By Jeremy Marre
The Telegraph, September 12, 1998
It was supposed to be the great new American musical, but it became Broadway's biggest-ever flop . Documentary director Jeremy Marre, who filmed events throughout, reveals what went wrong with Paul Simon's ‘The Capeman’.
"Seven People Will Be Slaughtered While You Watch This Play" screamed the pickets' placards as nervous celebrities arrived in their stretch-limousines. It was January 29, 1998, the opening night of Paul Simon's new musical ‘The Capeman’. The show that was supposed to "re-invent Broadway". The show that aroused more venom in the press, more gossip on the streets, more agony in the dressing-rooms than all the others put together.
I'd been flying monthly between London and New York to make a film of its precarious progress through the sacking of three directors and half of the cast, the dismissal of its management team, the retreat of its backers and bankers - and finally, delayed by a mere five months, the agonised first night. Producer Edgar Dobie confessed to me: "Opening a Broadway show's a bit like having your appendix out in the middle of Times Square, but this time it's without anaesthetic. The most difficult decision for a Broadway producer is to do the show in the first place. The second most difficult is when to close it." Just 10 weeks later, the curtain fell on ‘The Capeman’ for the last time. The producers' pockets were several millions lighter and the loyal Latin cast were back on the streets.
Paul Simon always knew that ‘The Capeman’ was a high-risk project, and that is part of what attracted him to it. He knew that the story of the teenage Puerto Rican killer, Salvador Agron, still carried an uncomfortable message for New Yorkers. This was the kid who stabbed to death two white boys back in 1959 and yelled at the TV cameras: "My mother can watch me burn!"
Agron was 16 years old when he committed the murders. And that same year, another 16-year-old from the New York suburb of Queens was playing with Art Garfunkel in a duo called Tom and Jerry. His name was Paul Simon, and those television images of Agron's defiance, and the racist anger it provoked, burnt deep in Simon's memory.
Forty years on, his Broadway musical brought the Mothers of Murdered Children back on to the streets, protesting and picketing. And had the New York Post repeating its hysterical demands for the death of ‘The Capeman’. Only this time it was a Broadway show, not the killer - if you could tell the difference from the vitriolic front pages.
Behind the safety curtain, the cast was holding hands in a tight circle, invoking divine assistance for "this trying experience", while in a secret opening-night ceremony an actress brought in a patchwork coat which she passed to the oldest Capeman performer, for good luck. He donned it proudly but - alas - instead of running clockwise round the stage, he tripped and ran anti-clockwise, provoking screams of "Oh, no! That's bad luck."
Meanwhile, red-eyed with exhaustion, Paul Simon stalked the corridors of the Marquis Theatre, hugging his cast: "It's a growing experience." But also a painful one. A mixture of desperation and euphoria. "My intentions were benign," Paul confided, while the protesters cried, "You're dancing on the dead!"
"If I made a mistake, I'm sorry, but I didn't mean to hurt," he added. "It wasn't that I didn't have great affection for the culture, the story, everything. I didn't spend over six years of my life to trivialise something."
Indeed, Simon thrives on controversy. My own relationship with him began when he saw my film, ‘Rhythm of Resistance’, about black music in South Africa. It helped inspire him to make the ground-breaking, politically contentious album ‘Graceland’. Now, 14 years later, publicist Dan Klores invited me to meet Paul at a baseball match in Yankee Stadium, and between hot-dogs and home-runs they told me about ‘The Capeman’, a disturbing tale of gang-murder and redemption.
Paul played me some of the 30 songs he'd composed and said, "I'm not sure if I trust you with this one." Winning Simon's confidence isn't easy. He's taken a lot of knocks in his career, and ‘The Capeman’ delivered some of the hardest. Yet, in a business filled with egomaniacs and monsters, he's a genuinely caring person who hides his vulnerability and laconic humour behind a typical New Yorker's hard-boiled exterior.
Until Christmas 1997, my own relationship with Paul Simon had gone relatively smoothly. Then he decided to sack Eric Simonson – ‘The Capeman's mild-mannered director - because, in Paul's words, "I wasn't seeing a vision that felt like an expression of my sensibility, even though I didn't know what that vision was." A producer added unsympathetically, "On Broadway you can't afford to employ a director who has to ask permission to go take a leak."
When the decision became known to the cast, there was a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, and I determined to film the acrimonious production meeting that followed. Simon instructed me to put the cameras away because he felt depressed and vulnerable. But I filmed it anyway.
Actor Ruben Blades (who had recently run for President of Panama and come last) first attacked Simon for interfering too much: "I heard somewhere the first director was sacked because she had too many ideas, and now the second because he had too few. You need to decide who's going to direct this show."
Simon shrugged off the criticism, so Blades turned to an even more sensitive issue - song-writing: "You can't get apples from a mango tree. If a song doesn't have the balls or the intensity, let's face up to the problem. In everybody's work there are moments that are very special and others that are simply . . . adequate."
Simon snapped, "That's not so. Everything should be at a much higher level than adequate, and if it's not then either the performers or the writer have to rise to it." Blades countered, "Not everything is Mrs Robinson."
