Mike Nichols by Mark Harris

Author:Mark Harris [Mark Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-three

OH, THIS IS TROUBLE

1983–1985

Nichols felt so revitalized by his experience on Silkwood that before it was even finished, he began contriving a way to reunite with Ephron and Streep. While in Texas, Ephron had been finishing Heartburn, her acidly funny, revenge-served-cold roman à clef about the breakup of her marriage to Bernstein. Nichols thought she should adapt the novel into a screenplay, and who better to play Ephron’s fictionalized version of herself than Streep? But when he returned to New York in late 1982, Heartburn was still months from publication, and a prospective movie version was years down the road. So he returned to stage work, with a determination to prove that he was back in the game. Over the next two years, Nichols would put four consecutive hits on Broadway and, more than twenty years after Barefoot in the Park, reassert his centrality in New York theater.

The first of those shows was an unpromising rescue mission. After The Queen of Basin Street fell apart, Tommy Tune had decided to return to the stage as a performer, in a musical called My One and Only, a silly, old-fashioned pastiche that was an excuse to string together two dozen songs from the Gershwin catalog, a format that had started to stake a claim on Broadway a few seasons earlier with Ain’t Misbehavin’. The show was prototypical early-Reagan-era stage entertainment—an expensive, defiantly retro throwback to a vague cultural notion of family-friendly “innocence.” The director, Peter Sellars, was a twenty-five-year-old Harvard prodigy who was hailed as a boy wonder for his innovative stagings of classic plays and operas—Handel set in outer space, Don Giovanni reimagined as Shaft. But his sensibility could not have been a worse match for the crowd-pleasing exigencies of a Broadway-bound musical, and, in what he called a fight “between the forces of Brecht and the forces of The Pajama Game,” Brecht lost in a first-round knockout. In January, a few days before the start of the show’s Boston tryout, the producers fired Sellars, and Nichols’s old friend Lewis Allen implored him to come take a look at the show and see what he could do.

When Nichols got to Boston, Tune was doing triple duty as co-director, choreographer, and star, and My One and Only was running close to four hours, not including the lengthy and apologetic “It’s a work in progress” speeches that Tune was delivering after the curtain call to any audience members who had stuck around. Reviews were abysmal; Paramount, the musical’s main financier, burned through much of the $2.8 million it had invested in Boston and contemplated tossing in the towel without opening in New York. Nichols and the show’s new book writer, Peter Stone, persuaded the studio to postpone the Broadway launch until May, the very end of the season, and to put in another $1.3 million for two more months of rehearsals and previews. Then they started performing major surgery.

“The thing that struck me about Mike was his calmness,” says the singer and music historian Michael Feinstein, who was tasked with representing the interests of the Gershwins.

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