You’re a newly proclaimed genius, the brains behind the most celebrated musical theater hit in history.
Your four collaborators are no slouches, either. Two of them penned the lyrics to one of the era’s most popular songs, and all four won Emmys or other awards for their television work. So you team up for an original Broadway musical and take it on an out-of-town tryout.
Nervous concern, hurried rewrites, bad reviews and finally a premature shutdown end in a loss in the millions. After the shouting, you’re barely speaking.
“Who once said,” wonders lyricist Marilyn Bergman, ” `Wish only on your worst enemies that they should write a Broadway musical and take it on an out-of-town tryout?’ “
Here’s what happened: In 1975, CBS aired author Jerome Kass’ teleplay inspired by the death of his mother called “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.” The made-for-TV movie was something of a musical drama, with songs by composer Billy Goldenberg and the husband-and-wife lyricist team of Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The acclaimed show went on to win multiple Emmy Awards.
Two years later, director-choreographer Michael Bennett, fresh from his “A Chorus Line” success, decided to produce and stage a Broadway adaptation of the TV movie, inviting Kass, the Bergmans and Goldenberg to add to their original. The result, “Ballroom,” played only four months.
Surprising news considering the participants’ accomplishments. The Bergmans were responsible for “The Way We Were,” “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” “The Windmills of Your Mind” and the songs in the movie “Yentl.”
Goldenberg’s scores over the years include the movie “Play It Again Sam” and the TV themes for “Kojak,” “Rhoda” and “Columbo.” And coming off “A Chorus Line,” Bennett was a Broadway savior, international media darling and seemingly invincible wunderkind.
In fact, Bennett’s status and single-minded determination may have been a part of the problem.
“The TV show was very close, intimate, interior,” says Marilyn Bergman of the story of a lonely Bronx widow who finds renewed life when she meets a mailman at the Stardust Ballroom. “It wasn’t really a piece about dancing, but about real people who went to a ballroom. For Michael, the dance became paramount and the show became all about dancing. But the emphasis was on the numbers rather than the story. We never felt it caught the spirit of the TV piece.”
“You have to understand, on the Broadway version of the show, Michael was everything,” says composer Goldenberg. “He’d even invested his own money. And he was brilliant. But he excised our show completely. It was almost as if he wanted no connection with the TV movie. He cut one of the best songs, in which the leading lady upbraids her late husband for dying on her and leaving her alone. And in the end of our story, she dies too, but Michael changed that. He said on Broadway, the leading lady can’t die.”
“Charles Durning starred in the original, but he didn’t want Durning, even though Durning was a dancer and had even taught ballroom,” recalls writer Kass. “He went with Vincent Gardenia, who really wasn’t a trained dancer.”
Even in the tryouts, the Bergmans, Goldenberg and Kass felt their treasure was slipping away. But who, in 1978, could question Michael Bennett? “I think at some point we gave up trying to recapture the original,” says Marilyn. Her husband, Alan, adds, “Michael was Michael. We tried to make the best of it we could.”
The “best” turned out to be a $2.2 million flop. (The original TV show had cost only $800,000).
But there is no business like show business. Instead of ending as another footnote in Broadway history, “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom,” its full title restored, returns to life in a rethought, reworked revival this week at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, where the surviving principles recently arrived to help restore the piece.
Twenty years after they flopped, 11 years after Bennett’s death from AIDS, the Bergmans, Kass and Goldenberg are reassembled to restore songs Bennett cut, provide two new ones and supervise what for them is an adaptation more faithful to their original. And like the “Chorus Line” song lyric, they’re all doing it for love. “You don’t get paid in the theater,” Marilyn Bergman notes wryly.
Marriott producer Kary Walker, who has programmed his share of adventurous material over the years, met Alan Bergman at a benefit last August and invited the collaborators to come to Lincolnshire.
“I never saw the Broadway production, but I knew the teleplay, and I have the album,” Walker says. “The score is terrific. Ten years ago, I sent off for the Broadway script and thought, `This doesn’t work. It’s such a departure from the TV original.’ When I first met and talked to Alan, he said, `This show is one of the saddest moments in our career.’ “
Walker brought on board this production’s choreographer, Arte Phillips, a Broadway gypsy and an international ballroom champion. “It really wouldn’t work if he weren’t both,” Walker says. He also found the director, David Taylor, an American now based in Great Britain.”
Feelings on the part of the original participants still run strong. “I’m not sure we could have done this 10 years ago,” says Marilyn. “Kary really made a difference,” notes Goldenberg, “He said at one point, `I want this to be a healing experience.’ “
Another return to Broadway, while not ruled out, is not the primary goal, either. “Our hope is to see the show the way we dreamed it,” says Kass. “And to see it become a part of the American repertoire of musicals performed all over the world.”
