1600: Anatomy of a Turkey

By every billing it was the musical that could not miss. At the top of the credit lines for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were two of the arts' most potent names: Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner of My Fair Lady and Camelot fame and West Side Story Composer Leonard Bernstein. The show, about the lives and times of 13 early Presidents, was a Bicentennial natural, and the Coca-Cola Co. eagerly footed the $1.2 million cost of bringing a 45-member cast and a 30-piece orchestra together for five weeks of rehearsals in New York and tryouts in Philadelphia and Washington. But when it finally reached Broadway's Mark Hellinger Theater, the critics found its view of American history "bleak and patronizing" and its humor --typified by such lines as Dolly Madison saying "I must go feed my parrot, his language is becoming scandalous" --unbearably flat. While some found Bernstein's score strong, rich and melodic, others said it was "self-derivative" and unable to rescue "a bum idea that has arrived in confusion."

So 1600 closed after seven performances (TIME, May 17), probably the most costly flop--in terms of tarnished reputations as well as money--in White Way history. What went wrong?

Lerner's original idea, on which the entire show turned, was an incredibly complex white-black Upstairs, Downstairs, a slice of a century of White House life expressed as a play within a play. Last week the survivors of the disaster were wondering what went right. Given the magic of the names involved, Coca-Cola and most of the 1600 actors bought the project on blind faith. Versatile Lead Ken Howard, who played all 13 Presidents, took the job without having seen a line of Lerner's book. British Actress Patricia Routledge, who played all the First Ladies, had heard only one song and Director Frank Corsaro (A Hatful of Rain, The Night of the Iguana) started rehearsals without even a finished second act. "That was," he says now, "a very dangerous situation. I would not have permitted this with any other playwrights."

Idea in Rehearsal. At Coca-Cola, which signed on as a backer because Chairman J. Paul Austin, a chum of Lerner's at Harvard in the late 1930s, had been looking for "something meaningful" as a Bicentennial project.

In retrospect, most of its principals seem to agree, 1600 was probably doomed as early as 1972. That was when Lerner, depressed by the Nixon landslide, decided to write a musical comedy about "the first 100 years of the White House and other attempts to take it away from us." The action would revolve around 13 Presidents, their wives and their black servants. The play within a play would involve performers dropping in and out of character to discuss acting problems along with the problems faced by the various Presidents--Lerner's way of conveying his notion of American democracy as an idea that is still in rehearsal.

Lerner sent an outline of his idea to Bernstein. Their only previous collaboration, in 1957, had been on a new Harvard hymn, but Bernstein agreed to write the 1600 score. After five weeks of rehearsal in New York, the show opened in Philadelphia to devastating reviews and the play doctoring began immediately. Jerome Robbins and Mike Nichols traveled to Philadelphia and quickly fled. Director Corsaro left "by mutual agreement" with the company. Bernstein reportedly wanted to deal himself out too, but was persuaded to stay.

Eternal Optimist. By the time 1600 reached its next road stop, Washington, Producers Roger L. Stevens and Robert Whitehead signed a new director-choreographer team: Gilbert Moses, 33, and George Faison, 30, both black activists who had worked together on the hit black musical The Wiz.

"When I came in," Moses told TIME's Edward Tivnan, "my feeling was that Lerner and Bernstein had three years or so to bring out their product. The result was Philadelphia. I had no sympathy for what didn't work. Whatever I thought was too long, too laborious, too repetitive, not theatrical enough, I cut." Lerner, Bernstein and even the producers were barred from some rehearsals. Moses complained about "superficiality" in the book; Lerner, having begun the project in outrage over Nixon Administration excesses, found himself holed up in the Watergate Hotel rewriting far into the night.

Whole songs and chunks of dialogue disappeared and new material had to be learned. Sets and costumes changed. "It was Dunkerque," recalls Routledge. "I never knew how I would get to the end of the show. Sometimes I didn't know which way I was facing." Adds Howard: "I couldn't sleep or eat. I found it hard to focus my mind on what I was doing onstage. I became a zombie, an automaton." But, says Howard, the endless changes that were made in the show were only "like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Lerner was the "eternal optimist," says 1600's arranger, Sid Ramin. "He thought the problems were solvable--if he only had a few more days." Moses wanted to take the show to Los Angeles, confident that "clarification would have come out of another three weeks" of work. But with expenses totaling $100,000 a week, the producers decided to face Armageddon in New York.

Although the coming disaster was clear to all, it still astonishes the survivors. Says Ramin: "We would attend these meetings with Lenny and Lerner in the same room. It was marvelous to see these minds meet, so brilliant. We'd leave thinking that everything was fabulous." There were many versions of why all efforts to fix 1600 failed: Bernstein's score was more like an opera than a musical comedy; the show was racist; the chorus couldn't act; Corsaro botched the staging; the producers, not having put up the original money, didn't exert enough control; and so on. But almost everyone agreed that the overriding problem was Lerner's original idea. Says Ramin: "No amount of staging, acting, choreography or whatever was going to save the book."

The book might have been less ponderous, Moses believes, had not both Lerner and Bernstein been involved. Says he: "It was like two great men meeting who decided to make a very important statement that had been on their minds about this country. Maybe if they had been younger [both are 57], more sparks would have been flying--and also more innocence. They wanted to do a sort of para-Broadway musical, but they were pulled down from their Olympian Heights by the demands of the audience for illusion, for magic, for mystery."

Loving Memory. Unlike Hollywood, where, as the adage has it, "You're only as good as your last picture," Broadway has a long and loving memory. Perhaps because stage failures are not embalmed on film, backers and producers and actors and directors tend to forget unpleasant history. This time they forgot that Lerner's last two tries for the theater, a stage version of Gigi and Lolita, My Love, were flops and that two previous shows, Coco and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, were coolly received by the critics. In fact, Lerner's last clear-cut hit was Camelot in 1960, while Bernstein had not written for Broadway since West Side Story in 1957.

Last week Bernstein had returned to the safer shoals of conducting and concertizing. The optimistic Lerner was cheerful: "I am not discouraged. If failure discouraged me, I would have quit long ago. I always have plans--I'm effervescent with plans. This sort of thing happens in the theater all the time."

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