Cy Feuer

Michael Kantor: But let’s start with guys in Dallas, you know, in a nutshell, where did the idea come from?

Cy Feuer: Well, Ernie called me from California. I was in New York. And he said, I’m holding in my hand a volume with a sensational title for a musical. It’s called Guys and Dolls. It was a collection of Damon Runyon’s stories. There was no actual story called Guys and Dolles, but the anthologist decided to call the collection Guys and dolls, which he did. And, uh… We were very excited over that because Martin and I were both Damon Runyon fans, and we got all charged up about it and went to the Damon Runyan estate. Runyon had died a few years earlier, and we knew an agent in New York was handling the estate. We went to him and said, we’d like to do, we told him what we wanted to do. And he said, well, a lot of the stories have already been sold to Motion Pictures. But why don’t I give you a batch of the unencumbered stories and you read them and pick out one that you want, come back and we’ll make a deal. And we said, no, we don’t want to do that. Our juices are running. We’re ready to go. Let’s do the following. Let’s lay out a complete contract to be based upon X story to be chosen and sign it with the advances the whole works. And in that way, the clock is ticking and this is going to be our next show. And we want the… We want the energy level to be kept up. And that’s what we did. And then we went to Lesser. And we told Lesser about it. And Lesser turned out to be another Damon Runyon junkie. And boy, he said, he went for it immediately. And we said, okay, now, Frank, you just sit here while we wade through all of this stuff. We had all the unencumbered stories. And he was too impatient for that. So he wrote, can do. Just on a generic sense of what the characters were. You know, it was a three-part, it was sort of a mildly contrapuntal sort of affair. And he wrote, you know what I’m talking about, Can Do.

Michael Kantor: No, if you can illustrate those with a little room. Yeah, if can illustrate by just singing a little bit and giving us a sense.

Cy Feuer: Well, you know it, it’s called, I got the horse right here, the name is Paul Revere, and here’s the guy who says if the track is clear, can do, can-do, et cetera. And he called it, the formal word for it was a fugue for tin horns, but it came generally to be known as can do was for three guys. And it was wonderful piece of material, and he said, okay, Frank, we have no story, we don’t know where to put it, put it aside, which we did. And then we… Went on and did our show, just to tell the story of Can Do. And by the time we were ready to open in Philadelphia, we found out that we were not in the horse business. We were in the crapshooting business. And consequently, we had no place to put Can Do, so we were about to open, and there was that wonderful piece of material sitting there, and we could find no place to put it, until Ernie came along and said, listen, he said, why don’t we do it the first number right after the opening. Before anybody knows what business we’re in,” he said. It’s a hell of a piece of material. Let’s do it. And we did it. It was just wonderful. It was received wonderfully from the very moment we did. As a matter of fact, when the three guys stood out there with the racing forms, with the jizz of vamp going, and suddenly the trumpet of the pit played the first call, you know, da-da-da, da da da, da de da da. The audience burst out laughing. They knew exactly what we were about, but there we were and putting it in first position. We held our breath and it went off great. We switched over to crapshooting and to this day, no one has ever mentioned, why did you open a show about horseplayers and they continue about crapshooters?

Michael Kantor: Hey, Burrows, Frank, you.

Cy Feuer: Well, I guess we naturally gravitate toward each other. Frank and I were very good friends early on in Hollywood. Abe came into Hollywood, and as I told you, Abe and I knew each other from high school, and Michael was another Brooklyn guy, and I guess our general temperament was suitable to this. That’s what I always felt, as I’ve told you about the other show, about My Fair Lady, where that group was all seemingly. Consistently complementary to each other. So, so were we. There’s something that we did do, though, that was important, and that was to include very, very much Damon Runyon. And Damon Runyan, we felt, we subtitled the show, A Musical Fable of Broadway. It was on everything. Guys and Dolls, A Musical Fabel of Broadway, that was for our benefit. Musical fable, uppermost in our minds. It was those, it was all of our mugs and tough guys were the seven dwarfs, Disney characters. They were all lovable. There was nobody, even our worst, our worst villain was a big teddy bear. And it was up and uppermast in our mind to maintain the fable quality and at the same time do, It was a kind of a street. Musical and I think the combination of those two things resulted in what Guys and Dolls is really the texture of Guys and Doll’s is really about and what makes it so so constant and everlasting.

Michael Kantor: When you talk about the street, obviously, what street is that and what does that street mean to you?

