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Stage Preview: Music and Passion - The Copa Barry Manilow and the CLO's Van Kaplan are making Pittsburgh the hottest spot north of Havana Thursday, June 15, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Correction/Clarification: (Published June 16, 2000) The last name of Michael Jenkins, the president and managing director of Dallas Summer Musicals, which is co-producing "Barry Manilow’s Copacabana" with the Pittsburgh CLO, was given incorrectly in a story on the musical in yesterday’s editions.
Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl. But long before that, she was a character in Barry Manilow's quirky novelty hit, "Copacabana. "
The lavish musical that's making its American premiere today at the Benedum Center began its life buried among the smooth romantic ballads of Manilow's 1974 "Even Now" album. It's a story song about a 1940s love triangle at a Latin nightclub in New York, but more interesting is the story of the song that wouldn't die.
While the album's title song is now a bargain bin cut-out, "Copacabana" evolved as an unlikely radio hit, a CBS television movie, a one-act Atlantic City musical revue and a full-length London musical before emerging in its current incarnation as a multimillion-dollar book musical that is in on the ground floor of a new, regionally based way of making musicals.
"Barry Manilow's Copacabana" isn't just opening in Pittsburgh, it's Van Kap-lan's baby. The producing director of Pittsburgh CLO was specifically recruited out of Texas to produce new musicals in Pittsburgh, bucking the old-school system in which shows had to be spawned in New York.
Co-produced by Michael Jenkins of Dallas Summer Musicals and already booked for a 40-week U.S. tour, "Copa" is the brainchild of Manilow and his longtime writing partner, Bruce Sussman, with a little help from veteran stage writer Jack Feldman. But it wouldn't be happening now, and certainly not in Pittsburgh, without Kaplan.
The anatomy of "Copacabana" starts with a pair of misplaced theater writers living in a pop music world and branches out to include a heads-up booking agent who sees herself as a matchmaker of artists; a mild-mannered producer with larger-than-life dreams; a larger-than-life director with a sentimental soul; an ambitious conductor who's now out of work; and a nuts-and-bolts construction worker who makes dreams come true.
Thursday, May 4, Benedum Center, Pittsburgh
In the main Benedum rehearsal hall, Manilow and Sussman invite a roomful of Pittsburgh reporters and CLO administrators and supporters to share their growing excitement over a ball that has already been rolling for nearly two years.
The creators of "Copacabana" describe the first phases of a rehearsal process that has already begun in New York. Seated near a piano, they sound slightly rehearsed -- their comfortable give-and-take the product of many such spectacles staged for investors. This afternoon's PR show is designed to repackage Barry Manilow as a theater pro.
"We didn't start out as pop songwriters," says Sussman, the articulate lyricist who has made a lucrative career of letting his popular melody writer take all the credit. "We wanted to write musicals until something horrible happened...."
"Horrible?" quipped Manilow. "I sold 52 million records. What's so horrible about that? But despite the hit songs, we never really thought of ourselves as pop songwriters. After all this time we're finally getting back to our roots."
Their first theatrical musical, "Harmony," didn't kick up any dust. They're hoping to fare better with "Copa." Three of the cast principles are with them at the Benedum, without set or costumes, to do a short scene and sing a couple of songs. The event ends with Manilow behind the piano, flanked by the performers and singing "Copacabana."
Monday, May 22, New York. 2:30 p.m.
The Wein Center is a drab old place, light-years architecturally from the elegant theaters of Midtown Manhattan. It's 20 blocks south of the Theater District, where Broadway is only a street sign -- a rehearsal center where the roses and standing ovations of opening night are earned with today's hard work and sweat.
Rehearsals have been progressing for weeks and Kaplan has organized another PR session for the New York press, and to convince a few more backers to loosen their purse strings.
In his plain gray suit and glasses Kaplan looks like a bank teller who walked in to use the coffee machine, as sexy dancers in heels and tights and hip New York theater guys hurry through in the unkempt hallway.
