Read Online Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) by Ted Chapin - Free Book Online

modern-day clothing, always a challenge to designers, was in subdued dark colors. Everything, including all the men’s suits, was color. The only people wearing black in the present were the players in the stage band who wore tuxedoes. The women’s present-day costumes were as stylistically diverse as their colors.
    Of course the costumes had to complement the palette of the scenery. When Hal Prince found the photograph of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the Roxy Theater, he took it to Boris Aronson, the seventy-year-old scenic designer with whom he had worked on his last four shows. Aronson was having something of a renaissance under Prince. Following a long and varied career, he had found something new and imaginative in his decadent and theatrically twisted scenery for Cabaret. He then came up with the ultramodern, chrome, glass and shiny-black urban environment of Company, which was so modern and new that many felt it had to be the work of a young artist. It was simply Boris Aronson being inspired. Independently, he had also seen the Swanson photograph, and when he heard Hal describe a show that took place in an empty theater, he was excited. “An empty stage is a gold mine, a concept that really fascinates me,” he was quoted as saying in The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (by Frank Rich and Lisa Aronson) —“a chance for Cubism of the highest order—and not just for the sake of abstraction, but based on something real.” He drew a preliminary, atmospheric sketch for the Follies set that captured the essence of the photograph, adding a broken catwalk above, abstract pieces of ripped scenery hovering in space, staircases leading nowhere, pieces missing from the proscenium arch, and a main stage area that looked as if things had been simply left behind. Ghostly figures, including one far upstage that looked just like Gloria Swanson, lurked in the shadows. The set became refined in each successive drawing, but it never lost the impression of that first sketch. It looked less like a theater being torn down than a theater that had just been neglected for a very long time. Nothing was entirely intact—walls were crumbling, remnants of old drops hung down, piles of bricks and rubble were strewn about. And despite the existence of the original color photograph of the Roxy Theater, in which the gold filigree and the red brick were as striking as Gloria Swanson’s black evening attire, for Prince and Aronson, this was the black-and-white version. Everything in Aronson’s design had lost its color. Of course, it was actually shades of gray, black, and white, but the impression was of shadow, and empty space. We were never shown how far the wrecker’s ball had gone until the final image of the show, in the early morning following the party. There was also no furniture; although the event of the play was a party, only a buffet table would ever make its way onto the set. Whenever anyone sat, it was on some piece of the set.
    In its simplest form, the set was a series of three square, raised platforms rising to the rear of the stage in angled perspective, with a corner facing the audience. Each angle was different, giving a sense of false perspective, and they were all floating on a flat-black floor, which was itself raked. Skeletal units, which also looked as if they were crumbling, were stationed offstage right and left, three on each side. They moved in tracks in the floor, on the diagonal. These units, made of structural steel and pipe, included pieces of crumbling walls, staircases (some functional, some not), piles of rubble, and various planks making areas in which small scenes could take place. One series of planks formed an area large enough to accommodate a piano, bass, and drums for the onstage party band. When these units were pulled offstage, the stage looked vast, black, and empty; when they were pulled onstage, the emptiness of the space closed in and shifted, so that scenes could appear to be more