Broadway Babylon (49 page)

“Paul Lynde, it turned out, was anti-Semitic, later blaming ‘the Jews’ for his failure to become a top-ranking star in Hollywood or New York.… He may have been funny to audiences, but he was very unfunny to me, and we
avoided each other as much as possible.”—concentration-camp survivor R
OBERT
C
LARY
on his
New Faces of 1952
costar

“Back in 1969, I flew to New York to audition for Kate Hepburn, who was going to play Chanel in
Coco
the musical. I couldn’t sing, but hell, neither could she! I wanted the part of her assistant, Sebastian.… If I may say so, I gave a brilliant audition … I flew back to San Francisco, and René Auberjonois got the role—and eventually a Tony. If Miss Hepburn didn’t much care for gay actors, butch though she assuredly was, she loathed gay actors who impersonated females, as I was famous for doing. Regardless that offscreen, she virtually never wore a skirt and never high heels.”—impressionist C
HARLES
P
IERCE

“I thought Alan Cumming was excellent in
Cabaret
. I thought, ‘What a daring, gender-bending performance.’ Until I saw him give the same performance in a movie, and then another movie, and another, and.…”—actor-coach G
UY
S
TOCKWELL

“The way I heard it, Hal Prince hired this English blonde nobody ever heard of [Jill Haworth] to play Sally Bowles in [the original]
Cabaret
because she was untalented, which the character is supposed to be. Apparently, Liza Minnelli had wanted the part, but Prince and his cohorts said she was too talented for Sally. That baffles me. Audiences love to see and hear talent, even if we understand that the character’s supposed to be lacking. It’s just, how dumb do producers think audiences are?”—costume designer H
ERMAN
G
EORGE

“What’s sad is the passing [in 2002] of Adolph Green. Socially, I could take or leave him. But when he partnered professionally with Betty Comden, that was a match made in heaven, a boon for Broadway.… The giants are all dead or in retirement, and all I see coming up are dwarves and ordinary though sometimes very mercenary people.”—publicist M
ICHAEL
L
UTZ

“Well,
Cats
. Hmm. What a concept. But a director? All it requires is a costumer, a choreographer, makeup, and lights.… Is the direction innovative? Exciting? Even logical? The answer has to be: Nunn of the above.”—composer S
IR
M
ICHAEL
T
IPPETT
, referring to
Cats
director Trevor Nunn

“I won’t identify the bodies or names, but you can bet if
The Full Monty
had been about females, all those bodies would have been nice.… Couldn’t they have chosen more hunks and no fats?”—Los Angeles—based British musicologist P
HILIP
B
RETT

“I don’t see much point in transsexual stories. There are thousands of gay and lesbian stories waiting to be told.…
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
left me cold. Also rather queasy … that ‘inch’ reference. All a transsexual is, is a closeted homosexual who cops out and realigns their body so they can become an opposite-sex heterosexual.”—playwright A
NTHONY
S
HAFFER
(
Sleuth
)

“Charles Ludlam and Marian Seldes are the best and most interesting actresses working regularly on Broadway, or thereabouts, in the 1980s. This speaks volumes about the condition of the once brimming and bubbling American theatre.”—H
ERMIONE
G
INGOLD

“Marian Seldes is the luckiest Broadway actress in recent history. Thanks almost entirely to Edward Albee’s plays, she’s become a major personality and presence—a tall woman, even—of the theatre.… It is good to see a woman of a certain age prominently included. She is also slim and elegant, which at that age is nearly as important as talent.”—celebrity publicist C
HEN
S
AM

“Nathan Lane has a wonderful sensibility for comedy … I’d say a gay sensibility. I would like to see him, for a change of pace, in a Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee [play].… It does rather surprise me that as a gay man he participates in that degree of homophobic humor in
The Producers
. They couldn’t have known ahead of time it would be such a hit.”—M
ADELINE
S
HERWOOD

“David Mamet really thinks he’s great. But if he can’t grab you in the Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams way, he’ll grab you by the balls with endless foul language. He’s like a terrorist of words.”—actor-director J
OSÉ
F
ERRER
on the playwright of
Glengarry Glen Ross
(1984)

“A man of the theatre died last night.”—acting coach S
TELLA
A
DLER
in 1982 to her class, about estranged Stanislavskian colleague Lee Strasberg. After the class sat down again, she added, “It will take 100 years before the harm that man has done to the art of acting can be corrected.”

