; if not, they can take a big ad in Variety and call me a lot of nasty names. We now have got as many lawyers as actors."





Room 130, New York County Courthouse, The Next Morning


In the passage outside the courtroom, Ella Logan, accompanied by her lawyer, said she had come not to testify but merely as "an interested spectator." Speaking of the producers, she said 'Amateurs, darling. Dilettantes."

Justice Samuel Gold elected to hear "the matter of Susskind" as the last case of the morning, when only Miss Logan and a few men in shabby overcoats remained on the hard wooden benches of the courtroom.

Harry J. Halperin, Susskind's attorney, moving to prevent the arbitration, began his statement by saying that his clients had invested nearly $500,000 in the play. This was his strongest argument. He reminded the judge that it was customary for authors to accept help if their plays received mixed reviews out of town.

"Even a genius must be practical, your honor," he said; "if Shakespeare were alive and behaved like Eddie Lawrence, then Richard Burton's Hamlet, one of the greatest productions of all time, but one that modified the script, could never have reached the stage." [The highly acclaimed Richard Burton production of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, opened in April 1964. It remains Broadway's longest-running Hamlet with 137 performances, having broken the record set by Gielgud in 1936.1

The judge asked Edward Schlesinger, the attorney for the authors, whether the matter could not be resolved in a peaceful manner, perhaps at a meeting in his chambers.

Schlesinger shook his head.

"Opposing counsel would have us weep for the producers' plight," he said, "but it was they who created this situation, willfully, deliberately and villainously. They want to take the play and do whatever they want with it, and we think the play will be a disaster. They are interlopers and vandals."

For several minutes Justice Gold examined the briefs presented by both attorneys, and then, addressing himself to Halperin, he said: "These people are vain about their work. They feel you'll mess it up in such a way as to make it commercially successful, but not something they wish to lend their names to. Being normal men, I'm sure they're acting according to the noblest motives their minds can conceive."

"But $500,000, if your honor please," Halperin said, gesturing desperately with his hands, "$500,000 and they want to see it down the drain."

Justice Gold said he would consider the matter and would hand down his decision in a few days. On her way out of the courthouse, Ella Logan, who was smiling, remarked on the unusually fine weather. "Almost like spring," she said. "I think I can hear birds singing."





The Broadhurst Theatre, Monday February 1


The despair of the previous week had given way to a new hopefulness. Susskind had borrowed another $50,000, thus delaying the opening until Saturday, February 6. Justice Gold, although he had ordered the dispute to arbitration, had not specified an exact date, and he had denied the authors' cross-motion to enjoin the opening.

Even Melnick's wife, who had never liked the play and who had come to the dress rehearsal with serious doubts, expected a limited success. As the younger daughter of Richard Rodgers, the composer of Oklahoma! and South Pacific, her opinion was considered valuable. Melnick was married to Linda Rodgers, who did not go into show business. Her sister, Mary Rodgers, was the composer of Once Upon a Mattress and Hot Spot. I

"The jokes don't seem like insults anymore," she said.

"They're generic," Melnick said. "I think it's on the way to something terrific." He thought the smallness of the Broadhurst Theatre would contribute to the sympathetic effect.

"It's an intimate house," he said, "not much bigger than our living room."

"We should have done the play in our living room," his wife said. "It would have been cheaper."

Although hopeful of success, Susskind still was troubled by the threat of an eventual lawsuit. On the telephone Charlap had referred to Melnick and himself as "money men," an epithet that he considered the unkindest of all possible insults. "How can he say that?" Susskind asked. "We contribute to this thing on all levels. Those slobs," he said again, "ought to be down on their hands and knees to all the people working to save this show. They can't be right if it means eighty people out of work and $500,000 lost." I What goes unmentioned is that producers Susskind, Melnick and Levine were otherwise occupied. Their import of the British play All in Good Time, by Bill Naughton, opened at the Royale on February 1ne week after the originally-scheduled opening of Kelly. I suppose you could call it a major hit, in comparison; it lasted six weeks.]

Of all the people associated with the show, however, the most optimistic was Nat Dorfman. For several days the newspapers had been printing stories about Ella Logan's dismissal, about the lawsuit, about opening two weeks before the date originally announced. Dorfman had been fending off reporters with assurances that these apparent troubles merely foretold a more dramatic success.

"I have never told so many lies in my life," he said. But he reasoned that even the disparaging publicity must do the play some good. "The people will be surprised," he said. "They'll like it because they'll come expecting so little."





