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Kathleen Marshall puts her stamp on Broadway and 'Follies'
Sunday, April 01, 2001
NEW YORK -- Having assisted brother Rob to choreograph his first three Broadway shows, Kathleen Marshall has since done five of her own and now has three running simultaneously -- "Kiss Me Kate," "Seussical, the Musical" and "Follies," opening Thursday, just 30 years and a day since its original debut. She had to give up her artistic directorship of the Encores! Series of concert musicals to accommodate all the work.
Kathleen calls choreography "an apprenticeship -- me with Robby, Robby with Graciella [Danielle], Graciella with Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse, Fosse with Jerome Robbins." Each former assistant goes on to mentor others, and Kathleen has already seen her assistant, Point Park College grad Rob Ashford, go on to solo choreography.
To start, you get jobs from previous jobs; producers and directors keep reappearing on her resume in a stepladder of collaboration. "I think there are just 10 people working in musical theater," Kathleen jokes.
But now, she is also sought for her track record: On each of her current Broadway shows, she worked with directors for the first time -- Michael Blakemore ("Kate"), Frank Galati ("Seussical") and Matthew Warchus ("Follies"). "It's also three straight directors not living in New York," she sighs, suggesting the awkward logistics of collaboration.
"I'm happiest in a rehearsal studio," Kathleen says. "Robby's been in development for movies for the past year -- that's wonderful but frustrating. We're used to the faster-paced world of Broadway."
Her rehearsal practice was on display last month in a studio at Radio City Music Hall, working on "Follies." The Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical drama about a reunion in a derelict theater, the reference books say, "has rarely been revived because of both expense and casting difficulties."
This cast lives up to expectations, including theater legends Polly Bergen, Donald Saddler and Marge Champion and younger veterans Blythe Danner, Judith Ivey, Treat Williams and Gregory Harrison. Kathleen is steering in tandem with young English director Warchus ("Art," "True West").
"Matthew and I never saw the original 'Follies,' which we think is good," she says. Rather than be intimidated by the famous Hal Prince-Michael Bennett original, "the only thing to do is make it personal."
On the day in question, she, assistant Joey Pizzi and dance captain Rod McCune were creating the famous "Mirror, Mirror" number for the "ladies" and their youthful "ghosts." Kathleen was low-key: "Ladies, here we're pointing. ... From here, we airplane around. ... Now, you tell me, shall we do the whole thing one more time?" Her favorite phrase is "kinda sorta," as in "do it kinda sorta like this."
"I want to see if I can do it with my glasses off," said Bergen. "Are you me?" said Champion to her ghost. Someone chimed in, "I always wanted to do that Rockette thing." "Well, there they are," said Kathleen, pointing to framed Rockettes on the wall.
Intricate planning was evident as the dozen ladies and ghosts completed the pinwheel pattern in unison. No one worked harder than Kathleen, who had to think, observe and strategize while she moved. "I need a couple of border collies in here to wrangle them into order," she said during a pause. "As Robby says, if the choreographer stops, the whole room stops."
During a break, Champion, 81, recalled making her vaudeville debut in Pittsburgh in 1938, doing five shows a day with a side trip to Steubenville on Sunday, because of the blue laws. "Margery Bell did a fair toe dance," reported "Variety," but what Champion remembers is her first taste of camembert cheese and first sip of beer. "I was 18. Maybe I grew up in Pittsburgh!" Of Kathleen, Champion says, "She's a dream. If this is going to be my last show -- who knows? -- to have this company and Kathleen as our choreographer, well, I tell friends I can't wait to get to rehearsal."
CMU grad Dorothy Stanley, who plays Dee Dee, and Nadine Isenegger, Point Park '92, a standby, recall earning their Equity cards through the Pittsburgh CLO, as did Kathleen. "CMU was the best two years of my life!" enthused Stanley. "I remember Larry Carra telling me, 'Just go out there and sparkle!' I owe everything to Pittsburgh and [the CLO's] Bill Thunhurst."
