Backstage Book Club: Edition #3 - "Up In The Cheap Seats"
On October 11th 1967, Ron Fassler walked into the 46th Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers Theatre) to view a performance of I Do! I Do!, his first Broadway show. By September 30th 1972, he had seen 200 Broadway productions, almost all of which were experienced from the cheap seats in the back of the balcony, purchased with hard earned money from his paper route.
Up In The Cheap Seats, his 2017 memoir, explores the idiosyncratic history he experienced, and the larger than life figures who influenced him from the stage. Featuring nearly 100 interviews with theatrical luminaries such as Stephen Sondheim, James Earl Jones, and Bette Midler, it is a window into the sunset years of Broadway's first Golden Age, and a marvelous read, fit for any long term theatre aficionado or young theatre fan.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Fassler this past month, as he begins the process of writing a follow up to Up In The Cheap Seats, Down In The House Seats. The following interview has been formatted for clarity.
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Up in The Cheap Seats opens with this quote from Hal Prince - “Those were the good old days. And I hate to say that, and I will not say it… but I said it.” What do you think it will take for the New York theatre to again reach the heights of your 200 show sprint from 1967 to 1972?
FASSLER: Covid notwithstanding, this is a nearly impossible goal now. Not only is it a matter of economics that has now priced theatregoing practically out of existence for the average person, but a matter of real estate. With shows sitting for twenty and even thirty years at a time in a theatre (I’m looking at you Phantom of the Opera and Chicago), it’s hard to book the number of shows per season that came in during Broadway’s halcyon years which I was fortunate to grab by the tail end in the early 1970s.
What is my hope and desire is for somehow to make theatre more accessible for young people and less so for only the elite. We’ve reached the stage where theatre is now like going to the opera, where if you want to sit in a good seat, you need to get a bank loan. The prices that have gone up post-Covid for the incoming revival of The Music Man this December are, in a word, obscene. Currently, they are listed as starting at $99 (how’s THAT for being up in the cheap seats?) to $550 per seat. And that’s not premium pricing off specialty websites—that’s walking up to the box office window and purchasing a ticket!
Your Aunt Helen seems in many ways to have been an Auntie Mame influence on your life - an independent woman who lived on the Upper West Side for most of her life, she encouraged your love of theatre, and set you on the path of 200 shows when she brought you to your first, 1966’s I Do! I Do!. What was your favorite theatre going experience with her?
FASSLER: Well, Aunt Helen wasn’t as madcap as the fictional Mame Dennis (she was a Christian Scientist), but she was a loving person who understood in a way no one else did in my family that nurturing my theatre obsession might offer dividends later in life (which it most certainly did). My grandmother took me to my second show (off-Broadway’s original production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) and a neighbor to my third, Fiddler on the Roof, which though late in its long run, I did get to see an unknown Bette Midler as Tevye’s eldest daughter, Tzietel. From then on, beginning at age twelve, I took myself to see shows with the earnings from my paper route. Not only do the current prices makes something like that prohibitive today, but what jobs can a twelve-year-old do to make enough money to support a habit like mine? There aren’t any. I did it all on $12 dollars a week. It’s one of the reasons why my book Up in the Cheap Seats appeals to readers of every age: those old enough to remember love being reminded of that time and those too young to know it ever existed are fascinated.
As for a favorite memory of going to the theatre with Aunt Helen, it was when I was in college and attending SUNY Purchase only forty-five minutes north of Manhattan and I organized theatre trips with my class. I always made sure to have a ticket for Aunt Helen to join us. I was paying her back for her giving me my first chance at theatregoing and also sharing her with my friends, for whom she seemed to have a never-ending supply of candies in her purse to hand out during intermission. She lived until her nineties, by the way, and I never stopped caring for her.
Your fascination with Robert Preston is endearing - what was it about the legendary Song and Dance man that captured your adolescent imagination?
FASSLER: Perhaps that’s a question for a good therapist, as there was probably a hint of a father figure in him, especially since the infatuation began with his performance as the con man Harold Hill in the 1962 film version of The Music Man (I was too young to have seen him do it on the stage between 1957 and 1959). His bringing such forceful light to the wounded young Winthrop, around five years old same as me when I saw the film for the first time. That had to have had an impact. But mainly it was that Preston was the center of attention in every scene in the film and I yearned to be that very thing (growing up in a family of six children). When my parents bought me the record album, I wore right through it (I remember getting another one on my tenth birthday to replace it). It also didn’t hurt that he was such a charismatic and charming performer. I mean, who didn’t like Robert Preston? By following his career, I began to read newspapers and magazines scouring for an interview or an advertisement to tell me if he was appearing in a new film, TV show or play. Imagine the work that took back in the 1960s without the internet!
