My Life
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Overture
1. Rock Island
2. Sur La Plage
3. Don’t Rain On My Parade
4. Goodnight
5. The Telephone Hour
6. Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend
7. Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina
8. Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats
9. Sixteen Going on Seventeen
10. Don’t Tell Mama
11. Soon It’s Gonna Rain
12. A Book Report on Peter Rabbit
13. And I am Telling You
14. I Believe in You
15. Keep it Gay
16. Rose’s Turn
17. Anyone can Whistle
18. The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York
19. How are Things in Glocca Morra?
20. A Trip to the Library
21. Climb Every Mountain
22. Who am I?
23. It’s A Helluva Fix We’re In
24. Emily’s Bat Mitzvah (Flashback Sequence)
25. Miracle of Miracles
26. There’s No Business Like Show Business
27. Never be Enough
Stevie Stephenson and Delacorte Press Present
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
To members of the drama club, everywhere
* ACKNOWLEDGMENTS *
Thanks go, first, to editor Jodi Keller, for her patient and probing guidance, and to Beverly Horowitz, for her passion and encouragement to get it right. A special spotlight shines on Marissa Walsh, at whose suggestion this book was begun. I clap my hands madly for Colleen Fellingham, for her careful copyediting, Jason Zamajtuk, for the eye-catching cover design, and everyone at Delacorte.
This year and every other year, the Tony for Best Agent goes to Elizabeth Kaplan. Stellar reviews are garnered by my loyal posse of early readers, for their support and invaluable feedback: Andrew Gerle, E. Lockhart, Kate Herzlin, and Mana Allen. The eleven o’clock number of gratitude goes to Dave Shine, for decades of friendship and countless enjoyable postshow discussions over dumplings!
If I were to stand center stage and name all the mentors who have taught and inspired me personally and professionally over the years, the curtain would never come down. Instead, I offer a most inadequate, all-encompassing thanks to my many talented colleagues in the world of the theatre: actors, directors, musicians, designers, teachers, collaborators, my brave fellow writers (especially my pals in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop), and the few, the happy few, who persist in producing and nurturing new writing for the stage—you know who you are, and I hand each of you a large and expensive bouquet.
For all the Broadway composers, lyricists, and book writers mentioned on these pages, whose work will eternally delight, I leap to my feet in a standing ovation. Of these, I would like to warmly thank Stephen Sondheim and Sheldon Harnick, and also Richard Maltby, Jr., all of whom have been generously supportive of my own writing for the theatre.
A solo curtain call goes to Sal Allocco, who taught me so much: how to listen to Puccini, why Agnes is flaming, how to sing very fast while making a meat pie, and what to do when I’m “Losing My Mind.” (The answer: stand in the light and belt!)
The final, company bow is for all my brothers and sisters from the original cast of Merrily We Roll Along, the most unforgettable entrée to Broadway a kid from Long Island could hope to have. Here’s to us!
Overture
“ANOTHER OP’NIN’, ANOTHER SHOW”
Kiss Me, Kate
1948. Music and lyrics by Cole Porter,
book by Samuel and Bella Spewack
BwayPhil: And it’s . . . five minutes! The call is five minutes!
AURORAROX: 7:55! I didn’t even start homework yet! Trigonometry evil, hate trig soooooo much . . . after the overture can you IM me some answers, pweeeeze???
BwayPhil: Emily, if you don’t learn how to do it yourself, you will crash and burn on the final.
AURORAROX: *pleading expression on face*
“When a friend calls,
a friend must answer,
When the music starts,
become the dancer”
AURORAROX: so send me the answers I BEG of you
BwayPhil: Sheesh, if you’re going to **sing** about it . . . ok but just this once.
AURORAROX: once will “never be enough,” ha!
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Shouldn’t that be “danswer”?
BwayPhil: Can it be? The Aurorafans of Rockville Centre chat room gains a new member!
AURORAROX: “danswer”?
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: To rhyme with answer. Danswer. Get it?
AURORAROX: got it
AURORAROX: it’s just sort of
AURORAROX: you know
AURORAROX: STUPID
AURORAROX: no offense
BwayPhil: Don’t be rude, Emily! She means “welcome, new person.”
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: No stupider than Aurora.
BwayPhil: Ouch, taking back the welcome . . .
AURORAROX: I don’t like the tone
AURORAROX: of your tone
AURORAROX: new person
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: You’re right. Stupid is the wrong word. How about banal, sophomoric, clichéd—
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Loud. I forgot loud.
BwayPhil: Are you lost? This is the Aurorafans of Rockville Centre chat room, planetbroadway.com?
AURORAROX: FANS
AURORAROX: get it?
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: “Aurora” is no “Guys and Dolls,” is all I’m saying.
BwayPhil: “Sit down, SAVEME, you’re rocking the boat,” is all I’m saying.
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Cute! Score one for Phil.
AURORAROX: maybe you should see Aurora
AURORAROX: a few more times
AURORAROX: with an ***open heart***
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: I’ve seen Aurora plenty, thanks.
