Jerry Orbach: I played Billy Flynn, the lawyer, and I gave him a certain kind of world-weary insouciance. He was very, very tough, very cold, calculating, but could be very charming.
Michael Kantor: I was thinking Billy Flynn, the lawyer, gets to sing that classic, sort of giving him the old razzle-dazzle. So tell us about, just mention that, whoops, and tell us all about performing All I Care About is Love, which we have a great clip on, what was going on in that song. So Billy Flynn is this character.
Jerry Orbach: You know, all I care about is love, which is a sort of classic hat and cane number with the girls with all the feathers. That’s Billy’s entrance. And he’s saying all he cares about is his love. He doesn’t want fancy cars or diamond rings or big cigars. And as he does it, he does a strip tease down to his shorts and t-shirt. And when I finished. I threw in Crosby imitations, Jolson imitations. A whistling chorus. It was total vaudeville. Finished on one knee with all I care about is love. And a la Fosse, kind of a cinematic dissolve, I walked in the boxer shorts and the t-shirt into my office, pulled on a pair of pants where a tailor was fitting me for a suit. So it dissolved seamlessly into my officer and the tailor fitting me. It was. That’s the kind of stuff that Fossey did on the stage. In Razzle Dazzle, it’s a whole different story. What happened then was the sharp lawyer in the pinstripe suit with the little thin mustache. And I explained that when we go to the trial, it’ all showbiz. It’s all razzle dazzle. And what I did was I took off the jacket and I had suspenders underneath. Pulled the shirt out of my pants to blouse it out, messed up my hair, and put on a little pair of wire-rimmed glasses on my nose, and I became Clarence Darrow, and then did Razzle Dazzle. So I changed in front of the audience, which was something I borrowed from sort of a French thing where, you know, you go from one character to another in front the audience. Those are things that we invented at the time.
Michael Kantor: How was Chicago untraditional, would you say? You know, you were in a bunch, you saw so many traditional musicals. Wasn’t there a sort of almost cynical view that Fosse brought to it?
Jerry Orbach: Chicago had a style of black humor, of world-weary decadence, almost like cabaret, which was also Fosse. It kind of harked back to Three Penny Opera, which was the first thing I did in New York. That kind of very sophisticated, you know, don’t believe in anything. Which was very unusual for the time and kind of ahead of its time. And of course it opened five days after Chorus Line which made it very tough on the reviews. And like I say, it was a little ahead of it’s time in it’s humor and it’s look on life and on civilization.
Michael Kantor: Places, you know, this is just post-Watergate, right? I mean, it was a dark time. It was a Dark Show kind of reflecting a dark time, maybe people wanted to leave that behind. What’s your thinking on that?
Jerry Orbach: It opened at a time when I don’t think the public was really ready for it. It’s almost like what happened with Follies, except Chicago ran a couple of years. It had a very nice run, maybe three years. But it’s like with FOLLIES, people went in expecting to see Vaudeville, a happy thing. And it was very dark and about divorce and lost love and things. So they weren’t quite ready for maybe.
Michael Kantor: What was the tone that Bob Fosse, when he first introduced, we’re doing this show, what did he say about his vision? What was he trying to achieve?
Jerry Orbach: Well, the story is based on Roxy Hart, which was, you know, a movie with Ginger Rogers and Adolf Menjou and a story of a murderess in Chicago who becomes a celebrity. We’ve seen so much of that, of criminals becoming celebrities in this day and age and, you know, the 15 minutes of fame. And that’s basically what Fossey was trying to show. And also, it was, the rights were owned by Gwen Verdon, who was Bob’s ex-wife, and it was kind of a present to her.
Michael Kantor: That’s great. How do you think Fosse’s approach to Chicago changed after he had this heart attack, right? There’s this moment during rehearsal, then something just happens.
Jerry Orbach: Bob had his heart attack when we were in the first or second week of rehearsal. And then months and months later, we started up again. And I don’t think he was a different person. I don’t think he changed that much. He was still chain smoking. I mean, he showed it all in that movie that Roy Scheider did, All That Jazz. I don’t say he had a death wish, but he just refused to change. You know, it’s like a guy who you tell him smoking’s going to kill you, Duke, you know, and they don’t stop. But his attitudes were the same, I think. You know he loved, he loved writers. He loved Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner and Peter Stone and those guys. He loved educated people because he didn’t have much formal education. He worshiped the written word.