Many of the productions you saw were not marketed to someone in your age range - do you think the current trend of preventing children from seeing more adult material is helping or harming the next generation of theatre devotees?
FASSLER: I think something like that should be handled by most parents on a case-by-case basis. There shouldn’t be a one-rule-fits-all regarding a child’s maturity on what is appropriate or not. I vividly recall that I talked my parents into taking me to dozens of what were then R-rated films (children under sixteen not allowed in unaccompanied by an adult) and they were happy to do so. They got that I was appreciating things on a level my peers weren’t. And they never censored the Broadway plays I was seeing either. Ignorance might have been bliss in that regard, as the late sixties and early seventies were a groundbreaking time with nudity and profanity on stage. Of course, they never really knew what I was seeing, although it wasn’t for nothing that when it was time for me to buy my tickets to Hair, I wound up seeing it with my mom. And she did NOT cover up my eyes during its notorious end of Act One ensemble nude scene.
As for censorship or self-censorship harming future theatregoers, I’m all in favor of making everything available to anyone as far as stage goes. I HATED being turned away from the box office when I offered up my $3 bucks to see a play or musical back in the day (which only happened twice with shows that featured excessive onstage nudity. And yes, one was the famous revue Oh! Calcutta!).
You cover a number of fascinating performers throughout Up in The Cheap Seats, but your description of Maureen Stapleton as collecting “friends the way people collect books.” particularly resonates. Can you elaborate?
FASSLER: Knowing I was devoting a chapter to Maureen Stapleton, I made sure to ask everyone I interviewed for the book if they had a story about her either onstage or offstage. Not because of any potential for hilarious off-color remarks or salacious bits of gossip, but because I knew she had a legion of friends and that she was emblematic of the type of show business personality that makes the theatre such a special place. It still thrills me on a personal level, that there are bars and restaurants in the theatre district that I can walk into that are just like the fictional bar on the TV show Cheers—sing it with me—"where everybody knows your name.” I only wish I could sit at a table with Maureen, as she really was one of the great recontours and wits of that very special time.
One story that didn’t make it into my book is about the after-party when filming wrapped on Bye, Bye Birdie and everyone was taking to testimonials about what a great shoot it was. Finally, fed up with all she’d been hearing, Maureen grabbed the mike and said, “Am I the only one here that doesn’t want to fuck Ann-Margret?”
James Earl Jones is one of the greatest actors of the 20th century, and your memories of The Great White Hope are vivid. What, in your estimation, makes for a strong piece of drama?
FASSLER: The Great White Hope was my first and last time experiencing a type of large-scale play that no longer exists. It had a cast of sixty-three—and it wasn’t a musical! Can you imagine? There was a time in the 1920s and 30s where shows had casts of nearly a hundred (where did they all dress?), but that sort of thing had completely died off due to the high costs by the time I started attending the theatre regularly in 1969. The scope of The Great White Hope was staggering by today’s standards and I consider myself fortunate to have seen him in this and Fences and The Iceman Cometh (among others), even from the last row of the theatre (in the case of Great White Hope for just $3.60). As good as he is in films and television, if you never saw him on stage, then you never experienced his true strength and power. It’s not just his magnificent voice, but the commitment and sensitivity that courses through all his work. An artist of the highest magnitude, I feel privileged to have seen him in more than a dozen plays over a fifty-year period.
Ron Fassler
In terms of what makes for a strong piece of drama, the best of them are always shot through with the adrenaline of truth. When you think of the best American playwrights, be they O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee or Wilson, you are talking about writers incapable of falsifying their own personal beliefs for some sort of audience approval, or providing an easy way out to make something more palatable. They are willing to take risks and show life in a raw, unvarnished way that, in the words of Shakespeare, “hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature.”
Your skill at talking yourself backstage to meet performers was incredibly charming - what are your thoughts on the debate surrounding whether or not ‘stagedooring’ should return post pandemic?
