The Musicals of Cy
After a notable period as a jazz pianist and composer of popular songs like "Witchraft," Coleman placed material in the 1953 Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac and wrote incidental music for the Broadway drama Compulsion 1957. It was not until 1960, however, that he made his debut with a full Broadway score, for Wildcat.
It was a thoroughly conventional product of its time, and, of course, a star vehicle, for a beloved TV personality making her debut as the star of a Broadway musical. Working with the highly skilled lyricist Carolyn Leigh, Coleman demonstrated that he could provide Wildcat's leading lady, Lucille Ball, with a bouncy opening number, "Hey, Look Me Over!," that would have a life outside of the show, along with a rousing duet for the star and a supporting player, "What Takes My Fancy." If the flat N. Richard Nash book was unable to elicit Coleman's most inventive work, the score was also notable for its more serious items, particularly a handsome introductory ballad for the leading man, "You've Come Home," and a chorus of anticipation for a crew of oil drillers, "Tall Hope."
Again a collaboration with Leigh, Coleman's next show was a much better piece, Little Me 1962, and it inspired the composer's first top-notch score. Little Me was tricky, for its spoofing of the vicissitudes of the life and career of fictional show-biz personality Belle Poitrine did not call for much in the way of sincerity. Yet Coleman was able to inject an occasional note of sweetness "Real Live Girl" that was absent in Neil Simon's hilarious book, even if the most dramatic number, "Poor Little Hollywood Star," was partially drowned out by the laughter evoked by a display of signs advertising the dubious highlights of Belle's silver-screen career.
Coleman and Leigh gave Swen Swenson a sizzlingly seductive song called "I've Got Your Number," for which choreographer Bob Fosse had no trouble supplying an equally sinuous dance routine. Young Belle Virginia Martin had the dynamic "The Other Side of the Tracks" and a very catchy title song, shared with her alter ego, the mature Belle Nancy Andrews. The older Belle had a fine closing item, "Here's to Us." In the 1998 Broadway revival, the two Belles were combined for one actress, Faith Prince. Little Me was another star vehicle for a television luminary of the '50s, and Sid Caesar, playing seven men in Belle's life, got a showstopper also brilliantly staged by Fosse in "Deep Down Inside," along with tailored comic items like "I Love You," "Boom-Boom," and "Goodbye."
Because Caesar was its king, Little Me was more about Simon's script, one of the funniest ever, and less about the songs. Coleman made a more significant contribution to his next show, Sweet Charity 1966, working for the first time with great, veteran lyricist Dorothy Fields.
With another Simon book and Fosse this time in charge of everything, Charity was a remarkably unified show, with all the elements -script, choreography, songs, sets, orchestrations-seamlessly blended into a single vision. For the third consecutive time, Coleman was fashioning a star vehicle, but it's fair to say that there were two stars, dancing comedienne Gwen Verdon and the choreography fashioned for her by her husband, Fosse.
The score showed Coleman maturing from a gifted tunesmith to a genuinely theatrical composer, capable of supplying material that was ideal for Fosse's notions for numbers like "Big Spender," "If My Friends Could See Me Now," "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This," "I'm a Brass Band," and "The Rhythm of Life." If the first two were extractable hit songs, all of these numbers supplied Fosse with the inspiration to fashion musical staging that was among the best of the '60s.
Coleman and Fields were also up to musicalizing their heroine's vulnerability, in "Charity's Soliloquy" and "Where Am I Going?," or of supplying the heroine's pals with wry comment on her plight that turns unexpectedly serious, in "Baby, Dream Your Dream." Practically thrown away was a handsome romantic ballad, "Too Many Tomorrows," another number that was at least partly drowned out by laughter, in this case provoked by the antics of the title character, temporarily hiding out in a movie star's closet. Given the show's conception, the Coleman-Fields score for Charity is pretty much perfect.
Little Me was a comic field day with no emotional content whatsoever. Charity did have emotional content, but the show was conceived as a comic fable, and not meant to be taken too seriously. So Coleman's most heartfelt show to date would be Seesaw 1973, again with lyrics by Fields. It was the first Coleman show to undergo radical revision on the road, with numerous personnel changes including a fired director and leading lady.
Seesaw's chief problem was its attempt to blow up into a full-scale Broadway show a potent but tiny source, William Gibson's two-character Broadway charmer Two for the Seesaw. As more than one critic noted, Seesaw felt like two different shows, one an intimate piece about its two principal characters, the other big and full of gaudy production numbers "It's Not Where You Start," "My City," "Spanglish," "Ride Out the Storm", staged by Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune, Grover Dale, and Bob Avian.
The two shows never quite came together, but, thanks to very appealing work from Michele Lee and Ken Howard, the protagonists were sympathetic, and Coleman and Fields musicalized them with a lot of heart in numbers like "Nobody Does It Like Me," "Poor Everybody Else" cut from Sweet Charity, "You're a Lovable Lunatic," "He's Good for Me," and "I'm Way Ahead." If Seesaw wasn't a fully satisfying musical, it was endearing.
