Page 128 of Playworld

“She’ll live,” Sam said, “how about we leave it at that?”

“Agreed,” I said.

And then he hung up.

It felt like the first adult conversation of my life.

—

That final week of summer, at 30 Rock, while we were shooting the season’s last episode, I was so bogged down with my school reading, I was so unprepared and blew my lines with such regularity, we had to halt nearly all my scenes in order for Liz and me to drill. These sessions were beyond triage, my flameouts so spectacular she was actually rooting for me to get through them, since the finish line was in sight, season five in the can. We stood just outside the set’s radiant circle so we could huddle, everyone keeping their places, me repeating lines she fed me like some sort of catechism.

“Don’t threaten my parents again, Lava Girl…” she said.

“Don’t threaten my parents again, Lava Girl…” I said.

“…or I’ll blow this volcano so sky-high…”

“…or I’ll blow this volcano so sky-high…”

“…Vesuvius’s eruption will seem like a firecracker.”

“…Vesuvius’s eruption will seem like a firecracker.”

“This is so bad…” Liz said.

“This is so bad…” I said.

“No,” she said, “thewriting.”

I laughed, and Liz did too, which relaxed me. “From the top,” she said.

Tensions were also high at the St. James. After we wrapped at 30Rock, I’d ride my bike there to catch some of the run-through. I liked not alerting Dad to my arrival—having the chance to watch him while he was unaware of my presence in the darkened balcony’s first row, hidden by its ledge, rendered almost invisible by the light shining from spots and PAR cans arrayed beneath it, especially during the lulls, while Fountain and Ferrer and Kay interrupted the performance to huddle in the orchestra level’s aisles. I might sometimes even risk discovery by sitting in one of the private boxes, and it was from here that I spotted Dad during one of the breaks—his back was to me—standing beside Katie near the left wing, his hands clasped behind him. The cast was assembled for the opening number, taking direction from Ferrer, Dad bending toward her ear to tell her something, to whisper it, fervently, she patting his back and then feeling her way down to finally clasp one of his fingers with her own. And Ihatedhim for it.

Opening night was the Friday after Labor Day. Mom and I went straight to our seats in the mezzanine; Oren hit the snack bar for a Coke and Milk Duds. The audience’s chatter was an almost audible correlative to my anticipation. The orchestra tuned up with such a feeling of tension it was as if I were witnessing a medieval legion pulling on a hundred drawstrings and then aiming their arrows toward the sky. And then the lights went down, there was the stillness that accompanies several hundred indrawn breaths, followed by the blast of light when the curtains went up and the music played. I wish I could do a better job of relaying the experience ofSam and Sarafrom start to finish. But when your father is performing, when you have seen a show take shape over the course of several months, when you have heard its songs sung in your home so many times that they seem like nursery rhymes, have seen dance numbers whose steps have been altered, the palimpsest of prologues auditioned, tried, and then trashed, it is like looking at the underside of an Oriental rug: all you see is the stitching. Instead, you watch for signs, for key moments at odds with the show’s rhythms; you wait, tensed, for funny parts that in the past have gotten laughs, only to have your heart sink when they don’t land; you are surprised when bits you never found comical set off a fusillade of cackles. For me the show rose toward andsank away from Dad’s appearances, the stunned silence that followed his two duets a confirmation of approval and a promise of possible success. I realized everyone noticed what Mom had flagged from the get-go, which was that the actor playing Sam had been miscast—his voice was somehow too operatic. The show itself seemed somehow anachronistic.As to the plot, Sam and Sara do not get together at the end. The couple sings a devastating duet near the show’s conclusion called “Getting Away with It.” They have, by this time, consummated their love for each other, but they are older, and when their chance to break from their marriages presents itself, when their feelings are strongest but their nerve is at its most tenuous, they succumb to inertia. They can’t bring themselves to leave their spouses. Not that I cared. The show had the quality of all mediocre art: my attention slipped right off it. I don’t remember much of the performances at all.

We migrated to Sardi’s for the cast party. This was customary for Fountain’s shows, to celebrate and eat and await the reviews from the New York papers just off the delivery trucks. Mom, Oren, and I were among the first to arrive. The room’s decor was a ubiquitous crimson: the awning, the walls, the carpet, and the leather banquettes were all red. Mom asked for a table in the far corner, I would realize later, to be as far as possible from Katie at all times and who, once the restaurant filled up, seemed similarly determined to keep as many guests as possible between herself and Mom. Oren and I hunkered down on either side of her in the highbacked banquette like a security detail. I left her only once to study the rows of caricatures that lined the walls. When I asked Mom about the drawings, she said that there had been a series of caricaturists since the restaurant had opened in the thirties. They were on their third artist who did all the portraits, but the first was a Russian immigrant who exchanged his services for two free meals a day. Was Fountain among its cohort? Might Dad be up there one day? He came over to join us, unable to sit still, too nervous to eat. He was all jitters compared to Mom’s implacable steeliness. Their conversation was the most wooden sort of dialogue, shot through with bad acting. When Dad finally got up the nerve to ask her, “What did you think?” she tilted her chin toward Fountain, who was now standing on one of the chairs, waving theTimesin his hand, ordering everyone to gather round. Dad left us to huddle with the cast. Fountain thanked everyone profusely for their efforts these past seven months, and then he snapped open the broadsheet and said, “This, ladies and gentlemen, from Richard Eder in theTimes”:

This critic recalls first hearing Marc Morales perform the title character in “Don Giovanni”—at Teatro Alla Scala, in 1964, to be exact—and how it seemed his voice could make the very earth tremble. Sadly, time and its ravages have reduced this great baritone’s instrument to a quaver—one of many shaky aspects in the new musical “Sam and Sara.”

Opening last night at the St. James Theater, “Sam and Sara” is the latest (I almost wrote last) offering by two of America’s most influential collaborators, librettist Abe Fountain and composer Hershy Kay. Once it was axiomatic that every aspiring lyricist cut his teeth imitating Fountain’s lines and every budding arranger echoed Kay’s melodies. Now the pair sounds like a poor impersonation of their past selves.

Oren pulled at my elbow. “This is scorched earth stuff,” he whispered.

“Maybe it gets better,” I said, trying not to look at Dad.

True, Fountain and Kay are still capable of the stratospheric showstopper but in spite of these soaring moments, “Sam and Sara” fails to launch.

“This is Old Testament,” Oren said.

“Be quiet,” I said.

“We’ll be sharing a bedroom until you leave for college.”

Fountain pressed on:

In one of the musical’s unintended ironies, it is the spurned spouses who perform the most revelatory song about love. These standouts, Shel Hurt and Katie Deal, are not only fullyrealized characters but also heartbreaking in their roles. Their final duet is by far the show’s outstanding number.

Dad looked over his shoulder at us, at Mom, and smiled, albeit mournfully.