Warchus came in to watch Kathleen's rehearsal. "I love collaborating," he said, "as long as you have common taste. Kathleen and I both love 'Follies.' I can feed off the work she does, and she can feed off mine. [It helps that] we're contemporaries."
Kathleen says, "Matthew's the first director I've worked with who's younger than me."
Building a career
"It was never a conscious decision to go off on my own," Kathleen says -- just as it hadn't been when she left performing. Then, Rob kept hiring her as his assistant; later, good offers kept coming in to work alone. One was to choreograph "Swinging on a Star," a regional theater revue of songs with Johnny Burke lyrics. The recommendation came from John Kander, who remembered Kathleen from "Spider Woman."
After assisting Rob on "Damn Yankees" in 1994, she worked with him on Hal Prince's "Petrified Prince" and planned to join him on "Victor/Victoria" -- "I was looking forward to working with Julie Andrews." But "Swinging" needed her. After another regional production, it became Kathleen's first solo Broadway show, opening the same week in 1995 as "Victor/Victoria," saving their parents a separate trip from Pittsburgh.
The Encores! connection came through director Charley Repole, whom Kathleen knew from CLO. He asked her to choreograph "Call Me Madam" in early 1995, the second Encores! season, when actors basically stood at the mikes, with maybe one dance number. For "Madam," that was "Something to Dance About," and it stopped the show. "It didn't occur to me then, but it was my New York choreographic debut."
In 1996, she choreographed "DuBarry Was a Lady" for Encores!, then "Time and Again" in San Diego for director Jack O'Brien (with whom she'd worked on "Damn Yankees"). Expected to transfer to New York, it didn't, nor did "Swinging" make its expected trip to Japan. Into this momentary pause came a call from Encores!, whose artistic director had left to take "Chicago" to Broadway; would Kathleen succeed him?
"Right away, I called Robby and Paul Martino [their agent]. Robby said, 'I know it's a surprise, but if it's something you'd ever want to do, how do you know you'll ever have the chance again?'"
She took it. Fortunately, the Encores! season is winter-spring, and her other projects fell in summer-fall, until "Follies."
Along the way, in 1995, she had done a workshop of "Violet" with director Susan Schulman -- under whom she had earned her Equity card at the CLO in 1981 -- and in 1997 they restaged "Violet" off-Broadway. But her second Broadway show was "1776" for director Scott Ellis, with whom she and Rob had worked on "She Loves Me."
In 1997, now in charge of Encores!, she had the pleasure of hiring Rob to direct "Promises, Promises." She hired Schulman to direct "The Boys From Syracuse," which she choreographed. In 1998, she choreographed "L'il Abner," then allowed herself to direct as well as choreograph "Babes in Arms" (1999) and "Wonderful Town" (2000, her last season in charge).
In the summer of 1998, she choreographed an off-Broadway Berlin-Hart revue, "As Thousands Cheer," and that fall she did the national tour of "Sunset Boulevard" (again with Schulman). Along the way, she made her directing debut with "Chess" in Maryland.
Then, "I got a call from Second Stage asking if I'd be interested in directing Sondheim's 'Saturday Night' [written when he was 23]. 'Yes -- yes, I think sooo!,' " she says, laying on the "whaddayanuts?" emphasis.
But the prospect was daunting. "I went to see Sondheim at his townhouse. I was very nervous." They ended up editing the book together. Sondheim, she says, "is amazingly collaborative, very forthcoming with information, and he's a hard worker and jumps right in." How hard? The last night of the workshop for his new musical, "Wise Guys," was also the opening night for his Broadway revue "Putting It Together" -- "and the next morning at 10, he showed up for the final auditions for 'Saturday Night.'"
That was in the middle of Kathleen's 21-month sprint. At one point, she followed 12-hour technical rehearsals for "Kate" with mornings casting "Saturday Night," and she planned Encores! during stray moments. "I realized I was stretching myself thin."
She says it's great fun putting together a creative team and playing "let's pretend" when casting for Encores! -- and you have a good chance of pulling it off. As examples, she cites getting Vanessa Williams to do "St. Louis Woman" and Nathan Lane for "Do Re Mi."
