Stardom has a shelf life, especially when it comes to theatre artists. The careers of stage headliners like Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, and Robert Preston may still be celebrated, thanks to fans' memories and to career artifacts they've left behind: memoirs, cast albums, a few filmed performances. But what of the supporting players whose stars burned brightly for a time, but who are now mere footnotes in theatrical history?
Lisa Jo Sagolla (a Back Stage contributor) has captured the full—if brief—life of one of these imperfectly remembered players in The Girl Who Fell Down, a biography of dancer-comedienne Joan McCracken.
The title derives from McCracken's breakthrough performance as Sylvie in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! (1943), in which she memorably plopped to the stage floor each night during the "Many a New Day" number. McCracken went on to play roles in Bloomer Girl (1944) and Me and Juliet (1953). She also was the star of 1945's short-lived Billion Dollar Baby, Comden and Green's follow-up show to On the Town.
Unlike many other performers who've vanished from the public's consciousness, McCracken is of interest in part because of her personal history. She was married twice: first to novelist Jack Dunphy (who later became Truman Capote's long-term partner), then to legendary dancer-choreographer-director Bob Fosse, whose career she played a big part in developing.
Sagolla's in-depth research for this project is admirable, as her pages of acknowledgments attest. With rich detail, she presents McCracken as a performer whose career timing had both a fortuitous and an unlucky aspect.
On the brighter side, McCracken became a ballet dancer (working early on with the Catherine Littlefield company) at a time when America was first embracing ballet as something that could effectively embody the national spirit. She then made her impression on Broadway in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's first and most influential collaboration. And she was not afraid to jump into the medium of television during its infancy, although her 1952 sitcom, "Claudia," had the misfortune to be slotted directly after "I Love Lucy."
On the down side, McCracken's ill health (she was diabetic) cut short her career and life before she could assume the burgeoning role of star dancer-comedienne that the next Mrs. Fosse, Gwen Verdon, brought to the fore. McCracken died in 1961 at age 43.
Sagolla gives us glimpses of the occasionally contradictory inner life of this performer. McCracken was both pragmatic and prone to flights of fancy—sometimes gregarious, often a loner. Her pixyish body type led her to play childlike women, although she had serious artistic aspirations: She was an earnest student at the Actors Studio, and she appeared in plays by Clifford Odets and Jean Cocteau. She sought a film career, then apparently sabotaged it by publicly decrying Hollywood's shallowness.
"Lots of things that should be happenin'—ain't," McCracken sang in Bloomer Girl.
Too true.
But while readers may be left bemoaning the fact that McCracken didn't get the breaks she deserved, they'll go away from this book warmed by an awareness of all the things she did accomplish.
Another fine musical-theatre read comes from Ted Chapin, best known as president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. When Chapin was a student at Connecticut College back in 1971, he embarked on a special project that, at the time, perhaps wasn't considered all that earth-shattering: He worked as a gofer during rehearsals for the en-route-to-Broadway musical Follies. Who knew then what a groundbreaking and controversial project the Stephen Sondheim tuner would turn out to be?
To say that Chapin's scholastic notes were copious is an understatement. In fact, he had enough material for a whole book, although this final, revised report comes 30-plus years after the Follies closing. Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies is an engaging backstage study—as exciting to read in its fashion as Moss Hart's classic Act One, though certainly without that memoir's romantic embellishments. The aging guests at the Follies reunion may have gone to the Weismann Theatre to "lie about themselves a little," but Chapin is more interested in setting the record straight in a no-nonsense (but extremely detailed) way.
In the book's afterword, co-director Harold Prince is quoted as saying that Follies was "the most flying blind I've ever done." The details behind that admission contribute a big part to the spell this book weaves. The show, in fact, went into rehearsals with no clear ending to the James Goldman libretto. And two of the best songs in the score ("I'm Still Here" and "The Story of Lucy and Jessie") were written and inserted during the Boston tryout. As we watch Sondheim, Prince, Goldman, and co-director and choreographer Michael Bennett sculpt the chaos into something extraordinary, this book becomes increasingly difficult to put aside.
And, indeed, as Chapin shows, the musical did turn out to be something extraordinary, rather than something perfect. Just as Joan McCracken is a compelling figure partly because of "what might have been," so Follies intrigues because of its flawed brilliance. Chapin may tie up some loose ends and dispel some misconceptions here, but this book will only increase, not diminish, the Follies mystique.
Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb tell their life and career stories to Greg Lawrence in Colored Lights. The book covers the duo's ongoing four-decade collaboration, from special material they wrote for Kaye Ballard in 1962 up through 2002's film rendition of their Broadway favorite Chicago. Along the way are detailed descriptions of times of thanksgiving (Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman) and plain old turkey days (70, Girls, 70; The Happy Time).
The distinct temperaments of the two men become apparent early on in the read. Ebb, the native New Yorker, comes across as the more tightly wound of the two, while Missourian Kander is a self-admitted "romantic" who's liable to take a "water-off-a-duck's-back" approach to life. When they attend someone else's show, Ebb tends to analyze things, while Kander goes for the enjoyment. Ebb is "absolutely in terror" of computers, but Kander embraces them for the convenience they bring to his work. (On the other hand, Kander has such stage fright that he stopped playing keyboards publicly years ago.)
What has bound the two together over the years is the fact that they are perfectly at ease with one another. "We never don't have a good time when we're writing," Kander says. Adds Ebb: "There is a freedom, a total lack of anxiety when we work."
Colored Lights has an introduction by Liza Minnelli and a foreword by Harold Prince. And there are sidebars throughout in which Minnelli and Prince add their two cents about the various topics that the two songwriters discuss. Lawrence might easily have forgone these interpolations, but they certainly don't spoil the comfy, chatty fun of the book.
