Icons: The Boy Wonder

Charles Strouse at 88.

            Charles Strouse’s trophy room is down his long front hallway and to the right; on the way down the hall, long and black and practically void of superfluous decoration, opens to a piano room overlooking Eighth Avenue on the left and bedrooms on the right.  But the room at the end of the hall is clearly the centerpiece attraction.  When I visited, it was eighty degrees and I was wearing a sweater, overdressed and nervous.  The walls of the trophy room, where Strouse sat me down in an armchair across from his, were almost literally papered with posters for musicals he’d written.  The table between us was pointedly decorated with three Tonys (awarded in three different categories for three different shows over the course of sixteen years).  One amenity, though, that Strouse and his wife, Barbara, who sat across the room from us for some of the interview, appeared to have dispensed with to make room for these decorations was air conditioning.  So there was a start.

            We sat briefly and drank ice water while Strouse told me about his wife’s early career.  She’s now a director-choreographer, but had been a dancer when they met, in 1956, a replacement in the ensemble of My Fair Lady.  I told them that that production was the one I’d most like to see if I could travel back in time.  Strouse asked, incredulously, “Why?”  Before I had time to answer, he was on to something else.

            Charles Strouse tends to get to the point because he moves quickly and doesn’t have time to screw around.  His genius as a composer is his ability to write music that sounds as if it has always existed, floating in the air, to be plucked out and played.  It makes sense – His mother was a “natural musician” who “never studied—” marriage got in the way – and it was partially her influence that sped him through high school and into the Eastman College of Music by fifteen.  He was one of the few students there who had a natural affinity and talent for jazz.  “And after coming back from Europe,” he told me, “I played piano for rehearsals for shows, ballet classes… Ballet teachers were so strict about keeping the beat, you know.  So I learned at the expense of getting my hand hit with a ruler.”  But money was tight and Strouse was desperate to help his parents out with money.  He got jobs here and there.  He played where he was wanted.  Then a friend of a friend got him a job playing on The Goldbergs, Gertrude Berg’s proto-sitcom, where he played off-stage music.  That friend of a friend, incidentally, was lyricist Lee Adams, who would go on to an eighteen-year writing partnership with Strouse – one of the most successful of the second half of the twentieth century.

            The following are selections from my interview with Strouse:

JAMES FEINBERG:  How did you and Lee [Adams] decide that you were going to start writing together?

CHARLES STROUSE:  Well, he wrote these shows at Ohio State. I had never worked with anybody, never written songs. And I liked him, as I still do.  One summer, as I recall… he was going to a [resort] called Green Mansions and they needed a choreographic pianist, which, may I tell you, is the hardest job in the world… You have to not only improvise on the spot and then you can’t change it because the dancers learn everything to this shit you’ve written… The choreographer will say something, I need something—and he’s just doing steps, so it’s like, da da beep da da da… Perfect… I had a nice summer. I knew a lot of girls—I’m straight. And so I ended up having a good time and they asked me back the next year, but I said I would like to write some of the songs for the revues and… I asked Lee up. I did it the first year myself, I worked with a guy named Mike Stewart, who later wrote [the libretto for] Birdie with us, and he was a wonderful writer, and a close friend, and I got hooked. I got hooked on audiences applauding… And the next thing I know… Lee came up and we wrote these revues every week. And it was really fun. I mean, I would do the orchestrations with a small orchestra and write the whole song. And it would be in rehearsal the next day. And we had some very—Carol Burnett was up there, Charlotte Rae, people like that. It was very high caliber. But they weren’t at that time. And so it was great fun and I was hooked.

JF:  Was it music first with Lee or lyrics?  I always ask.

CS:  I would say it varies, and I would say it’s like a love affair… You know… who had the confidence and the passion to do it first. Yeah, it was very much like a marriage. He might show me an idea for a lyric, which I thought sucked or something, and I would play him a bit of a tune. You know. Or he’d like something and, you know, I’d extend it. It’s hard to say. Sometimes he would write a lyric first…. We were married and I love Lee still, although, you know, I’m getting on for sure, and he’s older than I am. So, um, he lives in the country, which is one of the reasons we’re not writing anymore because he likes to live in the country. I hate it. So…

Bye Bye Birdie (1960)

JF: So Bye Bye Birdie, it wasn’t that long after you started working together?

CS:  It happened literally when I was playing rehearsal piano for a show. The show was with Carol Lawrence and I forget what the name of it was, and I was in the pit playing rehearsal piano for that show, it was a fairly well known show—and the stage manager, I remember ‘cause I’ve told the story a number of times, but it’s true—peered down into the pit, it was a very low pit. And he said, “Is it true, Buddy”—‘cause my nickname used to be Buddy—“that you’re a composer?” I said, “Yeah. That’s what I am.” … He said, “Would you be interested in doing a show?” I said, “Well, of course.” And he said he had an idea for one. Well, the idea turned out to be Bye Bye Birdie. It was that simple.

JF:  The person who was going to produce the show was auditioning teams, wasn’t he? … It was like an exhaustive process that—

CS:  Yes, he went through every writer in town. Mike Nichols and Elaine [May] were two of the people auditioning for him. And [he] turned them down. And Mike Stewart, [who] was at Green Mansions… with us, we loved him and I knew what a good lyricist, as well as writer, he was, very clever guy. And we kept on suggesting—Lee and I both said, you got to try Mike. But he wouldn’t. And finally when there was nobody that he liked, he finally went to our first choice and he told him the idea he had for the musical…and Mike typed it in, I think, nine weeks… And everyone thought it was great.

JF:  The instruction was just that it was supposed to be like about teenagers, right?

CS:  That was the only thing. Well, actually, the actual book—it wasn’t even that. The actual book that he bought was about a girl who determines to fall in love one summer. That was the hook … as I remember it, and she will do anything but she’s never experienced it. Had nothing to do with what came out … I don’t even remember reading the whole [book] because all this time was spent auditioning other writers. When I say auditioning, I mean [the producer] would just interview them. I didn’t have anything to do with it. But I do remember Mike and Elaine were two of them.

