You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (48 page)

Unsurprisingly, even as
Like Jazz
opened, he was back on the East Coast preparing another musical,
The Great Ostrovsky
. Coleman had first started on this show in late 1998, the same year he had begun
Pamela
, as a vehicle for comedian and satirist Alan King, who in addition to his work in clubs and onscreen had Broadway credits as a performer and producer.

For this tuner, set in the halcyon days of the Yiddish Theater in New York, when companies dedicated to presenting work specifically for Jewish audiences abounded on the Lower East Side, Coleman was working with yet another new collaborator, but one who was an old acquaintance: Avery Corman. “I had originally met [Cy] in St. Thomas in the ’60s when he was down there visiting a friend of his, Marty Clark, a songwriter who wrote with Bob Haymes,” Corman recalled.
28
Since that time they had stayed in touch, primarily through their friend David Newman, who had written the book for
The Life
. In the intervening years Corman had written the screenplays for movies such as
Oh, God!
and
Kramer vs. Kramer
. When the idea of
Ostrovsky
first came up, Coleman approached Corman, sensing he would have an affinity for the material.

Corman drafted a script about a fictional impresario, David Ostrovsky, who, as the musical opens, is enjoying success with adaptations of classics ranging from a musical version of
The Dybbuk
to a version of
King Lear
with a happy ending. Unfortunately, changing times and the machinations of unscrupulous producers undermine the man, forcing him to retire, but only briefly. In the tradition of the character’s own productions, Ostrovsky gets to enjoy a theatrical comeback and a happy ending.

Coleman returned to his earliest musical roots for this piece, writing a score filled with the klezmer music that his parents so enjoyed. He did not, however, work in mere pastiche. “[Coleman] says he liked the story and the challenge of incorporating the distinctive sound of klezmer music into a Broadway score” was the way that Douglas J. Keating described the composer’s work in a March 17
Philadelphia Inquirer
feature.

One thing Coleman didn’t talk about with Keating was the provenance of one song in the score, “On Top,” which had a melody that came from Coleman’s trunk. He had written it in 1995 for Liza Minnelli when she replaced a vacationing Julie Andrews in
Victor/Victoria
. The song had gone unused, so when
Ostrovsky
came around he pulled it out and penned a new klezmer-sounding verse that segued into a driving Broadway-style showstopper.

Coleman might have been able to transform a quintessential Minnelli tune into a song for the company manager of a Yiddish theater troupe, but he was not able to reconcile his own hard-nosed business sense with King’s. According to Corman, “there was never any legal work done between any of the parties” while the script and score were being drafted, and when it came time for contracts to be written, King made demands. Coleman told Corman that he found King’s conditions “untenable,” and then, Corman said, “Suddenly I got a phone call from Alan one day, ‘I’m not going forward with this. The terms are not what I want.’”
29

“What happened next, after Alan withdrew,” Corman remembered, “is Cy knew Marjorie Samoff, who was running the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, and he got in touch with her, and then they offered us a production.”
30
The staging, however, would be dependent on the nonprofit’s securing the funding for it.

Eventually, the theater committed to the show, asking Douglas C. Wager, who, after a long tenure at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., had just joined the Prince’s staff as director in residence, to stage it. In addition to Wager, the show’s creative team would include Birch, who would both choreograph and codirect.

A Broadway-worthy cast was assembled for the three-week Philadelphia engagement. Bob Gunton (who earned a Tony nomination for his performance as Juan Perón in
Evita
when it debuted in America) was cast as Ostrovsky. The company also featured Louise Pitre (fresh off her success as Donna Sheridan in
Mamma Mia!
) and Jonathan Hadary (who received a Tony nomination for his performance as Herbie opposite Tyne Daly in
Gypsy
), along with such Broadway veterans as Nick Corley, Paul Kandel, Daniel Marcus, and Kirsten Wyatt.

Bringing the show to life was by all reports difficult. As the creators worked to refine it, artistic differences developed. Corley recalled it as “one of those shows where, if they wanted to talk about the piece itself, we were ushered into the hallway. We spent a lot of time there.” He added, “The budget aspect of the show was stressful. . . . [It] kept getting slashed, but they were still trying to get the show on. So there was supposed to be an ensemble, and the ensemble got cut from the show right before we started rehearsal, so we had like, what, a two-person ensemble.”
31

Corman, too, remembered how the show’s limited finances affected things, particularly the music: “I always thought for budget reasons we were short an instrument that would have given it a bigger lift, and the music would have more of a klezmer feel than it had.”
32

Regardless of these issues, Corley said, “It was a happy group, and I think a lot of that was Cy. I mean, we didn’t really care because we were working with Cy, and he was building songs on us. He made us all feel good about what we were doing. And I have to say that that was the fun of it.”
33

