Broadway Babylon (2 page)

“Broadway is … I mean this about theater in general, it means freedom to me. As a girl—a total tomboy—I wanted to be an aviatrix, to be that high and that free and far away from boredom. On stage, that is exactly what I do. I’m complete, yet I’m somebody else. Stage acting is the most freeing activity I know.”—actress and Actors’ Equity Association President C
OLLEEN
D
EWHURST

“Broadway is magic time! It may be childish, but I love to see a curtain going up, and to this day [1997], when it rises, I want to be on that stage. Now my theater life is over, but I go all the time and I’m a wonderful audience. The curtain goes up, the bank of lights in the balcony comes on, and off we go. It’s heaven!”—J
ONATHAN
H
ARRIS
(
Lost in Space
’s Dr. Smith), stage and TV actor

“Broadway is the most nerve-wrackingly glorious place on earth to work.… I just wish it could be the other way ‘round of what it is: that far more people saw the musicals and plays than the movie versions!”—B
EATRICE
A
RTHUR
(
Mame
and its non-hit movie version)

“Broadway is what excitement builds to, if you write songs.”—composer E
UBIE
B
LAKE

“Broadway is what outsiders have created. And Tin Pan Alley, which supplied the music.… Mostly Jews, also gays … Catholics. Not wishing to insult white Protestant heterosexuals, but clearly their talents lie in making money and rules, not art.”—N
ICHOLAS
D
ANTE
, co-writer,
A Chorus Line

“Broadway is fairer, more realistic, more decent than it used to be. Today you can be openly gay or lesbian and have a stage career and win Tonys, like Nathan Lane and Cherry Jones. Mere decades ago, you couldn’t present gay or lesbian characters on a New York stage or serve a drink in a bar to ‘a known homosexual.’ Those good old days were not.”—Tony- and Emmy-winner M
ICHAEL
J
ETER

“Broadway is the one medium, and art, that has said and done the most about AIDS, while other media, as well as political and religious institutions, have shamefully neglected this national tragedy and challenge.”—G
REGORY
P
ECK

“Broadway is more ‘all-American’ than ever before. The price for this—in Hollywood too—is less glamour and diversity of types, accents, outlooks, and less perspective. Look at the golden age of Broadway or of the movies—if you hadn’t had the European presence you did, behind the scenes as well as on, you wouldn’t have had a golden age.”—
A Chorus Line
co-writer J
AMES
K
IRKWOOD

“Broadway is producing, or yielding, more and more cookie-cutter people. Clone people or actors. Somehow, the bigger our population, the more alikeness in the younger people.”—legendary producer C
HERYL
C
RAWFORD

“Broadway is big enough for b-i-g personalities.… Merman and Channing were too large for movies, forget TV. Broadway dotes on the bigger-than-life and the outrageous. At its best, Broadway is terrifically glamorous and outrageous.”—G
EORGE
B
URNS
in 1983

“Broadway is not the happy habit it was. You’d go back each season to see your favorite stars in new shows. Stars can go away for years now, in between stage projects.”—producer A
LEXANDER
C
OHEN

“Broadway is for people with longer attention spans. Seeing a play or musical is in several ways a commitment. Theatre is the ne plus ultra of Going Out. It’s something to congratulate oneself on. You know, in America they don’t really watch TV anymore—they watch ‘what else is on.’ ”—writer-announcer A
LISTAIR
C
OOKE

“Broadway is partly about responsibility to language.… Plays come at you more through the ear than the eye. A play is ninety percent an auditory
experience. I don’t trust people to pay the attention they should.… There’s the issue of the reduced attention span. People used to be able to listen to and comprehend an entire paragraph at a time.”—three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright E
DWARD
A
LBEE

“Broadway is not about writing about what you know. Broadway is imagination unleashed. Lerner and Loewe wrote about Scotland and ancient England. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote about Siam and Oklahoma. Why limit yourself?”—lyricist E.Y. H
ARBURG
(“Over the Rainbow”)

