The Secret Life of the American Musical by Jack Viertel

Author:Jack Viertel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711252
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

12. Intermission

When I was first taken to the theater, in 1955, intermission refreshments were limited to a watery form of orange drink served in a waxed cardboard carton. I have never understood why this should have been so. The theater owners, not above figuring out new and different ways to pick up a little extra something from a captive audience, could certainly have done better—heaven knows the movies were already selling a variety of products at inflated prices. But the Broadway theater, as it so often has, stubbornly resisted. The audience, made up almost entirely of New Yorkers who were inured to this pathetic reality, made do with orange drink and, slightly later, a similarly packaged (and similarly watered-down) version of lemonade. In an early—thus far unrepeated—act of petty crime, I stole one of these drinks from the refrigerator that stood across from the men’s room door in the basement of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre during a matinee of A Thousand Clowns in 1961.

Jason Robards made me do it. In A Thousand Clowns he played Murray Burns, the writer of an awful kiddie TV show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. Murray has just quit his job and is spending his unemployed days making fun of the conventional workforce; shouting at the world from his window; seducing an adorable social worker who has come to threaten him with the removal to a foster home of Nick, the nephew he is raising; and generally imparting his unconventional values to the boy, who was exactly my age. Murray’s message seemed to be that the world was wrong and he was right, and if he felt like doing something, he just did it, without apology.

I took the bait. I had seen the refrigerator before taking my seat at the beginning of the play, and I was seated on an aisle in the rear of the theater—perfectly positioned to be the first one down the stairs when the first-act curtain fell.

It was a revolutionary act: I thought the theater should be doing better with concessions, and charging less, and that its failure to do either entitled me to express my dissatisfaction in an act of sticky-fingered protest. And I was thirsty. Capitalism was a bad thing anyhow, though not as bad as the orange drink, which, I admit, tasted a little better when you had boosted it with lightning stealth.

I now work as senior vice president at Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, and a trip down to the basement-level restroom is always tinged with a little nostalgia for that free carton of orange drink. This, apparently, is what persistence in a career amounts to.

The career would not have happened at all without the gambler’s instinct of my first New York boss, Rocco Landesman.

In 1987, I was working as the dramaturg at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and had begun to understand what it meant to tell a story onstage. In hindsight, it’s amazing that, as a daily theater critic in the

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