Cy Feuer: Well, I don’t know, it was Broadway. And it’s a fabled Broadway. I use it, it’s all make-believe. There is, everything that they do that’s terrible in the show turns out to be wonderful. And the street itself, I think, is just a, sort of a make- believe Broadway. You look at it and it looks real. But what it’s really about is once upon a time.

Michael Kantor: Tell me about the real Broadway and growing up, what it meant to you. What did Broadway symbolize?

Cy Feuer: Broadway symbolized nothing to me. I was not involved in it. I was a musician. And when I was kid, I used to play the trumpet on odd jobs and all the way up through high school. And consequently, in those days, the musicians used to hang around the corner of 46th Street. It was kind of a musician’s exchange for odd jobs, kind of like a hiring hall. Really strange. And 46th and Broadway. And consequently, I inhabited that a great deal after school and later on when school was over. And to me, it was just a… Kind of, it wasn’t glamorous to me. It was a place to go to get a job, you know? And I was so much a part, being a musician, so much of a part of the Broadway that I could never look at it from the outside view of glamorous Broadway, never looked glamorous to be.

Michael Kantor: But why when you and Frank and all those other people were obviously working well, successful in Hollywood, what was the lure of Broadway then?

Cy Feuer: Oh, well, that was very easy for us. Ernie and I… Were in Hollywood at the height of the golden age of musical movies. Everyone in the country was flooding to Hollywood. All the talent, the place was so full of talent, it was just alarming. And to compete with these guys was impossible. When Ernie and I decided to go into partnership together after whatever preliminaries were involved, we decided, well, look, all these guys are coming west, let’s go east. Maybe, and that was based upon individually us having, when I was in the Army, I used to get free tickets to Broadway. I was stationed in New York for a while. And Ernie, who was 4F, and was working at CBS. Used to make trips to New York for CBS, and he would go to the theater. And when I was at the theater, after looking at all of this grandiose, tremendous musical production in Hollywood, and you go to theater and look at that show, that little cockamamie show up on the stage, boy, that was easy. Doing those things out in Hollywood was really tough. I mean, you just couldn’t do them. It was just forbiddingly difficult. I said, God, we could do that. You know, it’s like putting a penny down and going in and seeing a show. We said, look, let’s go there, where it’s easy and guys with our limited talent can make it. Whereas if we’re up against all of these, the brilliance is flooding out there.

Michael Kantor: Now, if you would, just without talking about them, give me the list of, we came here, we did, where is Charlie? And then go through the list of the shows you did.

Cy Feuer: If I can remember them.

Michael Kantor: Well, you’re going to leave one album. You came east, and what did you do?

Cy Feuer: Well, we came east, and we successively did the following shows, and not necessarily as easy as they sound when I rattle them off. There was Where’s Charlie?, Guys and Dolls?, Can Can?, Silk Stockings?, The Boyfriend?, Whoop Up, which was our first flop, and then How to Succeed, and then After that, we did quite a few more, didn’t we? Little May, right. And then Skyscraper, I think. Skyscrapers, Walking Happy, a couple of flops. And

Michael Kantor: Last one.

Cy Feuer: And then we did… I can’t remember them all. I’d have to look at the list.

Michael Kantor: No, no, that’s great. How about just for the sake of our sound thing, you can just say, and lots more. What’s that? Just say, end lots more so we can.

Cy Feuer: And lots more.

Michael Kantor: Perfect. Describe if you would, I know because of your background, you worked with Frank Lesser on some of the songs. What was it like to work with him on a song? Well, I.

Cy Feuer: No, well, I didn’t do that. I didn’t work with Amman’s songs. What Frank would do was he would play me his unfinished stuff, which was very flattering. And before it was completely finished, almost in its final form, so that complete enough, so that conceptually you knew what it was about, lyrically and musically. And that was the extent of it, but I never ever collaborated with him. He was always his own man.

Michael Kantor: Describe, if you would, Frank’s temper.