Michael Kantor: It’s wild to hear that about Fosse when you think of him as this style. You know the dancers talk about this little stylist and I mean in a way you’re saying he’s more of a conceptual thinker. You know with Bennett it is sort of showbiz razzmatazz that Fosse was interested in ideas and so on.
Jerry Orbach: Concepts, concepts and attitudes. Attitudes about life and sex and work and religion and everything.
Michael Kantor: Speak to, you know, the Times Square area like in the mid-70s. You’ve been in music theater many years. What was happening to theater overall and speak to how Chicago was part of that?
Jerry Orbach: The mid-70s may have been, kind of the last, the end of what I think of as the golden era that really was the 50s and the 60s and it went into the 70s and things sort of started to change after that. I mean you see the disnification of Times Square and some of the things that have happened since. We’ve gotten, I don’t know if we’re more sophisticated or what it is, but Broadway. Times Square in the 40s, back in the late 50s, it was a wonderful place. It was a beautiful, seedy, crummy, but very, very glorious place. It was place where people came from all over the world, the crossroads of the world.
Michael Kantor: Now do you think when people show up there they get, they certainly don’t get the seediness, but just speak to, you know, if it was wonderful then, how would you describe it now?
Jerry Orbach: Well, the theater just posted its biggest box office ever. Of course, it’s at $100 a ticket. When we opened Promises, Promises Merrick went to $12.50 a ticket, and it was unheard of. I think we went to $15 at some point. People were up in arms. But the ticket is the same as 10 times the movie. If a movie was a quarter and Broadway was $2.50, the movie got to be $1, Broadway was 10 dollars. You know, so now a movie is $10. The prices just go up accordingly. But I think the tourists who come in from all over the world still have that unique experience of the big Broadway show, whether it’s a musical or a drama.
Michael Kantor: If you would, give us a sense of, you know, Billy Flynn. There’s this great line, give them the hocus pocus, bead and feather them. How can they see with sequins in their eyes? Or something from Razzle Dazzle or All I Care About with Love that just speaks to how, you now, there’s this showbiz sleight of hand going on.
Jerry Orbach: Well, in Razzle Dazzle, when he says how can they see what sequence in their eyes, it’s the same thing a magician does, razzle dazzle. He’s making you look at this hand while he does something over here with this hand. That’s basically all it’s about, fooling the jury, fooling a judge, making them believe one thing when something else is possible, you know.
Michael Kantor: Coming back to all I care about at Love, was it funny to strip to your underwear? What was the audience reaction as you did this number?
Jerry Orbach: It was great fun because here are all these gorgeous girls, these incredible bodies just writhing around and doing this fan number. And Billy’s saying, I don’t care about it. I’m just interested in saving a poor girl who’s accused of something. Totally against what he really is, which is the fun of it, you know, protesting so much that all he cares about is love, nothing else. Packard cars, big cigars, forget it. I hate that stuff, you. And then he says, have you got $5,000? I’ll defend you if you have $5000. Her husband says, but she’s innocent. He says, I didn’t ask you, is she guilty or is she innocent? I asked you, have you got $5,000? So you see that Billy is totally without any kind of heart.
Michael Kantor: The basic themes of Chicago. You mentioned how it’s about a trial and so on, but put it in the biggest context. It’s about how American culture is about show biz and all that sort of stuff and money and sex and how Fosse tapped into that. One big overarching look at the show. What Chicago really is.
Jerry Orbach: Chicago is about your 15 minutes of fame and about how it can come to anybody for any kind of reason that, you know, if an ax murderer is famous enough, they’ll put them on stage and everybody will pay to come see them. It’s an indictment of our pop culture, really.
Michael Kantor: John Kander and Fred Ebb’s music, what in particular in Chicago made it so theatrical?
Jerry Orbach: Kander and Ebb are an incredible combination. Fred Ebb is witty and stylish and he knows humor and sophisticated. And John Kander can do any musical style you want, from kind of semi-classical to pop to rock to, you know, vaudeville. So the two of them combine to make a perfect team for musicals because the song in a musical should be about the words. The melody shouldn’t be intrusive. It should fit the words, and they just go together so beautifully before. For the musical form, and it furthers the plot. A song should take away two or three pages of dialog and replace it and move the action forward, which they do. They do. They don’t just throw in a song just for fun. It always means something.
Michael Kantor: And Chicago had such a range of the various showbiz styles, just very quickly. Tell us about.