JF:  So you wrote fifty songs for Bye Bye Birdie in a year, is the number that I read somewhere.

CS:  I may have said that and it may have been true or I may have been exaggerating. But we certainly wrote a great many, yeah.

JF:  Did it all just come out right away, or had you been building at least a little bit of a trunk?

CS:  Mike typed the script that Bye Bye Birdie became… in nine weeks.  Lee had the idea for the rock and roll singer. [Mike] typed it without that. But when we were talking, Lee contributed the rock and roll singer. And how did the rest happen? I know Lee was a very strong collaborator in the story and the rest I can’t even remember, except that we all, to a man, hated the title. We did anything to get rid of it. And finally they had to, well—

JF:  And you didn’t like a lot of the stuff—I read somewhere that you didn’t like “Put on a Happy Face” when you first saw the production.

CS:  No. Well, his number, the thing that Gower [Champion, director/choreographer] choreographed was an acknowledged failure the first time we did it… So there was no argument about throwing it out. He was going to do that. But my training had been, at that point, working at Green Mansions, if a number doesn’t work, it’s out and we write another one. But it was Marge [Champion’s wife] who she said she liked the song. [hums tune] I didn’t think anything much of it. I thought it was okay, you know. And I’m not a good judge of pop music. But she insisted. I give her all the credit. And I believe it was her idea to start it off with three girls doing a tap dance. And I was very ashamed of it because I had come from a serious music school and I thought my first public exposure was going to be a tap dance. And I fought it, but not, you know, like I’ll leave the show or anything. Nothing like that. But I thought, Oh no. You know. And it was an instant success.

JF:  When [Gower Champion] was brought in, he had a Tony at that point, but he was relatively living low—

CS:  He was known only as the team. We went over to meet him in New Jersey. He and Marge were playing at a nightclub in New Jersey…

JF:  So what were his immediate contributions when you brought him in?

CS:  Oh, they were—what is the word? Manifest? Many. Well, he was a very, very sharp critic of the book and the score. He had a great sense of balance and form and a very clear image of what songs would dance. He was a very tough director and very strict, which I was used to, fortunately ‘cause I worked with choreographers. And I can’t put my finger on what were his first ideas, but I know the idea for the set was his…He had a real conceptual view of the theater for a man of that kind of experience… I know I had seen them first in a movie—he and Marge dancing. And I knew of them. So he must have been well known. I knew he was headlining at this nightclub. But he was a real… tough guy. He was a taskmaster. Very bright, and he made us toe the line… We were always at his beck and call… I remember saying, “He wants total control.” He said, I don’t want you to change a clarinet unless we talk it over first. He was really… rigid about that. And I assured him I wouldn’t change a clarinet part, etc. One day, it’s funny, you’re bringing back a memory, which I hadn’t thought of for years—one day, we were rehearsing the Ed Sullivan number—

JF:  “Hymn for a Sunday Evening.”

CS:  [Sung by] Paul Lynde. And in the rehearsal, Paul threw in the line, “Ed, I love you.” The way only Paul Lynde can do it. We did not write the line. Well, [Champion] called everyone up for the rehearsal for the Ed Sullivan number and we didn’t have a chance to say to him that he put in a line because … it was like he was a Nazi, Gower. We were scared stiff of him. We were scared of anybody. It was our first show. I mean, all three of us [Strouse, Stewart, and Adams] were scared. And we didn’t have time. We sent everybody on stage and there was no time to say, “Look, he put in—“ So he did the number and Gower broke up, as everyone did. It was hilarious the way he did it ‘cause he has a way—well, you’ve seen Paul… And [Gower] laughed. And then he yelled at us. I remember the three of us ducked behind the chairs. But… the line stayed in and we explained [it] to him later. The secret with Gower was we would take him out for a chicken sandwich—he always had chicken… He was Mr. Gentile. I mean, that’s what he had to eat—a chicken sandwich on white bread. That kind of a thing…

JF:  Was [Champion] involved in casting at all?

CS:  Ruled the roost. Yeah.

JF:  What was that process like?

CS:  Well, the process is that by contract, I and Mike and Lee have approvals. The Dramatists Guild say anything we say goes. But in practice, it’s the guy either with the most power—the director, or the guy with the most money perhaps—a David Merrick, who might end up having the final say. But officially we, the authors, have total say over who will or will not [be cast]. But in practice, particularly if it’s a strong director, a strong director will guide things. And of course there’s a lot of agreement. You hear about the disagreement, but there’s a lot of agreement. And we agreed upon it. But it was my first experience on Broadway. I had done summer stock. And so the first girl who came in, I went: Wow, I’m in New York, we’re sitting in whatever theater it was and these people are, you know, coming out. And I, uh, I thought, Wow, this is a dream. And the first girl who came out, I’ll never forget it. I thought, This is marvelous. I’d seen talent up at Green Mansions, but this girl was marvelous. I turned to Gower, I said, “She’s wonderful. My God.” And Gower said, “Next!” And I remembered for years, and I often speak to her, I can’t remember who she is, but I embarrass her telling her that story that when I first saw her and thought, My God, the first person who came out on stage in New York.

JF:  Was it clear, when you saw Chita Rivera or Dick van Dyke, was it, did you know right away, or was there a process with them?