There were other duties. She's staged numbers from her shows for several Macy's Thanksgiving parades: "This is the only time a choreographer gives directions like 'line up with that street lamp, stand on that manhole cover.'" Then the day after "Seussical" opened last November, she was up at 6 a.m. to head to Washington to stage the Angela Lansbury section of the Kennedy Center Honors.
"Seussical"
The bottom line on "Seussical" is the Broadway truism that "musicals are never finished, you just run out of time." It was Kathleen's first experience with a new musical going right to commercial production, with all the pressures of time and money.
"Seussical" has charm and a lively Stephen Flaherty score, but in retrospect, Kathleen says it suffered from "workshop love" -- the Toronto workshop was such a hit, they skipped further development. It happens often. "As Robby says, how many times do they come measure the green-room couch because that's what they used in rehearsal."
Finding the balance between kids and adults was an issue. On the "Seussical" design, says Kathleen, "they were afraid to let it look like children's theater." The initial result was awkwardly dark. The marketing campaign wasn't sure how to pitch the show. Original lead David Shiner, now replaced by a series of attention-getting guest stars like Rosie O'Donnell and Cathy Rigby, is a great comic mime, but he hadn't spoken onstage or worked with a director or choreographer since college.
Another problem was leadership. They "changed parents," as Kathleen puts it, when original producer Livent went bust in the middle of the workshop. Director Galati never took firm control. Kathleen praises producers Fran and Barry Weissler for financing the expense of redesign, re-rehearsal and the hiring of a play-doctor.
She recalls the night they "took me to dinner and asked how I'd feel if they asked Rob to come take a look!" She was delighted. "Rob helped focus everyone, telling them not to be afraid to be bright and cheery." But there was only so much that could be done in a few weeks. Kathleen knows that, because in 1996 she did a spot of doctoring herself, on "Once Upon a Mattress."
At a "Seussical" preview 10 days before its opening, Kathleen said, "I feel I've been in Biosphere 2 for five months. It's been like 'Groundhog Day,' living the same day over and over." Usually, she said, you're done two weeks earlier, with time "to turn cheerleader, clean your apartment before your parents arrive and plan what to wear to the opening."
You can see why choreographers want to direct. Since "Seussical" is basically sung-through, the choreographer is involved in nearly every moment. "It's hard to have the responsibility without the authority," Kathleen sums up. But she loved working with Flaherty, a fellow Pittsburgher her brother's age. "Stephen's like the Energizer Bunny."
Moving on
After "Follies" opens, Kathleen has "Hair" to direct for Encores! "I want to get a young cast, concentrate on the music and the relationships, and there won't be a love bead or Nehru jacket in sight." Then she has two companies of "Kate" to rehearse -- a national tour and a London company.
Along with serving on the board of the union for directors and choreographers, Kathleen is often asked to speak to theater groups. At a recent critics' meeting, she talked about choreography, quoting Robert Frost's statement that "writing a poem without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net."
"I like a net," she said. "Story-telling is different from an all-dance program. My nightmare would be to choreograph the opening number of an awards show: Who are they?"
Asked about her specialty, she says, "I think my taste is really eclectic." Doing Encores!, she found she loves the classy past-masters like Rodgers and Hart but also the modern sophistication of Sondheim and the brassy blare of Jule Styne.
As to working with a director, "It's sort of an arranged marriage. You have to do this very delicate negotiation." With Rob, she had the ideal working relationship. "He always allowed me the freedom to say anything. His way of working has become my way of working: Sit down and conceptualize a number, then story-board it, then get it on its feet."
In an essay last May, assessing the revival of dance on Broadway, New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella gave a nod to Rob as part of the choreographic establishment, then picked Kathleen and Susan Stroman as the best of the new crop. Although Stroman's all-dance "Contact" later beat Kathleen's "Kate" for the choreography Tony, Acocella praised Kathleen's subtlety: "She is true to her gifts -- wit, nuance, class." She suggested both women "were put on Earth precisely to reveal the glories of Broadway's past," and she ended with a quote from Kathleen: "These are our 20th-century classics."
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