"The last Michael Bennett workshop, and indisputably the most closely watched, was 'Scandal,' a show that never opened on Broadway.
Mr. Bennett, acting as director, choreographer and producer, abruptly shut it down in January 1985, after more than a year of intense work with the company and even more time with the show's writers.
'Scandal' had been a chancy project from the beginning. The story of a self-doubting woman caught up in the throes of marital upheaval, the show was punctuated by production numbers that revealed with no little explicitness her sexual fantasies and adventures. Despite an enthusiasm for the show that members of the team still express today, Mr. Bennett says that his decision to terminate the production was based on economic and creative factors, and that they were the proper outcome of the workshops. 'What's a workshop for?' he asks. 'To see whether a show should go into production. I have very good instincts, and I decided 'Scandal' would not work.'
That decision came as a shock to the rest of the team.
'Michael sent me the script and it just knocked me out,' says Swoosie Kurtz, who played the leading role in the show. 'He called and said, 'Honey, do you want to be the leading lady in my next musical?' I thought, Did I? He's got to be one of the four, maybe five best directors alive.
Working with him one-on-one was extraordinary - his inventiveness, his imagination, his knowledge of what should be cut and what's dead wood.'
During four workshops, songs written by Jimmy Webb and major dance numbers were integrated into a script written by Treva Silverman, a writer of the original Mary Tyler Moore television series. The director announced his plan to open the show with a brief Off Broadway run before moving it to the Mark Hellinger, a theater that he vainly attempted to become a part-owner of during that time.
The Off Broadway plan, Mr. Bennett concedes, did not go over well with the performers or the creative team. 'The crew - people who had been working with me all my life -did not want to go Off Broadway,' he says.
'They were upset because they were expecting Broadway money at a certain point,' Miss Kurtz says, 'and suddenly it was being put off again.
My own feeling was that he knew better than we what would be best for the show.'
'I think Michael's the only one who knows what happened with 'Scandal,' ' says Ms. Silverman, who had worked with Mr. Bennett for several years on the project before the workshops had begun. Ms. Silverman and Mr. Webb were reluctant to talk in detail about their work on 'Scandal.'
But a frank tale of sexual experimentation was looking like more and more of a risk, he says, in an era of growing conservatism and concern about AIDS. People involved with the show began to question its taste. Mr. Bennett also admits that he was deeply frustrated when, at the last minute the writers, whom he says were not theater-oriented, attempted to exact greater control when Broadway rehearsals were announced.
'A number of things happened that indicated to me that the group of people I had put together was unproduceable,' says Mr. Bennett. 'A number of very dear friends of mine got very greedy,' he adds, refusing to be more specific. But many factors figured in his decision to terminate 'Scandal' and Mr. Bennett insists that no single one forced him to stop work on the show. The outcome, however, had its effect: 'He got sick of the greed,' says Mr. Wagner, who designed the sets for 'Scandal.'"
I found this in a New York Times article from 1986. Very Interesting.
Scandal 1986 NYT
Current Avatar:The sensational Aaron Tveit in the soon to be hit production of Catch Me If You Can.
Updated On: 3/27/09 at 05:51 PM