CS:  No, this… was not a process. It was a series of accidents. First, we all wanted Carol Haney to do the role… Carol was an up and coming star, dancer, everything. And the whole show Bye Bye Birdie was about a Polish girl. Every line was about, the mother would say, “Polish…” you know, and call her, whatever, Polack or something.  [Haney] was a real comer, but a bad luck girl. She lost a lot of jobs, not through lack of talent, but through bad luck. I remember once in Las Vegas reading about her fainting during a show. She, I believe she got sick. It was The Pajama Game and the woman who took over from her became a big star, but it was originally supposed to be Carol. She just was bad luck. She was a very sweet young woman, and I worked with her for a couple of weeks. And Gower and Lee and Mike came down to her house. She had a brownstone with her husband. And we had worked for a half hour, and she was singing creditably well and the doorbell rang, she opened the door, and she said, “Oh my gosh.” And she lost her voice right on the spot. It was so embarrassing and I felt so bad for her. She said, “I don’t know what happened…” I said, “Gower, she was singing them really well a half hour ago.” And so we sat around for about a half hour and finally everyone had to leave. And it was awful. We thought, Well, now what are we going to do? And I don’t know which one of us—I will take credit for it—[I said,] “What about if we used Chita?” [Chita Rivera] was a pal of mine because I had done Shoestring Revue, and we changed it all [the Polish references] to Spanish…The jokes were exactly the same… And then we said to Chita, “Would you…?” And Chita was thrilled.

JF:  So you opened in an enormously competitive season, right?... I think it was Camelot that year, Unsinkable Molly Brown, Do Re Mi, and Tenderloin. It was all the same year…

The reason I ask that is, were you able to tell right away that you were a hit?

CS:  The New York Times was bad. The only bad review we got. And I was so sensitive that I fainted.

JF:  Really?

CS:  Yeah, I mean, I guess I had been dreaming about this moment all my life. And the first review was from Brooks Atkinson, and he said, “Bye Bye Birdie is neither fish nor fowl nor good musical comedy.” And I collapsed. Lee picked me up—I fainted in the men’s room. And after that, I retired. I had a one-room apartment on West End Avenue on the ground floor and I didn’t see anyone for a week. The phone rang. And it suddenly, it started to seep through that all the other reviews were raves. And then it seeped through that it was a hit. And then Brooks Atkinson apologized—

JF:  Did he really?

CS:  Yes. And retired. When he did retire, his last column said, “I guess I’m out of touch.”

JF:  That’s crazy.  You know what’s so funny about that is, you wrote the score to Bonnie and Clyde [1968] too, right? Didn’t you? And then the same thing happened to Bosley Crowther, the exact same thing.  [Crowther wrote a negative review of the film, excoriated by Pauline Kael, that precipitated his firing from the New York Times.]

CS: I was just thinking about that… You’re right.

All American (1962)

JF: So did you and Lee approach Mel Brooks [the All American librettist], or did he approach you?

CS:  Well, I knew Mel from [Sid Caesar’s Your] Show of Shows. I used to write the dance music when I was still a pianist… We decided to do—it was the same producer, Padula—and I had wanted to do, and proposed to him, a book by Nabokov, which I thought was a wonderful book. And it was about a refugee who came to this country… but Nabokov wouldn’t give us the rights. So somebody, I can’t remember who found this book called All American, which was basically the same plot, about a European who comes to America… Well, we were hot after Bye Bye Birdie. And I think Josh [Logan, director of All American]… thought we were the hot team. And, anyway, he climbed aboard, and unlike Birdie… there was no trouble getting money…. Josh was the leading director in the United States. So when Josh was aboard, everything flowed our way… The only [time] we started quarreling with Josh [was]… I wanted a guy [for the lead] by the name of Ron Moody. This was the first argument [we] ever had. I don’t think I was alone in that. I think Lee did too. Ron Moody had a been a great success in Oliver [as Fagin]… I thought he would be perfect for this role. And Josh insisted on Ray Bolger, who he had worked with in Where’s Charley? And that was the first real argument I had with Josh. He turned out to be my closest friend, but who was going a little berserk at the time.

JF:  He was bipolar, wasn’t he? That’s the official--

CS:  Whatever they called it. He was having heavy drug problems and was out of it. But we remained friends for years…. He was very fatherly towards me. But he was also highly neurotic at that time. He was living on pills. A lot of pills… He started to get mentally out of it. He would do ridiculous things. The idea of Ray Bolger I thought was ridiculous to begin with because we wrote it for Ron Moody. We wrote it for a man of European… sensibilities, but who can sing and dance. There ain’t many of them around. Whereas Ray is basically, I think, a clown, and not a really good actor. But Josh prevailed. He was Josh Logan. He had discovered a lot of stars like Warren Beatty, for instance. I mean, Josh discovered more stars than I can remember. And he wanted Ray Bolger. So we thought we had no choice. We did have a choice. Our contracts give us legal rights to agree to performers. But, you know, he was right up there with [Elia] Kazan as far as names, and Ray Bolger wasn’t exactly, you know, a come-down. So we did one of the many things that people do that cause failures and that was go against their judgment…. And the whole thing became misguided from that point. And Josh… great man that he was, he was out of it.  He would call rehearsals for the whole orchestra. Nobody does that. It costs a thousand dollars a minute or something… And as Mel said later… He’s like the guest at the wedding who sits on the wedding cake.” That’s what he did. It could have been a pretty good show, we felt… But he mashed it up. Ray was wrong. The British actress—who was very good—she couldn’t sing. The choreographer, who was very good—nothing meshed. And the show was not what it could have been.

JF:  So you weren’t surprised by the [negative] reaction or did you expect it?

CS:  Well… you always have a fantasy… A couple of good things came out of it, certainly for Mel. I introduced him to Anne Bancroft [later Brooks’ wife], who was a friend of mine.

JF: So that’s something he got out of it.

CS: Yeah.