After the meeting, an irate Simon confronted me on the staircase. "That was deeply distressing for me, and everytime I looked up I saw the f---ing camera recording my humiliation." I said something about telling the truth. "Well, I think it's time you stopped filming the truth until I tell you to start again."
He vanished into a December blizzard. Minutes later he reappeared, a diminutive snowman in a Yankee baseball cap: "Don't take any notice of what I said. I just want you to know that was one of the worst moments of my life that you taped for TV."
After that, he never asked to look through the camera, never viewed any footage, and never even watched my documentary before its completion. His trust was hard-won.
A short time
later, Simon invited me to film his song-writing collaboration with Nobel
Prize-winner Derek Walcott, at the poet's home in St Lucia. I phoned Paul on my
arrival on the island. Edie, his wife, answered. She said, "He doesn't want
to talk to you or see you again ever," and put the phone down. I took a deep
breath, walked twice round the room, and tried again. This time Paul answered.
"Oh, it's you Jer," he said warmly. "I'll come and collect you
myself." If he wanted to disarm me, he succeeded.
Moments later, a Suzuki jeep slid to a halt outside the Green Parrot Hotel. Paul was smiling and took me for a vegetable curry at the local Indian. After discussing such frivolous matters as death and reincarnation, I asked him about some of the glaring problems in ‘The Capeman's construction. Like those characters who appeared in the desert and then disappeared and had nothing at all to do with the story? "It's just like life," he sighed. "People walk into your life, and then they disappear. Why shouldn't that happen on Broadway?" It did.
Simon had spent seven years on the music before the show collapsed. His creative partnership with co-writer Walcott had been unusual, and unequal. Paul selected the rhythm of each song, and then picked judiciously through a dozen pages of Walcott's yellow legal pad to select a single word or phrase he could remould into whatever lyric he wanted. Then he improvised on his custom-made Martin guitar until he found the chords to support that lyric. Then he reworked the whole thing several times. And then offered it back to Walcott.
In typical Simon fashion, bursts of intense, anguished concentration were relieved by self-deprecating humour as he and Walcott parodied their own efforts.
Simon: "It's a Tex-Mex situation! People in the audience will go 'whoops' at that!"
Walcott: "What audience? Just the two guys left sitting in the stalls saying: 'It must be time for a cup of tea, Bert.' "
That was funny at the time. But uncomfortably prophetic. Despite its magnificent music, ‘The Capeman’ was destined to close while the tabloids howled, "Broadway's Biggest Flop", "Backers see 11 million Slip Slidin' Away". Paul Simon's disasters are still big news.
Publicist Dan Klores had been unable to stem the tide of bad news. Leaks and misinformation depicted a rudderless, spendthrift musical and misrepresented as arrogance Simon's unwavering loyalty to his project and cast. "I had a fantasy that we'd get great reviews," Klores said sadly. "There's nothing more we could have done. Every day, another major crisis. I've worked on senatorial, even presidential campaigns, but this far exceeds any of those pressures. Not even close."
In the months before the opening, as the word on the street changed from "controversial" to "troubled", the show's backers began pulling out their money. The Latin bankers and businessmen, once so eager to invest, began to see ‘The Capeman’ as a "negative stereotype" and sat on their hands while Paul dug deep into his own pockets, funding Bob Crowley's ambitious sets, the endless 30-piece band rehearsals and the 50-strong Latin cast.
"Look, I have over a million dollars of my own money in this," Paul told me. "And if I lose it, I can say it was a privilege for me to work this way. I can afford it. Go tell a businessman that it's a privilege to lose a million dollars and he'll laugh at you. He's in the return-on-investment business; I'm not."
But Paul was in the investment business. A creative one, worth seven years of his life. And Paul doesn't like failure. So he gambled with a third director, cult choreographer Mark Morris, who tried to censor our filming as he floundered flamboyantly, failing - like Eric Simonson before him - to translate Paul's personal vision on to the stage.
As Morris's mood turned increasingly sour, he was replaced by Jerry Zaks. But that safe-bet Broadway veteran hardly had time to begin. Money was running out, and confidence too. The wolves were gathering.
Without the backing of a big corporation, bad reviews on Broadway will kill you. And ‘Capeman’ got the worst. It was "a wounded animal waiting to be put out of its misery". But Simon wouldn't compromise his vision. He refused to adapt his show to placate the Mothers of Murdered Children, the politically-correct bankers, the resentful Broadway establishment, or the critics who now derided his "Cape of No Hope".
"I think it was personal," confided Ruben Blades. "There was a knife which they twisted and then twisted again. They said 'We're going to show you something now', and they fell on Paul like a ton of bricks and killed ‘The Capeman’."
I last saw Paul Simon in a poky upstairs dressing-room on opening night. He was dressed in a blue pinstripe suit, T-shirt and baseball cap: "It's not personal to me; they're not just mad at me. Within the theatre community, they're rooting for everyone to fail - except their own play. So while I could say 'I'll never do this again', I don't really feel that way.
"There were lots of things I thought were distasteful and unfair, but so much of it was so rewarding. We got there; we got to a 'there' I'd never imagined. I'm optimistic, because for me it was a learning experience, and that implies there's some way I'm going to use this experience in the future."