'The Misanthrope' – The Musical

 

[I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company, an experimental theater troupe based in the East Village.  I got to know Leo Shapiro in 1986, when I covered the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place in Baltimore that year.  I was very taken with his company’s work, represented then by The Yellow House (see my post on 9 February 2018), a company-created play about painter Vincent van Gogh.

[My report on the ToN was published in The Drama Review of Spring 1987.  A separate article on The Yellow House appeared in the same issue.

[Six years later, TDR editor Richard Schechner asked me to write a profile of Leo and his company.  I shadowed Leo for several months and “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” was published in TDR in the Winter 1993 issue.

[Combing through Shaliko’s files and interviewing Leo and his colleagues and collaborators, I eventually put together a fairly complete history of his and the company’s work over his lifetime.  Though the original article focused exclusively on the work of The Shaliko Company (1972-93), I expanded that focus and included a record of Leo’s independent work, for a prospective book. 

[One production that fell into that category was an abortive staging of a musical based on Molière’s The Misanthrope for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977. Below is an account of that ill-fated production.

[Leo died of bladder cancer in Vallecito, New Mexico, on 22 January 1997.  He was 15 days past his 51st birthday.]

New York City’s Shaliko Company’s second production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), introduced the troupe to Joseph Papp (1921-91), who offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as its home—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.  The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project, was in performance at New York University.

Playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), whom Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Shaliko’s founder and artistic director, had known since his NYU-student days and who had a relationship with Papp and the NYSF, praised Measures to Gail Merrifield (b. ca. 1935), Papp’s wife and the NYSF director of new play development, who saw it and then brought Papp to the Shaliko production.  Measures moved into the NYSF’s Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Following Measures, Shaliko presented Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975) and then Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1976).  (For accounts of the latter two productions, see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko's Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014, and “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020.)  After Woyzeck, however, the two actors about whom Shapiro cared most, Mary Zakrzewski and Chris McCann (b. 1952), left Shaliko, Zakrzewski to quit the professional theater and McCann to pursue commercial aspirations. 

Shapiro disbanded the company and decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  Some years earlier, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666) with Shaliko but let the project drop. 

The composer, Margaret Pine (b. 1948), one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro had cast John McMartin as Alceste, John Bottoms as Philante, Helen Gallagher as Arsinoé, and Virginia Vestoff as Célimène but, according to the director, Papp wanted performers who had worked at the Public in the past, including Raul Julia and Patti LuPone or Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. 

“He wanted the Broadway pitch,” Shapiro opined.  “He wanted a Broadway musical hit.  He was hungry for another Chorus Line . . . .”  Papp acquiesced to Shapiro’s casting plans but ultimately the producer objected to the timbre of the production:

Like, Joe was upset because Alceste was too sexy.  He was upset because they were too sexy as a couple—Alceste and Célimène.  He thought that Alceste was too angry.  He thought that Alceste was too much the hero. 

He couldn’t stand that I had a scene in which Alceste and Philinte held hands.  He thought that was just awful and he said, “Are they homosexuals?  Why are they holding hands?  You can’t have that happen.”  And I said, you know, “They’re best friends.  They, as far as I know, are not homosexual.  But if they are, it’s none of your business, Joe.  I mean, that’s not the point I’m making in any case.”  And he said, “Well, you can’t make that point.”  

He said, “The audience won’t understand that.”  I said, “I am teaching the audience that.  That’s why I’m doing it.  I want them to see it.  You know.”  He just couldn’t understand that you can create a convention in that way.  He felt like this means A; it can’t mean B.  This is what it meant to him.  I’ve never forgotten that.  I don’t know what . . . .  He had this lexicon of things, you know.

Shapiro refused to make changes, he said, and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

(A Chorus Line opened at the Public Theater on 15 April 1975.  It moved to Broadway’s Shubert Theatre on 25 July and stayed there for 15 years, closing on 28 April 1990 after 6,137 performances, winning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical, and, as of 2005, grossing over $277 million for the Public Theater.  The New York Shakespeare Festival’s share of the profits supported the company’s efforts for years and the play continues to produce income every time it’s revived or the 1985 film is shown.)

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own. 