Bye Bye Birdie (film) (1963)

JF:  So after All American, how involved were you with the Bye Bye Birdie movie? I mean, I know you wrote the opening number—

CS:  We did. First of all – I had never seen big money in my life. My father, he did okay, but he was a man of the Depression, made a modest salary. I loved him very much. And I had never seen the big bucks… Bye Bye Birdie was such a hit that they paid us a million dollars, which was the most money they had ever paid for a movie at that point. And they flew us out. I’d never been to Hollywood. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and met every day with lawyers in the office. And I have a huge appetite—so does Lee—and they had these fantastic buffets all the time, which none of them would eat. Lee and I were sitting there and we were just [laughs] stuffing ourselves. I really laugh when I think of it. And a limousine everywhere. You know, we stayed at a Beverly Hills Hotel, but god forbid we should walk… And so we had a ball. We had all this money and then they had this new girl that the producer was in love with, Ann-Margret [eventual star of Birdie film], and we met her one day. They asked if we could come. Lee and I were appalled because… the way we saw the role, the girl was a virgin. And Ann-Margret is a sexpot. She happens to be the nicest woman... But she was a sexpot. And we didn’t have any script approvals. You never do in Hollywood.  So they wanted a title song… it was inconceivable. We never liked the title to begin with. And we had not an idea, so we kept ducking it. And they paid us an extra $100,000. I remember that… We were just full of guilt because we kept eating their lunches. They had these terrific lunches and we’d go up there and, you know, have all the cheese and nuts… and they gave us private offices and a secretary for us… although Lee… is such an old lady in a way. I love him. He would go out and buy his own pencils and sharpen them himself. I said, “Lee, there’s a secretary who’s just sitting there. All you have to do is say “Pencil. Yellow. No, no, make that blue.” … He would go out and get himself a pencil. And we had private bathrooms, which no one has. In the writer’s building, there’s a bathroom. We had our own office. So it was really something. And then we would be sitting there, you know, being guilty… We could never think of anything to write for “Bye Bye Birdie.” Until one day the producers realized how much money they had paid us and, I suppose, how many [lunches] we had eaten—I really laugh when I think about it. And Lee and I, we’re guilt ridden. And so we said, “We’ve got to do it.” This guy was yelling at us. We had all this money. So we sat down, locked the door, and we honestly wrote the very first thing that came to our mind. And I said, “You start,” which was silly because he said, “Okay, ‘Bye Bye Birdie.’” And then I had to, and I swear, ‘cause it’s such a fond memory to me, that I went ding dong ding dong [hums four opening notes]. “Great,” he said. And then he said, “I hate to see you go.” Oh, I was in big trouble… Well, that was the way the song was written. If there was any inspiration, it was totally unconscious. It was… Torture.

Golden Boy (1964)

JF: Okay, so then you did Golden Boy next after that, which is the first non-original musical you’d written… What attracted you to the Odets play [of the same title, about a poor boy who becomes a boxer] as source material?

CS:  The producer, who was a very shrewd guy, called Clifford Odets and he said, “No, I don’t think so.” He called, I think, Sammy Davis next. I’m not sure whether it was us or Sammy. We were a little hot, but Sammy Davis was, of course, Sammy Davis. And Sammy wanted to be an actor very much. And Sammy said, “No, I don’t want to. I can’t.” He said, “I guess if Clifford Odets wrote it, you know… and he wrote it for me…” [The producer] went back to us, ‘cause we were much more eager to do it, and we said yes. And he then said to Clifford, “What if Sammy Davis would do it and we’d do it as a [musical]?” And Clifford said, “That would be interesting.”  And then [the producer] went back to Sammy and said, “Supposing Clifford Odets wrote it.” Sammy said, “Well, if Clifford Odets wrote it—” So… that’s the way he got Sammy. Once Sammy came in, he was able to get it produced. And that’s basically the story of how it got on. It was the producer’s idea. We worked for three years with Clifford before he died. In fact, he died on the first day of rehearsal.

JF:  Yeah, I think I read about that, and they brought in people to finish the book.

CS:  And [they brought in] everybody, alphabetical order.

JF:  I’ve seen clips of you and Sammy doing press for the show. You two seem very close in those.

CS:  We were. We got along well, although I had a lot of growing up to do and maybe he did too because, you know, there were a lot of songs that I didn’t want jazzed up at the beginning… And [Sammy] took great offense. So I decided to swallow whatever he did [jazzing up songs] but it became hard for me. The director, a man by the name of Peter Coe, who was my idea… made the mistake of staging a group of people in Harlem and having Sammy upstage. He wanted to… portray him as the lonely boy… he would do something that directors often do. He would have him way upstage. [He]… didn’t realize that Sammy doesn’t live except if he’s in [the] number one part of the stage. And that turned to be a very big schism in the show and meanwhile, [we were] selling out every night. I never had a show like that. You know, we would do 100% or 99%. I never made more money in my life. But Sammy took a dislike to [Coe]… And so Sammy, he was with the producer and [the producer] called me and he said, “Sammy wants you to fire Peter Coe.” I said, “Wait a second. First of all, I don’t fire. I’m the composer.” … And he put Sammy on the phone. Sammy said, “You brought him in”—which I had. I had suggested Peter—he says, “you fire him.” I said, “But—“ He said, “No buts. Just do it.” So I went down and I told Peter Coe. I said, “I don’t know how to do this.” I said, “I’m not in charge of this show, but Sammy doesn’t want to work with you.” And Peter said to me, because he’s British, very smart, I think a very good director, he said, “Well, Sammy has to go.” I said, “We’ve been working on this show for a year and a half, Peter. I’m making a lot, it’s sold out every night. I can’t even think of that.” “But,” he says, “you must, Charles.” And I said, “You know, I’m in a funny position. I’m thinking artistically you’re saying the right thing, but I’ve worked on this”—it was about two and a half years, and not only worked on the show, but we had followed Sammy Davis around the country. We used to go to Las Vegas at his beck and call. At four o’clock in the morning, he wanted to have a meeting… Anyway, I had to say that to poor Peter… I said, “I don’t know what to say, Peter. He’s asking me because we’re friends and he doesn’t want to come down and do it.” And, as I say, Peter said to me, “But, of course, [Sammy]’ll have to go then.” And then I explained to him… I made more money on that show, I think, than I ever did because of Sammy. I met, I can’t tell you how many governors. I met Martin Luther King twice… who was very complimentary about one of the songs in the show. And, I mean, Sammy knew everybody. The governor would come into his dressing room and movie stars that you wouldn’t believe. And, anyway, so I fired [Coe] and then they brought in, I think Arthur was the next choice. And that’s how I knew Arthur Penn [replacement director for Golden Boy and later director of Bonnie and Clyde].