Jerry Orbach: There’s vaudeville in Chicago. There’s personal kind of soliloquies, Roxy’s thing of I’m gonna be a star thing. There are all kinds of different turns in it. There’s a lot of, a lot harking back to vaudevilles and to burlesque, but always with that cynicism.
Michael Kantor: We saw some of the almost naked people. Did the audience react weird to that, or was that just part of the set of the costumes?
Jerry Orbach: No, the audience didn’t mind the near nudity. I mean, you got to remember there had been Ocalcutta before that, my friend Jacques Levy did. And there were a lot of shocking things in the 60s. I was in a Bruce J. Friedman play called Scuba Duba where we had the first topless woman since LaGuardia banned Burlesque, you know. So they were used to things by then. They’d gone through the 60’s. David Merrick was an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum. You know, he was a lawyer from St. Louis. He, I don’t know if he ever wanted to be a journalist. He became a producer, and he became arguably the most famous, most prolific, greatest producer of Broadway that there ever was. He was kind of paranoid. He had ups and downs. He might have been manic-depressive. I don’t know, but he went through a lot of different things in his life. I may have been closer to him than. Almost any other actor. I was at the hospital with him when his child was born, his daughter. Spent some time with him, you know, all out of the theater. But, uh… The one story I remember. Which I think I may have told you some time ago, but when we were getting ready, when we just opening 42nd Street, David had taken the profits from a movie that he produced and bought out his only two investors for like a million a piece. And he now owned the whole thing. And it was all his gamble. And I was having a poker game one night and I said, I saw him alone on the stage looking around at the scenery on this empty stage. He, I said, David, we’ve got a big poker game going on tonight. Would you care to join us? And he said, this is my poker game. And it was. It was his gamble. And when he would make a lot of money on something like a Hello Dolly, then he would produce things like Arturo Ui or Beckett or things like that, that were artistic projects under his foundation, which he knew probably wouldn’t make any money. He’d get to do those or the Entertainer with Olivier. He didn’t have to worry about the making money because it was like a nonprofit organization. So he had two things going at once. He could be the artistic producer and the commercial producer.
Michael Kantor: They say Ziegfeld never really got the comedy part, or the music part, I can’t remember
Jerry Orbach: The comedy, yeah.
Michael Kantor: But speak to, you know, what did Merrick thrive on in musical theater? What was the part that, you now, whether it was the song, the dancing, the girls, whatever, that really wired you?
Jerry Orbach: Merrick had the capacity to, he had a critical facility. He knew when it was good and when it bad. And he would hire creative people, sometimes who didn’t know what was good or bad, but created all kinds of things. And he’d say, no, get rid of that or leave that in. I remember Gower Champion on Carnival, wanted to put in this dream ballet with giant size puppets, because we had the puppets. I was the puppeteer. He wanted to in a dream ballet and we started to put it in out of town of Philadelphia. And Merrick said, No, get rid of that, they’re not going to buy that. Gower said, no, but this is essential to the story. And Merrick said, I’ll close the show before you have that. He always threatened to close the shows. And he won that argument, which was just as well. Because, you know, Gower had an idea that was, Merrick thought, not workable. He knew what worked. He knew, he knew what was commercial.
Michael Kantor: Gower Champion apparently was one of the few guys who could really stand up to Merrick. I saw a quote, he called Merrick a Presbyterian Hitler.
Jerry Orbach: Ha ha ha.
Michael Kantor: I mean, speak to that dynamic and what Gower brought to, in particular, 42nd Street.
Jerry Orbach: Gower was the epitome of a choreographer-director, like Jerome Robbins. He had tremendous… You know, you get that feeling of power from choreographers because they’re used to telling dancers what to do and the dancer does it immediately. No argument, no nothing. So, choreographers are not used to being argued with. And when they are argued with, they go crazy. And Gower would have just epic battles with Merrick, you know, but they worked together several times because they knew that one made the other one succeed. I think Merrick originally chose the Winter Garden because it was the biggest house he could find with the biggest potential gross. I don’t think anything else entered his mind. We then moved it to the Majestic and Cats redid the Winter Garden and opened there and we played at the Majestic, I don t know how many years, before Phantom moved in there.
Michael Kantor: Speak to the day right up until, you know, the opening night of Forty Second St. What happened the day of Forty Second St?
