New Book: Champion of Broadway
Getting to work with top choreographers Robert Alton and George Balanchine, Champion and Tyler dance in three Broadway shows, then Gower renews his acquaintance with Marge Belcher, daughter of one of Hollywood's most sought-after choreographers. After dancing in the film Till the Clouds Roll By, Champion forms a new nightclub act with Marge, while the pair begin a romance that culminates in marriage in 1947.
In Los Angeles, Champion does the dances and overall staging for the successful revue Lend an Ear, which comes to Broadway after Champion makes his debut there with the choreography for another revue, Small Wonder. Carol Channing is featured in Lend an Ear, but Champion loses the job of choreographing her vehicle Gentlemen Prefer Blones because producer Oliver Smith had promised it to Agnes de Mille. Champion "never wanted to speak to Smith again," but Smith will work with Champion again on one of his biggest smashes.
The team of Marge and Gower sign with MGM for five films, including Show Boat 1950 and Lovely to Look At. Champion gets to choreograph the film Give a Girl a Break, which also features Bob Fosse, who aligns himself with director Stanley Donen and winds up dominating the picture at the expense of the Champions and Debbie Reynolds. Meanwhile, Champion wins praise for his choreography of the Broadway flop Make a Wish, a significant step in his evolution as choreographer and director. In 1954, Champion is credited as both director and choreographer for the first time with the concert revue 3 for Tonight, the only joint Broadway appearance of Marge and Gower.
Champion turns down the choreography for My Fair Lady because he wants to stick to directing. An experience with a play that folds on the road leads Champion to a realization: "To insure success he insisted on having absolute authority over every aspect of the works he staged."
All of this is but prelude to the heart of the book, an in-depth analysis of Champion's years as a director-choreographer of Broadway book musicals, a reign that begins in 1960 with the hit Bye Bye Birdie. Leading lady Chita Rivera in a role turned down by Carol Haney and Eydie Gorme says that Champion "was lighthearted, but he was a taskmaster," while composer Charles Strouse found Champion to be "a very cold man, very controlling and very controlled." Birdie "defined the features of Champion's stagecraft in the twenty years to come---brilliant imagination fused with endless inventive touches, then tempered with perfect taste and warmheartedness to unify production." It's not too early for Gilvey to note that "By streamlining the way productions were mounted, Gower would soon bring the staging of conventional musicals to its highest peak and pave the way for the concept musicals to come."
Champion would have a lengthy love-hate relationship with David Merrick, and his first of seven shows with the Broadway legend was Carnival, which foreshadowed concept musicals with its "uninterrupted flow in the presentation...henceforth, continuously choreographed staging would become common practice, and musicals would dance from start to finish." On Carnival, Champion "became less benign and more tyrannical," and also became infatuated with leading lady Anna Maria Alberghetti.
Gilvey gives Carnival its due as one of the outstanding auteur stagings of its day, and goes on to offer a detailed account of all aspects of the development of Hello, Dolly!, with little-known information on the changes the show underwent on the road. Gilvey notes that the continuously choreographed staging was aided by the use of a ramp encircling the orchestra pit. We get interesting backstage trivia, like the fact that Nanette Fabray was Champion's first choice for the title role, but she refused to undertake some exploratory sessions with the director to see if she was right for the part. Gilvey sums up Dolly! as "the last titanic hit in a class of musicals launched over sixty years before by George M. Cohan that celebrated the innocence and boundless optimism of the American spirit."
The two-character musical I Do! I Do! came together when, after twelve refusals, Robert Preston agreed to take the show, which Mary Martin would only do with Preston. Gilvey sees I Do! I Do! as a concept musical about marriage, with the characters of Agnes and Michael made into archetypes to depict a kind of universal marriage. Once again, Gilvey gives Champion's staging its due: "Though not really a dancing show, it was suffused with a choreographic design that only a showman of Gower's demonstrated skill could imagine or realize. Simple and theatrically true movement was flawlessly integrated into the action to dramatize the situation, ideas, and emotions of the characters."
