Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Albert Poland. Stages: A Memoir. N.p.: Independently published, 2019. 452pp.
Albert Poland’s name may not be as immediately recognizable to you as are most of those whose memoirs have filled these columns, but that shouldn’t prevent you from taking an interest in his book, Stages: A Theater Memoir, especially if you have even the slightest interest in a leading mover and shaker of his era. Poland, born in 1941, wrote his memoir six years ago, when he was 78, and transitioning into retirement after an illustrious career. It began during the birth of Off-Off Broadway in the early 60s, rose to the heights in the for-profit world of Off-Broadway, and culminated in impressive achievements on the Great White Way. Although he had acting and singing ability, it’s his offstage contributions as a general manager (mainly) and producer that earned him his respect.
Poland’s heart, he reminds us now and then, belonged mainly to Off Broadway, which he watched transform from a gutsy artistic do-it-yourself artistic world to a place where bottom-line commercialism consumed it. As he says, “No longer scotch tape, paper clips, and glue, Off Broadway had become spreadsheets and marketing. Advertising and theater costs had increased dramatically. . . . Higher prices were a given. . . and it seemed to happen overnight,” in the 80s.
His book is filled with an abundance of stories about working on shows, a quite surprising number of them still rememberable to anyone who observed the New York theater scene over the past sixty years. Poland was there in Off-Off’s early days at Caffe Cino, La Mama, and Judson Poets Theatre, and he has stories to tell about some of that period’s most distinguished individuals.
His prolific career allowed him to become closely associated with widely known icons like Ellen Stewart and Sam Shepard (both loom large on his pages), whose idiosyncratic comments and behavior fuel juicy stories that theater geeks will devour. There are also powerful behind-the-scenes individuals like Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld, producers who ran the Shubert organization, Broadway’s most powerful, but who, despite having theaters named after them, are little known to the public at large. Many others, like Steve Eich, will ring bells only among the true cognoscenti.
Stages is the autobiography of someone who cut the deals, wrote up the budgets, and created the contracts that helped make many shows a reality. As he blazes a path from show to show, Poland reveals numerous tale of the backstabbing, disappointments, triumphs, and failures of the many famous and not-so-famous shows he handled, giving insights into business arrangements, financing, union problems, artistic and business temperaments, and all the rest of what’s involved in commercial producing.
Poland—gay, Jewish, and liberal—was born to conservative parents far from the bright lights of New York in Big Rapids, Indiana, where, as an ambitious 12-year-old, he became so enamored of Judy Garland that he founded her first national fan club and even got to meet her. (Her daughter, Liza Minelli, would later, for a time, figure prominently in his life.) He moved to the Big Apple right out of his teens, leaving college to enroll at the American Theatre Wing, also studied with people like Wynn Handman, and soon began getting theatre jobs, including on stage (like being an understudy in a bus-and-truck tour of The Sound of Music). He moved on to front office jobs, made influential friends, and became a valuable contributor to the then freshly ascendant downtown theatre scene.
Poland’s stories are often funny and eye-opening, especially when they recount the behavior of the stars with whom he worked. Since many of us read theater memoirs to gorge on the platter of prominent names dropped, Poland serves us well, scattering many crumbs for us to peck at. He dishes informatively about gay theatre pioneers like Divine, John Glines, Harvey Fierstein, Al Carmines, and Charles Busch; actors like Gilbert Price, Madeleine le Roux, Jose Ferrer, Hugh Jackman, Gary Sinise, Bette Davis, Uta Hagen, Frank Langella, Eileen Heckart, Vanessa Redgrave, and, of all people, Quentin Tarantino (in a flop revival of Wait Until Dark); creatives like Fernando Arrabal, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, David Cryer and Nancy Ford, Tom Eyen, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Earl Wilson, Jr., Charles Pierce, Bricktop, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Claudia Shear, Vernel Bagneris, Tommy Tune, Word Baker, Michael Bennett, Mike Nichols, William Ball, Yoko Ono, Steve Martin, and Eduardo Machado; and storied venues, like the Theatre de Lys (Lucille Lortel Theatre), Village Gate, the Cherry Lane Theatre, and the Astor Place Theatre, the latter the one with which he was most closely associated.
Poland’s encounters with managers, press agents, investors, critics, proprietors, and producers—including Paul Libin, Lucille Lortel, Art D’Lugoff, Phil Oesterman, Jeffrey Richards, David Merrick, Sam Cohn, and Peter Schneider—are laid bare, and you learn much about both the euphoria and the depression that go hand in hand with a life in the living theatre. Even theatre journalist Michael Riedel gets caught in the reaper; a feud he had with Poland was so well resolved that Riedel wrote the foreword to the book!
And then there are his valuable memories of the shows he helped midwife, usually as general manager but sometimes in other jobs, like company manager, and, most impressively, producer. Some flamed out like brief candles, others made history, among them Now Is the Time for All Good Men, Peace, The Dirtiest Show in Town, The Faggot, Let My People Come, Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down, Happy End (Meryl Streep’s last Broadway show), A Life in the Theatre, One Mo’ Time, Table Settings, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, As Is, Little Shop of Horrors, The Grapes of Wrath, Steel Magnolias, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, A Lie of the Mind, Last Night at Ballyhoo, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Boy from Oz.
We’re introduced to backstage squabbles, contract quarrels, personality conflicts, onstage calamities, and everything else you expect to hear from someone who has been there and done that for so long and on so many shows. But much time is also taken to cover the AIDS crisis, which robbed the theater of so many golden talents, some of them touchingly memorialized in the author’s pages. Among Poland’s greatest losses was his longtime collaborator, Bruce Mailman, with whom he published 1972’s Off Off Broadway Book, once a major resource, although some have found a few cracks in its façade.
For all the crises and controversies Poland endured (like a show using blackface), personal and professional, a positive spirit is present, one thrilled to have been blessed with ongoing opportunities and a work environment surrounded by exciting show biz personalities, both celebrities and non. Only now and then was he blocked by employment or physical setbacks, like pancreatitis or alcoholism. It would have been humanly impossible for him not to have felt distaste for certain colleagues, but, by and large, he remains evenhanded, rarely lapsing into bitterness, no matter how much of a right he had to do so.
My single quibble concerns his mentioning several times that a New York theater with 499 seats can qualify as Broadway status and therefore be eligible for Tony Awards. For many years, the rule has been that a theater must have 500 seats to be Tony-eligible, so I’m curious to learn why someone like Albert Poland, who must know this like he knows the face he sees in the mirror, would so insist. Readers who can respond are invited to explain.
Stages: A Memoir will be a boon for those who lived through the fascinating maelstrom of Off and on Broadway in the last half of the 20th century. It will bring back memories of those good and bad old days as recalled by an affectionate, knowledgeable raconteur who earned his stripes, not writing, acting, directing, or designing, but making sure shows made it to the stage, whether in an East Village hangout seating 100 or in a lavish Broadway palace serving 1,500. Even theatre geeks who weren’t around in those days of yore should know who Albert Poland was and what he did.
Next up: Maureen Dowd, Notorious.