'Wise Guys': Work in Progress for 47Years
By STEPHEN SONDHEIM I suspect, however, that "Wise Guys," the show that John Weidman and First, a little background about the Mizners themselves. Addison Mizner In fact Addison was, among other colorful pursuits, mostly an architect But their paths crossed most significantly in the 1920's when they 1952 I first became interested in the Mizners when, a couple of years out of I returned to New York, fired up and ready for my assault on Broadway, 1994 As often happens with theater projects, the Merrick musical died Knowing John's interest in American social and cultural politics, I thrust 1996 With both our desks cleared, we began to talk about the show in detail. I had been primarily interested in Wilson, a man of many gifts but with no The process of writing is a process of discovery, and as we started to 1997 As we continued to write, we researched further -- not just books but We kept discovering things. For example, the speed and energy with The more we dug into the relationship between the brothers, the more it 1998 With a first draft in hand, it seemed a good time to find a director, and 1999 Now it's almost half a century since I first came across the Mizner boys, Wilson and Addison's adult lives began in the Gold Rush of the 90's (the Moreover, what might have come across in 1952 as a breezy piece with Beginning in the 60's, the black and white absolutes of American Gray became, and has remained, the favorite color of the popular arts. Authors' commentaries about what they have written, or at least what It's not about the Mafia. It's a musical comedy. It's here. At last. "Wise Guys" will have a three-week workshop, from Oct. 29 to
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
To anyone interested in the commercial theater, it is common
knowledge that a musical, from conception to production, usually
takes a long time. Two or three years is the average, but many have
gestated for five, six or even seven -- periods of time often referred to as
"forever."
I have written about the Mizner brothers, is about to set a record. It has
been 47 years since I first came across their story and started to turn it
into a musical. Bizarre as it may seem, I believe the delay has been good
for it.
(1872-1933) and Wilson Mizner (1876-1933) were brothers who,
although they played only a minor role in the cultural history of this
country, might well be seen (at least by John and me) to represent two
divergent aspects of American energy: the builder and the squanderer,
the visionary and the promoter, the conformist and the maverick, the
idealistic planner and the restless cynic, the one who uses things and the
one who uses them up.
while Wilson, among many other even more colorful pursuits, was mostly
a dope-addicted gambler and con man. Addison was a closeted
homosexual, whereas Wilson was a womanizer. Throughout their lives
their relationship was extremely close, even symbiotic, and they shared
adventures prospecting for gold in the Klondike.
converged on Florida and became largely responsible for the land boom
that exploded and the bust that followed, both of which rocked the state
(and the country) between 1924 and 1926. Addison's mark can still be
felt there: he popularized the Spanish style, which so pervades the
architecture of Palm Beach and Boca Raton, a city the Mizners virtually
invented.
Williams College, I read a series of articles in The New Yorker that
prompted me to start researching them and their times. I had been living
on money from the Hutchinson Prize, a college award for post-graduate
study. The money had run out and I was about to take my first job, as
assistant writer for the television series "Topper." It meant working in Los
Angeles, far away from the Broadway theater that I loved and wanted to
be part of. But it also meant I could save up enough to move back to
Manhattan, rent an apartment and still have enough left over to take some
time off and write a show about them. And indeed, after five months of
educational slave labor, that's exactly what I did.
only to learn that David Merrick had got there first. David Merrick and
Irving Berlin and S. N. Behrman. (For those of you under 40, David
Merrick was Broadway's most successful producer at the time and Sam
Behrman among the more elegant playwrights of the era. Berlin needs no
introduction. I hope.) While I had been away, Merrick had bought the
rights to "The Legendary Mizners," one of the Mizner biographies, and
Berlin and Behrman were starting to make a musical out of it, to be called
"Sentimental Guy." I gloomed heavily and went on to other things, never
forgetting my original crush.
aborning, and 42 years later, I found myself talking to John Weidman,
with whom I had written "Pacific Overtures" and "Assassins," about
collaborating again -- on something brash and lively and, above all, funny.