For Corley, one particularly enjoyable number was a comic patter song that he shared with Daniel Marcus, who recalled, “About two weeks into rehearsal—there was a side room directly across the hall from where we were—Cy says, ‘Come over here. Come in here.’ And we go in and he just starts playing.” It was there that Coleman built the arrangements and expanded on the tune, telling the actors, “Try this and you try this.”
34
“It was,” as Corley said, “classical musical comedy, like a scene from a movie.”
35

Once in Philadelphia the company continued to face changes. “The opening number did change every single day up until the moment we opened,” Corley recalled, “and we were like, ‘Can we pick a version to go out and do for the audience tonight?’”
36
And yet, Marcus pointed out, “[Cy] was all guns firing trying to come up with solutions. And he was so happy. That’s the thing I take away most from that experience. You know the guy with the thing in Boston that’s not working out and that pressure and that need to come up with something. . . . [Cy] liked that pressure.”
37

The Great Ostrovsky
did finally face the critics, almost all of whom found ways to praise the music. “Coleman is known for his masterful melodies–and ‘Ostrovsky’ is loaded with them,” wrote J. Cooper in a March 23
Philadelphia Weekly
review. In the March 23 edition of the
Jewish Exponent
on the same day, Michael Elkin said that Coleman had written “show tunes that show a bravura and braggadocio underscoring the unctuous and the anxious who dominated Second Avenue.”

The problem, both critics felt, was with Corman’s book. “Corman doesn’t take a page out of the life of Yiddish theater’s titans; he shreds it, bissel by bissel,” was Elkin’s assessment, while Cooper used his praise of the songs to damn Corman’s work, writing, “If only Corman’s story were as full-bodied as the show’s score.”

Neither book nor score was praised in the
Variety
review that ran on April 4, after the show had concluded its limited engagement. With the notices in mind, Coleman and Corman began to consider their next steps with
The Great Ostrovsky
. As the year progressed, this project, along with
Grace
,
Pamela’s First Musical
, and a few others in earlier stages of development, would occupy Coleman, as would his family life and a return to the realm of performing.

32.
Finale

As Coleman was juggling these myriad projects, he was also taking on a new personal responsibility. His wife, Shelby, remembered how he was the first to raise the subject of having children. “He came home one day and said, ‘I realize I never asked you . . . do you want to have kids?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, well you know. . . .’ (I was 38 at the time.) ‘Yeah, I’d like to have kids, but I think the time might have passed.’ And he was like, ‘No. No. I never thought about it, but if you want to have kids, we should have kids!’ And I said something, and then he said, ‘Yes. You should have a kid!’ A friend had convinced him he was depriving me of motherhood.’”
1

Coleman’s sudden interest in the idea of children may have come from his friend journalist Malcolm MacPherson, a man he had known since the late 1960s, when they met at a house party in London. Coleman later became godfather to one of MacPherson’s children. And as MacPherson’s widow, Charlie, recounted, “Cy was so great with the kids. He would basically buy out F. A. O Schwartz, and these gifts would come in boxes the size of a refrigerator. He was just so generous.”
2

It was just one instance of the paternal instincts Coleman showed over the years. Houston Huddleston, son of one of Coleman’s early collaborators, Floyd Huddleston, remembered how Coleman helped him out as he began his career, “Cy wrote my introductory letter when I was trying to get into the American Film Institute.”
3

Beyond such relationships, Coleman demonstrated a father’s instinct with music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell ever since they first met: “He was very mentorlike, and he also had a kind of fatherly overtone with me. It was a surrogate father kind of thing. . . . He really wanted to teach me, and it was obvious that he had taken a real interest in and made an investment in my career.”
4

At home he and Shelby continued talking about having children. Eventually, she said, “We both went through the humiliating, horrible process of fertility testing. His was the least of it. Mine was a lot more invasive. . . . He was given a clean bill. He came home one day, saying, ‘It ain’t me, baby. My fish are swimmin’.’”
5

There was some question, however, about what would be necessary for her to conceive, and so rather than subjecting themselves to the rigors of proactive conception, the couple began to consider adoption and eventually embarked on that process.

There were some disappointments along the way, but eventually, in 2000, the couple brought home a baby girl, whom they named Lily Cye. She was born just as Coleman was finishing up his first full studio recording in nearly thirty years,
It Started with a Dream
. Shelby recalled that she flew to California on her own to be with Lily Cye’s birth mother while Coleman stayed behind to finish up work on the CD. As soon as the child was born, though, he hopped a plane to California to be with his wife and new daughter.

According to both his wife and his friends, Coleman took to fatherhood quickly, and by the time Lily Cye was a toddler, Shelby remembered, “she had the run of the whole house. He had an open-door policy. It didn’t matter who was there. Any collaborator he was working with at that time will tell you, she’d come in and he would stop everything to play with her, get down on the floor with her.
6
He even gave her a memento from his early career: the toy piano he had grudgingly played back in the 1950s.