Cy Feuer: Frank had a colossal temper. You must understand that Frank was a very sweet man and a very bright man and a well-educated man. And also, he could come out like a street fighter. And he had a blast of anger that could just, at one point, we were doing, it was with guys and dolls. And he wanted, oh, I was adamant that, that, that uh… But Guy’s and Dobbs is going to be new musical theater. It would not have reprises for the sake of reprise. You know, every show used to make certain that its hit song was reprised two or three times, and it was like a song plugging because the book didn’t mean anything. It was no one ever paid any attention to the book. They went here to hear the score, and however, it was just something to hang the score on. And I said, look, we don’t want to do that. We’re telling a viable story, and we can’t stop and do it. Song plugging, and we’re not going to have any reprises. And Frank and I, we were at Kaufman’s apartment. It was Kaufman and Ernie. Kaufman and Ernie were sitting on a couch together, and Abe and I were in combat. I was saying, no reprieze. He said, I got to have repriezes. I got something in a second act so that they know, the song going, the battle raged. And Frank at one point, he gets so mad, he used to jump up and down, and his both feet came off the floor at the same time, yelling. And finally I said to him, we’re not going to do it, and we reached an impasse. And Kaufman… Very quietly, and Ernie and I were watching this thing like a tennis match, you know, and finally, Kaupman said, I’ll tell you what, Frank. He said, we’ll allow you to reprise the song in the second act if you’ll agree that we can reprise some of the jokes in the 2nd act, too, you see, you now? And, uh… Sort of eased off after that, and finally I said to Frank, listen, I said, if we find a spot… If you can find a spot that doesn’t hold us up, you can have your reprise. He says, I’ll find it, I will find it. You son of a bitch, he says. And so I said, okay. And he said, what are you doing for dinner? You know, this is the way. And I promised him that he could have his spot but he never did find it and we never did have any reprises. But another time he walked out of, how does he quit, how to succeed? I don’t know if you know about that. Oh, okay. But that was part of his anger, you know.

Michael Kantor: What happened with Isabel Bigley?

Cy Feuer: Well, I can’t quite remember. It was at an orchestra rehearsal. And he wanted her to do something vocally. And I can remember what it was.

Michael Kantor: Something on if I were a bell.

Cy Feuer: If I, was it Ira, if I, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think so, I’ll tell you why. It was not Ira Bell. Oh, yes it was. Yes it was, because she.

Michael Kantor: I think it was. That’s what I.

Cy Feuer: You do? Maybe you’re right, because, you know, Ira Bell was taken away from her and given to Vivian, and then given back to her. We couldn’t make the thing work somehow. So, well, call it Ira, it was probably Ira Bell. And he got aggravated, and there was a riser to step up on because he was quite a bit shorter than she was. And he stood up on his riser, and he was trying to explain something. He lost control of himself, and gave her a, and slapped her. It was really a tap, it wasn’t what you would call a resounding slap or anything, and everyone was shocked. And I think that he spent the rest of his life apologizing for this, or at least he spent the next four years, any time he saw Vivian, saw Isabel, he apologized. I think he ran out of apologies after a while and everybody stopped listening.

Michael Kantor: Tell me what, how do you feel like within the spectrum of musical theater, Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady represent two ends. Tell me about.

Cy Feuer: Well, they’re both, but they’re my two favorite shows. They’re both kind of.

Michael Kantor: Which show’s it on?

Cy Feuer: Oh yes, My Fair Lady and Guys and Dolls are my two favorite shows. They’re about something, and they’re elegant in their conception. If I didn’t use the word conception, I’d call them immaculate, immaculat in their conception. But they are, they tip their hat to George Bernard Shaw and we tip ours to Damon Runyon and both were serviced beautifully I thought, musically as well as, as well literally and I compare them always in spite of the fact that one is a kind of a street smart thing about a bunch of hoods, the other was in a very elegant English upper class. But I do regard them sort of as a pair of wonderful concepts. Many contractions have made it somewhat stilted and wonderful to read and impossible to use as drama. Abe’s job, Abe Burroughs’ job was to convey. The sense of Damon Runyon, for those who’ve read it, because he was widely read and very popular, into fooling the people into thinking that our dialog was Damon Runyan when it was modified so as to be able to be used as dialog without being as stilted as the Damon Runy if you actually did it. We ran a couple of Damon-Runyon movies before doing this where they tried it, and it absolutely didn’t work. It just didn’t play. It didn’t lay on the tongue for conversation easily. But Abe would write… Well, let me tell you about Abe’s. His first, there was an entrance in Guys and Dolls that would typify this. Let me set this up for you. And says, fellas, I’m in terrible trouble, that lousy Brannigan. And they say, shh, shhh, Brannican. Oh, he said, Lieutenant, I hope you do not think I was talking about you. There are other lousie Brannigans. And Brannigen says, I understand you’re having a tough time finding a place for your game. He says, yes, Lieutenant. He says the heat is on. I say, you must know from the fact that you now have to live on your salary. He goes off and he says, what does that cop want from me? I’ve been running the crap game ever since I was a juvenile delinquent. Now, that sounds like running, but it speaks, very interesting.