According to the New York Shakespeare Festival, Margaret Pine brought The Misanthrope to Papp in October 1976 after having considered other companies, including André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, and the director Mel Shapiro.  (Stage director Mel Shapiro [b. 1937] is not related to Leonardo Shapiro.  He previously directed—and adapted—the musical version of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona for NYSF in 1971, for which he won an Obie Award, among other productions for the company.) 

According to Joan C. Daly, an attorney for NYSF, Papp maintained that Leonardo Shapiro became part of the project because he had worked with Pine “in developing the concept of such a production, and she brought him along.”  (Daly [b. 1925] was a lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, attorneys for NYSF.)

From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur, whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  As both Jeffrey Horowitz, Shapiro’s prep school schoolmate, and Marilyn Zalkan, Shaliko’s long-time administrator, have remarked, Shapiro had no background in music or musical theater. 

Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker, recommended J Ranelli, another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro.  (Parker [1927-2019], late Vice President of Curtis Brown, Ltd., not only represented Wilbur [1921-2017] and Ranelli [1938-2019], but also Bill Gile [1942- 2011], the director who eventually replaced Shapiro on 7 October 1977.)

Wilbur, however, had approved of Margaret Pine as the composer, but did not approve of Shapiro as director and even as early as March 1977, Wilbur held “lingering doubts about Leo Shapiro as director.”  In addition, Wilbur’s contract with NYSF stipulated that his text would remain intact unless he authorized changes.  This provision clearly would make it difficult to accommodate songs and may have ultimately helped sabotage the production. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that “while there was merit in the concept of presenting ‘The Misanthrope’ with music, Mr. Shapiro could not handle it” and that what Pine and Shapiro had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh view point, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur also objected to the alterations to his translation and demanded immediate restoration of “unauthorized cuts” in his text. 

At the same time, he insisted that he’d approved Margaret Pine as the composer but hadn’t agreed to any other composer and hadn’t been consulted on the replacement of her songs with anyone else’s.  

Finally, Wilbur demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production. 

According to Horowitz, Shapiro’s long-time friend who’d been in the cast of Shawn’s Youth Hostel at NYSF, there was more to the contretemps, much of it the fault of Shapiro. 

After the director disbanded The Shaliko Company in 1976 and left the Public Theater, Papp was angry at him and Shapiro began gaining a reputation for someone “who had problems.”  Shawn brokered Shapiro’s return later in 1976 to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director. 

Papp’s ultimate rejection of Shawn’s plays for the regular NYSF season had nothing to do with Shapiro’s direction, but then the producer hired Shapiro for Misanthrope and trouble started to appear.  “He wouldn’t listen to Papp,” said Horowitz, founder, in 1979, and artistic director of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience.  “He was rigorous about his visions.”  Shapiro’s friend went even further, however:

I began to be aware then, starting in the late ’70s—around that time that Papp fired him—that he was having a great deal of trouble putting together his ideas and the community’s understanding of those ideas.

Shapiro’s fellow artistic director had watched, he said, as Shapiro’s acclaim began to deteriorate.  He saw his friend begin in the early 1970s with great respect and strength, both among critics and theater professionals like Papp.  Horowitz called that Shapiro, at the start of his career, “an enfant terrible,” a “brilliant iconoclast.”  Then, Horowitz recounted, “Something happened where he began to get a reputation as someone who had once been very good but was no longer that.”

If Horowitz is correct—and it must be said that he wasn’t present for the Misanthrope rehearsals, nor had he been a member of Shaliko—then this may have been another instance of Shapiro’s inability to function as part of a team or to defer to anyone else’s ideas.  

He would do this again in 1992, with similar consequences, with playwright Karen Malpede over the direction Blue Heaven and the administration of Trinity College over the management of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, which the Hartford, Connecticut-based college administered and Shapiro conducted in New York City.  (A blog article on Blue Heaven is posted on 11 and 14 May 2020.)

Regardless of the perspective, however, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly:

I worshiped Joe; he was like my father, you know.  I came there after my father died and I basically identified Joe as my father and I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my life.  I thought it was home. 

I never got over being fired by Joe.  It never had occurred to me that it was possible.  I never knew you could be fired; I didn’t know about contracts. 