The Same, Five Days Later


The bulletin board backstage was decorated with the usual opening-night telegrams, among them one from Leonard Stern, who, since rewriting the show in Boston and New York, had returned safely to California. The telegram read: MAY THIS BE THE FIRST OF 1,000 PERFORMANCES.

Wandering across the stage, en route to their various dressing rooms, the members of the cast stopped to embrace and wish each other good luck. Half an hour before the curtain Ross and Melnick, both in evening clothes, came around to thank everybody for their time and trouble. On behalf of the company the dancers presented Ross with the gift of a Japanese tree in a pot.

Susskind, who had suddenly become superstitious, stayed away from the theatre. On his television program that week he had entertained a group of soothsayers, among them a palmist, an astrologist, a lady with tea leaves, a man with playing cards and a handwriting analyst. In response to his question "Will Kelly be a big, fat hit?" each of the five had consulted his respective sources and returned with the unanimous answer, "a smash."

The night before, at the last of the five days' paid previews, Susskind had been absent, eating dinner with friends at "21." Ross and Melnick believed that the show had gone especially well that night and so, for good luck, Susskind had returned to "21," where, as the opening curtain went up, he was sitting at the same table with the same friends, ordering the same meal.

In the crowd outside the theatre, jostled by arriving celebrities, Levine, tanned and healthy after his week in Jamaica, overheard a conversation between the box-office manager and twelve people who had tickets to the show that had closed the preceding week at the Broadhurst. I David Merrick',, successful transfer of the British hit, Oh what a lovely war. I They wanted their money back.

"So do I," said Levine.

Together with Ross, Melnick's wife and a few of his vice presidents, Levine sat out the performance at Sardi's, the theatrical restaurant directly across the street from the theatre. Melnick watched most of the play standing up behind the last row of seats, and loudly applauding at all appropriate moments. Whenever the strain became too severe he walked across 44th Street to Sardi's and ordered another drink. At the intermission he told Ross he had heard a conversation between a blonde girl and jean Kerr, the playwright and wife of Walter Kerr, drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

"Jean Kerr is crazy about Don Francks," he said. He considered this a good omen, because he once heard a rumor that jean Kerr exerted an influence on her husband's opinion.

Charlap and Lawrence saw the play from the balcony, Charlap holding a tape recorder and accompanied by his lawyer, Lawrence making notes on sheets of yellow paper. Ella Logan sat with friends in the orchestra.

The play went as well as it ever did. The actors and dancers gave their performances all the verve and energy at their command. Nobody dropped a line. But although the applause sounded loud and hearty in the orchestra, where most of the people had free seats, the balcony remained ominously quiet.

While the audience drifted out of the theatre at the end of the performance, Charlap, Lawrence and Ella Logan stood on the sidewalk among friends sympathetic to their respective causes. "I could write better than this when I was eleven years old," Lawrence said. "The most shocking dialogue I've heard in the theatre in twenty years.... They're going to jail for this."

"Cornball," Charlap said, "one of the ugliest things I ever saw, like a horse with three legs. The work of hucksters."

Miss Logan smiled peaceably. "A lovely night," she said, "just the kind of night to go for a ride in the park." I The lead paragraph of Howard Taubman's review in the New York Times: "Ella Logan was written out of Kelly before it reached the Broadhurst Theatre Saturday night. Congratulations, Miss Logan."]





Sardi's, A Few Minutes Later


Because it was Saturday, the newspaper reviews would not come out before Monday but everybody went to Sardi's anyway, partly because it was the customary thing to do and partly because at least they could wait for the television reviews.

The tables downstairs had been reserved for members of the company and their friends, and when each of the principal actors arrived, there were gusts of applause. At a large table near the center of the room Levine sat with his back against a pillar, surrounded by his family, his friends and his vice-presidents. He entertained them with magic tricks, balancing forks and spoons on his forehead.

When Charlap came in, defying a tradition that forbids outcasts at such celebrations, he stopped at Levine's table and offered to shake hands.

"You still going to sue me, are you?" Levine asked.

"Yes, sir," Charlap said.

"Well, I'll tell you something, you little punk," Levine said, batting aside Charlap's hand. "I'll fight you in every court in the country, you and that crummy partner of yours."

The job of watching and then reporting the television reviews fell to Fred Segal, the man whose advertising agency had designed the posters and billboard publicity for Kelly. He had been with the production since the beginning at the Amsterdam Roof. Although never fond of the play, he liked many of the people associated with it, and it pained him to bring unhappy reports.