Michael Kantor: And that’s a bro.

Cy Feuer: That’s Abe Burroughs, transformed the whole guys and dolls into valuable Damon Runyon.

Michael Kantor: And didn’t Frank Lesser do this.

Cy Feuer: Frank Lesser did it. He used contractions, which we ignored. But Abe did not. Do not think I was talking about you. Not don’t think I’m talking about.

Michael Kantor: What’s your favorite lyric that Frank wrote for that?

Cy Feuer: Oh easy, Adelaide’s Lament. Adelaides Lament is a single best piece of comedy material that I’ve ever heard in any show and you know what that was, of course you do. You know Adelaid was, Adlaide and Nathan were engaged for 14 years and she worked in this in the hotbox which was this cheesy nightclub. And because of the fact that she wore very skimpy costumes, she had this chronic cold. And someone once gave her a book on psychosomatic medicine. And again, here’s Frank. God. He asked, he said, can you give her a cold and give her this chronic call? And we arranged it. She was in her dressing room in a wrapper, putting it down, and she now had this book that someone gave her. And she read… The average, I won’t sing this, but she read, the average unmarried female, basically insecure, due to some long frustration may react with psychosomatic symptoms difficult to endure affecting the upper respiratory tract. She puts the book down as she thinks. In other words, just from waiting around for that plain little band of gold, a person can develop a cold. And again, she ends with… From a lack of community property and a feeling she’s getting too old, a person can develop a bad, bad cold. Great, just great. Nothing like it ever written before or since.

Michael Kantor: I’ve never been to a show, never seen anything, how would you describe…

Cy Feuer: I don’t know what you were doing. Broadway musical. You mean A Broadway musical?

Michael Kantor: Yeah, just brassy. What’s the words that come to mind when you think of it as a genre? How would you describe it as whole?

Cy Feuer: Well, remember that we got into it when it was musical theater. You know, when it transformed from musical comedy to musical theater, we got in in post-Oklahoma and post-immediately post-South Pacific. So we were into serious theater and where serious stories were being told, where we couldn’t find a spot for a… Can do because we were telling a story that had sequences in it.

Michael Kantor: We were ending with Ethel Merman. Tell me, you know, why was Ethel Merman’s people’s.

Cy Feuer: Well, first of all, she had a clarion voice that could be heard clearly. She had magnificent, magnificent reading of the lyrics where. The lyrics were pristine and they could be heard five miles from the theater. And the composers just loved it. And they heard everything that they wrote and heard it clearly and enunciated it with great care. And she was just a hit song dynamo.

Michael Kantor: What would she like as a person?

Cy Feuer: She was kind of tough, but not really. I didn’t know her that well. We never did a show together, so I never really got to know her, and of course, I wouldn’t know when the chips were down, but she always seemed very nice.

Michael Kantor: What about Vivian Blaine? Why was she, very briefly, why was she so perfect for Adam?

Cy Feuer: Well, the reason is, and they didn’t understand this in the subsequent productions, Adelaide was sweet. Sweet is the key word for Adelaid. When Faith Prince played her, Faith Prince could have licked Nathan. As a matter of fact, in the staging, he had, the director had him, she was hitting him presumably on both cheeks. Adelaide would never do a thing like that. Adelaid was this sweet, wonderful woman who was being put upon by this terrible, inconsiderate monster who really loved her, and she knew he loved her. But Adelaida, your heart went out to Adelaido, and she had to be that flesh and blood, and that was the key to it.

Michael Kantor: Tell me about the musical theater great, George Abbott.

Cy Feuer: Well, George was a, I felt he was kind of a machine. He just knew where everything belonged. He fit every cog into his proper place. He was no nonsense. Let’s get down to it. We didn’t have a very good close relationship with him. As a matter of fact, we had some difficulty between us, but he knew exactly what he wanted to do. And he was very He was the height of efficiency. And to the point once at a casting session where we were trying to cast somebody and we saw four or five people, and none of them seemed, they were all right. One of them was okay. They didn’t seem good enough. And he said, well, that’s all we have to choose from. And my attitude was, well, let’s get other people to choose from, you know what I mean? But he wasn’t a settler either, by any means, but he was very. Cut and dried, this has to be done, and he really knew his business. He was top-notch, and everything was on time. As a matter of fact, they came over and auditioned once. It was at 3 o’clock. I arrived there about 2 minutes after 3, and he just looked at me this way, and he looked at his watch. It was about 2 and a half minutes after 3. So that was Abbott.