I didn’t know it was his show; I thought it was my show.  I’d never done a show that wasn’t my show.  I mean, I made it up; it was my idea.  It was my idea to do a musical of The Misanthrope.  I mean, what was his about it? 

You know, I didn’t understand what was on paper.  I never looked at anything on paper.  I don’t have contracts; I don’t deal with that world.

(Shapiro met Papp and moved his company into the Public Theater only a few months after the death of his father, from whom he was estranged and with whom he had a strained relationship all through his life, on 15 January 1974.  The timing certainly played a large part in Shapiro’s incipient relationship with the impresario.)

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.  “I just was beaten.  That’s really like the worst experience of my life, getting fired off that show.”

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Even years later, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . .  I don’t know that I’d say I admire him a lot.  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

He noted that there was some of Irving Shapiro in George Bartenieff’s 1992 portrayal of Hermann Kafka, but he also admitted that there were aspects of Papp in it as well.  Shapiro, after all,  saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression (see my post about this play on 5 and 8 November 2015). 

Part of the root cause of the failure of Shapiro’s freelance directing outing at the Public was his understanding—or lack of understanding—of the standing of an independent director.  Reviewing his motivation to disband Shaliko, Shapiro lamented, “[I] thought I could do bigger work without a company. . . .  I was wrong.  Working freelance didn’t work.  I wasn’t free to address issues I cared about in radical ways; I wasn’t free to rehearse for months at a time or develop original work.”

Aside from losing his company and being unable to develop his own material, Shapiro learned that he was simply no good at working for other people such as producers and artistic directors who had control over his work.  “I have had problems with producers . . .,” he confessed.  “And that’s . . . a character defect . . . .  And I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  

This was the basis, of course, of his falling out with Papp, with whom Shapiro had gotten along fine as long as Papp had functioned simply as sugar-daddy.  When he found himself contending with Papp over the substance of a production, Shapiro discovered he couldn’t follow orders.  Being fired by Papp left Shapiro confused:

I think that that experience has a lot to do with the fact that I basically can’t work for anyone else.  I think that I didn’t know what it was like to have somebody have power over your work and be able to say, “You can’t do this.  You have to do it my way.”  Artistically that had never happened to me and it was such a dreadful experience that I really avoided it one way or another ever since.  I mean, I basically don’t work for other people.

Papp and Shapiro never reconciled and Shapiro continued to feel cheated because he had left Misanthrope unfinished, something he said he had never done before.  (This assertion isn’t true.  Shapiro was fired from Yes Yes, No No, his first professional job as a director, before the show opened on New Year’s Eve 1968; it closed after one performance.)

An abortive attempt at a reconciliation did occur in 1984.  In a letter to Papp, Shapiro wrote, “It was nice to talk to you, it helped me set some things at rest.”  (Shapiro wrote on Trinity College letterhead rather than Shaliko Company stationery and provided his Hartford campus and residence phone numbers.  Did the younger director feel that an academic base was more likely to get Papp’s sympathetic attention?) 

Shapiro went on to broach a number of subjects, including several “projects I am interested in” (which included Edward Bond’s Lear, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Ibsen’s Little Eyolf), but Papp rebuffed the overtures.  The letter bears handwritten notes by Gail Merrifield Papp, instructions for a member of the New York Shakespeare Festival staff to respond “for JP.” 

Merrifield described Shapiro as “a director that once worked here, old rift that recently got dealt with” and she instructed the staff member to reply with “the 5 No’s”—referring to the one-word marginal and interlinear annotations she had made by each of Shapiro’s proposals or suggestions—“without being brutal.” 

The tone, at least of Merrifield’s notes, was brusque and dismissive, however.  Even though neither Papp nor his wife themselves had reached out to Shapiro, having delegated that task to a subordinate, when Papp died of prostate cancer on 31 October 1991, losing the chance to make up with the man he had thought of as his father hit Shapiro very hard.  “I really thought that it was my fault that I didn’t make up with him,” he lamented.

The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile, credited with the staging. 

An additional composer and orchestrator were brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.  (In fact, NYSF delayed opening the production to critics until 22 November, when the run was nearly over.) 

