You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman by Andy Propst

Author:Andy Propst [Propst, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography, music
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
Published: 2015-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

19.

“Bouncing Back for More”

For other musical theater writers, such as Richard Rodgers, who spent a majority of his career working with just two primary lyricists, or Alan Jay Lerner, whose main body of work was written with one composer, the death of a partner like Dorothy Fields might have resulted in a period of inactivity. But unlike these authors, Coleman had maintained and cultivated a host of different collaborative relationships since he and Fields first explored working together in the early 1960s, and his workload in the months following the opening of Seesaw was typical of how he juggled work with different partners while also creating opportunities for himself as a performer.

In May 1973 it looked as if Broadway would be welcoming a new Coleman musical before the end of the year: Beautiful People, the tuner about a marathon group encounter session that he and James Lipton had completed in late 1971. Herman Levin had originally planned on producing it, but after Seesaw started heading for the stage, he moved away from the project, making way for an unexpected producer, Warner Bros., which announced its intention not only to bring the show to the stage in the fall of 1973 but also to turn it into a feature film.

The company’s investment in the show and its wide-ranging plans for the property fueled almost immediate interest in the musical among the general press, and soon details about the musical were fodder for columnists. Jack O’Brian became one of the first (and then most frequent) chroniclers of the aborning show when he reported that Beautiful People had a “fat role for a slender beauty that should make her a star. Agents have hundreds of clients lined up. The character’s named Miss January because she’s so-named in a Playboy centerfold.”1 In a subsequent column he teasingly told readers, “Eighteen roles are up for grabs in the Cy Coleman–Jimmy Lipton musical ‘Beautiful People’ and you’d be amazed at the stars fighting for them.”2

Not to be left out, Earl Wilson used his column to tout the show over the summer: “None of the actresses up for Miss January in Cy Coleman’s new musical, ‘Beautiful People,’ mind the nudity in one scene—what scares them is the torrid lesbian action.”3

The section of the musical to which Wilson was so luridly referring was a dance sequence in which one of the women in the group became entranced by the sexuality being expressed by Miss January and one of the male group members, and in the process a heterosexual pas de deux transformed into a homosexual one.

Tellingly, neither these general-interest columnists nor reporters from industry press speculated about who might stage the work during the course of the summer, and in the absence of a director, there was no mention of when Beautiful People might be reaching the stage. As the 1973–74 season progressed, the show’s title was never touted even as a dim possibility for production.

Glimpses of the show would be caught in articles over the

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