JF:  Do you think eventually that [with] Golden Boy, were you trying to accomplish anything racially with that show [given its revolutionary mixed-race love story] or was it purely—

CS:  No… Well, look what it is today. That’s the first time… in a show… [that] a white person and a black person had touched. Touched. [Before that] they didn’t even hold hands… We had them shacking up… And we were very proud of it. Although we got a lot of threatening mail… When we opened in Philadelphia, we had to have a police escort, Lee and I, to take us back to the hotel because the letters that we got, you would not believe—this is Philadelphia—“You fucking bastards. We’ll get you…You come into our town and do this kind of shit.” I’m not exaggerating. These were the kind of letters Lee and I were getting at the hotel… But I wouldn’t even say I was proud of it… I’m a New Yorker, so I never had a problem… I was not in the business of saying, “Oh we’re breaking the boundaries.” But nevertheless, that was the first time a… black and a white actually touched…. On television no one ever kissed. They never shook hands. I remember vividly—not everybody does—but I remember vividly. And Lee and I were very proud of ourselves for having written it. I didn’t even feel I was doing something, you know, liberal.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman (1966)

JF:  Next show, correct me if I’m wrong, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plan, It’s Superman was the only collaboration that you and Lee did with Harold Prince? Is that right or wrong?

CS:  Yeah.

JF:  So can you talk about how that came together, you and Harold Prince?

CS:  The idea came from Bob [Newman], from David Newman’s son. [David Newman was a friend of Lee Adams’ and later co-screenwriter of Bonnie and Clyde with Bob Benton.] [Lee had been a newspaper] editor and he knew [Newman and Benton]. And they were interested in doing musicals… So we just started to bat around ideas and David said to me one day, “My kid had a terrific idea. My son said, ‘Why don’t you do Superman’”—he was into Superman—“‘as a musical?’” And of course, Lee and I loved it. Lee thought it was great… We loved it and [producer] David Merrick [came onboard].  He was a great man but a total liar. I mean, he lied about everything… I could give you stories. I think everybody could give you stories about David Merrick. But David liked it and decided to do it. And [then he] simply broke a contract with our lawyer. He said, “I never promised that they’d get that percentage.” Whatever it was. It was over some business point. And [Merrick left the project and] we brought it to Hal [Prince], who liked the idea. And so [he] directed it and produced it… I still love that show.

Bonnie and Clyde (1968)

JF: But this was the same time when you were doing it that you were scoring Bonnie and Clyde, right?

CF:  Yeah, it was around the same time. In fact [it was with] the same two authors [Newman and].

JF:  Right. So what was that like? How involved were you with the people who were doing the movie with Penn and Beatty and [everyone else]?

CS:  …I had done music for a few films… it’s not like Broadway where you’re part of the production team. Far from it. Because a lot of music one writes for the, for a film, the sound editor gets in command. So… you do a film and, when they do [the] sound editing, I have the right, you might say—I don’t know whether it’s a right—to say to the sound editor, you know, there’s a clarinet solo coming up now. I’d love it if you could raise that a little bit. They have total control. They rehearse with many microphones and all. But Arthur [Penn] wanted… and I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not much, he really wanted it to be about tire squeals—a lot. And birds. You know, you have the ability in the sound booth to say there are birds. But there’s a flute solo also. And usually, you know, it’s a… collaboration the way one expects it to be. It was not [a collaboration] on Bonnie and Clyde. If there was a tire squeal… he wanted that tire squeal [over the music]. And I really felt that it was a movie that was about tire squeals as much as it was about the story of those two. Nevertheless, I had a good time. I had a fight with Warren about one thing ‘cause he kept interrupting. You know, you’re recoding with twenty musicians or something, and in the middle of the recording Warren—it was his film, so he had the right, but—I actually had a fistfight with him—

JF:  Did you really?

CS:  He was nine feet tall and I’m four feet tall, and so…But Arthur broke it up. It was a real fight where I pushed him. He made me so mad. And he pushed me back and he’s six foot something and I’m less. But we got to be good friends after that. He took us all out for Chinese dinner. And, you know, in a funny way, he was right. We were all hearing, for the first time… a new kind of music… a street sound. And I couldn’t quite get it. I was trained in classical orchestration. And in hindsight, I think what he wanted, Warren, was something he didn’t quite hear, but he knew he didn’t want to hear strings playing holding a chord. He wanted something else. And I wasn’t able to give it to him. And he wasn’t able to express it.

Applause (1970)

JF: You moved on to Applause after that. What attracted you to All About Eve as source material?

CS:  The producer brought it to us. We loved it… So we got the rights to do it and we wrote the score and we thought, I think it was [producer] Larry Kasha—and he said, “You know, Lauren Bacall [eventual star of Applause], she would be [great]”—how [do] you meet Lauren Bacall? Anyway, he arranged for Lauren Bacall to be at somebody’s apartment and we met her—she [was] a wonderful lady and a great influence on my life. And we played her a couple of songs. She said, “I love it. I’ll do it.” Nobody ever does that because, you know, people have agents who say, “Wait a second. She needs this and that and then…” But Betty [her real name] [was] a very forthright woman. She’s from Brooklyn. She knows what she wants. She’s smart and… I would say she’s a street woman, though that would not do her justice. She said, “That’s great. I’ll do it.” And she had never sung before. The only time she had ever sung, she told me, was once in a while [Humphrey] Bogart [Bacall’s husband] would take her to a nightclub and she said if it was very dark, a lot of smoke and nobody was in the club, she would get up and sing… And so, I worked with her. I coached her. I used to do a lot of coaching. So I was pretty good at it. And we got to like each other. I certainly got to like her. I’ll never speak for her and say she liked me. But I think she did. And I worked with her every day on the songs. And ‘til the very end of her life she would kid, not quite kidding say, “Yeah. You still think I sang that E flat wrong, don’t you?” You know? She was capable of actually doing that, but it would be mock anger with me. She was just a terrific lady. I loved her.