Helen Gallagher (b. 1926), who played Arsinoé, reported at the end of November that changes in everything, including her performance, were being incorporated right up until the press opening.  NYSF files confirm that new music, costumes, and set designs were being incorporated in the production as late as 10 November, and that new orchestrations were still on order at that date. 

Some of the responsibility for the failure might devolve to the new directorial team: Gile’s principle success, for which he won a Tony nomination, was the light and frivolous entertainment, Very Good Eddie (21 December 1975-5 September 1976), and the replacement composer was the flamboyant “glam rock” figure Jobriath (also “Jobriath Boone,” among other stage names; né Bruce Wayne Campbell, 1946-83), who, in an interview, once replied, “I am a true fairy.”  One reporter remarked on the need in this case for “his fairy magic.”

Though there’d been a fair amount of anticipatory press before the production started performances, I could only find four reviews of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Misanthrope.  According to a comment in Richard Eder’s New York Times notice, published on Thursday, 24 November, the Public only invited press to the show on Tuesday, 22 November, and would be closing the production on Sunday, 27 November.

In a review entitled “Miscued Musical ‘Misanthrope,’” Eder observed that all the personnel changes “has resulted is a confusion of purposes and directions, a stageful of misconceived ideas jostling one another for breathing space.”  He quipped that the festival’s belated invitation to reviewers “was for obituaries.”

“Everything is blurred and coarsened,” complained the reviewer of the musicalized version, which he labeled an “absurd trivialization.”  He protested, “The comedy of thought and character has been replaced by a comedy of gesticulation and pratfalls.” 

Of the score, Eder reported, “What the songs don't obscure is blotted out by the noisy, slapstick style of performance,” and dubbed the music “mediocre.”

The Times review-writer even had negative things to say about the physical production, finding that all the energy of the cast, which was all he felt it displayed, “is absorbed by an overlarge and extremely ugly set: fake black marble floors and columns upon which a few pieces of classical French furniture sit as if on consignment.”

(In his negative appraisal of the production, Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News described the set as a “formal, marblelike setting, severe enough for Racine . . . .”  For readers who aren’t up on references to classical French drama, Jean Racine [1639-99], a contemporary of Molière [1622-73], was a Neo-classical dramatist who wrote primarily tragedies.  One of his best-known is Phèdre [1677], on a production of which I reported on ROT on 13 October 2009.)

In the Soho Weekly News, Tish Dace, writing on 1 December, joked that “Thanksgiving week brought a real turkey in the Public Theatre’s . . . Misanthrope.”  (24 November had been Thanksgiving Day in 1977.)  She added, “Molière must have been spinning in his grave at the tacky trumpery.” 

“[T]his production confuses the crass with the comedic,” wrote Dace.  “These aren’t fops and coquettes, these are weirdos.”  The SWN reviewer exempted one cast member, John Bottoms as Philante, when she lambasted the work of the company as “dross.”

“All of this transforms a work of genius into a debased disaster of the most dreary kind,” Dace snapped.  She panned the costumes as “in keeping with the overall gross taste,” concluding, “The totality is vulgarity cultivated as an art.”

I won’t go on to summarize the other notices.  Their headlines tell the tale, I think:

·   “Molière Goes Down the Drain” (Ted Hoffman, Villager)

·   “More misadventure than ‘Misanthrope’” (Douglas Watt, Daily News)

It's noteworthy, I think, that Leonardo Shapiro, The Shaliko Company, and The Misanthrope are all omitted from Papp’s biographies: Stuart W. Little’s Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American Theater (1974) and Joe Papp: An American Life (1994) by Papp and Helen Epstein.

[Past posts on Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company are:

·   “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009

·   “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009

·   “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010

·   “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010

·   “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010

·   “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011

·   “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep’” by Leonardo Shapiro, 7 May 2011

·   “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013

·   “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 & 6 March 2014

·   “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·   “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 & 8 November 2015

·   “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 13 January 2016; “Faust Clones, Part 3,” 21 January 2016

·   “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018

·   “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018

·   “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018

·   “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 & 14 May 2020

·   “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020

[I haven’t included posts on topics to which I was introduced by Leo or those in which he was mentioned in passing.]