AMERICAN THEATRE | ‘Pippin’ within the Belly of the Beast

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Eight of Magic to Do: Pippin’s Fantastic, Fraught Journey to Broadway and Beyond, by Elysa Gardner, from Applause Books. Previous chapters discover the present’s origins as a medieval allegory a couple of prince on a seek for that means and goal, and element the customarily tense inventive course of amongst composer Stephen Schwartz, ebook author Roger O. Hirson, and director Bob Fosse. This chapter covers the present’s pre-Broadway run in Washington, D.C.

Summer was winding down by the point the Pippin forged and crew rolled into the nation’s capital, and there was nonetheless work to be accomplished earlier than the present’s Sept. 20 pre-Broadway opening on the Kennedy Center Opera House. Most of the corporate members have been put up at a Holiday Inn throughout the road, although John Rubinstein was amongst a number of who acquired to remain—together with Bob Fosse, Stuart Ostrow, Stephen Schwartz, and Roger Hirson—on the swanky Watergate Hotel, not but generally known as the positioning of a nationwide scandal. Rubinstein introduced his spouse and child daughter, Jessica, who discovered to crawl there. “We had a beautiful view of the Potomac River and would watch the rowers practice their team sculling,” he says.

Everyone had been following the continuing debacle in Vietnam. The three tv networks all had information groups stationed within the discipline, Rubinstein remembers, documenting “the explosions, the saturation bombings, the jungle ambushes, the helicopter raids, the assassinations of Vietnamese civilians, the burning of villages, the napalming of children, and, importantly, the dead and wounded American servicemen and women as they were loaded onto Hueys and Air Force cargo planes and sent to hospitals, and as they arrived back home.” The Pentagon Papers had been launched simply over a yr earlier than Pippin began rehearsals, revealing how the American individuals and even members of Congress had been deceived by authorities leaders over a number of administrations. Now the Pippin group was within the stomach of the beast at which the present took purpose—if circuitously or constantly, then with graphic element.

Like Schwartz, Rubinstein had demonstrated in opposition to the battle and been haunted by the prospect of getting drafted. He acquired a medical deferment after graduating from UCLA in 1968, however by the point a lottery was instituted towards the top of the next yr, he was assigned a quantity “in the lower middle,” making him extra prone to be referred to as than these with increased numbers. But he by no means was. “I lived in trepidation for years, but I was lucky.” Ben Vereen, who had a spouse and younger kids, was excused from service, although he had joined Jane Fonda on a tour of U.S. military bases the earlier fall—“to protest the war, not the soldiers,” he stresses. Richard Korthaze and Gene Foote had aged out of eligibility. “I was drafted for Korea,” Foote says, “but they asked me if I was a homosexual, and I said yes. Then they asked if I was passive or aggressive, and I said, ‘Whatever turns you on.’ And they told me to go home. By the time Vietnam came along, I was already an old lady.”

Candy Brown remembers, “There was this program where you could get a bracelet with a soldier’s name on it, and I got one. And even though we weren’t supposed to wear jewelry onstage, I wore that bracelet, and nobody said anything. So yeah, the war was very much at the forefront of everybody’s mind, though we had no idea that Watergate was going down.” Foote, nonetheless, is for certain he noticed a girl in a nightgown outdoors the resort one night, “running around like a crazy lady” and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Martha Mitchell, the soon-to-be former spouse of Nixon’s lawyer normal, John N. Mitchell, who could be convicted and imprisoned for his function within the Watergate scandal. (Mrs. Mitchell had been recognized to talk overtly and critically concerning the Nixon administration, and she or he would declare that shortly after the break-in, she was held in opposition to her will in a California resort room to maintain her quiet.)

A extra bracing signal of the occasions was the bomb scare that interrupted a rehearsal of, wouldn’t you recognize it, “War Is a Science.” Foote recounts it most vividly: “We were working on one of the four variations we had already learned; Bob still wasn’t happy yet so we were doing a new version almost nightly. Leland Palmer had done nothing all day and was asleep in a box in the corner of the rehearsal room when someone burst in to tell us there was a bomb in the building. We all started to run when Bob said, ‘Wait, before we go, could we just try this one more time?’ Of course, the answer was no; Phil [Friedman] said we had to go. So we left the building and went out onto the lawn—and as soon as we were there Bob wanted to try one more thing. He didn’t want to stop working!”

It was a false alarm, fortunately, and much from essentially the most anxiety-producing improvement throughout Pippin’s four-week run on the Opera House. A person that Jennifer Nairn-Smith had been courting had apparently discovered of her involvement with Fosse, and was not happy. There have been threats of violence, in line with forged members. “We had all heard and shared rumors about it,” Rubinstein says of the affair between the gorgeous dancer and her director, “but I personally never saw any evidence of it”—not till simply earlier than the journey to Washington, when the forged and crew moved rehearsals from Variety Arts to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for a number of rehearsals. When Rubinstein confirmed up for work, “Bob had bodyguards on both sides of him as he sat in the house, watching rehearsals”—Ostrow had employed a pair of off-duty law enforcement officials after studying of the boyfriend—“and we were frisked as we came in.” The backstage drama adopted Fosse out of city. “They had to get a limousine to get Bob out of the Kennedy Center safely, because there were actual threats to his life,” says Cheryl Clark. In his memoir, Ostrow recalled, “I had to ask my connection at the White House to have the Secret Service escort us to the D.C. city limits.”