“I was married to a true devotee of the theatre, Helen Menken. She created a sensation in the title role of
The Captive
(1926).… I urged her to take on the role; I knew a shiny bit of press bait when I saw it. You see, I’d knocked around on Broadway myself before moving out to California and Warner Bros.”—late bloomer H
UMPHREY
B
OGART
, whose more-famous-then wife’s character was “captivated” by a lesbian in the imported stage hit by Edouard Bourdet

“Yes, it was ahead of its time and failed. Even so, I’m proud my wife [Gladys Lloyd] costarred in it.… It might have had a better chance in New York, where
The Captive
was a smash hit until the authorities shut it down.… Chicago audiences didn’t take to the play, and the press there gave it as little publicity as they could.”—E
DWARD
G. R
OBINSON
on
Sin of Sins
, a lesbian-themed 1926 play formerly titled
Hymn to Venus
, which one local critic deemed “a horrible thing of soul leprosy”

“Rock Hudson could have been the toast of Broadway in
La Cage aux Folles
. He was offered the more husbandly part and he’d seen and loved the show, but he couldn’t say yes … too contrary to the ingrained habit of publicly avoiding everything gay-associated, except as a spectator, and even then.”—friend and TV-costar N
ANCY
W
ALKER

“… I was starting to get worried because I wasn’t nervous. I always think of Ethel Merman when it comes to nerve. She once told me, ‘I never get nervous. I know what I’m going to do. The audience should be nervous, they don’t know what they’re gonna get!’ I’ve never forgotten that.”—R
OSE
M
ARIE
(
The Dick Van Dyke Show
), who did four Broadway shows

“The Gospel According to Barbra relates a battle with me over the staging of ‘Miss Marmelstein’ that went like this: Barbra wanted to use a chair on casters, I fought her; she wanted to roll around the stage on the chair during the song, I fought her; she won the battle and stopped the show cold opening night in Philadelphia, I capitulated.

“In point of fact, ‘Miss Marmelstein’ was staged by Herb Ross and very inventively. It was his idea to use a chair on casters and it was he who directed the rolling around the stage. If she really had stopped the show cold opening night, David Merrick would never have wanted to fire her, but she couldn’t have: it was dead before she came on.”—
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
director A
RTHUR
L
AURENTS
on what Laurents calls Streisand’s “invented story” that has received “credence and acceptance as fact merely by being repeated in interviews, articles, and celebrity biographies”

“It’s not very long [eighty minutes], but it’s a clever play, from an unexpected source—a film actor named Daniel Stern (
Home Alone, City Slickers
) … about the different levels of fame, and lost fame, so crucial to most American performers. It’s quite trenchant and amusing, actually.”—E
MMA
T
HOMPSON
in 2003 on Stern’s
Barbra’s Wedding
, about a former TV supporting actor coming unhinged at being reduced to a stargazer on the day of his Malibu neighbor Barbra Streisand’s wedding

“If you are what you eat, then Richard Stilgoe must eat a lot of arseholes.”—a
UK TELEVISION COMEDIAN
on the lyricist of
Starlight Express

“When someone first mentioned this new show to me, I thought the title was
You’re in Town
. I didn’t get around to seeing
Urinetown
, but I possibly may because in the meanwhile it’s won [in 2002] Tonys for best music and lyrics and book! To me, the shocking thing is I’m not shocked anymore.”—TV (
The Honeymooners
) and stage (
Take Her, She’s Mine
) star A
RT
C
ARNEY

“One of my favorite musicals—the story, the music, everything—was
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
[1965]. John Cullum and Barbara Harris were so good in it. What happened? For a while, she was in several movies, then she disappeared—she must still be alive. And John Cullum disappeared, until he made a big comeback on Broadway in—can you believe it?—
Urinetown
. Good for him, but God help us.”—movie director G
EORGE
S
IDNEY
(
Show Boat, Kiss Me, Kate!
)

“Late the night before
West Side Story
went into rehearsal, Lillian Hellman called me.… ‘This is Lillian.’ (No ‘Lillian Who’; certainly no ‘Hello, how are you?’) ‘You are in for the worst experience of your life. Leonard Bernstein is a megalomaniacal monster. He will destroy every word you write. Good night.’ Click.”—writer A
RTHUR
L
AURENTS
(Hellman had worked with Bernstein on
Candide
.)