Michael Kantor: What about George S. Kaufman, I mean, we pick him up in the story in 1931, with Of Thee I Sing, I mean, right, tell me about how you mentioned earlier, what did he do for you all young guys relatively new to the Broadway field?

Cy Feuer: Well, it was just great.

Michael Kantor: What was his name?

Cy Feuer: Oh yeah, George Kaufman was just great, he, uh… After we had finished about, not quite finished the first act, we thought that we’d better get in a director and knew a little more about what was going on than we did. And Abe, I think, knew Kaufman. I can’t quite remember, but we got to Kaufman, we sent him the material, and we met with him, and he recognized the value immediately. He was a guy with a long nose for material, And he said… What we have here, I’ll never forget, in our very first meeting, he said, what we have is very valuable, and we must be very careful not to compromise at all. And he agreed to do it. And… His knowledge was profound and we all recognized it and we realized that we were sort of in the presence of a kind of a musical personality a musical musical Encyclopedia and not a musical a theatrical Encyclopedia that we could all benefit by and we can sort of sat at his feet in a way and also he was He was also a no-nonsense guy very much in a sense like Abbott where he didn’t believe in things like a good morning, a good night, how do you feel, and any of that stuff, you get right down to business.

Michael Kantor: I know that’s it’s sort of hard for you to imagine, but

Cy Feuer: I don’t know if anyone from another planet wouldn’t understand any music, but I don t quite know how to put that into context.

Michael Kantor: So put Cole in the context of the Broadway pantheon. What did he offer that was different from Gershwin and Rogers and Frank Lesser? What was his?

Cy Feuer: Well, first of all, he had a tremendous composition style. He was a genuine composer, a real, real creator. And, of course, his lyrics were very tricky and very contemporary. And he used the contemporary scene, picked up everything that he heard and it was all indelibly registered in his memory, and he used it all in contemporary terms. But above all, it was so talented. Both musically and lyrically, that it was unusual. And also it had a, he had his own stamp, as many of composers do. You could sort of recognize, you couldn’t really, but you could, but you sort of could, it sort of recognized Cole Porter when you heard him without the lyrics. And we met him later on in life when I’d just read a biography of his, when, of his early life, which is entirely different. His personality was entirely different than when we knew him. We did his last two shows. And to us, he had settled down somewhat. He was an older man. He had had the…

Michael Kantor: And pick it up with, you know, after Cole Porter’s accident, what was he like physically? Tell me about that.

Cy Feuer: He was frail. He was in constant pain. And he fought like the devil not to lose a leg. He had many, many operations in an effort not to loose a leg, and that had been going on for years before we met him. And, uh, he, uh… He never acknowledged the pain. He was a gentle man and he was genuinely interested in us. I guess not only in us but in other people like us because he was totally unlike us. He was kind of insulated against the world. He was born rich, went to all the best schools, graduated from Yale and became a world famous composer So he didn’t really experience any of the vicissitudes of life under the conditions that most of us did, and so he was his existence was somewhat unreal to us, but he was very interested and had two lives. He was homosexual, which is well known, and he had his homosexual existence and he had his show business existence, and was an enthusiastic participant in the show business end, Consequently, he had… I personally felt very much at home. My wife and I became very friendly. And as a matter of fact, he left my wife something in his will.

Michael Kantor: What about his apartment? I understand that when it was decorated, he wanted the decorator to understand that it should have a Broadway feel. Why does, he obviously spent a lot of time in Hollywood, but he loved to show business.

Cy Feuer: Not true. He lived in the Waldorf Towers. He had an apartment that had nothing whatsoever to do with Broadway at all. It was very elegantly decorated by Billy Baldwin. And we spent a lot of time up there because by that time he had lost his leg and he didn’t go out and we spent time with him. And as a matter of fact, he took us into his bedroom one night where he had a lot of sound equipment and he played us the demos on, what was the last movie he did? I can’t. So, Grace Kelly and. Well, it was clearly Linda. He was devoted to her. They had a marriage of convenience between the two of them. She knew that he was gay. And I don’t know what her sexual activities were. But she was like a second mother. He claims that Linda taught him everything he knows. And that in reading the book, when he arrived from Peru, Indiana, he seemed to be kind of a rube. It was the impression that you had. And when he met Linda, she polished them up. And of course, he had all the money in the world. And she evidently moved in these high social circles. And if you read the recent biography, it was just fabulous. And matter of fact, one night, the story that I tell.