Jerry Orbach: The opening day of 42nd Street, which had been postponed many times for various reasons. We knew that Gower was ill, thought it was some kind of pernicious anemia or something. We had no idea that it was this rare blood cancer or something
Michael Kantor: Merrick was potentially throwing away by saying no, no more previews for however many days.
Jerry Orbach: We were all wondering what was going on. Merrick stopped the previews. He changed the opening date. He announced there was a bomb threat, a rat in the theater, meaning that there was critic. We had no idea what was going on. Then the day we were finally supposed to open, he called us in for a brush-up rehearsal and to reset the curtain calls in the afternoon, which kept us in the theater right up until half hour. And of course, we weren’t hearing any news. And they had kept it from the networks that Gower was dying or had already died. Opening night happened. It was a fairly early opening evening. And Merrick, for better or for worse, for publicity or for shock value or for whatever he thought it would do, waited until the curtain calls. And when we had finished two or three, four curtain calls, when you might bring out the author, author, author or whatever, Merrick came walking out to a big applause. And he said, this is a very sad occasion. And we laughed. And he said, I have to tell you that earlier this evening, Gower Champion passed away. Our reaction was, and the audience’s reaction. It was on every front page of every newspaper in the world. What happened was my instincts, my theatrical instincts, and my instincts as the producer, director of the show, pretty lady in 42nd Street, we had egg on our face. The audience didn’t know what to do. We didn’t what to and I yelled, curtain, bring it in, curtain, you know, and you know the stage hands said, oh yeah, and they brought in the curtain. And that was. The end of it, well, everybody said, my God, what presence of mind you had that you took over and said curtain. I said, we’re standing there, you know, totally in shock. The audience is in shock, we had egg on our face, as we used to say. So, I called for the curtain to come in. Now, we go to the opening night party, and great opening night part up at the Rainbow Room, you know top of NBC, and Benny Goodman and his band and everything, and Neil Simon was there. And Doc Simons said… If you wrote this story and brought it to a major motion picture studio, they would kick you out on your ass because it’s just too far-fetched. It’s too theatrical and too unbelievable. The director dies on opening night, you know, and the producer comes out and makes the announcement. But that was Marek, the flair for the dramatic, the flaire for the press.
Michael Kantor: Speak to how that was maybe Merrick’s glass great success and there’s really no one like him left. Things have changed. Now you have corporations and.
Jerry Orbach: Shortly after that, a year or two later, Merrick had a stroke and he recovered, but things were never the same for him. It was really his swan song, 42nd Street. And after that, there have been other producers, Marty Richards who did Chicago along with a few other guys, the Producer Circle. But there has not been anybody come to the fore like Merrick who was a one-man team who did it all himself. It was his vision, his taste, his money. I don’t think we’ll see it again. We see groups of producers, we see groups of investors, corporate investors. You have the American Airlines Theater and the Ford Theater and people backing things like that. It’s a different world.
Michael Kantor: Houses sold, you have however many people in the orchestra who have to get paid, performers who have to get pay, I mean, that, if it wasn’t hundreds of thousands of dollars, it was a ton of money. Just speak to that moment of, Merrick did something that no one else would ever do.
Jerry Orbach: Merrick at some point canceled the previews of 42nd Street when people had already paid their money, gave them their money back, and we didn’t do several performances. I think because he didn’t want any critics coming in before. He wanted everything to happen opening night. Again, he took a huge gamble. Took a huge gambling with his own money. He was a no-limit poker player. He would go all in.
Michael Kantor: Perfect. In the show, you say this fabulous line, which I hope you can repeat for us. Think of musical comedy, the most glorious words in the English language. Speak to how 42nd Street is, a classic, traditional musical comedy, and how that’s, in a way, disappearing or.
Jerry Orbach: 42Nd Street is really the grandfather of all backstage stories. The star breaks her ankle and the kid goes on and becomes a star overnight. And it’s a love story and a story of the depression. Chorus line is kind of an update of 42nd street. A lot of things are based on that kind of same story. But the secret of it, when Julian Marsh says, think of musical comedy, the most glorious words in the English language. You’ve got to, you know, you’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got come back a star. The more serious you are about that, the funnier it is in today’s world. When I say you’ve gotta give it everything you got, they’re paying $4.40 a seat out there. That’s funny, but you mustn’t make fun of it. It’s absolutely dead serious. And the more serious you are, the funnier it is. So it is, it’s the classic, classic backstage story.
Michael Kantor: Occurred during the making of Forty Seconds.