"NBC thinks it's a musical by committee," he said, returning from his first trip to the television set.

Thereafter, as he continued to come downstairs with less and less hope, he walked through the room with increasing slowness. Upon his last return he sat quietly at the table for five minutes before saying anything, moodily stirring his drink.

"Monumental bore," he said eventually, `AP."

After that word from the Associated Press, Segal didn't bother going upstairs anymore. Instead he explained his theory of Kelly as the ugly debutante. "You know what Kelly's like," he said, "it's like an ugly awkward girl at a coming-out party she doesn't want. Her parents have bought her a new dress, hired the most expensive ballroom, taught her to sing and dance, all this in hope of impressing the right people, in this instance the New York drama critics. But the parents don't love her. They did it for reasons of their own, and that's why she's still a dumpy, awkward girl. Nobody loves her."





The Broadhurst Theatre, Monday, February 8


The reviews, of course, were ruinous. Norman Nadel, writing in the New York World-Telegram, exceeded even Kerr and Taubman in the harshness of his judgment.

"There is some virtuoso tuba playing in the otherwise commonplace overture to Kelly," he began his column, "...mark it well, because nothing else that entertaining happens during the next fiftyfive minutes."

Lacking even one moderately kind adjective, which they could perhaps take out of context and use in advertisements, the producers decided that morning to close the show. They had no money to pay for another week. During the afternoon Susskind's office telephoned or sent telegrams to the cast, informing them that there would be no second performance.

At 8 p.m. Susskind came to the theatre to say good-bye to the actors and dancers. Melnick did not appear. The company gathered in the first five rows of the orchestra, all of them stunned, some of them crying. "I had to see you again," Susskind said. "You're marvelous people. I'm heartbroken. The notices bore no relation to the things that I had come to love in the show. Those were death notices." As he talked he swayed slightly. Accompanying himself with broad, circular gestures, as if trying to shape his feelings of sorrow and loss into a round ball.

"I will never forget any of you," he said. "I will stay in this business forever, I intend to come back to this theatre and beat its brains out. We just thought we had so much going for us. If there had been only one review, even one phrase that we could have taken out of context, we would have borrowed more money to pay for ads to keep the show open, but there was nothing. I'll never know why or how...."

His voice weakened, subsiding into vague and helpless sounds.

Eileen Rodgers cried out, "May your next show be a good one, David," she said, "you deserve it."

At that everybody applauded, and Susskind, smiling wanly, continued with his farewell.

"One last word about Moose and Eddie," he said. "I hope they come to their senses. I hope all this ugliness passes away in a cloud of mercy and understanding. But... if not... maybe we'll have to call on you to testify."

Nat Dorfman, who had listened to the speech with awe in his face, was himself almost moved to tears.

"In all my days," he said, "I have never seen a scene so beautiful as this, nothing so poignant, so true."





McKay's Dump, Secaucus, New Jersey, Four Days Later


Under a railroad bridge, beyond a soap factory hidden in a veil of yellow smoke, at the end of a winter road worn deep with ruts, an almost illegible sign mounted in a jumble of wrecked automobiles marked the entrance to McKay's Dump. A heavy mist reduced visibility to less than thirty yards.

Randy Brooks, the stage manager, had said the sets would be burned at 10 a.m. The man at the gate, however, said he had heard nothing of any such play, and besides, they didn't burn stage sets anymore: He pointed toward a road leading to the center of the dump and said maybe at the end of it somebody might know something.

The road, paved with the tar-paper shingles of ruined houses, ran in a wide semicircular curve, along the crest of a mound of debris. In the hollow of the curve, rising out of the rank and fetid mud flats, marsh grass swayed in the wind. Every few hundred yards along the edge of the temporary road, the old men living in makeshift shacks were lighting their morning fires. In answer to questions they, too, pointed vaguely down the road.

Where the road finally stopped, at the brink of a new excavation, a man wearing high rubber boots stood leaning against a bulldozer. He said he had broken up some stage scenery about an hour before and then had buried it in the muck. No, he said, nothing could be seen, not even the edge of a flat or a drop; he had already buried something else on top of it.

"A play, huh," he said. "Yeah, we get a lot of plays out here."

[Fantod]

Posted: 2/6/15 at 8:47pm

I think that's the last of it. Sorry it isn't formatted.