If there's anything that people imagine more romantically than the life of a New York performer, it's probably the perception of how an actor's life used to be 40 years ago. That was the Golden Era, when the old guard still writing for Broadway included Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge (to identify just a tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg), and the new crop of writers included Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Ira Levin, Stephen Sondheim, Adler and Ross, and some fascinating dramatists from across the ever-shrinking Atlantic Ocean. In other media, radio was unmistakably on the wane, but television was compensating with an abundance of acting jobs, many of which were still broadcast from New York. And although films were still centered in Hollywood, a good number were cast and filmed on the East Coast. Yes, it was a great time to be an actor in the Big Apple.
Or was it?
Surprisingly, it seems, yes. Of course, it is human nature to remember more of the good times than bad-- Andrew Lloyd Webber would not have sold a gazillion copies of "Memories" if nostalgia had a bitter taste-- but even so, agents and casting directors who remember those times appear sincere when they say they really were Good Old Days. Not necessarily better than the present (where theatre professionals can take advantage of modern inventions like residuals, to say nothing of cell phones and future participation in the nascent Internet entertainment field), but they were certainly different, and wonderful in their own way.
Talent agent Michael Hartig, who went into business in 1960-- the same year Back Stage was launched-- remembers the performing community as more chummy than it is today, possibly because it was smaller, both in population and geography.
"The volume of actors seems to have quadrupled since 40 years ago," Hartig says. "In the 1960s, I thought I knew every actor in New York City, if not by name, by sight. They made 'rounds,' they signed books in your office, so you felt you knew them. It felt like a community-- and it felt like we were in control of it.
"There was a rule then that all agents' offices had to be between 42nd St. and 57th St., so that actors could, as the saying goes, save shoe leather. If we were forced to be in a 15-block radius, they had less walking to do, had to spend less on subway and bus fares, and could accomplish much more. At that time, about 10 key buildings housed about 100 agents. In the course of a day, actors could hit 20 agents, and if they were really industrious, they hit us all in the course of a week. They dropped off their picture in every office, and they'd be interviewed if we had a minute between phone calls, so they had a better chance of getting to know us faster and get sent out faster."
Also, he recalls, it was easier for actors to meet casting directors, who operated differently from the way they do now. "All Broadway producers had in-house casting agents who had worked for them for 100 years," he says. "It was a lot if they produced three to six projects a year, so the casting directors had time for actors to make the rounds, meet them, say hi, and talk a minute. Again, it was more personal."
Lionel Larner, a talent agent in New York since 1959, remembers well the days when producers had their own casting directors, since was one of them: he came to New York from his native England to work on Otto Preminger's "Saint Joan," and then segued into representing actors.
"In those days we were all friends," he says. "Maybe that exists today, but in those days casting directors knew agents' clients, and they were very cooperative. The camaraderie was terrific; you stopped by their offices and talked. When you got a new client, you would call the various casting directors and talk about them, and within days-- sometimes that very day-- a casting director would have something they were right for, and would read them for it."
'DETECTIVE' AGENCIES
Before Breakdown Services came along to alert agents to forthcoming projects with daily updates of casting directors' needs, producers and directors funneled information to agents through a verbal network. Agents had to stay on good terms with the casting directors if they were to get that information-- although successful agents didn't rely solely on the grapevine, of course. "We did our own detective work," says Hartig. "We had to scout for opportunities ourselves, so we always read the morning's 'News from the Rialto,' a theatre column that appeared every day in The New York Times, like there is on Friday now. That's where we'd find out that someone was taking an option on a new play, so we'd follow it up and see if we could get a script and work on it."
Things were somewhat different for dancers, according to Terry Merone, a chorus singer in the 1950s before she moved to Equity to work as an outside rep. "Chorus Equity, which was formed in about 1915, merged with Actors' Equity in 1955," she recalls. "When we merged, we had a condition that Actors' Equity had to form the ACCA, the Advisory Committee on Chorus Affairs." An institution that continues to this day (still with a minimum number of chorus members), it advocates for chorus members' interests, including fair and open auditions.
"It was very important to us that there would be chorus Equity calls," she says, "so that dancers and singers would have a chance to audition." That insistence on open calls ensured that a wide array of professional chorus people would be seen, but still left the final hiring decisions up to the directors and choreographers. It was (and still is) a fact of life that they are likely to hire performers who have worked well with them in the past. What has disappeared, according to Larner, is the former tradition of letting leading actresses dole out a few patronage parts. "When Tallulah Bankhead and Ruth Gordon went on the road, they always salted their casts with their poker-playing buddies," he recalls. The practice kept things harmonious backstage and funneled work to established pros at a time when there seemed to be plenty of work to go around.
"There was a tremendous amount of activity," Larner recalls. "Not only theatre, with Broadway openings every night, but New York also had 'Play of the Week,' 'Playhouse 90,' 'Studio One,' and 'Armstrong Circle Theatre' on television, and there were the moviemakers who lived here and worked here, so clients went out on reams of auditions.
"That's all changed.