If Schwartz encountered no such risks whereas in Washington, he was “not a happy camper,” in line with Dean Pitchford, an actor and songwriter who met Schwartz when he efficiently auditioned for a substitute spot in Godspell’s Off-Broadway forged, then served as standby for and finally performed Pippin on Broadway. Pitchford, who would turn out to be an Oscar-winning songwriter and screenwriter—his many credit embrace Fame and Footloose, in addition to a musical theatre adaptation of Carrie—had been promoted to the function of Jesus on a nationwide tour of Godspell that wound up spending two and half years in Washington, throughout which Pippin got here to city. With Fosse firmly in command of the latter present, Schwartz started spending a few of his ample downtime with the Godspell forged on the Ford’s Theatre. “They were all my age, and friends,” he says. “It was sort of like, when you have a difficult family life, you go off with friends.”

Pitchford, who has remained near Schwartz, remembers that the composer even started taking notes and calling rehearsals, maybe attempting to unleash his pent-up inventive vitality in a extra welcoming setting. “We were all very happy to see him, but it got exhausting,” Pitchford says, laughing. “We were already doing a lot of extra stuff, making special appearances at schools and meeting people on Capitol Hill as part of publicity. So I had dinner with Stephen after the show one night, and I told him, ‘We love you madly, but you can’t keep rehearsing us. Just come and hang out with us.’ So he got in the habit of coming towards the end of the show, and then four or five of us would go to Georgetown and get Italian food. Then he’d call and ask me to have lunch, and I’d hear about what was going on at Pippin. He was feeling like the show had gotten away from him. Bobby, as I would eventually witness myself, endeared himself to the cast so much that he could do no wrong. Whenever there was a dust-up, everyone would line up behind Bobby—and Stephen was left feeling very alone. He had a strong relationship with John Rubinstein, but that’s because when Bobby was working with his dancers, John was sidelined; he would sit with Stephen while Bobby was working with Ben Vereen and Leland Palmer, who spoke the language he spoke.”

While Schwartz, once more, didn’t really feel that the dancers regarded him with any hostility—“Everybody was pretty nice to me, as I remember it,” he says—his strained relationship with Fosse sophisticated this late and essential section of the manufacturing. The composer doesn’t recall even discussing politics with the director, nonetheless a lot their mutual opposition to the battle in Vietnam—and battle usually—knowledgeable Pippin. Schwartz could be invited to go to the White House by Frank Gannon, an aide to President Nixon and a fan of each Godspell and Pippin. He accepted the supply however arrived carrying a button endorsing George McGovern, Nixon’s Democratic opponent in that yr’s upcoming election. “It didn’t occur to me that was rude,” Schwartz insists. “Then someone told me that either H.R. Haldeman or John Ehrlichmann”—Nixon’s White House chief of workers and home affairs adviser, respectively—“was also a fan. That was both intriguing and horrifying to me—because I was so rabidly anti-Nixon, and I was learning that his henchmen were fans.”

Schwartz’s idealism was nonetheless fervent sufficient to make him chafe at an trade in the course of the scene through which Pippin, having killed Charles, briefly replaces him as king. “Pippin is trying to do all these good things that people are demanding of him, but they don’t work, and he winds up going back to basically ruling like his father.” Schwartz factors to a line that he thinks Hirson wrote whereas working with Fosse—“Take that man away and hang him!”—echoing Charlemagne in an early encounter with certainly one of his lowly topics. “I know the scene works as shorthand, but it was very troubling to me politically—because it said, well, there’s no such thing as an enlightened ruler; you can’t change things. That was not a message I wanted to put out there at the time, and to tell you the truth, it still bothers me a bit politically. However, I have to admit that, as I have with several of the lines Bob added, I’ve come to like the line, because Charles says it in his first scene—and then when Pippin as king repeats it, Roger added a response from the unfortunate man: ‘Not again,’ which is funny and has the quirky quality I like about Roger’s work.”

Schwartz had significantly loved crafting what could also be Pippin’s most unabashedly sardonic tune: “Spread a Little Sunshine”—a saccharine-soaked waltz sung by Fastrada within the scene the place she learns of Pippin’s plan to kill his father and deceives each males within the hopes that she and Lewis will profit. The tune was crafted throughout rehearsals and have become one of many composer’s happier collaborations with Fosse. Another was “Love Song,” which Schwartz wrote in Washington to exchange “Just Between the Two of Us,” a duet for Pippin and Catherine that, in line with Rubinstein, “was a perfectly nice song, but somehow didn’t grab the audience.” It additionally examined Jill Clayburgh’s restricted vocal vary. The romantic leads have been referred to as right into a resort room to learn and study the brand new tune and instantly beloved it. “We were delirious,” Rubinstein remembers.

Alas, their delirium could be too apparent that night after they needed to carry out “Two of Us” as soon as extra for a reside viewers. “We ran onstage for the scene”—through which Pippin and Catherine first make love—“and she sat on her little square box that came out of the floor, and I sat next to her, leaning my arm in her lap, and I sang my first line and she sang her first line. But having just heard this new song, and knowing that it was being orchestrated and would go into the show in a night or two, we looked up at each other for the third line—and broke into hysterical laughter. Because we knew this old song was going away—it was halfway in the garbage—and we no longer had to give it respect or decorum, and our discipline just disappeared. And seeing each other laugh made us laugh harder. I remember looking at Stanley Lebowsky, the conductor, who was conducting nothing, just soft accompaniment to this song we weren’t singing. We sang about four per cent of it, maybe. And at the end, oh, were we sweating. That was one of the most shameful moments I have ever had onstage.”

Elysa Gardner has written about theatre and music for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Town & Country, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, and USA Today, amongst different publications, and has been a contributor to VH1 and NPR. She is a theatre critic for The New York Sun and New York Stage Review, and hosts the podcast Stage Door Sessions for Broadway Direct.

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