Michael Kantor: I interrupted you when you were saying Cole’s attitude toward, and it was toward his work in terms of the unity and, you know, taking a song out and did he have difficulty rewriting material?

Cy Feuer: Well, he didn’t rewrite, he, there was one. There was a song that didn’t work and he played it for us, for Ernie and me. And before we could, you know, I was trying to figure out how am I going to let him down easy. Before I could do this, he said, look, he said this is no good. He said, you don’t like it and I don’t like it, and let’s get rid of it. But he said but I’m all out of ideas on this. So if you guys can come up with another idea, I’ll do it. His attitude toward the book was interesting. He said… I know nothing about books, and we invited him to come to a story conference. He said, I won’t go to a storytelling conference because I have nothing to contribute. I’m interested, naturally, in the story and everything, but I have to contribute and I’m uncomfortable. I don’t want to be in that position. So you guys figure out what the book is. As you know, I like the subject matter. I’m in. Tell me what you want and I’ll write it. And that was his attitude. Simple as that. And that’s what we did.

Michael Kantor: Great. And if it came to rewriting a song…

Cy Feuer: To rewriting this particular song, he said, I have no ideas. If you guys have an idea, tell it to me and I’ll rewrite it, which is what we did.

Michael Kantor: What if he got stuck for a rhyme? What would he do?

Cy Feuer: The one time he asked me about being stuck for a rhyme and… Uh… He called up and it was about 4 o’clock in the morning. And said, did I wake you up? He said, no, no. No, we were just lying here waiting for the phone to ring. And he said, I’m stuck for a rhyme. The aurora borealis is not as heated as a da-da-da. And I said, the aurora borealis is not as hot as a data-da, do you mind if I call you back? Oh, no I’m sorry. I’m so I go back to sleep. The next day I said… The aurora borealis is not as heated as a palis is.” She said, I said, it’s a terrific line. I will have made a contribution to a Cole border lyric. And I called him. I said Cole, I’ve got it. The auror borealis not as heated as a Palis is. He says, that’s the first one I threw out. I said well why? What did you throw it out for? He says you can’t keep them heated. I said you can keep what heated? Palis’s. What are you talking about? He says, when Linda and I had our palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, froze to death. Absolutely froze to the death. I said, well, cold. The average man thinks it up, and he says, and not only that, we spent one night at Buckingham Palace. Same thing. Froze to death, he says. It’s terrible. So I said to Cole, believe me, the average man on the street thinks that a palace is a very nice place. Well, he said, they’re not, you know, they cold. I said well, Cole, belief me. And he said, what about… The aurora borealis is not as heated as Dallas is.” I said, no, no. Stick with the palace. I said that’s it. Believe me, stick with the Palace. He said, well, if you say so, he said, and he did. And he wrote. Siberia, cherry Siberia.

Michael Kantor: What motivated?

Cy Feuer: Well, first of all, he was truly, genuinely talented. He was full of inventive things. He was bursting with it and everything trying to pop out. No matter what you, he confronted him. There was all some angle that was oblique that you had no relationship to that he came up with. And it was wonderful. I mean… The guy was kind of astonishing, and he could kind of do it all. He was very well organized, and I guess that’s about it.

Michael Kantor: What about that sense of obsession? And he drove himself, didn’t he?

Cy Feuer: Yeah, kind of, but what, he eventually, theatrically made himself into a one-man band, he didn’t want any help at all. His last show had no composers and no director, no, you know, he was a director, he was composer, not composer, he used the standard music so that he didn t have to collaborate with anybody. And that was the thing about the… Madonna Street, and he eventually didn’t like producers either who would restrict them, although I never found him unreasonable in working with them. But I was working with him either as a producer or as a director, and we co-directed, and we were very close up until we had a falling out on the movie. And that was sad and unfortunate, and it remained that way until the end. He was a black and white man. You were either a friend or an enemy. And he moved me from friend to enemy, and there was no way halfway. It was sad. I regretted that.

Michael Kantor: And with that, in terms of, I mean, we’re studying the play Cabaret, Howe Prince’s version, how did Fosse try and put his stamp on it as a film?