"I think agenting has changed too-- it's become more a job. So many more people who are doing it, especially in the bigger offices, have come from business schools and they're money people." The same goes for studios and producers' offices, he adds. "You used to make the deal directly with the producer," he sighs, "but now you've got to talk to business affairs."
Geoffrey Johnson, one of the founders of Johnson-Liff Casting, also remarks on how producers' powers have changed in the last few decades. "When I worked for David Merrick," he says, "although he had investors, we were really only responsible to David Merrick, just as the people who worked in casting for Alex Cohen were responsible to Alex. There was one producer.
"Now look at how many producers there are for one show, because producing has gotten so expensive, and there's such a lot of money to be raised." Naturally, he adds, it's more difficult to satisfy several producers than just one.
"Everybody has an opinion," he says. "You sit in on auditions with a novice producer, or producers, and they want to speak up and say, 'No, I don't like that girl, her eyes are too close together,' or whatever, and you can't say, 'What do you know?' If they've raised a million bucks to throw into the show, I guess they have a right to say that." He compares the situation to the casting procedure on daytime dramas, which he called "real committee stuff" and "extremely frustrating," based on his experience of casting "Another World" for nine years.
"Soap producers say they don't want pretty, that they want good actors," he says, "but to hell with that; they want pretty." Hartig is even more acerbic, suggesting that soap executives might as well "just hang out at gyms and offer contracts to whoever has the best abs."
CHORUS MEMBERS MAKE THE SCENE
In the 1960s, the performers who had the alluring musculature, but not necessarily great technique, frequently found work in the chorus. (Not all, of course, and many chorus members throughout the history of Broadway have been brilliantly talented; still, it must be admitted, many others were hired more for their decorative properties than for their acting abilities.) That's something else that has changed, according to Terry Merone.
"Chorus people play so many more small parts now," she says. "Those used to be played by character actors, but producers found out it's easier to get a chorus member to do a part than a character actor."
Johnson agrees the members of the chorus are called upon to do more than they were a generation ago. "When there was a singing chorus and a dancing chorus," he recalls, "it didn't really matter if the dancers could sing. But those days are gone forever. The level of dancing today is higher than it was in my day; dancers are much better trained. I don't know if the singing aspect has changed as much, because there has always been terrific singing on Broadway. What's changed for singers is that now if they're hired, they have to be able to move-- and do more than just move a little."
As an example, he referred to performers who auditioned for the forthcoming Broadway musical "The Producers," saying, "If the musical director passed them vocally, then they had to do a dance audition for Susan Stroman. And that ain't easy. They can't have two left feet, and they have to be able to act."
Merone concurs. "Years ago, there were singing choruses and dancing choruses, and singers did the singing and dancers did the dancing," she says, "but then it started to merge around the time of 'My Fair Lady' and 'The Most Happy Fella.' The dancers did the heavy dancing, but singers had to do dancing, too."
Now, of course, it's almost unheard of to have separate singing and dancing choruses: everyone acknowledges that to be successful, chorus people must know tap, jazz, ballet, "up" singing, ballad singing, and, preferably, some specialties like hip hop-- plus acting, to an extent that was not required 40 years ago.
Finally, as Merone points out, chorus members are frequently expected to have some stagecraft abilities. "We even move the sets sometimes these days," she marvels, "but we have it in our contracts that we get paid extra to do that."
THE PAST VS. THE PRESENT VS. THE FUTURE
It is the prerogative of longtime agents, casting directors, and performers to recall their hardest battles with pride, and to wax nostalgic about some things that other people probably don't find all that appealing. Hartig, for instance, looks back fondly on the days when cold-water flats were abundant in New York: yes, they were awful, he says, but they were affordable in ways that today's newcomers cannot imagine, which made it possible for beginning performers to survive. Like veterans of any prolonged skirmish, their war stories are among their most valued possessions. After listening to them talk in their past perfect tense, some actors who are just starting their careers now might dejectedly conclude that the glory days of New York theatre have passed forever, but that's a defeatist attitude (which is almost the worst thing any aspiring performer can develop).
Fortunately, for theatre professionals who missed those days, Back Stage has filled the vacuum created by the disappearance of cozy networking and "making rounds." Knowledge is power, and Back Stage has always supplied performers with a healthy crop of both, in the form of casting notices.
Every Thursday for 40 years, actors have picked up this paper in search of the next break that could advance their career-- and each week, some happy performers have found it. Some of those advances are immediately, obviously huge, catapulting lucky thespians into international spotlights, while others are naturally more incremental. But to real professionals, each new job is valuable because even those that don't show promise at first glance can pan out to be the turning point they've been preparing for and dreaming of.
Those actors who revel in the challenges of their chosen profession are the ones who have the best chance of surviving its vagaries for the next 40 years. If they do, they will end up with their own battle scars and misty-eyed recollections of how much better things were 40 yeas ago-- in the good old days of the year 2000.
For now, they would do well to ignore Lloyd Webber's "Memory" and join in the chorus of a different Broadway standard, written by the indomitably optimistic Jerry Herman: "The Best of Times Is Now...."