AURORAROX: so have we,
AURORAROX: but plenty will “never be enough”
AURORAROX: (that’s a song from the show, just so ya know)
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: And just how many times have “ya” seen it, Miz Rox?
AURORAROX: would you care
AURORAROX: to take this one, BwayPhil?
BwayPhil: We’re definitely approaching three figures.
BwayPhil: For an exact count I’ll have to open my spreadsheets, it’ll just take a minute . . .
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: turning blue—grabbing heart medication—
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: Kids—you are kids, right?—Please, get a life, okay?
AURORAROX: now that we’ve chatted
AURORAROX: & gotten to know each other
AURORAROX: i feel i can say this to you, SAVEME
AURORAROX: GO AWAY
SAVEMEFROMAURORA: I’m serious. Don’t waste your time and money. I know what I’m talking about.
BwayPhil: Adios, SAVEME. Crappy screenname, BTW.
AURORAROX: LOL! {{{{philip}}}}
AURORAROX: whew, he’s gone
BwayPhil: Now attention, ***true*** Aurorafans, it is now 8:02 . . . a mere twenty-five miles away, at the Rialto Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City . . .
BwayPhil: . . . the overture for performance #1013 of Aurora is about to begin! Places, the call is places please! Get your CDs ready . . .
AURORAROX: got mine.
BwayPhil: Got mine! On my count, press PLAY. 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1
1
“ROCK ISLAND”
The Music Man
1957. Music, lyrics, and book by Meredith Willson
Sometimes—pretty often, in fact—sixteen-year-old Em
ily Pearl wished that her life were a musical.
A fabulous Broadway musical, she’d think. With me as the star. And every Saturday morning when she and Philip took the Long Island Rail Road from Rockville Centre into Manhattan to see the matinee performance of Aurora, the thirty-eight-minute train ride would magically transform into a toe-tapping, finger-snapping, Broadway-style production number.
The chug-chug-chug of the train would set the tempo. The conductors would tap-dance down the aisles, punching holes in the passengers’ tickets to a syncopated beat. The babies would cry in key, the ringing cell phones would coalesce into a catchy melody, and soon the passengers would be swinging from the overhead luggage racks and belting out a happy traveling tune.
“Penn Station!”
That’s how the number would end, with everybody singing very loudly, in lots of harmony parts.
“Penn Station!
Next and last stahhhhhhhhhhp!”
Thunderous applause.
Emily blinked and looked around. The train was as it always was, noisy and filled with sour-faced people reading the newspaper. The last note of the musical number was still ringing in her mind. It would take only the tiniest provocation, she felt—someone humming the right note, or gesturing in a particularly theatrical way—to cast the spell that would make it truly begin. She nudged Philip with her foot.
“Philip?”
“Hmmm?” Philip was busy updating the Aurora spreadsheets. These meticulously kept records chronicled every performance of Aurora the two of them had seen, all the way back to the first preview nearly three years before. Data categories included the weather, the exact locations of their seats, whether there were any understudies on, and anything unusual that might have happened during the performance (sometimes an actor flubbed a lyric or something went wrong with the set—mishaps like these were always terribly exciting in live theatre).
“Show question.”
“Shoot.”
“Has there ever been a musical number,” Emily asked, staring dreamily out the train window at the little suburban houses flitting by, “a production number, that took place on a moving train?”
“Easy,” he said. “The Music Man, opened on Broadway 1957. Book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson—two L’s. The opening number is called ‘Rock Island.’ It takes place on a train and it’s not even sung; it’s spoken in rhythm.” Philip smiled. “Great show. Rarely has a triple-threat author created a work that succeeds so well on all three levels: book, music, and lyrics.”
It only took Emily a second to remember what Philip meant by “triple-threat.” Most musicals had a composer, who wrote the music; a lyricist, who wrote the words to the songs; and a book writer, who came up with the story and wrote the script. Some shows had music and lyrics by one person and book by another, and some had music by one person and book and lyrics by another. But rarely did one person do all three jobs. There was no rule against it as far as she knew; Emily supposed it was just too hard to be good at everything.
“Aurora succeeds on all three levels,” she said, somewhat defensively. She’d been feeling protective of the show since their weird encounter in the chat room with that SAVEMEFROMAURORA jerk. Banal? Aurora? Please.
“Yes, but nobody knows if Aurora was written by one, two or three people.” Philip finished tallying some numbers in his head, jotted the answer on his spreadsheet, and looked up. “Who knows, it might even be more than three. A Chorus Line was based on interviews with the entire original workshop cast. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was partly derived from group improvisations.” He was prepared to give more examples, but Emily didn’t need to hear them.
Instead, she started singing softly to herself.
“Never be enough,
My love for you could never be enough,
Ten thousand years could never be enough
To say what’s in my heart. . . .”
Emily sang in time with the rhythm of the train as she took a notebook and pen out of her messenger bag. The bag, a Hanukkah gift from her parents, had the familiar Aurora logo printed on it: a silhouette of the show’s star, the divine Marlena Ortiz, her mittened hands reaching up to the sky and a long multicolored scarf twirling ribbonlike in the air around her. Emily started to write.