Cy Feuer: Well, that was a… Fosse came into the film late. We got an okay on the film to go ahead, based upon. A screenplay written by Jay Allen in which I had some very strong opinions about, first of all, we had to reduce, I think there must have been about 17 numbers, we have to reduce them to something like six because a film can only handle six spots. I also got rid of a secondary story and put in another one about a young Jewish woman passing and a And that was all done. The screenplay was finished and approved for production. Fassi is much more stylized, has his own identity. Michael, he didn’t have any particular style. He was just theatrically wise and adept at everything. And also, conceptually, he was wonderful. What show to do? With the idea of creating. Chorus line, just the idea of doing anything like that, which is such a departure from anything ever done before, I think that that’s where his strength was, whereas Fassi’s was actually in terms of movement. Well, first of all, Michael was very aware of what the story was about. He was concerned. And his stuff was fashioned to enhance that, which was very good in those days where musical theater was being taken seriously. And his staff was very physical. He would demand things of his dancers that used to worry me because of the danger of it all. But he was a He demanded they could do anything, he could do anything that he asked them to do. As a matter of fact, at one time, he had the girls, the girls objected about wearing high heels for one of the numbers, and he grabbed the pair and stuffed his feet into the largest pair he could do and he did the whole number in the high heels to demonstrate that it could be done. He was also, he’s a warm, nice man, so he’s not a Martinette, so it took the edge off of that a little. And his ideas were wonderful. In Can-Can, he had one of the great things in Can-can. He got the biggest laugh in the evening. We had to, he had to create a number that had to be so bad. That they could be arrested for performing it. And it was important to the plot for them to dance the number and have photographers waiting and snap the action. And then for the cops to come and arrest the girls. And he did it. And when I saw it, I let out a yell. I just couldn’t believe it. I wondered, how the hell are we ever going to do this? What can you do that’s bad enough to be arrested on the stage? And what he did was, the girls were sort of a can-can, but in kind of civilian clothes. Where the girls had real stockings on that were rolled down to here, and panties with a little lace on them, which was much more sexy than those costumes. And they had big dirndl skirts with flared up, and you all saw their underwear. And at the end, he had them standing with their legs apart, and he had the guys do a knee slide face up under the girls, facing up to the girls as they went through. And when they came up on the other side, Each of them held up a pair of pants that they had snatched off, panties that they have snatched of the girls. The girls reached back and grabbed the back of their dintels and pulled them up and covered their obviously bare spot. And the audience let out a scream and the flash bulbs went off before you know what, when they could do it. And they arrested them and it was just absolutely terrific. I mean that was the kind of stuff that Mike would do and it always had some sort of a point to it.

Michael Kantor: Let’s go back to Bob Fosse again, I felt like we didn’t cover him in the way that we might. Why do you think, ultimately, he’s sort of self-destructed?

Cy Feuer: Oh, I don’t know. Luckily, most of the time that I worked with him, he wasn’t that way. It was only later that he had a drive to do it. And then, of course, he turned out to be a very, very good picture director, you know, and did some very interesting films. And I don’t know, he had some kind of a drive in him to do this, to be isolated creatively. But when I work with them and… And at that stage, first of all, we were very, very good friends, and Gwen as well. And our families knew each other. And so I don’t know quite, I don’t know if I can answer that question for you. Because by the time he was going off to do that, we was, we we were estranged.

Michael Kantor: What was, you know, Gwen’s genius as a performer?

Cy Feuer: Oh, God, I don’t know. She went on stage and everybody else disappeared. It was one of those things. She just moved, had a certain movement that was just spectacular. I don’t know how to define it otherwise, but she was magic when she danced.

Michael Kantor: Wasn’t it your show that really catapulted her? Yeah, sure. Describe that moment and how Broadway can take someone who’s really not done much and all of a sudden they’re not. Yeah. Describe.