“I’d like to say here that it was Nanette Fabray who took all my good clothes away [in
Mr. President
, 1962]. She didn’t want my dresses to be better than hers. [Costume designer] Theoni Aldredge told me years later, when … I said to her, ‘Remember that beautiful dress? Why did it get cut?’ and she said, ‘Miss Fabray requested it.’ Oh, well!”—actress A
NITA
G
ILLETTE

“It was difficult working with Ray [Bolger, the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
film]. He never really looked at you. He was sort of off on his own.… He just had no contact and never paid any attention to you. And that [
By Jupiter
, 1942] was my first lead and I really needed support.”—N
ANETTE
F
ABRAY

“I thought Ray Bolger was nice to me, early on. Whatever motives he may have had, he seemed kind. To me, anyway. Years passed … I realized he didn’t like me, and I never knew why. I’d never done anything to him.… I ended up loathing him. He’s dead now, so I can say that.”—actress G
RETCHEN
W
YLER

“His big thing during
All American
[1962] was to sing [his old hit] ‘Once in Love with Amy’ after the curtain call while we all stood onstage watching. We finally had to get up a petition that said if he wanted to do his nightclub
act that was fine, but we wouldn’t have to stand there every night for his number and curtain speech.”—A
NITA
G
ILLETTE
on Ray Bolger

“There was one time during rehearsals [for
The Pajama Game
, 1954] when I didn’t feel comfortable in a certain place in the show. I questioned something [George Abbott] was doing. So I asked to see him, and I went up to his office. There he was, sitting behind that huge desk, and he said, ‘What is it, Janis?’ and I said, ‘Mr. Abbott, I’d like to talk to you about this scene. I don’t feel it. I can do better.’

“He said, ‘Janis, you have five minutes to make up your mind. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s going to be. Now, you want to stay in the show, or you want to leave? You go outside and stand there for five minutes, and make up your mind.’ Well, I burst into tears, which I’d had no intention of doing.… Then I dried my tears and … walked back and said, ‘Mr. Abbott, I’m staying.’ He said, ‘Good. Get back to work.’ ”—J
ANIS
P
AIGE

“Andrew Lloyd Webber is to be thanked for making scenery the star of hit musicals.
Phantom
’s crashing chandelier,
Miss Saigon
’s helicopter,
Sunset Boulevard
’s enormous staircase … and the allegedly feline costumes in
Cats
!”—C
HARLES
G
RAY
(
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
)

“Cats
, the empty musical … powerfully demonstrates the popular appeal of cats and the wild freedom they represent. The authors of the show took T.S. Eliot’s anthropomorphism more seriously than he did, notably in the case of pathetic Grizabella, a once-beautiful cat who mourns her lost youth and ascends into heaven at the end; they give her a lamentation, the song ‘Memory,’ from one of Eliot’s poems about
humans
. One longs for the honesty of Don Marquis’s weather-beaten Mehitabel, who like any normal cat is blissfully unaware that she is no longer attractive in human terms.”—P
ROFESSOR
K
ATHARINE
M. R
OGERS
, author of
The Cat and the Human Imagination

“Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere. But then so is AIDS.”—M
ALCOLM
W
ILLIAMSON
, Master of the Queen’s Musick [sic] in 1992 (he later apologized … to People With AIDS)

“Did you hear the latest
Cats
joke? After
Aspects of Love
bombed, an associate told Lloyd Webber it was time to face the future. Because you can’t live on memories. Webber said, ‘I can.’ ”—theatrical producer J
OAN
L
ITTLEWOOD
(“Memory,” of course, was
Cats
’ sole hit song.)

“It’s not true that [we] are no longer speaking. I saw his last show. At least I hope it was his last show.”—T
IM
R
ICE
on former collaborator (
Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar
) Andrew Lloyd Webber