"Because of a number of things that [his predecessor] Charlie Gray had done, it really positioned the CLO in a good place for staging new musicals. CLO has a terrific subscriber base, one of the largest and most solid in the country. Over a period of years, Charlie had begun to introduce new shows. He also established the Fund for Excellence, which we use to help develop new shows. The 50th anniversary of the CLO was the big thing that helped infuse the fund. They raised an awful lot of money and its been growing over the years."
But CLO didn't have to cough up the $2.5 million to $3 million that is going into "Copa." Kaplan and his Dallas partners are raising the capital by attracting investors, most of whom are presenters who simultaneously book the show at their regional theaters.
"This is a new way of doing musicals," says Kaplan. "Ten, 15 years ago, it would have been unthinkable. But the market has changed. Look at what's on Broadway right now: 'Kiss Me, Kate,' 'Sound of Music,' 'Jesus Christ Superstar,' 'The Music Man.' That's what the CLO does. [But] I can't produce any one of those shows because the rights have been tied up by the Broadway producers. Look at a show like 'Lion King.' It will be years before CLO will able to do it. We've never done 'Cats.' We'll never do 'Phantom.' We'll never do 'Les Miz.' They won't let us. So one way to produce is to produce your own."
In a city where a cup of coffee can cost $4, the expense of creating a new musical has become astronomical. Producers who aren't backed by a major entertainment conglomerate have begun exploring other options.
"We don't know yet what this will cost," says Kaplan. "Maybe $2.5 or $3 million. In New York it would cost $7 million to $8 million."
Whatever expenses can't be raised through investors, CLO will split with its Dallas co-producer. Kaplan says he's told the board that the project might cost CLO anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000.
"Or," he says, "if we can raise all of it, it won't cost us a nickel. But we have the rights so we'll be profiting from it for the next 50 years. We rehearse the show here because everybody lives here and it's cheaper to put up a few people from Pittsburgh in a hotel here than to put up the whole company at a hotel in Pittsburgh. It's all economics."
As president of the National Alliance for Musical Theater, Kaplan has the clout and the contacts to book a new show from Seattle to Miami without ever going through the Holland Tunnel.
"When 'Copa' leaves Pittsburgh," he says, "it goes to Dallas, St. Paul, Seattle, Houston and other Alliance members. We all support each other. So the show will be out for at least 40 weeks having never played Broadway."
3:15 p.m.
The producer gets a hallway couch, but the creators get a private room for interviews. Manilow and Sussman have a habit of talking over each other, as if they're writing answers to questions the same way they write their songs. They talk virtually nonstop.
"The London production wasn't what we had in mind," begins Manilow. "Out of our naivete, we thought the whole world knew about the 1940s Technicolor musical movies we'd seen as kids. [The West End creative team] all nodded and said they loved them too, and we sent them everything we thought would help . . . . "
"Videos, posters," says Sussman.
"And when we got there it wasn't our vision of it; it was their vision." Manilow throws up his hands as if he's seeing the cheesy London musical again for the first time. "We didn't want to get in their way because we didn't want to be the Ugly Americans, but now we finally get a chance to put it up the way we wanted."
The Brits, as the original producers, get a small cut of the profits, but they had no input in this version of the show. Manilow's name was tagged onto the title to avoid violating the rights still held for the 1940s Groucho Marx movie "Copacabana."
"There are many differences between the London production and this one," says Sussman, "but perhaps the biggest is, in London it was about the story, and here it's about how we tell the story. There's a whole style to those movies -- an innocence, a romance, a heightened acting style."
"And it's because," says Manilow, "the device is the song is being written by a guy in the year 2000 who loves musicals of the '40s and he falls in love with the character he's created..."
"And the journey he then takes colors and enlightens his life," says Sussman. "He has to go back to that world to find out something about himself that will allow him to move forward in this world."
"Each number is a nod..."
"...A homage..."
"...To those wonderful movie musicals of the 1940s," says Manilow.
Considering their string of pop hits, and the possibility that the musical could spawn a revival of "Copacabana" on easy listening radio, are they hoping to spin off a radio single?
"There are so many things a song has to do in a musical," says Sussman. "If you don't honor that responsibility first, you're sunk. I think the days of radio songs coming out of theater are long gone. It can't be done anymore."