Cy Feuer: Well, it was in the second act. There was a comedy dance based upon Apache, you know, the Apache dance where the Apache mistreats the girl and she stabs him, kills him and… The whole group participated and finally the two emerged from the group and it was just Gwen and this one fellow and They did the thing in slow motion. I don’t know how Michael did it, but the whole thing was done in slow-motion and a way to pass with a big cheese and It was a knife in it at the climax of the dance and she in slow, motion grabbed the knife Turned around and went to her lover and stabbed him in the stomach came back, turned around, put the knife back in the cheese, and she walked off, which was the end, and then the rest of them all finished on stage. And the audience clamored at the end. They wanted to, she was off stage when the number finished, and the audience wanted her back on. And they stopped the show, and it was on opening night in New York, and they demanded her to come back on, which she finally did with a kind of a wrap around. She had already changed her costume. And stood there while they thunderously applauded and stopped the show and then had the fun of stopping the show. The scenery had changed, the actors were standing around awkwardly and the audience sensing that just kept it up longer because of the awkwardness of it. And it was what’s known as a show stopper, which was most shows don’t get stopped that way, but this one did.

Michael Kantor: What about the state of musical theater in Broadway? How do you feel about it?

Cy Feuer: Well, you know, my time has passed, and, uh… So I don’t disapprove of what’s going on, but I don’t connect with it because I was always interested in what people were saying rather than what they were, what the scenery was doing. And also, the comedy, you know, my time was what they was saying was funny. And that seemed to have disappeared from musicals. There wasn’t, there weren’t any really funny musicals any longer. And I guess that, well… A funny thing happened on the way to the forum, which was very physical, but did have some very funny things in it. But again, that was a part of that era of my old era. The fun has gone out of it. And you’ll have the Scarlet Pimpernel and Jekyll and Hyde and the great Phantom of the Opera. And, you know, they all have a furrowed brow, not the kind of fun that we used to have. Even My Fair Lady was enormously amusing. Very funny.

Michael Kantor: Why is it that shows are so expensive now? What’s the, where’s the culprit?

Cy Feuer: Well, I guess it’s the rising cost of everything. I said that is fundamentally the, fundamentally a company. And also, the cost of labor has gone up commensurate with everything else. And certain unions have, dominate the industry because there’s, remember we can’t, the theatrical business can’t control its cost because the balance between labor and management always is the strike issue. You can’t have a strike on Broadway, really, because if you strike, everything closes and doesn’t open again. It’s not like Detroit going on strike for two weeks. When it goes open again, there’s still Cadillac and Pontiac. You close for six months on a strike, and forget it. All the shows have lost all of their money. And so there’s no power in the negotiation. And that’s always existed as a result of which the costs are enormous on Broadway, probably a little higher than they are in other areas. It evolved from operetta. Used to be operetta, Victor Herbert was the American, and there was the France later on. All the foreign operettas were done here with the Blossom Time and all those. They were big business. And little by little, these foreign-influenced composers dominated that field. And when Nicole Porter’s and the Irving Berlin’s and so forth started to appear upon the scene, and the Rogers and Hart’s, they sort of… Took over in line with that and went into that nonsense area of musical comedy. It was a gradual evolution. Well, I can’t tell because I didn’t know much about him. He was, he did the choreography on our first show, Where’s Charlie? And I didn’t know he was George Balanchine. Those were the days. He was just another choreographer who was around. And the work that he did for us was not, it was okay. He wasn’t particularly outstanding. The thing that interested me most about him, he was a little guy who used to wrinkle his nose a lot like a rabbit, and every Sunday he would take the New York Times crossword puzzle and write the whole thing out like he was writing a letter. I’d never seen anything like it. It took him about 30 minutes and he’d write out the whole crossword puzzle. That was what really impressed me. Little did I realize he was going to turn out to be George Balanchine. Oh yeah, Big Julie came to an audition with a friend of his, I can’t remember his name, who was auditioning for the show. And he was just in the wings rooting for this guy. And George Kaupman and Ernie and I, Frank, were out front and we heard his gravelly voice guide. Gene Bayless, I think, was the actor who was on stage. Our boy Gene, we heard this, and… Finally, Kaltman said, who is that back there with that voice, you know? And he said, would you ask him to come out? It was B.S. Pulley. B. S. Pulleys. But Kaltmen said to him, Mr. Pulli. Do you know anything about gambling? And he pulled a pair of dice out of his pocket, rattled them, and said, you’re fated, you bum. And rolled the dice out onto the stage. And Kaufman turned around and said gentlemen, we have just found me a jewelry.

Michael Kantor: And wasn’t he actually, like, there’s something to do with jail? He just got in a j-

Cy Feuer: Yeah, he did. He was in jail for some reason. I don’t know what for, but he had just been sprung, and there was a whole long story about Marty Baum, the agent, trying to find him, and he showed up on his own without that. Marty was trying to fine him when he showed as a friend of Gene Bayless.