Lily’s presence was also felt at the theater while Coleman was working. She and her mother were present throughout the process of Coleman’s work on
Grace
in Amsterdam (the toddler was even at the show’s opening night), and Nick Corley remembered watching Coleman with his daughter during rehearsals for
The Great Ostrovsky
in Philadelphia: “When Shelby would come with his daughter, she would come running into the room, and he would pick her up and swirl her around and forty years just dropped away. It was great to watch that happen, to just see the years melt away. It always made me happy when they’d stop by rehearsal.”
7

The album he had been working on when Lily Cye was born hit stores in early 2002, and in tandem with its release, Coleman also made a rare cabaret appearance, offering two concerts at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in March. They were his first cabaret appearances in nearly thirty years, and as Coleman indicated in an interview two years later, his absence from that world had not been intentional. Of performing, he said, “It’s one of the things I have to do.”
8
But with his work on Broadway, scheduling had always been an issue.

For a while in the 1970s, Coleman had been able to satisfy this need through his work with symphonies, where he could play just one night, but even this had proven to be problematic, and so he curtailed this side of his career. In October 1981, he described what had caused this for Barbara Delatiner and the
New York Times
: “‘Here I was in Boston, trying to get things into shape [for
On the Twentieth Century
] . . . and I was expected to take off and go to Tulsa and Chattanooga and the last thing on my mind was playing a concert. Why, I had to find a piano shop that would let me use its Steinway, and I’d sneak away from rehearsal to go down into the shop’s basement to practice. That was it. No more concerts and no more conflicts.’”

As Coleman was describing in 2004 how intrinsic performing was to his nature, he was preparing for a two-week stint at the uptown club Feinstein’s at the Loews Regency Hotel, coincidentally just a few blocks away from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where he had had his first big success as an entertainer. “As soon as I heard ‘Would you play these two weeks at Feinstein’s?’ I thought, ‘Another opportunity. Let me get it ready.’”
9

Coleman’s stint at Feinstein’s ran from October 12 to October 23, and in the show he offered up some of his hits, anecdotes about his career, and one interpretation of a jazz standard he had not written (“Green Dolphin Street”). It was an engagement that prompted Stephen Holden to write in the
New York Times
on October 22, “[Coleman] still commands the keyboard with the authority of a sharp-shooter.”

After the Feinstein’s gig, Coleman settled back into a routine of father and married man about town. There were meetings about his various musicals, including an upcoming revival of
Sweet Charity
, but, unusually, he was not in the throes of any rehearsal process. “I’m established now. I’m more secure and I’m not so hungry,” he told Robin Finn for an October 8
New York Times
feature. As for his social life, that also changed in the new century. Shelby recalled, “Our original deal when we were first together and got married was that we would stay home at least two nights a week. I made him promise me that. . . . So when Lily was born, before she came, I said, ‘This has to change. We’re going to flip it. We’re going to have to be home five nights a week, and he did it.’ He said, ‘Okay.’”
10

One evening out for the couple was November 18, 2004: the opening of Michael Frayn’s play
Democracy
. It wasn’t just an interest in one of Broadway’s newest offerings that drew Coleman to the show; he was also there to support old friends. The production was staged by
City of Angels
and
The Life
director Michael Blakemore and featured James Naughton, who starred in Coleman’s
I Love My Wife
and
Angels
.

After the performance the Colemans went to Tavern on the Green, where Cy had spent so many early mornings performing on the 1950s television show
Date in Manhattan
. During the course of the opening-night party, Coleman talked with A. R. Gurney about an English-language revision to the musical
Grace
and was waiting for Blakemore and Naughton to arrive when he complained that he was not feeling well. He and Shelby left the party and hurried to New York Presbyterian Hospital. As soon as they arrived at the emergency room, Coleman collapsed and died, a victim of heart failure. He was seventy-five years old.

In Coleman’s November 20 obituary in the
New York Times
, Robert Berkvist quoted one of his final interviews. Just one month before he died, Coleman said, “Retirement? It won’t work for me. I’m lucky to be in a profession where you can keep getting better. To put it in musician’s terms, my chops are good.”

The night before the obituary ran, the lights on Broadway were dimmed in tribute to a man who had had eleven musicals produced there, had written full scores for over a dozen others, and was at work on at least three more new musicals at the time of his death. It was a workload that well illustrated an anecdote his friend and colleague Campbell shared with
Playbill.com
the morning after her mentor’s death: “We had talked a lot about doing a revue of his, of his work. . . . And he didn’t want to do it because, he said, ‘I’m not done.’ . . .”