JF:  Right, and did [Betty] Comden and [Adolph] Green [Applause librettists] come in after Betty?

CS: Betty and Adolph, only because of Bacall, came in. In my opinion.

Annie (1977)

JF:  About Lee, speaking of Lee, jumping backwards, tell me about the background of Annie and why Lee wasn’t involved.

CS:  …The reason Lee and I didn’t stay writing was a very simple one. And that is, all through my collaboration and very close friendship [with Lee], I was a bachelor. And so, my working was everything, you know, Get up in the morning, I don’t know what I’m going to do except I like to compose… And Lee is not like that. He’s a wonderful craftsman, my best friend in the world. But he likes to take a week off and… At one point, he got married. He’s entitled to that. But I wasn’t married at the time. Okay, we were still working along. And then he said, “We’re buying a home in Westport.” And I said, “What does that mean?” I said, “You’re going to live there?” And he said, “Yeah. We found a beautiful home.” And I said, “Well, what are you going to – are you going to work?” He said, “Well, I’ll come in every day.” Well, it started not to work out for me. This is relative to Annie because at four o’clock, or so it seemed, around that time, Lee would say, “Gee, you know, if I leave right now, I can catch the 5:02.”  And if I stay any later I have to wait ‘til 7. And then before you know it, he’d be leaving at four. And I had nothing to do. I wasn’t serious about any girl or anything and… I didn’t have, you know, a pile of friends. That was everything… So it was around that time, and he knew it—but he tried to work it out. But I told him I didn’t like it. You know, I said, “I like to keep working on something, and now we’re doing everything by phone.” So it was around that time that [Annie lyricist] Martin [Charnin] called me. And we had been friends for years, Martin… And [Martin] had an idea [for Annie, based on the ‘30s comic strip]. We met with [Annie librettist] Tom Meehan, who had never written a show before, and we started talking… We were all eager to work. Martin is like me, and so is Tom. Or was. And we got a shot at doing it at that summer at Goodspeed [Opera House, in Connecticut]. Which turned out to cost us a fortune… Because Martin insisted on directing it. And I said, we won’t get a penny if you direct it. And I wouldn’t agree to it. And so he called it off. We quit. I quit the show. He quit the show. Although he said he was doing it with somebody else, and that was fine. Not fine, but you know. And we had played it only for a couple people among whom was Michael Price, the guy runs Goodspeed. It’s really a fascinating story. But there was no Annie anymore. A year after we played the audition for him—Martin and I were not connected at all now—he called me from London, from Piccadilly Circus, as he said. He said, “I’m calling from Piccadilly Circus,” and he said, “My wife and I have been walking around London and we’re singing three songs and we’re having a big argument.” She said, “I think they’re Beatles songs.” But he said, “We can’t forget them.” She had been at this audition too. And he said, “It suddenly occurred to me that they’re from this show you played me called Annie.” And he sang me one of the things. I said, “Yeah. That’s…” So he said, “I think we should talk further.” [At that time]… the show was dead, totally dead. And Michael said, “I figure if I’m remembering some of those songs over a year period, there must be something to them.” So I called Martin and I told him and he said, “Well, unless I direct the show, I won’t do it.” And I said, “Look, Martin…. We can’t get any money right now. If you’re the director, we’re not going to get any money. I can’t agree to that.” So we had a big fight about it. He quit. And so there was no show again. And finally, I think it was my wife who said, “Why don’t you play it one thing at a time?” Anyway, I had gotten Martin… to say that we would talk to other directors, which we did. We talked to two or three other directors, showed them the script, asked their ideas. And frankly, none of us liked their ideas. And meanwhile Michael Price said, “We’ll go ahead. We’ll get somebody.” And Martin started running the show and before you know it Michael said, “Oh, fuck it, let him direct it,” you know. Well, he turned out to be a terrific director for it. Knew it better than anybody would have except us and that was it. So we, we just went ahead with it. It was not a big success the first night or anything. But… since it was a summer theater, we had a whole summer to work on it. And [Times theater critic] Walter Kerr came up to see it in the middle of the summer and panned it.

JF:  Really?

CS:  Yeah. In a Sunday review. And we were distraught. And I remember vividly. We all sat out—the three of us sat on the lawn—and read Kerr’s review as though it were the New Testament or something. We said, “What did he mean by that? And what did he mean by that?” And we came to the conclusion—and we really had to read between the lines—that he was a real old-time Democrat and we read into his review—he didn’t come out and say it—that we were making [Franklin] Roosevelt too foolish. [Roosevelt] was getting a lot of laughs… [So] we—Tom specifically—pulled a lot of the jokes away from Roosevelt and gave him a quasi-serious aspect. And it started to work better. And then through a friend of mine—who I give total responsibility for the show’s success—a woman by the name of Jay Presson Allen… I asked her to come up and see it. And she saw it one night when we had put in some of the improvements. And she said, “I think you have something.” I knew Mike Nichols because actually he had been one of the writers that… the producer turned down [for Birdie]… I knew him slightly. But I didn’t know him well enough to call him. But Jay did. She was doing a film with him. She was a very successful writer… She called him… She said, “Mike, I think there’s something here that might interest you. Can you come down?” “Oh,” he said, “Look, we’re having a baby and no, I can’t.” And she’s very tough. She said, “Mike, get your ass down here.” I remember this so well because she was on a phone backstage at Goodspeed and Jay was the kind of person you didn’t say no to. She was really tough. So he said, “All right.” And he came and it [went] over very well. And that was it. When Mike said yes [to producing the show] the money rolled in… He had virtually no money in the show. He just liked it. He did, I think, put in, like, $40,000—or $4000. I don’t even remember. But I insisted his name go on the top [of the poster], which was very hurtful to the men who had really worked hard to get money. But I said, “I insist on it. I’m not going to do this show.” Because I figured it would give it a cache that nothing else would—

JF:  And it did.

