NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS

“I just think there are enough neurotics who want to work in the theater, and, hopefully, they get their shot.”
            -- William Goldman in “ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway”

 
Dreams are centrally located on Broadway, in a twelve-block strip in the city’s mid-section, bordered on the south by the Nederlander Theater on West 41st Street and on the north by the Broadway theater on West 53rd.  Within that narrow stretch of skyscrapers and cement, they land in droves, season after season, generation after generation – dreamers of any age, armed with unbridled and unprotected hopes of making their own individual statement on the theatrical stage. 

Is the risk and heartbreak as big as this all-consuming passion?  Not if you make it, baby!

“ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway” is a feature-length documentary that examines the annual influx of ambitious, star-crossed hopefuls, scrambling for the high-board to make their big leap into everlasting limelight.  It could be any season, because this phenomenon continues as faithfully and ritualistically as swallows’ return to Capistrano.  This one just happens to be 2003 – 2004. 

It was the year that a temp and an intern named Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx caught a wild comet of an idea – addressing realistic human foibles as an irreverent puppet show – and it carried them to the Tony podium for the season’s Best Musical.  And, with it, the show carried a couple of unknown puppeteers, John Tartaglia and Stephanie D’Abruzzo, into the running for Best Actor and Actress.  It was also the year that Tartaglia contended with a London unknown, Euan Morton, who managed a stunningly accurate impersonation of the young Boy George in “Taboo.”  When that show failed, Morton’s work visa was cancelled, and he had to return home to England and square one. 

Close but no cigar.

It was the year a big-noise musical named “Wicked” huffed and puffed its way onto Broadway, and critics muffled a yawn, but a sleeping public susceptible to Wizard-of-Oz-wonderment was aroused and turned the show into a $1-million-a-week cash cow.  And it was the year “Caroline, or Change,” didn’t change Broadway’s preference for “Business” over “SHOW” – holding fast despite the best of intentions of its hopeful angels.

Indeed, Goldman’s notions about neurotics on the Great White Way is the parting-shot in “SHOW Business, as well it should be: Goldman, is, after all, The Boswell of Broadway--a rep made largely on the basis of one book, “The Season,” published in 1969, the year he turned Oscar-winning screenwriter (for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) and started devoting himself to screenplays and novels.
 
“The Season” in question was 1967-1968, and, for 18 theater-obsessed months within that time frame, Goldman explored with laser-like intensity every aspect of shows that made it to Broadway (or at least gamely made the bid). It was a landmark close-up of the ups-and-downs, ins-and-outs, gives-and-takes of putting on a contemporary commercial entertainment. So thorough was it, so good at making good on its own lofty ambitions, that it has never been equaled. In fact, nothing like it has been attempted in any medium.
 
Nothing till now. Producer-director Dori Berinstein tells essentially the same story of theater at high tide, only with a camera--lots of cameras, in fact, that ground away for more than 250 hours during the Broadway season of 2003-2004. Footage was shot on virtually every Main Stem attraction, then pared down in the editing room to the backstage dramas of four major musicals, all racing for survival, riches and the Tony.
 
Berinstein readily admits her debt to Goldman, whose book blueprinted the way she wanted to go: “‘The Season’ was my first inspiration, and that’s what I set out to do, knowing that, to tell the story of the season in a feature-film format, we’d have to narrow it down and find stories to tell that captured the pervasive struggle, passion, glory and risk that is Broadway.”
 
The quartet in question came to the fore with their own individually colored baggage--the $3.5 million “Avenue Q,” the $7.5 million “Caroline, Or Change,” the $10 million “Taboo” and the $14 million “Wicked.” As Tony races go, Berinstein lucked out with one that had the most jaw-dropping finish in many a year. One of the above shows expired before the nominations came out, another lingered only three months after the awards, and the other two are still going strong, expanding into road companies and at least one possible TV series.
 
“The Season was a roller coaster with highly anticipated shows closing early and little shows coming out of nowhere to take Broadway by storm,” Berinstein adds, “There was no way to predict where the Season was heading.  Consequently, it was necessary to capture everything.  Editing, as a result, was a massive and extremely difficult process.  Narrowing down our primary storytelling to four musicals was excruciating.  So many extraordinary moments are on the cutting room floor – so to speak.  I can’t wait until we assemble the DVD!”
 
