This is Part 8 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

The New York Opening:

We went to London a nervous group of apprehensive American performers hoping to receive some sort of nod from the English masters of classical theater with our experimental rock opera based on a famous Greek tragedy and came home swaggering with a hit show.

The people of London ‘got it’.  Even the critics ‘got it’.  The critics, with their well-written reviews has pointed us in several directions that we wanted to fix before opening in NYC, so our producer, Joe Papp, once again put us back into rehearsal – this time for a month.  Doug Dyer, our wild, avant-garde Texas director was full of new ideas far too exotic to even attempt in that short period of time.  What we needed was to have the rough stone polished to a high gloss.

Unfortunately, we wasted two of the weeks trying some of Doug’s ideas and finally, a frustrated Joe fired director Doug and brought in Gerald Friedman to direct and work with our brilliant young choreographer, Lar Lubovitch. Gerald was the guy he should have brought in as soon as we got back from London.  He was an experienced Broadway professional who really knew the theater.

One of the biggest disappointments was that neither Joe nor Gerald had seen the show at its best in London and though the hearsay was excellent, neither had a strong sense of how well it had worked for the audiences.  Nonetheless, Gerald went to work in the two weeks remaining and did wonders cleaning up and polishing the show and readying it for the NY critics.

The Achilles character was cut and Iphigenia’s potential husband was only talked or sung about.  What worked was the music and the girls and Clytemnestra (Madge Sinclair) and Agamemnon (Manu Topou) were strong classical performers with the size to match our Iphigenia of twelve.

We went into NY previews with an even better show than in London with the additions, deletions and savvy corrections of our new director.  Oh how I wished he had had the chance to work on the piece longer, for his work was smart, sharp and just what the piece needed.

Previews were a smash.  The audiences went wild every night and Joe was most excited to present NYC with still another big hit show.  But Gerald and I were wary.  In New York, in the 70s, you had to get the NY Times critic to love you or else you would never have a true hit.  Without The Times rave review, you wouldn’t have a blockbuster.

We knew that this piece was flawed, but knew not how to fix its flaws.  First, the idea of twelve actresses playing one girl was chancy to begin with.  Audiences absolutely loved and ‘got’ the idea, but critics are another creature altogether.  Secondly, we had a powerful classic story to tell with Iphigenia In Aulis as our first act.  We often had standing ovations at the end of Act One.  Perhaps it should have ended there, but all felt that the evening would have been too short for paying audiences.

Perhaps we should have fleshed out the first act more and written more songs and just gone with that.  Aaahhh, retrospect, hindsight …

Trouble was that though, in the second act, we had dropped the book (the story) which was weak to begin with and had gone with the power of the music in a we now called Iphigenia In Concert, and though the audiences absolutely loved it, we felt that the critics might not approve.  We had, in fact, failed to make the second act work, though the concert worked its magic every night and standing ovations from our audiences ended every show.

But Joe Papp was Joe Papp – at the time the most successful and creative producer in the world – and full of vim and vinegar and ready to turn NYC on its ear.  Again, back in the 70s in the theater, you did not postpone your opening, that was always a sure sign to the critics and the public that you were in trouble.  The word of mouth, a huge factor in theater savvy NYC, was simply terrific and Joe rightly (in retrospect) went ahead with the opening.

I don’t actually remember opening night, but the critics generally loved it, appreciated the experimental nature of the piece, loved the music, loved the girls, loved the concept, recognized the impact on the audience and highly valued that.  Some took us to task for our flaws, but no one panned the show, there was an occasional stuffy mixed review, but of the 30 or so reviews we got, there were probably 25 raves.

So we were a hit.  The Times was a good-to-great review depending on how you read it.  It was, in Joe’s opinion, highly workable.

We began our run that really should have lasted a couple of years with the way audiences reacted and with the reviews that we had.

We kept our cast together for about 5 months, but these were the hot girls of New York now and several started getting offers to do other leads in shows, Iphigenia being a terrific showcase for each.  Also all had been dedicated to this show for nearly a couple of years now and some understandably needed to move on.  But terrific replacements were plentiful, though, for me, there was never a group like those original 12 ladies.  It was a finely tuned machine at it’s best that had incredible confidence and ripped the roof off The Public Theater every show.

One morning seven months into the NY run I received a call from Joe informing me that he had to close the show for a week in order to do repairs on the theater.  It seems that in the haste to build the sets, the audience bleachers, etc., certain fire department exit regulations had been ignored and reconstruction was necessary otherwise we would be closed down by the fire department.

At the time, a week’s vacation for everybody seemed like not a bad idea.  We were an established hit and audiences were full so it did not seem like a week’s break could hurt us.

Then Joe, a man of possibly too many ideas, had another idea.  “Let’s move it to Broadway!”  Now he could charge the much higher ticket price and really go national with a Broadway show and make back all the money spent on our long workshop process.  Generally we were all excited about the idea, but Gerald, the director, and I were somewhat speculative about the move.  We were doing great at The Public and when you’re doing great, why change?  Besides, the only rock show that had ever worked on Broadway at that time had been Hair.  Was Broadway in the 70s ready for a rock opera of a Euripidean classic?  Probably not!

But as I like to say, Joe Papp was Joe Papp.  You didn’t buck the king.  You went along with his notions no matter how far-fetched.

So we began to prepare the show for Broadway.  Instead of going back to work after a week off Joe postponed the show until further notice.  Whoever heard of doing such a thing?  But Joe was Joe.

He then decided that we needed a whole new book for Broadway and that the flaws aforementioned needed to be fixed.  Over the next six months we went through three or four top writers (some of whom had never even seen the show) who wrote treatments on the piece.  All were awful.  I went through frustration after frustration as I saw our cast dissipate into other shows and confusion reign.

Finally Joe said, “Let’s get away from it for a while and gain a better perspective.”  Sometimes time will do just that and by that time I was ready to go do something else as well, never imagining that our beloved show would never be performed again.

But that was the case.  Joe had other things to do, other dragons to slay, other shows to stage. Sadly, Iphigenia became a thing of the past and was never presented again.

ABC Records did step in and produce the cast album.  I took the original girls into the studio for a week and cut the tracks with the original great show band and even brought in some of NYC’s top studio musicians to play on some of the tracks – drummer Bernie Purdy for one.

The making of the cast album was, for me, great solace to the disappointment of the show closing so unexpectedly.  The music would live on even if the show did not.

We had finished the album and were working on the graphics for the cover and promotional elements when ABC Records, a subsidy of ABC Television and a company that had been in business for decades, announced that it was suddenly going out of business and closing its doors.

The album, though finished, went on to the proverbial shelf, never to be heard by the public and I went off to other adventures, head hung in disappointment at the strange series of events that led to the demise of our young girl, Iphigenia.

In the end she really did get her head chopped off.  In the end it was a tragedy.

But there is worth to all tragedy.  There are lessons.  We learn from our tragedies.  We, as a people, are fascinated by tragedies.  Euripides wrote them, Shakespeare wrote them, Tennessee Williams wrote them.  They have their purpose in our lives.

They have their exhilarating moments; they have their high drama.  Iphigenia, the rock opera, was no exception.  Even though the experience itself ended in tragedy, it was, for me, one of the best of times, the most creative of times.

I am the better for it.