CS:  And it did. That was the smartest decision I ever made. Even though it hurt some people, but it was Hal Prince actually who told me, who gave me the strength to do it. Because after Superman, when it closed… he said, “The lesson I’ve learned from this is you can do a show if an adult can bring his child to it. But you can’t do a show that a child brings his father to.” And that was the advice I took to heart. I thought it was right. And Mike Nichols said, “It’s an adult show…” He was, you know… a nice man and we were very close friends until he kind of lost it… But I can remember vividly that… I insisted that Mike’s name go on. It made all the difference in the world.

Rags (1986)

JF: I want to just quickly talk about Rags if I can. Just because I think it’s such a fascinating story. It was you and [lyricist] Stephen Schwartz and [librettist] Joe Stein—The three of you hadn’t had a show on Broadway in seven, eight, nine years—

CS:  Is that so?

JF:  So it’s these three people, like these legends, really, who have come—I mean, I hate to—

CS:  You tell my wife.

JF:  I will. I hate to be so blunt about it, but it’s true.

CS:  Be blunt.

JF:  I just want to know about the mentality there with the three of you and the collaboration process ‘cause it’s [three] such big personalities.

CS:  Joe and Stephen—This is not a reason, but I think it’s worth saying. Joe and Stephen did not get along. And they quarreled a great deal. I’m not going to say that’s responsible for one thing, one decision that we made because I think it is a wonderful show—

JF:  It is. It’s a beautiful score. It really is. I love that score.

CS:  Thank you. I do too. I mean, I love everything I write, at the moment… But, yeah, they fought a great deal. And I would say if there was any trouble with the show, it was that. For people who were such close friends—they had written another show [The Baker’s Wife]—and we all cared about one another—[but] they fought all the time. Stephen and I got along extremely well. He’s so talented. He’s a wonderful lyricist, I think.

JF:  He is.

CS:  And he’s a good musician. You know, I would play something and sometimes I’d give him a copy and sometimes his ear would remember and he was able to play it and so, you know, his lyrics really fit and we never argued much. But I do think the differences between Joe and Stephen did a great deal to undermine some of the show, because there were really subtle decisions about how much of the rabbi and how much of the kid [the two main characters]. I mean, it’s centered around things like that… Stephen is very strong about having the young love story because he’s very into pop music… There were endless arguments about that because Stephen, after all, wrote Wicked—so he has a great feel for what kids want. And so, I would say it centered [around] that. And they never got together on it.

JF:  … Do you feel that in the more recent revivals that it’s gotten closer to what you were originally trying to say?

CS: The only thing I was trying to say is that, like all of us in this room, our forbearers came from Europe... I think it’s a great story and it’s everybody’s story. And Stephen and I and Joe worked very hard on it. Poor Joe’s gone [Joe Stein died in 2010]. He rewrote it eighteen times… You know, I’ve seen people—I saw a guy in… Florida see the show—an old man who was in tears. And, you know, that stays as a very strong memory with me because although I’m not an immigrant and my parents weren’t immigrants, their parents were. So, I just thought, you know, it’s very important—not important. It’s just that it’s meaningful to Americans. But apparently there was enough in it that was not working. We got one wonderful review, but the rest were all [negative]. The score generally came off well, you know. You know, you do parse these things, and I did. And audiences were great. But we did have a couple of very bad breaks. The producer, the man who could have kept it going—because we were getting good houses—he got a brain tumor and died I think two or three nights after we opened. Lee Guber. And so there was nobody at the helm. There was nobody to tell press agents. Because I do know, although I was so hurt by it, that I didn’t see the last performance [Rags only had eight regular Broadway performances]. I was just so wounded because, well, you put love into everything that you work on… I love to compose. I was so hurt, that I didn’t see the last performance, which is terrible that I couldn’t stand it. But I saw it in the news, a bunch of the people from the audience marched down Broadway. They loved the show so much and they were marching in favor of it not closing. I suppose I should look back on that and say that’s a compliment. But I was so hurt, you know.

Thoughts

JF:  I always ask these two:  What is your favorite song that you’ve written right now? It may change later.

CS:  I don’t know. Both Lee and I, I think, liked “Once Upon a Time” [from All American] a great deal. The only time until I met my wife I had ever loved a girl—I had gone out with a lot of girls, liked a lot of girls, felt “Wow”—but the only girl I ever loved, who died recently, and I still have a strong feeling about the time—I was twenty and she was twenty-one and she was a musician like me. And I had never known love and I fell for her very strongly. And we went together for four years. That’s a pretty long time. And we wanted to get married…. I know she wanted to marry me and I wanted to marry her. I just was crazy about her. And she was a very good musician, composer... And I was crazy about her. I still am…. So that song, I think, “Once Upon a Time,” [showed] that I was very strongly aware of her. I still am. About thirty years later I found out… Well, you can look up things that are astounding and I finally found out that she died. She was 82 at the time. And she was a year older than me. So I must have been 81. And when I found out she died. I still carried a thing for her. Isn’t that incredible?... We used to talk about [getting married]. First of all, we’d need ten rooms because I can’t stop composing, you don’t want to stop composing. So we’d need ten rooms so we don’t hear each other. Anyway, it seemed impossible so we broke it off.

JF:  That’s a shame.

CS:  Yeah.

JF:  The other one that I always ask is what is your favorite composing team besides you and Lee?

CS:  Oh, well, I think Rodgers and Hammerstein have to go up there first. I have a natural love… a great admiration for Stephen [Schwartz], who still is a friend, but we used to be really tight when we were starting out. We were really tight friends… And I certainly admire him. You know, the whole thing to me is so—the talent that I do have, I feel sometimes has nothing to do with my craft, but it has to do with a kind of luck, you know. It’s like winning a—I do have talent, but I don’t know. Rodgers had enormous talent, but also he [had] a craft about him… Cole Porter is miraculous to me. Cole Porter, I would say, and the fact that he wrote lyrics too.

JF:  He was so prolific.

CS:  Yeah.

JF:  Did you ever meet Rodgers?