Champion experiments with IMAX photographic projections on The Happy Time, but the multimedia effects tend to overwhelm the fragile story. The director sought to "adapt the techniques and abstractions of avant-garde cinema" in his staging of Prettybelle, which was initially envisioned as a small, dark, experimental show until producer Alexander H. Cohen made it into a bigger one. Seeking to make a serious statement in contrast to his previous, upbeat work, Champion attempted to tell the story visually, with minimal dialogue. But Prettybelle was done in by its unpleasant subject matter, and star Angela Lansbury was relieved when Cohen decided to fold it in Boston.
Gilvey details the hectic tryout of Sugar, with Jo Mielziner's sets replaced by Robin Wagner's; Johnny Desmond's singing gangster replaced by Steve Condos' tap-dancing version; Neil Simon coming in to write a few new scenes for Peter Stone's book; and Robert Moore and Donald Saddler contributing to Champion's staging.
At the urging of star and old pal Debbie Reynolds, Champion takes over from an out-of-place John Gielgud the direction of the revisal of Irene, demanding absolute control of the production and succeeding in saving the show by confidently showcasing the star. Champion was attracted by the darker side of the material of Mack and Mabel, but came to realize the difficulty of translating silent-screen slapstick to the stage. Champion's behavior on the show was "as insensitive and distracted as Mack, unsettled and impulsive as Mabel." Champion and songwriter Jerry Herman ultimately believed that the show was better in its L.A. premiere than it was, three cities later, in New York.
Champion had begun to see the conventional musical as a dying form, and gets excited about competing with the youth culture and staging the rock musical Rockabye Hamlet. The show was killed by hostile critical response, but Gilvey describes the staging as "contemporary, irreverent, audacious, and totally unlike anything he had ever done---the breakout directing feat needed to save a fading career."
Late in the tryout, Champion takes over the unhappy, Martin Scorsese-directed production of Liza Minnelli in The Act, turning a disaster into a much better show, and eventually taking over the male lead from a vacationing Barry Nelson. Unwisely, Champion takes charge of A Broadway Musical, which lasts one night on Broadway.
Champion is diagnosed with a rare, malignant blood disease that forces him to resign from his next major project, 42nd Street. But Champion rallies sufficiently to take on a show that would become "the summation of all he knew and loved about the American musical." Gilvey maintains that in 42nd Street, Champion would "graft his own spectacular staging onto the slender tale to create a concise history of the ways movement had stirred audiences since musical theatre began."
Assembling "a colossal production in which the American musical itself would be the concept, the dynamic driving every component," producer Merrick and Champion were both seeking the sort of comeback show that the story's Julian Marsh is desperate for. Champion and ingenue lead Wanda Richert begin a romance. Gilvey offers an authoritative account of the dramatic decline of Champion's health which led to his death on the morning of the Broadway opening.
Gilvey's account seems virtually error free 42nd Street's first move was from the Winter Garden to the Majestic, with the St. James coming later, and offers valuable documentation of forgotten projects like Champion's 1975 staging of a West Coast revisal of Annie Get Your Gun starring Debbie Reynolds.
Unlike many musical-theatre biographies, this one offers a great deal of information on and description of the subject's shows. Gilvey supplies lengthy accounts of Champion's staging of individual musical numbers, often referring to Champion's rehearsal scripts and notes.
The book is not notably dishy; while it's frank enough about Champion's temperament and his rocky relationships with two wives, the narrative isn't excessively revealing. Occasionally, one may feel that the author is overly beholden to some of those who granted him interviews, thus overstating their importance in the story.
But in general, Gilvey evinces a keen understanding of Champion's skills and of the productions on which he exercised them. Before the Parade Passes By covers the subject as thoroughly and intelligently as possible, and is likely to be the last word on one of the great Broadway musical careers.