Jerry Orbach: I think the thing that epitomizes the essence of David Merrick is when we were about to open 42nd Street, he was standing on the stage, looking around at this new drop, this red velvet thing, all by himself after a performance. And he had just bought out his only two investors, a couple of guys from Texas. Million apiece and so he was the sole proprietor of the show now was all his money and I had a poker game going after the theater so I said David we’ve got a big poker game on tonight if you want to join us and he looked around and he said this is my poker game And that was David Merrick.
Michael Kantor: Energy, is it the brashness, is what is it, you know we could have emerged in London or Paris, what makes Broadway
Jerry Orbach: Broadway, as we know it, is American. It’s an American art form. It came down from vaudeville and minstrel shows. It really reflects the patchwork, quiltwork diversity of America because you had the black influence on the music, the Jewish immigrant influence, the Irving Berlins, and all the people who go to make up America have been all these influences on what we know as Broadway or as popular music. You know, 40, 50 years ago, all the songs. On the hit parade, the top 10 songs in the country were things that came out of South Pacific or My Fair Lady. So they represented the popular culture. And it’s really the best of the popular cultural, I think, the Broadway musical. It’s unique, uniquely American. Some years ago when Laurence Olivier and Robert Stevens were sort of co-directors of the National Theater, they decided they would do, they wanted to do Guys and Dolls. I think Maggie Smith was going to. Did a few days of rehearsal, and Olivier said, we’re not going to do this. And Robert said, why? He said, well, we’re incapable of doing this. We can’t do this, it’s crazy. They could act it, certainly. This isn’t what we do. Well, over the years, they’ve been able to do quite a bit with musicals, but it really is an American art form. We don’t do Shakespeare as well as they do.
Michael Kantor: Tell me again for our intro, what are the kind of adjectives that describe and really deliver these when you think of them? The Broadway musical, you know, brassy, whatever comes to mind. When you think and really help us give some energy to that intro, what’s the Broadway musical?
Jerry Orbach: The Broadway musical is made of fun. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. It’s sexy. It’s brash. It’s exuberant. It hits you in the gut sometimes. And it tickles you. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful entertainment.
Michael Kantor: Before you were describing a Fosse one-way, just very quickly talk us through those three major figures in terms of just your perception of their style, Champion, Bennett, and Fosse.
Jerry Orbach: Gower Champion was extremely visual. He saw things in visual terms. He would, as a director, he would say, I want you to circle around and make tighter and tighter circles around the girl as you’re talking. So, oh, you want me to get more and more angry? Yeah, that’s it. But to him, it was a visual thing. And he was painstaking about every individual on the stage had to be exactly someplace. He was very, very… Precise in what he did. Michael Bennett was showbiz, showbizz and brilliant, brilliant ideas of dance, of movement, of making groups go together, split apart, you know, patterns on the stage. And he would tailor things to your abilities. I wasn’t a dancer, but he had me jumping around the stage a little bit. He said, show me some things you would do if you were dancing, when I had to do this basketball number. She likes basketball and promises. Michael was an all-around kind of showbiz, showbizz, showbus guy. Fosse? Fossey was very complex. He had a very dark side and a very kind of oblique outlook on life, and his humor was dark. And it was withdrawn. It was pulled in, turned in, you know, sneaky hats and canes and cigarette dangling. But he loved the writers, he loved the written word, he knew music, he knew showbiz backwards and forwards, but his was a darker outlook on life. The three of them were terrific. They were all unique. They were unique in their own ways.
Michael Kantor: British invasion what you thought of it or how was it different from the kind of show you’ve been in you know a jillion Broadway shows. Take us from 42nd St.
Jerry Orbach: When 42nd Street moved from the Winter Garden to the Majestic, Cats moved into the Winter Garden. They completely remodeled all the seats and everything so that the kids, the dancers, could run up and down the aisles and interact with the audience, which had been done before. It was done in Hair. It was in the revival of Candide, you know, people going among the audience. But Cats was a turning point. It was the British invasion. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber. And it was different, it was not the same for me. The audience loved those shows like Phantom. They’re spectacular, they’re big, they have, I used to say they have chandeliers and helicopters and things like that. But Cats has one song, if you can remember anything besides memories, I applaud your memory. Phantom has one song which sounds like school day, school day is good, feel it here, you know, the music of the night. There’s nothing else in it, a lot of pageantry and a lot of production values, some wonderful performances, but they’re not what I consider the classic musical form, the American musical. They’re not Guys and Dolls. They’re no Carousel. They’re not… They’re not even Hello, Dolly! You know, they’re different. And when the audience sees a good revival of a great musical, of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, or a Julie Styne or Frank Loesser, that’s a different world. And not to mention Sondheim. Those geniuses, those people that developed this brilliant American art form. I don’t think it can be matched any place else in the world.