"But if anybody has a shot at that kind of thing," interrupts Manilow, "we do because we kind of know that world of pop songwriting. After so many years my melodies are always very catchy. I can't not write a catchy melody."
4 p.m.
The "public rehearsal" that the New York press is invited to is really a slightly more elaborate staging of the PR show done in Pittsburgh. Manilow and Sussman still get laughs with "...something horrible happened. Yeah, I sold 52 million records," but the actors do portions of two scenes, including a sexy dance number that generates big applause.
Kaplan taps his wingtips and smiles. On the bleacher seats near him is the unassuming woman who started it all, the agent who first fixed up Kaplan with Manilow.
Susan Weaving is a vice president of the William Morris Agency, in charge of its Broadway, Touring and Theatrical division. While on the phone with Manilow, a client, she had a brainstorm.
"He was talking about wanting to do 'Copa' and said, 'Do you have any ideas?' " says Weaving. "I made one phone call. The only guy I thought who would really have a sense of the fun and understand it was Van. He has worked for years producing shows and has a big subscription base and he understands entertainment. I had worked with him as a buyer and I wanted to work with him as a producer. So five days later he flew in, and we had a meeting with Barry, and they decided to do it."
"I had not heard of the show at all," says Kaplan. "I knew Susan as an agent and was talking with her on a daily basis and she said one day, 'I talked with Barry Manilow about you and his show.' I didn't know what she was talking about. So she overnighted me the CD from the London show and within five minutes I was on the phone with her saying, 'My God, this show is fantastic.' "
"It's our job to package," says Weaving. "We want our A-list people to be working together. It's a big agency, and so we have a great creative team, and Van has been a great producer. I can always tell that when I hear from our composer and our choreographer in the middle of the most stressful time, which is now. If they're not moaning about the producer, he's doing something right."
Director David Warren is one of those hip theater guys. He's the oddball in room -- a native New Yorker in a town full of people who've sacrificed everything to be here. Warren directed a long list of Broadway revivals and premieres, including Manilow and Sussman's first musical, "Harmony."
"Copa" was cast in New York, although unsuccessful casting sessions were held in Pittsburgh.
"It's a very tough show to cast because you need singers who dance, dancers who sing and they all have to act," says Warren in a loud corner of the crowded rehearsal space. "You need what we call 'triple threats,' and that's very difficult. I think it's a wonderful town, Pittsburgh, but a lot of those [actors] end up here because New York is where it's all happening."
With a familiar title song, glamour-puss costumes and spectacle, "Copacabana" seems to have a good chance at dazzling audiences. But Warren knows they'll have to accept the show's intentionally hackneyed dialogue before they can get into the story.
"In the show the songwriter travels in his imagination back to 1947," he says. "So it's a convention that we're seeing a world he knows only through these 1940s Technicolor movie musicals. They talk like that on purpose, because that's the way he remembered them talking in the movies. I would say [audiences] wouldn't respond to it if it didn't have any kind of truth at its core, if it was just over-the-top period banter. But I think all the scenes have an actable truth at their center."
Wednesday, May 24, Pittsburgh
In a back street warehouse on Pittsburgh's South Side, they build spectacle. The Construction Center of the Arts is a division of CLO. They call it simply "the shop," but producers from across the country call on the shop to build sets for their theaters. John Edkins, production supervisor, heads a team of 28 union carpenters and designers who are constructing the lavish "Copa" set. It's a movable, state-of-the-art, computerized, $150,000 monster -- before adding computer programming costs -- that has gone from blueprints to workable, transportable reality in less than three weeks. It's due at the Benedum in two days.
"We're also doing 'Parade' for a company in Atlanta," says Edkins, a company that, coincidentally, was rehearsing next door to "Copa" on the same floor of Wein Center and that will come to Pittsburgh later in the CLO season.
Although the cast is relatively small, the "Copa" set is huge: a translucent 30-foot by 60-foot New York skyline, scrims, inlaid floor lighting troughs that blast waves of brilliant light, a moving staircase and track-mounted, cable-guided pianos and set pieces that glide on and off stage controlled by an elaborate computer system.
