Betrayed! Oh boy, I’m so betrayed!
Like Samson and Delilah, your love began to fade
I’m crying in the hoosegow, you’re in Rio getting laid!
Betrayed! Let’s face it, I’m betrayed!
Boy, have I been taken! Oy, I’m so forsaken!
I should have seen what came to pass
I should have known to watch my ass!
I feel like Othello, everything is lost
Leo is Iago, Max is double-crossed!
I’m so dismayed. Did I mention, I’m betrayed?
The number worked and would eventually bring down the house. The show was now firmly in Max Bialystock’s hands and Nathan was the star.
* * *
—
It takes a village to make a musical, but you need very specific villagers. You need a villager who is a set designer, somebody to design and build the sets. We were so fortunate to get scenic designer Robin Wagner, who had worked with Stro on Crazy for You. What Stro liked more than anything were quick set changes that were fluid and moved the show along at a brisk pace. She knew Robin could deliver that in spades. Not only did he deliver a great office set that harkened back to the cinematic look of the movie right down to Bialystock’s huge half-moon office window overlooking Forty-eighth Street on Broadway, but his “Springtime for Hitler” set took what was onscreen in the movie and blew it up to a bigger and better glorious cascade of beautiful descending stairs with inventive Third Reich regalia. And lighting those sets exquisitely every night was the work of our next talented villager, lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski. He was brilliant; in an instant he could go from a solo follow spot to completely flooding the stage for our big production numbers with rich, elegant lighting. Then came our next really important villager, William Ivey Long, our gifted costume designer who had also worked with Stro before on Crazy for You. William really had his work cut out for him. We had only twenty-three people in the cast but because the ensemble played multiple roles, we had something like three hundred and twenty costumes. Everything from men playing little old ladies to women playing Nazi storm troopers. Not to mention the hundreds of shoes, boots, hats, and helmets that went along with them. That’s just part of why a big Broadway musical can cost over ten million dollars—and that was then! Who knows what it would cost today!
Speaking of costs, we had a big decisive meeting with the producers. They thought the show was in good enough shape to skip going out of town and, to save the million dollars it would have cost, they wanted to just go straight to Broadway.
Both Stro and Tom adamantly said, “No, spend the money!”
Stro vehemently added, “Out of town is critical—it will tell us what we have and what we don’t have.”
Stro wasn’t wrong. Out-of-town audiences are usually kinder to a new show than the tough, show-me Broadway audiences. When a show goes out of town it gives the actors a chance to play for a crowd of non–New Yorkers who will not boo or walk out while a show is breaking in. Giving the cast, especially a comedy, a chance to fine-tune their performances in front of sympathetic audiences. Playing first to out-of-town audiences is critical to the success of a Broadway show, but it can also be a difficult, heartbreaking experience. Sometimes things you wrote that were wonderful in rehearsal just don’t land out of town and you start to wonder, Could your big hit possibly be a big flop?
My old friend Larry Gelbart from Caesar’s Hour once said, “If Hitler was still alive, the worst thing I could wish him was to be out of town with a musical.”
So we went out of town and we took Hitler with us!
The Producers made its out-of-town debut at Chicago’s big, beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre on February 1, 2001. Inside the theater, life was good but let me tell you something about Chicago in February. Calling it the Windy City was not a mistake. It lived up to “windy” in spades. It would have been cold enough without the wind, but with the cold blasts of wind at freezing temperatures I was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. Yes, even colder than being a soldier in Germany during World War II in the late winter of 1945. It was just freezing! Absolutely freezing, I had to wrap a scarf around my face and pull my woolen hat down so that I could just about peer through the tiny space between my hat and my scarf to see where I was going. I was so happy to get to the Cadillac Palace Theatre, which was always warm and filled with music, laughter, and, not to mention, beautiful showgirls.
The entire run was almost completely sold out. We had our ups and downs, but generally the Chicago audiences were generous with their laughter and their applause. But Tom kept reminding me: “Out of town is out of town. It is not Broadway.”