“Broadway is
for
the creator. It respects writers. In Hollywood when my play
Me
was produced [in 1973 with Geraldine Fitzgerald and Richard Dreyfuss], they congratulated me not because I wrote a play, but because I directed it. Hollywood always values the interpreter over the creator.”—ex-TV star G
ARDNER
M
C
K
AY
(
Adventures in Paradise
)

“Broadway is what I should have focused on.… My real love as an actor is Shakespeare. I should have gone to England, maybe.… One of the ruder people I worked with, who later gave up the stage for the silver screen—silver tarnishes, remember?—once said I had a future in the theatre because I had a face long enough to wrap twice around my neck! I should’ve followed the creep’s advice.”—J
OHN
C
ARRADINE

“Broadway is where a commercially successful and stereotyped actor can try something else. Nobody in [Hollywood] could see me in a mental institution, but on Broadway I starred in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, and it was great.… I never got to make the movie, and my role won [Jack] Nicholson the Oscar.”—K
IRK
D
OUGLAS

“Broadway is more impressive to someone from the Midwest. Two of the biggest thrills of my lifetime were on Broadway … when I played the lead’s best friend in
Tea and Sympathy
and got nominated for ‘best supporting’ by the New York Drama Critics, and then when I took over the lead in
Bus Stop
, by William Inge. Those two had more of an impact on me than later when I found out
Bewitched
was the number-one-rated [TV] show for the season.”—D
ICK
Y
ORK
(the first Darrin)

“Broadway is wonderful! Like Berlin was. Before Hitler, of course.”—L
OTTE
L
ENYA
(
Cabaret
)

“Broadway is the most, it’s just the heights. It’s intoxicating.… After Broadway, everything else is poverty.”—D
OLORES
G
RAY
(
Carnival in Flanders
)

“Broadway is the collision of talent and maximum publicity in a medium free of popcorn.”—L
ARRY
K
ERT
(
West Side Story, Company
)

“Broadway is, at its best, words and music that blend and elevate.”—critic V
INCENT
C
ANBY

“Broadway is good writing or diverting performers. One or the other. Both can happen, but don’t expect it—be happily surprised. And grateful.”—H
OWARD
C
RABTREE
, singer, dancer, designer, and former chorus boy

“Broadway is the illusion that everyone up there on the stage is having the time of their lives.”—P
EGGY
C
ASS
, Agnes Gooch in
Auntie Mame

“Broadway is, like the [
Chicago
] song says, ‘razzle-dazzle.’ People want to believe. They want to be transported out of a grimy, gritty world. So … you razzle-dazzle ‘em.”—R
OBERT
P
RESTON
(
The Lion in Winter, The Music Man
)

“Broadway is where I was happiest.”—musical star M
ARY
M
ARTIN

“Broadway is, or used to be, America’s showplace. The national circus.”—L
EE
R
EMICK
(
Anyone Can Whistle
)

“Broadway is more blatant than ever. And when an ecdysiast says that, you know it’s gotten a mite raw! True, it
was
less truthful. But there wasn’t actual nudity, just promises. Early on, I was in a traveling chorus show which cleaned up because we were billed as ‘50 Beautiful Girls!… 45 Gorgeous Costumes!’ ”—G
YPSY
R
OSE
L
EE

“Broadway is just reflective of the bigger picture.… Bringing back
The Graduate
as a play isn’t [about] nostalgia or reviving a classic movie. It’s trading on the nudity of its star actress.… More people will go see
Take Me Out
now that it’s won the Best Play Tony, but the big lure wasn’t just drama or the outing theme, but athletes showering naked on stage. Shock, or nudity, is what it now takes to sell a show and get people inside. A good show’s not enough. You gotta have a gimmick, and it’s either major names or spectacles or major nudity.”—Monte Carlo columnist D
ELPHINE
R
OSAY

“Broadway is and has always been more creative and daring than Hollywood, and I put it down to there being no studio heads in charge of the theater. Those were very uncreative, uneducated, frightened, conformist men, and it all revolved around safe formulas for the masses. Pro-commerce and anti-controversy.”—Tony-winner R
ODDY
M
C
D
OWALL

