He Remembers Sherry!
Now that February 24 has come and gone and we all have the new studio cast album of the 1967 musical Sherry!, we can all read the CD booklet notes on how the score was lost, then found (thanks to producer Robert Sher), resulting in the album finally being made with six Tony-owners (Nathan Lane, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters, Tommy Tune, Lillias White, and Phyllis Newman) in the cast. But I thought I’d stop in and talk to lyricist-librettist James Lipton — better known as the host of Inside the Actors Studio — and find out what didn’t make it into the notes.
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PETER FILICHIA: Who had the idea of musicalizing The Man Who Came to Dinner?
JAMES LIPTON: I did. I decided I wanted to do it with Larry [composer Laurence Rosenthal]. We’d met in high school in Detroit [in the ’40s] and were collaborating even then. Our first song was called, “Black Orchid.” [He sings:] “Black orchid, mystical flower of lost romance.” [He stops singing:] I was 16 years old. What did I know about lost romance?
PF: But you knew about Broadway?
JL: Yes, and I wanted to do a musical with Larry. But he went to the Eastman School of Music and I was at Wayne State. We met in the ’50s in Paris, when he was studying with Nadia Boulanger, but I was on my way to Greece to act in a movie. Some time later, I ran into him right in front of Carnegie Hall but he told me he was going into the Air Force. Then, some years later, I was in New York eating in a restaurant on a bitter cold night and a man outside rubbed the frost off the window to see if the place looked good. That man was Larry, who by now was writing background scores for movies [including A Raisin in the Sun, The Miracle Worker, and Requiem for a Heavyweight]. I was writing and directing a musical based on Molière’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself for the Westport Playhouse and I asked him to do the incidental music. That went so well that I suggested The Man Who Came to Dinner.
PF: Was it hard getting the rights to such a famous play?
JL: Certainly. We had to go to Kitty Carlisle Hart, Moss’s widow, and Anne Kaufman Schneider, the daughter of George S. Kaufman. They told us they wouldn’t give us the rights unless we wrote two-thirds of the score on spec. By now, Larry was commissioned to write the background music for Becket and had to be in London, so I went there and we spent much of 1963 writing our songs.
PF: Which did you tackle first?
JL: “Crockfield,” “Marry the Girl Myself,” “Imagine That,” “Maybe It’s Time for Me,” and the title song. The ladies liked them and gave us the rights.
PF: Were you happy about getting Morton Da Costa, who’d had big hits in the ’50s but only flops in the ’60s?
JL: We were very excited. We were just so glad to see it happening.
PF: I imagine that was partly because you’d already had a Broadway failure, Nowhere to Go but Up, in 1962. Are we now going to get a studio cast album of that?
JL: It’s not in my mind. I always assumed that show failed because I just wasn’t good enough and didn’t write it well enough. I didn’t know enough yet. But Sherry!, I believe, is good work. Larry and I used to say, “We’ll never know whether or not this show was good.” Now we will. [He taps the CD jewel box.] I’m prepared to accept our fate with this, whatever the verdict, for this is the show we wrote. I feel this album will vindicate us and I’m hoping for a new production.
PF: Starting in a regional theater?
JL: No. I’ll hold off for a class-A Broadway production. Now that Chicago has revived the movie musical, maybe we’ll even get a movie.
PF: I saw the show in Boston when George Sanders was in it.
JL: Ah, George! We were so excited when we got him; we thought he was perfect casting for Sheridan Whiteside. But, one day during rehearsals, we found him crying because he’d found that his wife had only three months to live. He wanted to leave immediately but we asked him to stay with us until we got someone else. That would be Clive Revill [Broadway’s original Fagin in Oliver!] but he couldn’t join us until after we’d finished the Boston tryout and we’d opened in Philadelphia. Clive wanted his own director and he knew Joe Layton; they came in as a pair, so Da Costa and Field left. We were making decisions under such pressure. Nothing at that point was being carefully decided. Every moment was an irrational moment. Anyone who said anything to us, we said “okay” to.
PF: Much has been made of the original orchestrations being lost and then found. And yet several numbers on the new album were re-orchestrated. Why?
JL: Because we didn’t like some of the orchestrations. During the tryout, when new songs were added, new orchestrators came in and did them in a hurry. Take a look at the booklet and see how many orchestrators we had: Ken Thorne, Philip J. Lang, Clare Grundman, Larry Wilcox, Larry [Rosenthal] himself. We wanted this album to be as perfect as possible, so if a new orchestration was required, we went out and got it.
PF: I find it interesting that both of your Broadway musicals had Ron Field as choreographer. Given that he didn’t stay with Sherry!, did you and he continue to be friends or were there hard feelings forever?
JL: Many years later (in 1981), I wrote a novel called Mirrors about a Broadway show coming to New York. The choreographer in it was gifted but tough and was really a portrait of Ron Field; some of the words that the character spoke were words I’d heard Ron say. When it came time to make the TV movie, which I wrote and produced, I called Ron and asked him to play the part. He did and he was wonderful in it.
PF: Sherry! was the last show that you wrote for Broadway. Was it the last straw?
JL: No, I got busy with other things. My book An Exultation of Larks came out in 1968 and has never been out of print. I did a number of TV specials, 12 with Bob Hope and one of Jimmy Carter’s inaugural. I became a specialist in specials. Then I and some colleagues invented this [Actors Studio] school, which today is the largest graduate drama school in America. Then we started the TV show, Inside the Actors Studio, which is now seen in 75 million American homes.
PF: But no other Broadway musicals.
JL: In the early ’70s, I did write another musical with Cy Coleman called Encounter — about the human potential movement — which we played for Michael Bennett. We weren’t too happy when we saw that A Chorus Line had tremendous similarities to our show. Now, Encounter couldn’t be produced because it would look as if A Chorus Line had influenced it and it would seem old hat.
PF: One last question: During Sherry!, did you have any trouble with Dolores Gray and her notorious mother, who was said to make Rose Hovick look like Little Mary Sunshine?
JL: We felt we were blessed because her mother was no longer alive to torment her — or us. But that does remind me of something. Dolores had a weight problem and our costume designer [Robert Mackintosh] went crazy trying to dress her. It was in her contract that she couldn’t gain weight, but she did. On opening night in New York, the costume designer and I were standing in the back of the Alvin and, during the curtain calls, out came Dolores in a white beaded gown that nobody had ever seen. The costume designer started screaming, “What! I don’t want anyone thinking I put her in that! I want my name off the program! I refuse to be associated with this show one minute more!” As it turned out, it was her mother’s dress and I guess she felt she could fit into it better than her costumes — though she was bursting out of it, too. So in a way, even though her mother was dead, we did encounter her.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]