Michael Kantor: So you’re not down on revivals, as a, you know.
Jerry Orbach: No, if you revive Hamlet, you know, it’s not a revival. Liev Schreiber is doing Henry V in the park right now. That’s not revival. You revive something that’s worth reviving. It’s just another production of it to me.
Michael Kantor: I mean, yeah, I guess Fosse does a couple things in the early 80s. Michael Bennett, I think, most notably, revised his Chorus line one night, but struggles with some other stuff. It sort of signals, in a way, the beginning of an end, doesn’t it?
Jerry Orbach: There have been a lot of… Rehashings of Fosse. There have been a lot of compilations, Jerome Robbins Broadway. These are things that are melages, mixes put together of things that used to be. There has been very little of original great musicals. The Producers is one, terrific. Mel, I think, and Susan Stroman did a great job. And a lot of things were originally movies, like Promises, Promises was The Apartment, Carnival was Lily. Things have gone from movies to musicals. Now, finally musicals are becoming movies again. But I don’t think there’s been really anything big, original and successful. We’ve had a few. The producers, Hairspray is a lot of fun, that was a movie. But they’re rare, they’re few and far between.
Michael Kantor: Speak to that moment, if you would, in 1987, as you mentioned earlier, with Jerome Robbins not making any more original work. Bennett, the Gowers died in 1980, Bennett dies that year, three months later Fosse dies. When they’re all gone, Broadway has to change. Just set that up for us, because you work, tell us how you work with these guys, and 1987, that’s like, that it.
Jerry Orbach: Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Gower Champion, and Jerome Robbins, the great director choreographers, choreographer directors. Their passing was really the end of an era. I think Susan Stroman is brilliant. She’s filled one of those gaps. I loved what Twyla Tharp did with Moving Out, it isn’t a traditional musical, but you realize whether you like Billy Joel or not, his music has been part of our lives for 30 years or more. And that’s a great piece of theater, the dancing, the story told through dance and song. I guess there are people coming along who still are in the tradition of Gower and Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse, Jerry Robbins. But they’re very few, they’re far between. There are a lot of people doing imitations of them, but not too many originals. I think you asked me what’s changed the most in the theater and the Broadway musical. I think amplification is one of the biggest changes. What’s his name? I think amplification is one of the biggest changes. I had a conversation with the late Walter Kerr one time on a plane, and he said, and I thoroughly agreed. When we were kids, we went to the theater, and we maybe sat in the really cheap seats in the upper balcony, and we had a strain to hear what they were saying or singing. But it was a one-on-one live experience. And when an actor opened his mouth over on stage right, you knew that it was coming from there, when somebody else spoke from stage left. Now, it all comes from the same speaker. You have to kind of look to see who’s talking or singing. It’s over-amplified. It, they’ve got a thing sticking over here usually or maybe it’s up here if you’re lucky. To me, it’s not really theater. It’s something else. When it becomes amplified like that, it second, I’m getting it second hand. I’m not getting it direct, direct experience one to one. That’s a huge change in the theater. Huge change. Also, people have become more sophisticated, if anything, because they get the same information from television every night, all over the country. There’s no more sticks. The lyrics, the writing has, with the exception of Sondheim and a couple of other people, like Adam Guettel, you know, Mary Rodgers’ son. With the exception of a few people the lyrics aren’t clever. They’re not sophisticated like they were years ago. We’ve, you know maybe through rap and things we’ve and certain rock and roll things we become used to things that don’t rhyme and things that really don’t make sense and we put up with it. Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, who were married for some years, had a wonderful partnership. She was his muse. He could choreograph things on her. And I mean, they did what they do, New Girl in Town, Redhead, Sweet Charity, a whole bunch of things. And she had gotten the rights to Roxy Hart. And they’d been divorced for years by that time. But… I think he did Chicago, based on Roxy Hart, sort of as a present to Gwen. There’s a release, there’s a kind of power that comes with reaching the last row. When I was a kid, when I was at Northwestern, we were taught to project. We were given an image by the great Miss Krause that there was somebody across the street on top of a 10-story building getting ready to jump off. And we had to say, don’t jump. But if we screamed, don’t jump, we would scare them and they’d fall off the building. If we just said, don’t