“Broadway is, thank goodness, non-akin to the movie world. In several aspects.… Broadway tries to cast for ability rather than type … [and] Broadway will even praise you, when warranted.”—H
OWARD
D
A
S
ILVA
, the original Jud in
Oklahoma!
, who was later blacklisted in Hollywood

“Broadway is like family. In the theater there’s a kind of closeness, whether it’s the stage manager or rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter or the star. All are family.”—composer J
OHN
K
ANDER
(
Cabaret, Chicago
)

“Broadway is not as culpable as other branches of entertainment that caved in—shockingly easily—to right-wing political witch hunters. After I was blacklisted for TV and movies, my career was revivified by Broadway, as was my friend Zero Mostel’s.”—J
ACK
G
ILFORD
(
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
)

“Broadway is something that evolves. Back in the ‘50s, early ‘60s, you couldn’t have put on
Cabaret
. Today [1966] it’s a hit, and an issue. And high time, too. When it no doubt gets revived someday, it may be even more daring, with more layers revealed.”—prophetic
Cabaret
star B
ERT
C
ONVY

“Broadway is also, even primarily, a venue for plays that question and enlighten. Such works are tough to get on … difficult to get an audience. But such a play, when it attains Broadway and finds its audience—and gets media attention—can become very significant and influential.… Broadway can magnify an idea.”—three-time Tony-winner I
RENE
W
ORTH

“Broadway is a gamble. Obviously. For producers. Regardless, audiences usually win.”—producer D
AVID
M
ERRICK

“Broadway is, sooner or later, bankers waiting in the wings.”—Oscar-winning lyricist and Broadway director H
OWARD
A
SHMAN

“Broadway is not always on the money. At least when I was young. Fancy, titling a play
The Brown Danube
! I was in it, but people wanted it
blue
.… I remember fondly the plays I did in the 1930s. I remember them as clearly as
King Kong
because what you do live, in person, with an audience, remains vivid in your memory.… Two of my husbands won Academy Awards for screen-writing, and they’d never have titled a movie
The Brown Danube
!”—F
AY
W
RAY
(born 1907) in 2003, on the seventieth anniversary of
King Kong

“Broadway is the top of the heap … the big mountain peak you aim for. One of my most memorable and fulfilling times, though a helluva lot of work, was doing
The Music Man
in Chicago at the Shubert Theatre. The only thing that could have topped it would have been to take the show to Broadway. That’s the big aim, and the height of prestige.”—F
ORREST
T
UCKER
, film (
Auntie Mame
) and TV (
F Troop
) actor

“Broadway is laying it on the line. You can’t fake memorization. You can’t substitute a good camera angle or a close-up for talent and a good voice.”—D
AVID
D
UKES
(
Bent, M. Butterfly
)

“Broadway is a way of life. It’s a world and schedule of its own … and you become a night owl, almost—in a wonderful, exhilarating way—like a vampire, just waiting for the night, to do your thing. You’re eager to get on stage and live and perform deeply, in the moment.”—C
HITA
R
IVERA

“Broadway is alive. Film is dead—not commercially, [but] artistically. When you watch film, it’s done and over. The audience is not and never can be involved the same way as in a play. Theatre is alive. Anything can happen. It can absorb you. Things can go wrong or wonderfully right. With a play or a musical, there’s chemistry between audience and players. There is no chemistry toward a film.”—Tony-winning costume designer P
ATRICIA
Z
IPPRODT
(
Cabaret, Sweet Charity
)

“Broadway is footprints in the sand—a truism. But therefore more exciting, and thereafter more nostalgic.”—A
NGELA
L
ANSBURY

“Broadway is certainly not dying, as I’ve read for years in American periodicals. It’s just that Hollywood is taking over, almost monopolizing, American entertainment. And Broadway today is almost no American actor’s goal. It’s what actors resort to when Hollywood won’t use them. It’s not that way in England. We do stage, film, and television. Of course they’re all in one city. But theater is absolutely still part of the actor’s package. Nor do any of us, while working on the stage, expect to become wealthy. Which helps keep ticket prices at a decent level.”—Tony winner S
IR
N
IGEL
H
AWTHORNE