CS:  Rodgers I met once. But I certainly didn’t know him. I met Irving Berlin once because Josh [Logan] was a pal of his and after our show, he went on to do Mr. President and he introduced me to Irving Berlin. But Berlin, from what everyone told me, was a mean guy—

JF:  Oh really?

CS:  That’s what people said to me. I don’t know whether he was or not.

Unproduced Shows (Notes, Marty, Minsky’s)

CS: I have a new musical for the first time in my life where I’ve written everything—[music, lyrics,] book, too.  It’s totally new.

JF:  Can you tell me anything about it?

CS:  Yeah, it’s called Notes. And it’s about a musician and a love affair and his experience. It’s very autobiographical.  But I said, “I want to do this.” I’m going to die in about ten minutes, they tell me. I don’t know. You know, my father died at 60. I’m 87 now. Or 88. I don’t even remember half the time. And I thought, I’d like to try it. And I tried it and I completed it, two acts of it, and sent it to—I didn’t send it to anyone; I was frightened. But I let my son, who’s a writer, read it, at least the first act. And he kind of liked it and he’s very tough on me.

JF:  Is your business manager, are you working on prospects for Minsky’s and Marty [unproduced on Broadway] too, or…?

CS:  No, Minsky’s seems to be dead. Marty, somebody asked to do it at school. I thought it had great promise. And I was very moved by it. But I know we could do it better and if somebody would… Well, I don’t know whether Lee would be interested. I’d be interested in reworking it.

JF: Here’s hoping.

CS: Yeah.  I hope.

*

True Lies

Dear Evan Hansen and The Present.

Ben Platt (center) stuns in Dear Evan Hansen.

            Evan Hansen, of the musical Dear Evan Hansen, now playing at the Music Box, is not, as you might originally think, a real person, press-ganged into service in what would be his personal hell, performing in front of thousands of people week after week on a Broadway stage.  In fact, he is portrayed by an actor, the twenty-three-year-old Ben Platt, though you could be forgiven for the mistake given that Mr. Platt delivers what is probably the most naturalistic turn in any Broadway musical, ever, and given the fact that he is, for Broadway, so resolutely unglamorous.  His words escape from his mouth in rat-a-tat barrages, as if he has been trying to keep them hidden but can’t quite manage it.  When seated, he rears back from conversational partners and freezes, almost in terror.  Perhaps most notably, his right hand appears to be beyond his control – it wanders and spasms; it nearly conducts, actually – in the fashion of someone whose life is similarly beyond his grasp.

            Evan’s story, as told by librettist Steven Levenson and composing team Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, is complex, and the work required to establish its premise would be less than worthwhile given that the show is best experienced with as little prior information as possible, pure, like an adrenaline shot.  Suffice it to say that it involves Evan, an anxiety-ridden seventeen-year-old (perhaps a tautology), the object of his affection, the sixteen-year-old Zoe Murphy (Laura Dreyfuss, understated and wonderful), and her misanthropic outcast of a brother, Connor (Mike Faist), as well as assorted well-meaning but misguided parents and schoolmates.  A case of mistaken authorship leads Evan down a path from which he can’t turn back; he acquires a measure of celebrity, achieves personal security, and follows his good intentions – pure but based, fundamentally, on a lie – to the point of no return.  It is wrenching.  It is beautiful.  It is magnificent.

            It is not an overstatement in the least to say that just as Oklahoma can lay claim to being the first fully integrated musical in the basic tradition of jazz and ragtime, so can Dear Evan Hansen be called the first fully integrated pop musical – not to diminish the score, since it’s nearly unclassifiable, completely unique, and gorgeous beyond reasonable expectation.  Everything – everything – is in the service of the story, and not a note nor a word rings false.  Its vision is total.  It never cheats.  It’s pretty near-perfect.  In Platt’s masterful performance, Evan’s loneliness and isolation are all too familiar – but we’ve never seen anything like the musical that bears his name.

            It’s been an odd season for dancing celebrities.  In Sam Gold’s Off-Broadway Othello, at the New York Theatre Workshop, Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo can be seen to cavort joyously to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” in what must certainly be the happiest prelude to any spousal homicide on the American stage.  And now, in Andrew Upton’s Chekhov adaptation The Present, at the Ethel Barrymore, Cate Blanchett hops up on a dining room table, showers herself with vodka, and grinds on an old man to Haddaway’s “What is Love?”  It’s a bit like an unorthodox Clue solution: “Blanchett in the Australian production of the Russian play with the Eurodance music.”

            The play is really very good, but similarly disjointed.  Sprawling, cynical, and impressive, as directed by John Crowley, Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh, and a company of similarly attractive Aussies (Toby Schmitz is a standout) all act powerfully in this quintessentially Chekhovian work, based on his untitled first play, written when young Anton was just eighteen.  It should come as no surprise given the proclivities of the author who inspired The Present that the pistol Blanchett fondles in the first act goes off by the fourth.  Nor, given the production’s country of origin, should it be unforeseen that the production is phenomenally sexy, passionate, and hot-blooded from tip to toe.  What is unexpected (and disappointing) is the startlingly weak third act, seemingly visiting from another play, and the dialogue, which starts off wonderfully moody and introspective but, after intermission, becomes so dense and impenetrable it nearly crowds the stage.

            Still, by and large the story fascinates, as Roxburgh’s charismatic philanderer and Blanchett’s pyromaniacal widow lay waste to a perfectly pleasant birthday weekend in 1990s Russia – a conscious, and an intelligent, setting adjustment by Upton, who’s fascinated by the era’s conflict between the old and the new.  But generally the production’s theatrical ostentation is not its strongest suit.  The Present works best when it allows its characters to live there.  One can’t help feeling Upton would get better results, given his superb actorly ingredients, by keeping it simple – start with a base of resentments, sexual competitiveness, and class conflict, and stir in the cruel, manipulative Russian gentry of Chekhov’s fetid imagination.  Sprinkle in the Haddaway – conservatively.  Then, let sit – and squirm.