FASSLER: I’m saddened even as an adult that it appears backstage visits will not be happening in the immediate future due to pandemic concerns, which is completely understandable and as it should be. I was extremely lucky that when I went backstage as a teenager it wasn’t done much, so there was rarely anything resembling a crowd at the stage door. I’d just knock and ask to see Julie Harris and the next thing I knew I was standing in her dressing room. Today with men, women and children begging for an autograph that more often than not winds up for sale on eBay, and everyone taking pictures with their phones, it’s out of control. I guess I’ll just as to treasure my times backstage as both child and adult and keep my fingers crossed that by 2023 or so I can visit with a friend immediately after a performance instead of texting them in an impersonal way how much I enjoyed their performance. On second thought, maybe I’ll go old school and pick up a phone.
That The Rothschilds, a stumbling Bock and Harnick musical, connected you in some way to the Jewish culture you had previously spurned is a remarkable feat. What aspect of the piece spoke to you so strongly?
FASSLER: Yes, The Rothschilds did speak to me in a way no prior show had. It was a combination of my maturing beyond when I saw Fiddler at only eleven years old and its powerful story of fathers and sons (to this day I’m a sucker for a father and son story, especially today as having now been both a son and a father to a son). It has one of the great unsung scores (and by that I mean it in the two meanings of that word), and though its two living creative talents, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and book writer Sherman Yellen have taken very late in life cracks and restructuring the musical, I fear it’s one and only shot was in its initial Broadway production that opened in 1970 and that I was so happy to have seen. I can conjure up scenes from it as if they were yesterday, even though it’s hard to believe it was more than fifty years ago. If you’ve never listened to the original cast recording, by all means right that wrong and do so. From its sensational Don Walker orchestrations to its infectious melodies from Jerry Bock and witty and insightful lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, it’s one of the most outstanding show scores of the 1970s.
Unfortunately they can’t all be successes - of the 200, do any of the stinkers have a place in your heart?
FASSLER: Absolutely! Not only performances from flops that have stayed with me, but even shows that didn’t get a fair shot from the critics. One was Michael Weller’s Broadway debut with a play called Moonchildren that died a quick death in 1972 only to be revived to much greater acclaim a year later off-Broadway in 1973 (same play) where it ran 394 performances. That original cast included a host of names who all became famous including James Woods, Christopher Guest, Edward Herrman, Robert Prosky, Michael Tucker, Jill Eikenberry, Stephen Collins and Maureen Anderman, most of them making their Broadway debuts.
I also have tremendous affection for another from fifty years ago, one of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s few quick flops, 70, Girls, 70. With a cast consisting of 99% septuagenarians, it was a salute to life and positivity chock full of wonderful tunes. Many attempts to resurrect it over the years have failed (not as lucky as Moonchildren in that department), but the original cast was an inspired one featured genuine vaudevillians, many of whom were performing in one last burst of glory on stage. In fact, one of the greatest stage comedians of all time, two-time Tony Award winner David Burns, was in the cast during its out of town engagement in Philadelphia when he was felled by a heart attack—on stage! He got his applause, felt faint and laid down behind the sofa on the set. Since the show was about old people, it didn’t seem that odd to the audience, but the cast members knew something was up. Through improvisation they carried him offstage and it was only when he was in the wings and not responding that they realized he had already died. Many who knew Burns felt that he went out exactly as he would have liked, immediately after “killing it” with a song and dance.
You speak of your reviews giving you an outlet to feel heard as a teen - what advice do you have for any burgeoning theatre fans who feel similarly silenced?
FASSLER: Even though I was writing my reviews as a teenager and gathering them into a looseleaf binder, not a single person read them save for myself. Why I saved them, I’ll never know (that my mother never threw them away when I left for college is a blessing) and that I printed some in my book was my pleasure. They were written not to be read by anyone but myself, so if I were a teenager today there’s no doubt I would have had my own blog. Or perhaps, like Iain Armitage (now a wonderful young actor starring in his own sitcom Young Sheldon), I might have gone to YouTube and filmed myself outside a theatre after having seen a show and reported my thoughts. There are certainly enough ways to be heard today, that’s for sure.
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If you would like to track your show going experiences in the same fashion as Fassler (or are looking to encourage a love of the theatre in a younger person), a PDF printable copy of the Play Evaluation Sheet seen in the book can be downloaded here.
You can purchase a copy of Up In The Cheap Seats at this link
Make sure to check back with Backstage Book Club next month, when we will be covering Putting It Together by James Lapine
If you are interested in submitting a book for consideration, please contact Margaret at www.margaret-hall.com