"Building it isn't the challenge," says Edkins. "It's making it so it can come apart and go on the road, and doing it, plus our other big job, in three weeks."
For the past three years the shop has been a 12-month operation, creating or refurbishing sets for CLO in the summer and taking on other jobs for other theaters. Next door is a 50,000-square-foot storage space where CLO contracts to warehouse dozens of sets. They've built, stored and/or designed dozens of sets for local and regional stages and have recently cracked the Broadway market with a set for Carol Burnett.
"But this is the first time we've ever done something this elaborate," says Edkins. "You're looking at $60,000 just to make the decking and all the automated computers to go with it. ... This is top notch; as advanced as it gets."
Wednesday, May 31, Upper St. Clair High School
"Believe in yourself," Manilow tells 400 kids in the high school's new theater. "I'm just a regular guy and look what I'm doing."
Today he's part teacher, part musical arranger in an unusual semi-public rehearsal arranged by Kaplan. CLO's narrow window of opportunity on the rented Benedum Center stage means that the entire season has to be crammed into nine weeks. Stage time is costly, so Kaplan cooked up a deal with Upper St. Clair High School to rent its stage for a week for music rehearsals. As part of the deal, music, theater and media students get to watch Manilow, the conductors and the 16-member orchestra practice for two hours.
It's a well-ordered zoo. Despite what contemporary pop radio feeds them, most of these kids know who Barry Manilow is and clamor for autographs while the sound tech blasts the room with snippets of tracked music, the road conductor leads the musicians through some of the songs for the first time and local video crews and newspaper photographers jockey to be in position for a good shot.
Manilow handles it all remarkably well, signing his name with one hand and pointing to a speaker with the other while nit-picking the score with musical director Andy Rumble.
"My parents listen to him at home," says one 16-year-old junior. "I think his songs are good -- 'Mandy,' 'I Write the Songs,' " two songs Manilow didn't write.
"He's everywhere," says another girl. "On 'The Simpsons' Homer sings a really bad version of 'Mandy.' So he's even on cartoons."
Manilow is patient, answering both silly and intelligent questions while the musicians learn the songs and the sound people learn their cues.
After one run-through of a big, brassy number, the students applaud and conductor Helen Gregory turns and laughs.
Later she says that despite the chaos, work actually got done.
"That was the first time we've gone through these songs," she says. "They just got the [sheet] music two days ago, so some of them were sight reading. They're incredible musicians."
She laughs again about her audience's response.
"We just plodded through that song and we thought, well, OK, and then they all started clapping and screaming," she says. "That's actually a good sign. If they liked it now, they're going to love it when it finally gets to the stage."
Unfortunately, Gregory won't be there to share it with them. A week before opening night, Steven M. Bishop replaced her as conductor.
Tuesday, June 13, Pittsburgh
Those brassy horns are audible in the background as Kaplan carries his cell phone to a quieter place farther from the stage. A few days before the first curtain and he's not a nervous wreck. Another good sign.
"I think we're in great shape," he says. "I think one of the things that really surprised me was how beautiful this show is, the lighting and the scenery and the costumes."
That extra week at the high school has given the orchestra more confidence, he says, and other than the replacement of Gregory there have been no negative surprises.
"We've picked up more presenters" to invest in the show, he says. "Copa" is already booked through the summer of 2001, and Kaplan is beginning to schedule shows for the fall of that year.
All the investors are given until opening night to commit. That way, Kaplan says, "everybody has the same kind of risk." He won't know until then how much of the expense has been covered and how much CLO and Dallas Summer Musicals will have to split, if anything.
"Long before the rehearsal process even started, we knew we could sell enough nights to break even," says Kaplan. "It's about minimizing risk. We knew by February or March, about the time we announced our season, that we could make this work."
By early this week CLO had sold more than 33,000 tickets. A matinee was added (1 p.m. June 22) to accommodate the demand for tickets.
"This is what I'm here for," Kaplan says, a syncopated blend of Latin music wailing in the background. "This is why I came to Pittsburgh."
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Where: Pittsburgh CLO at Benedum Theater, Downtown.