It would be more than twenty years before Coleman again worked on a musical with significant emotional content. Indeed, he seemed to be attracted to light, comic pieces that offered little opportunity for audiences to become deeply involved in the character's plights.
A hit that spoofed the sexual revolution and wife-swapping, I Love My Wife 1977 features one of Coleman's less interesting scores. That's not to say that it isn't accomplished and well-suited to the property. But many of its songs function as comment numbers or as respites from the farcical action. With surprisingly good lyrics from librettist Michael Stewart and the frequent deployment of an on-stage, four-man band, the I Love My Wife score had a catchy theme song in "Hey There, Good Times," but was at its best in a country-style duet for a pair of wives, "Something Wonderful I Missed," and the satiric "Ev'rybody Today Is Turning On."
Coleman returned to peak form with On the 20th Century 1978, written with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Choosing to mirror the extravagant nature of the plot's stage hams and screen divas with a score in the grandly over-the-top manner of operetta, 20th Century was Coleman's most ambitious work. Its sound is unlike that of any other show of its period, and that sound was an ideal embodiment of the flamboyant characters that crowded into the show's dazzlingly designed railway cars.
Because its melodies are often spun out in unpredictable fashion, the 20th Century score may have needed more than one hearing for full appreciation. In Coleman's overall oeuvre, it holds up extremely well. 20th Century falls short of greatness, however, because the romance of its central characters isn't deeply compelling, and the show's comedy isn't consistently hilarious enough to make up for that lack of feeling.
A few bright tunes were squandered on Home Again, Home Again 1979, Coleman's first outright disaster, and a show that folded after tryout runs in Stratford, Connecticut and Toronto. Coleman recycled some of the songs from Home Again in 13 Days to Broadway, a backstager that was announced for several Broadway seasons but then quietly disappeared.
The next Coleman show, again with Michael Stewart lyrics, was a solid international success, Barnum 1980. The biographical show's chief attractions were Joe Layton's life-as-a-circus staging and the opportunity for a title-role star turn. The adept score featured a number of catchy items "There Is a Sucker Born Ev'ry Minute," "Come Follow the Band" as well as a few attractive, quieter items "The Colors of My Life," "I Like Your Style". Once again, it was hard to care deeply about the relationship between circus impressario P.T. Barnum and his wife, Chairy, but the non-stop staging and Jim Dale's performance made up for that.
Coleman's only Broadway disaster was Welcome to the Club 1989, a distasteful piece about husbands in alimony jail that lasted two weeks. Sharing the lyric-writing credit with the inexperienced A.E. Hotchner, Coleman supplied several strong tunes, but they went to waste in what would be the only Coleman show to make it to Broadway and not get recorded. York Theatre Company subsequently offered a heavily revised version of Club, called Exactly Like You, which was even worse than the Broadway incarnation.
Working with the talented young lyricist David Zippel, Coleman was back in the hit category with the last Broadway musical of the '80s, City of Angels 1989. Once again, the show's central conceit --the simultaneous depiction of the travails of a Hollywood screenwriter and of the film-noir screenplay he's creating-- ruled out any emotional content. That was made up for by Larry Gelbart's funny book and by the Coleman-Zippel score, which saw the composer reverting to his roots to supply one of the jazziest Broadway scores ever. Featuring a cornucopia of 1940s musical styles filtered through a Broadway sensibility, the City of Angels score is one of Coleman's most accomplished.
Things were simpler in The Will Rogers Follies 1991, Coleman's second consecutive Tony-winning Broadway musical, with the composer working again with Comden and Green. Like Barnum, it told the story of a true-life entertainment figure through a central staging concept, in this case Will Rogers' life as a presentation of the Ziegfeld Follies. While there was charm in the central characters, Will Rogers Follies had almost no emotional power. But then the show was meant as nothing more than lightweight entertainment, buoyed by a high-gloss Tommy Tune staging and a fine star performance by Keith Carradine. Coleman's tunes were consistently bouncy and appealing; it was the kind of traditionally brassy Broadway score that was becoming rarer and rarer.
An overheated melodrama depicting some seedy denizens of a pre-Disney Times Square, The Life 1997, Coleman's final Broadway musical to date, was nothing if not emotional. With lyrics by Ira Gasman, its score was full of high-powered performance pieces that were taken full advantage of by a talented company. Some found The Life powerful; I found it fairly ludicrous, although Coleman's score was his most operatic.
Since The Life, there have been the Dutch production of Coleman's Grace Kelly musical, Grace, and U.S. regional stagings of Coleman's The Great Ostrovsky and Like Jazz. With the title changed to In the Pocket, Like Jazz with Marilyn and Alan Bergman and Gelbart has been announced for Broadway next season, while Coleman's Pamela's First Musical with Zippel and Wendy Wasserstein is scheduled for a regional premiere in 2006.