Something close to 6 months of my life was spent backstage at the Mark Hellinger in the Fall/ Winter of 1988/89 trying in vain to get the scenery on Legs Diamond to move like it was supposed to.
The brilliant set designer David Mitchell was nearing the end of his great run on Broadway when he designed all the floor scenery in Legs Diamond to move into place using 2 turntables set into a larger full-stage turntable (similar to the scheme at Groundhog Day). Choreography was planned with the turntables, numbers were built around those turntables. Everyone loved the turntables.
Fatal error #1: When the bids came in, Marvin Krauss, legendary producer extraordinaire, required budget cuts, so what went out? The turntable floor, of course. In its place, we assistants in David's design office (also the first floor of his brownstone) hatched with Showtech's engineers a plan to build a cheaper show deck with winches to carry smaller rotating wagons all over the stage on great semi-circular tracks to mimic the old turntable scheme. But science is science and physics doesn't care about budget cuts: there was simply no way airplane cable could pull those mighty set pieces around and around the stage as intended without fouling up at nearly every performance.
Fatal error #2: The show never had the capitalization to go out of town to debug the set (never mind the dreadful script and score for which it was designed). We loaded straight into the vast upstage space of the Hellinger (uniquely vast among all the old theaters on Broadway) in early September of '88. Tech rehearsals got under way. And like clockwork, with every single set change depending on a winch to move the wagon unit, the rehearsal would crash to a halt. Local One guys would march out onstage, pull the pins tagging the wagons to their winch dogs, and manually drag the thing offstage.
This went on for days, for weeks, even as the show around us cut song numbers, fired lead actresses, eliminated whole settings like a giant Lower East Side tenement set all done in shades of grey that had originally opened the show. The first preview was delayed, and delayed again, finally allowing paying customers into that gorgeous lobby on October 25th according to IBDB. During the ensuing two full months of previews (unheard of back then), things actually calmed down. Routines were simplified, set moves were axed, set pieces were lightened and the winches were beefed up (an army of them filled the crossover space below the stage). My recollection is that this was one of the first shows to computerize the winch cues all from an operator at a console up on the fly floor, so that acceleration and deceleration could soften the movement of those scenic beasts as they lumbered on and off stage, all of which helped the show to finally move closer and closer to its original intent.
And while our heads were all filled up with mechanics and engineering, did we ever realize what a turkey of a show we were laboring so mightily over? I don't think that fact really hit me till Opening night, the day after Christmas, 1988. What we thought was a great vintage throwback show in the mold of GUYS AND DOLLS or PAL JOEY actually turned out to be a vanity project for Peter Allen covered in flop sweat that asked the audience to believe he was romantically attached to brilliant but elderly jazz stylist Julie Wilson, a reach for any audience member. But hey, at least the scenery moved on and offstage correctly by then.
The show closed 64 performances later. It was the last musical to play the house.