“Whatcha doing?” murmured Philip, perusing his copy of Variety, the weekly show-business newspaper. Last week Aurora’s ticket sales had dipped slightly, but the weather had been horrible. Funny how things like that made a difference. “I need a ‘persuasive essay’ for English comp on Monday.” Emily tapped her pencil eraser against her lower lip. “And I just figured out what my subject is.”
Philip frowned. “Didn’t Henderson tell you not to write about the show anymore?”
“It’s not about the show.” She leaned forward, bright-eyed with inspiration. “I’m going to write about Aurora. Aurora herself. The person who wrote the show.”
“I don’t see the difference, it’s still Aurora.” Philip didn’t look up from his Variety. “Besides, nobody knows who wrote the show. Except whoever it was, of course.”
“Hmmph,” said Emily, undeterred. “But somebody did write it, that’s the point! ‘Aurora, By Herself.’ That’s what it says in the Playbill, and on the posters, and on the marquee. There is an Aurora, somewhere.”
“True, but Henderson might not see it the same way.”
“This is a persuasive essay,” said Emily, a mad gleam in her eye, “and I’m going to persuade the reader that Aurora, the real Aurora, is actually two people: a collaborative team of composer-lyricist and book writer.” She thought for a moment. “Or maybe it’s a composer and lyricist–book writer, I’m not totally sure. But one of them is a man, no older than thirty, with a rural background but highly educated. The other is a woman, not from the United States, often depressed, perhaps a former actress . . .”
The train had gone into a tunnel now, and the lights flickered off and on the way they always did at such moments. Emily didn’t notice. She continued spinning her theory, basing it on “hints” and “clues” she found in the dialogue and lyrics, costumes and staging of the show. Some of these “hints” she elevated to “compelling evidence,” and only one time did she use the word “proof.” She thought that showed a lot of restraint, which Mr. Henderson was bound to appreciate.
Philip gave up trying to dissuade her and spent the rest of the trip neatly stowing his spreadsheets, highlighters, and freshly sharpened pencils in his backpack. There was no point in trying to reason with Emily about Aurora. Her all-consuming love of Broadway musicals, like his, was as fixed and inevitable as the carefully scripted, rehearsed, choreo-graphed, spotlit, and underscored shows themselves. Real life was a dull, chaotic mess by comparison.
“Penn Station, next and last stop,” crackled the conductor’s voice over the speakers. “All passengers must leave the train. Penn Station, last stop.”
Emily and Philip had arrived. New York City, home of Times Square, Broadway, the Rialto Theatre, and Aurora.
2
“SUR LA PLAGE”
The Boy Friend
1954. Music, lyrics, and book by Sandy Wilson
Playing “stump Philip” was the preferred way to kill time on the Aurora rush ticket line. A steady steam of questions arrived, some verbally, some written on scraps of paper and passed down the line from person to person. Some days Philip declared a theme: Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, for example, or shows of the 1930s, but today he was only fielding questions about Aurora.
“How many performances have there been to date?” (A little under three years’ worth: 24 previews, 989 performances, total 1,013.)
“How many fake flower petals are released over the audience each night during the curtain call?” (Roughly a ton per performance, eight tons a week.)
“How many musicians are in the pit?” (Twelve, plus four “pit singers,” who sang along with the chorus when the onstage performers got breathless from trying to sing and dance at
the same time.)
“How much did the show initially cost to produce?” (Six and one half million dollars.)
There were many facts about Aurora, and Philip knew them all, but his personal favorite was the length of each performance. The first act of Aurora ran sixty-six, sixty-seven, or sixty-eight minutes, depending on how much applause there was. The second act ran fifty-nine or sixty minutes. Intermission was always sixteen minutes. The figures never varied, which Philip found extraordinary, since when his mother went to work on a Monday and said “See you later,” sometimes it meant later for dinner and other times she didn’t come home for two days because of a business trip to Wilmington that she’d forgotten to mark on the calendar.
“Hey,” said Emily, tugging at his sleeve. “Check it out, Ian’s back from Florida.”
Together they looked down the rush line, which formed every Saturday morning in front of the theatre and snaked down Forty-fourth Street until it turned the corner on Eighth Avenue. If you arrived before ten a.m. with cash and had the fortitude and strong bladder to wait in line until one p.m., when the rush tickets were distributed, you might get one of the thirty discounted tickets that were put aside for Saturday matinees. Thirty tickets, day of performance only, first come, first serve. They were bad seats, too, upstairs and all the way to the side, but for twenty-five dollars who could complain?
In theory, the goal of the rush line was to make sure non-wealthy people could afford to go to the theatre. In practice, the thirty tickets almost always went to some subset of the hard-core Aurorafans, all of whom had seen the show dozens of times. It was a strange club, with its own cliques and factions, and Emily and Philip considered themselves among its more reasonable members.
From a half block away, Ian spotted them and waved. He broke into a graceful, waltzing skip and proceeded to pas-de-bourrée down Forty-fourth Street until he arrived at their spot on the line.
“Emily! Philippe! Mes amis!” He gave Emily a pair of Euro-style kisses, one on each cheek, and a somewhat more manly high five was exchanged with Philip.