With playgoing on hiatus, the contributors to New York Stage Review have decided to provide our readers with alternate discussions of theater: think pieces, book/music/video reviews, and the like. We would much rather be reviewing live theater, and we look forward to the day when the curtain rises once again.
Bob Avian’s memoir of his Broadway, off-Broadway and beyond career, Dancing Man (University Press of Mississippi), is smart, intelligent, informative, heavily detailed, and as juicy as an expertly prepared porterhouse steak.
It may be that when members of the theater community as well as theater-goers hear the Avian name (he was born Robert Avedisian to Armenian émigrés), they may not know he was a Boston University graduate vaguely expecting a life teaching literature. More likely, they’ll immediately link him with the late and lionized Michael Bennett. Indeed, aside from Avian’s index listings, his longtime pal Bennett’s listing is the longest on those pages.
No surprise. The two hoofers met when dancing in West Side Story as it toured the country and then roomed together—never as lovers—in Manhattan for a while. Establishing a friendship as Bennett sped up the choreographer’s ladder, they discovered that Avian was an insightful observer of Bennett’s outpouring seminal notions. In those complimentary capacities, Avian gets explicit about his ambitions in contrast with Bennett’s, calling himself “a second banana” and writing that their collaboration worked so well because “I didn’t want to be Michael, and he didn’t want to be me.”
Having formed a two-man team, they went to work on what are inarguably among the most successful, not to say buzzed about, musicals of the second half of the 20th century. Maybe the most revered are A Chorus Line, Follies, and Dreamgirls, but preceding them were publicity-snagging items like Coco.
Oh yes, Avian—with co-writer Tom Santopietro—begins his reminiscences with that Katharine Hepburn-starrer, recalling that Bennett and he were thrilled with the celluloid and sometime theater icon for ten minutes until, “Michael [then 27] and I [then 32] look at each other and realize there’s an elephant in the room: The legendary Katharine Hepburn doesn’t have a musical bone in her body.” That opening chapter is titled “Katharine Hepburn, Coco, and a Big Smash Flop.”
Needless to say, Avian has plenty to say about the pair’s big three accomplishments, about Bennett’s inspired notions, and Avian’s helping to shape them—not to mention the so-so Ballroom results, which he describes as involving two shows fighting each other. That’s right. The dancing man never flinches from calling a failure a failure.
With all the Chorus Line nitty-gritty, he reminds musical enthusiasts that Bennett felt it would take time to fashion a viable production from the tapes made by chorus members he had gathered to spill their terpsichorean beans. So he asked Public Theater’s Joseph Papp, who wanted Bennett to create something at the downtown outfit, for the luxury of workshops. Thereby Bennett set the pattern for the proliferating worships that still follow. Bennett was so sold on the idea, which he realized in studios at 890 Broadway, that he eventually bought the building. (By the way, Dancing Man is a good candidate to be read with Ken Mandelbaum’s 1989 A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett.)
All sorts of Company and Follies anecdotes multiply, including the not-especially news flash that during the former production Elaine Stritch wasn’t easy to work with and that during the latter Alexis Smith was. Avian also confides that Bennett asked him to stage Dorothy Collins’ spectacularly understated introduction of Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind.” As for turning Jennifer Holliday into a Dreamgirls star, Bennett and Avian more than once had to talk the untrained talent to remain in the show.
Along his high-stepping way, Avian doesn’t float the impression that the brilliant Bennett was start-to-finish a picnic in Central Park. He’s well aware of his buddy’s increasing arrogance as the hits and the accompanying red-hot notices accumulated. He brings up Tommy Tune’s Nine, which bowed the same 1982 season as Dreamgirls, and writes, “Nine won the best musical over Dreamgirls. Americans love an underdog, and there was a feeling that a win for Nine would bring Michael down a peg or two.”
(N B.: Bennett helped put the lanky Tune on the map when he brought him in while improving the out-of-town Seesaw. The rest is theater history. Bennett’s firing of Lainie Kazan to hire Michele Lee is entirely another story given the once over here.)
Dancing Man isn’t concerned with only Bennett-related works. To underline the title, Avian starts his career as a dancer upon discovering, when he was young—as many dancers do— that he had the talent for it. By his early twenties, he was notching his belt in shows hither and yon. He gets to tell that during the 1962-63 season, “I’d been in four shows in the span of one year—Nowhere to Go But Up, Jennie, Zenda, and Café Crown.” The nowhere-to-go-but-up sentiment turned out to be a promise kept. Funny Girl was next, for which he danced plenty and said one line to Barbra Streisand. By the way, aforementioned flopola Jennie nevertheless made Mary Martin an abiding chum.
Avian has a strong post-Bennett credits resumé thanks in large part to the belief in him expressed by Cameron Mackintosh, who had known him for some time and wanted him when Follies was getting ready for London. Feeling his choreographing and then directing oats, the following gig was Sunset Boulevard. Avian maintains that Patti LuPone sings the Norma Desmond role better than anyone has. Mackintosh also put Avian on Miss Saigon, the several versions of Martin Guerre, and The Witches of Eastwick. (Full London disclosure: I caught Martin Guerre and The Witches of Eastwick, neither of which has ever been imported. I can offer—with some confidence—that Manhattan has been spared.)
Throughout, Dancing Man has many witty, pithy and personal things to say. Avian talks lovingly about his marriage to television producer and show-biz-hip Peter Pileski. He goes on about performer Marti Stevens and the parties she threw where the likes of Ingrid Bergman would drop in. He also talks about directing Carol Burnett in Putting It Together.
He also peppers in any number of wise observations about the business at which the 83-year old has excelled for so long. To close, here’s just one from which new and old practitioners might benefit: “[Fixing] shows is very hard work and not terribly rewarding, because the show can never really be yours. You are playing the cards someone else has already dealt: the design, the score, and the cast aren’t of your choosing.”