In shaping these backstage sagas into an interlocking whole, Berinstein had the help of two crackerjack editors--Richard Hankin, who is no stranger to unwieldy footage, having edited the Oscar-nominated and Sundance-winning “Capturing the Friedmans,” and Adam Zuker, who recently displayed his theatrical expertise cutting “Broadway: The American Musical” into a TV miniseries. “It’s not unusual for documentaries to shoot hundreds of hours of footage and end up with a movie that’s around 100 minutes,” Berinstein says.

She and her editors assembled a wall-to-wall all-Broadway score, and composer Jeanine Tesori (a Tony nominee for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Caroline, or Change”) was brought in to do new arrangements of classic show tunes. Disparate versions of “Cabaret” bookend the film--a brassy out-there version for the half-hour-to-curtain opening sequence and a slow, wistful rendition for a coda section at the end. She also did a sexy, edgy, delirious “Lullaby of Broadway,” which Idina Menzel, the Tony-winning star of “Wicked,” delivers over the end credits.
 
For the “Chorus Line” number that begins “Step. Kick. Kick. Step. Kick,” the guys doing the barking are five of Broadway’s top choreographers (Jerry Mitchell, Rob Ashford, Hope Clark, Ken Roberson and Wayne Cilento). “It’s either music directly from the four shows or other shows of the season, or it’s classic Broadway. There’s a rock version of ‘Cockeyed Optimist’ from ‘South Pacific,’ arranged by Jeanine for the Pop Star Kids.”
 
Having been down this Broadway path before and walked off with three Tony Awards herself--for 1999’s “Fool Moon,” 2001’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and 2002’s “Thoroughly Modern Millie”--helped to give Berinstein a sense of direction for her film.
 
Almost 400 people were accorded filmed interviews for the picture, coming from a variety of places and perspectives in the business, thus permitting a balanced overview of Broadway. “It was a question of getting different storytellers from different vantage points. With Rocco Landesman, you have a theater owner and prolific producer. With Chris Boneau, you have an expert publicist. With Alan Cumming, you have a brilliant Tony Award-winning actor. With Nancy Coyne, you have a master marketing exec. To help us chronicle what’s going on and bring up key points along the way, we needed people who were real leaders in what they do.”
 
The result has been called “a triumph of access.” Not only does this portrait have breadth, it has considerable depth as well, thanks to the candor of the people Berinstein approached to go on the record. And how does she account for this unprecedented cooperation from the theater community?
 
“Theater people are proud of and love what they do.  I believe they understood that we aspired to capture the magic, the sweat, the risk and the heart behind their work and share it with the rest of the world.   And they believed more people would come to see live theater as a result.” 

Actor Cumming, being a co-producer on the film as well, was involved in the project from the beginning. “Originally, the conceit was that Alan was going to be our narrator,” says Berinstein, “and we shot a tremendous amount with him throughout the year. We have amazing moments on the cutting room floor with Alan that will make their way onto a DVD. When we put the film together, we realized that having a “narrator” diluted the emotional impact of our storytelling.  It was much better to let the story tell itself. Alan agreed.”
 
Finding a title that properly conveyed the ground covered was no easy proposition, admits Berinstein. “We landed on ‘SHOW Business’ because we felt that the film did address very much the concept that exists not just in theater but in all the arts. You have The SHOW--the big, glamorous, beautiful, heart-felt, passionate SHOW, with everybody trying to make the best art they can--and yet you have to balance that out with the reality of ‘How much is this going to cost? Will people come to see it? How do we handle the critics’ response?’  The clash of the two, ‘SHOW’ and ‘Business,’ is something we address in the film, so that’s how we found our title.”
 
Speaking of critics, Berinstein recognized that their relationship to the Broadway season – often as full of drama as what happens on stage every night – was a key element to her film.  And her approach to the fourth estate was simple: she gathered a group of key critics and columnists for lunch at various points in the season and photographed them discussing the offerings-so-far and stirring the cauldron. “They met four times: at Orso’s, Angus’s, Joe Allen’s and Sardi’s.”
 
Among the print pundits who participated were Linda Winer (of Newsday), Jacques le Sourd (of Gannett News Service), Patrick Pacheco (of Show People), Charles Isherwood (then of Variety, now of The New York Times) and Michael Riedel (of New York Post).
 
“You can’t tell the story of a Broadway season without including the press. That is a crucial part”  -- the theater press plays an integral part of every season [as “essential to The Theater--as ants to a picnic,” didn’t Addison DeWitt once observe?]. “Also I wanted to capture the in-the-moment drama of what’s happening on Broadway as it unfolds – the critics and columnists were excellent storytellers and addressed the issue of art, show and business head on.”
 
That’s why they call it “SHOW Business.”