jump, they wouldn’t hear us from across the streets. So we had, watch out sound man. We had a… Command them not to jump. So we walked around all day saying, don’t jump. And that’s how we learned to project. So when you say, what’s it feel like to reach the back row of a theater, it’s not just volume. It’s a kind of command. And the first time I understood that command, that joy of the one to one experience with the audience was really my first job in New York was Three Penny Opera. And I got to play McHeath for about six months at the age of 20, working with Lottie Lenya when I was 20. At some point, McHeath is about to be hanged. And he says, which is worse, to rob a bank or to own a bank? Which is worse? This or that? And which is worst? And finally he says and which is a man dead and lying on his back or a man alive on his knees? And I could hold that audience until I turned away to walk up the steps of the gallows. And I said, I’ve got them at that point so concentrated, then I can let them go. I understood that kind of, you feel like the director, you feel the cameraman, the cinematographer, you’re everybody at once, because you’re now doing everything for the audience. You’re concentrating their attention, you’re telling them where to look, what to listen to, and that’s a great feeling. That’s a wonderful feeling. That’s why people love to be in the theater. Movie actors want to say, I want to go do something on stage. That’s the feeling. You make them laugh, you make them cry. You give them a good time. Oh, I think when you’re backstage and you hear the overture start to a musical, that fires you up and the adrenaline comes up. That’s the moment I like. And I always remember opening night of Chicago, Chita Rivera said, oh, I’m going to throw up. I can’t stand this. Oh, God, how am I going to get through this? And, of course, she always does. But I said, Chita, I said this isn’t real life. And she said, what do you mean? I said we’re not robbing a bank. I said if we screw this up, they’re not going to throw us in jail. How bad could it be, you know? But still, you have that adrenaline. That always works. And people who only do a show for three months or five months or six months and say they get bored, I don’t understand it because when the curtain goes up and you have all that responsibility on you to get through it. To do 100% as often as you can, you know. I don’t know how people get bored doing a show, doing a live show. The thing about live theater, it’s an experience for the actor, but it’s a experience for audience too. It can be a very emotional experience. I can’t tell you how many times somebody’s come up to me and said, I saw Carnival when I was 13. It changed my life. I fell in love with the theater. I saw Promises, Promises. My wife and I went on our honeymoon when we came to New York, and we’ll never forget. There were high points in people’s lives, those shows, those performances, that they remember. And they’ll always remember. And that, of course, for me, is the important, wonderful thing when I say, wow, I touched somebody’s life. I made somebody remember some night. It was just another night for me, you know, but it’ll always be in their memory. And that’s wonderful. That’s a thing that you can just carry with you.
Michael Kantor: When you hear the word Broadway, what do you think?
Jerry Orbach: When I hear the word Broadway, it conjures so many images for me of the theater. A world unto itself of the Damon Runyon characters that I’ve seen in the days of Lindy’s and the turf and the stage deli and 42nd Street at the movies going there to midnight shows coming out at four in the morning, young actors from the Actors Studio from Strasburg’s sitting around and arguing about acting. It’s a world. Broadway is a world unto itself, and it reaches out to the rest of the world and road companies and news of Broadway. But Broadway is really New York. It’s Manhattan. It’s legendary, and thank God it’s still alive.
Michael Kantor: Musical theater lives and provides that emotional element in this milieu of time square.
Jerry Orbach: Okay? In what I consider really interesting art or great art, there’s an element of danger. There’s an elements of unpredictability. Great actors have an element of unpredictably like a Brando, Bobby De Niro. You’re not sure what they’re going to do next. You just can’t predict where they’re going with any scene. You know, they’re liable to blow up, throw something through the window. You have no idea. So you’re always watching them fascinated like you would a snake. And great theater should have that element to it too. You shouldn’t be able to predict what’s going to happen. You shouldn’t say, oh boy meets girl, boy loses, you know, boy gets. You shouldn’t be able predict it. That’s what makes it really interesting and fascinating. That was part of what was. Broadway in the 40s and 50s and 60s even of going to 42nd Street, going to Times Square. There was an element of danger there too. You could get mugged, you know.
Michael Kantor: Great, well, I thank you so much. My pleasure.
