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PART TWENTY-THREE |
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Time out to become a stage writer-producer
of TheColumnists.com
While I still was writing my New York Daily News column from San Francisco, I also was working on a musical revue with an old college friend, Morrie Bobrow, an attorney who had written several shows about lawyers for the local Barrister’s Club (with titles like “Maim” and “Premises, Premises”) before branching out to produce his own revues.
Morrie had come to New York with a girlfriend and I’d told him I’d always loved revues and wanted to write one, so we decided to do one together. Thus was born “Quirks,” which opened in spring of 1979 at a little hole in the wall on Clement Street called The Open Theater.
I’d reviewed hundreds of shows but never worked on any before, in any capacity, and suddenly I was a co-writer and co-producer--going to auditions, making set and costume decisions, hiring a director, a cast, crew and publicist. Morrie was an old hand at all this, so he was the boss and I was his willing intern/assistant.
I especially loved writing “Quirks” because it was a social experience as well as an artistic one, and I’d been cooped up at home with an occasional day at The San Francisco Examiner, where they let me have a desk. I loved creating a show with other people, despite the creative debates that are part of collaboration and even despite the usual traumas, tantrums, tears and tempers.
One night, our stage manager failed to show up with the costumes, so, with about 45 minutes to go before show time, I raced over to her house to retrieve them. Another time, one of our two musicians got so loaded at the bar next door during intermission that he was in no shape to play the second act. The lighting guy was always grumbling about something. An unshaven would-be artist named Owen, who slept in the theater loft and painted window signs in exchange for a bed there, misspelled the name of the show on a poster (“Quicks”). The man who ran the place, a high school drama teacher, was always laying down strict house rules as if it was the Old Vic Theater. The restrooms were behind the tiny stage, so the audience had to troop across the set to go to the john. Opening night in June it was still light outside at 8 p.m., so at 7:50 we were hastily hanging black crepe over the windows. By opening night, Morrie and the director weren’t speaking, communicating via a member of the cast--all par for the show biz course.
“Quirks” was a lot of work but a lot of fun and generated a lot of press because one of its creators (me) was a New York Daily News columnist, a newly published author of a humorous book on marriage and a local boy to boot. The show got almost unanimous raves and ended up running about 18 months in two theaters - first at The Open Theater, which produced a hodgepodge of plays, revues and one-man shows, and then at a onetime strip-tease joint in North Beach called The Chi-Chi Club, every bit as un-chi-chi as it sounds, run by an ex-Japanese stripper, Miss Keiko, formerly married to a rumored mobster. The walls were still festooned with Miss Keiko in her prime, posing with fans and feathers.
Toward the end of the run of “Quirks,” Sally, one of our cast of six, said she’d noticed a nice looking older bald man in the audience at several shows. He was always smiling. Eventually, he introduced himself to us as Ray Golden, a producer-director from Los Angeles in town to look at possible shows to bring to L.A. “Quirks” was on his list. He asked if we might be interested and we said sure, with no idea who Ray Golden was.
He said he was a revue fanatic who never missed a chance to see a new one, and he liked ours. He reeled off his credentials as a onetime New Yorker revue writer and onetime movie gag writer who had written for the Ritz Brothers, the Marx Brothers and a lot of other stage and screen comics. I was a little suspicious, but, imposter or not, Ray was an impossible man to dislike.
Ray was quick, funny, full of puns and opinions, and as warm and sunny as his name. He had a thousand stories, theatrical theories and one-liners and sometimes when he spoke he got so excited that he stuttered. I knew him, on and off, for the last 10 years of his life. We bonded instantly. He called me his “illegitimate son”--and when he died at 81, a light went out in my life. He was a truly sweet man who was a kind of surrogate father.
Morrie and I both took to him instantly. He spoke our language and liked our material. What's more, he wanted to bring “Quirks” to Los Angeles. That sounded almost too good to be true, but we were about to find out what Ray Golden really could accomplish.
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©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The photo from "Quirks"
is the property of the author and his co-producer. This special
extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement
with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed
to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt
first posted here July 30, 2007.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Gerald Nachman. To send
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