I had just finished two years' work on "Passion," a piece I had loved
writing but not one that had left me exactly chuckling at the end of the
day.
the Mizner research into his hands. To my delight, he not only needed no
persuasion to forge ahead, but his enthusiasm sparked me to recapture
my own initial impulse and return eagerly to a story I had long consigned
to that file every writer has, the one holding treasured ideas never
followed through.
And as we did, we found that our initial, instinctive responses to the
Mizner brothers had not been entirely the same.
focus for his energies and no moral center. John thought that Wilson was
little more than a witty bastard, which he probably was. What fascinated
John was the relationship between the two brothers and what their lives
added up to: they were both men who used and abused their powers in
different ways and who amounted to something both more and less than
what they seemed. There was within their fraternal bond a shifting
balance between antithetical approaches to life that seemed provocative
and peculiarly American.
write we began to see the implications of the Mizners' lives. We also
unearthed two memoirs, one written by Addison, another co-written by
Wilson and Edward Dean Sullivan. The brothers' voices are vivid and
distinct in these autobiographies, but their anecdotes are no more reliable
than the contradictory gossip in the numerous books and articles written
about them. This freed us to take similar liberties, leaving only the general
arc of their lives and some specific episodes intact -- not the usual
process for John and me, since our other collaborations are historically
true in all essentials and most details.
photographs, correspondence, newspaper clippings (Wilson made a lot
of headlines, most of them fairly scandalous). We went to the source,
Palm Beach, and saw most of the Mizner buildings that still exist. They
were all that we had hoped: original, eccentric and humorous. Addison
was one of the few architects whom Frank Lloyd Wright admired, and
you can see why as soon as you enter a Mizner creation. You can sense
the fun he had in designing the place, the same sort of exuberant
originality you can find in his admirer.
which the Mizner brothers lived their very American lives was reflected in
a very American art form: vaudeville, whose life span (roughly 1870 to
1930) almost exactly mirrored theirs. This prompted us to use vaudeville
techniques, notably the shallow stage and the direct connection with the
audience, as part of the style in which to tell the story.
kept reminding us of something. It took a while to recognize the echo, but
when we did, it informed the whole piece: the Mizners, or at least our
Mizners, were in many ways the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby of the
Road movies -- Wilson as Crosby the manipulator, Addison as Hope the
patsy, two conniving rivals who would stop at nothing to ruin each other,
but partners and soul mates in the face of the world. And vaudeville to
the core.
we went to Sam Mendes, who had done first-rate productions of
"Assassins" and "Company" in London and whom we had both found to
be an ideal collaborator. Among directors, he is a rare animal: he thinks
like a playwright. This is both good and bad. The good is that his
suggestions are always worth considering and often worth exploring. The
bad is that his suggestions are always worth considering and often worth
exploring, and that takes time. Which it did, as another year rolled by.
But what was one year after so many others?
and they are about to step onstage in the wise guise of Nathan Lane and
Victor Garber. A long time but, as I said earlier, the delay may have been
fortuitous.
other Gold Rush, in the other 90's) and the coming of the new century
spurred them into action. It is what they did with their opportunities, with
the riches and resources that this country made available to them, that
forms the core of the show and seems especially appropriate as the next
century begins.
a simple moral (e.g., you can fool all of the people some of the time, etc.)
has, by the nature of time passing, become something more complex.
cautionary tales began to give way to the gray areas that now pervade
our popular culture. One of the things that was nouvelle about the vague
was its blurring of moral boundaries. Was Belmondo a villain or a hero?
And while moviemakers (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, etc.) complicated
the bandit-outsider, playwrights (Guare, Shepard, Albee, etc.) extolled
the eccentric.
And "Wise Guys" is richer for it. By sheer chronology, it has become a
Clinton-era musical.
they think they have written, are in the long run unnecessary. Works of
art, even popular art, are probably best left to speak for themselves. Still,
information about them can be helpful, and in the end I have three points
I wish to make about "Wise Guys":
Nov. 20, at New York Theater Workshop in the East Village, and
will open on Broadway on April 27 at a theater to be announced.
