Broadway Birthday

By Gerald Clarke

Unaccustomed to such a hands-on director, the actors at Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival were perplexed at first, afraid that the boss might stifle their creativity. "I should have heard those lines, and I didn't," was his constant complaint during rehearsals of Broadway, a melodrama he had first directed in 1926. But then they remembered the name behind that stern voice. "Hey," said one young actor, "this is George Abbott! We know it's going to work."

At that moment the Cleveland company became students in what has been called the George Abbott University, an institution whose graduates include Gene Kelly, Shirley MacLaine, Kirk Douglas, Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer, Paul Muni, Van Johnson, Shirley Booth, Eddie Albert, Nancy Walker, Garson Kanin, Richard Widmark, Arlene Francis, Hal Prince . . .

Following those dots there should be a partial list of the 128 shows that Abbott has directed, produced, acted in or written, in whole or part: On Your Toes, Pal Joey, On the Town, Where's Charley?, Call Me Madam, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Fiorello! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

The name George Abbott is, in short, almost synonymous with American theater, and it is altogether fitting that when he turns 100 later this month, the biggest names on Broadway will jam the Palace Theater to help him celebrate with songs and sketches from some of those landmark productions. How does it feel to turn 100? "Well," says that man of few but well-chosen words, "I'm getting a lot of mileage out of it."

In most of the big ways, the approach of the century mark has left him remarkably unaffected. True, he uses a hearing aid and walks with a cane, and a bad leg has forced him to give up dancing the rumba. But it is also true that he still golfs at his winter home in Miami Beach, swims at his summer home in New York's Catskill Mountains and, most important, has unquenchable energy and enthusiasm for his first love: the theater.

He made his debut on Broadway in 1913, acting in a comedy called The Misleading Lady. Other parts followed, but, itching to control the entire stage, he began writing and directing. For half a century after Broadway, his first big hit, he was the theater's leading show doctor, whose infallible diagnosis could make a bad play better and a good play terrific. Some equate the Abbott touch with speed, a notion that horrifies Abbott, who deplores farces that look as if they had been directed with a stopwatch. What is important to him is keeping the action alive and eliminating anything that breaks the rhythm of the show. "Pace is a matter of taste," he says. "It means keeping the action alive. But that can be done with pauses as well as with picking up cues. It means not having any deadwood." Using that criterion, he discarded what even he thought was a good number from Call Me Madam: "Everything else will be an anticlimax." And out it went, over the protests of Composer Irving Berlin and Choreographer Jerome Robbins.

Nothing is wasted on an Abbott show. Rehearsals start on time, and there are no temper tantrums or displays of nerves from either the director or the actors. Legend has it that a Method-trained actor once yelled from the stage, "What's my motivation?", to which Abbott responded, "Your job." He despises what he considers exaggerated interpretations. "If an actor puts his personality ahead of creating the character, then he's not an actor," he says. "He's just a performer."

In fact, he could do without stars, often preferring to work with unknowns. "Young people are excited and eager," he says. "They make me feel young." And no one is irreplaceable. "Oh, there are always plenty of people who can play a part," he says. "You think there aren't, but they're there if you look for them."

Abbott is a little embarrassed by the awe he inspires; even old friends are reluctant to call him by his first name. "It's like being knighted when you reach the stage where you can call him George," says Choreographer Donald Saddler, who has worked with him on many shows and now enjoys that privilege. A few weeks ago, Abbott extended the invitation to Gerald Freedman, artistic director of the Cleveland troupe. The dumbstruck Freedman -- Sir Gerry now -- could only respond, "I'll try, Mr. Abbott."

In his autobiography, "Mister Abbott," he wrote lovingly about his first wife, who died in 1930 and with whom he had one daughter, and somewhat less lovingly about his second, from whom he was divorced in the '50s. Right now he is concentrating on No. 3, the bubbly Joy Valderrama, 55, whom he married when he was a mere 96. In Florida, they are usually on the golf course or by a pool during the day and watch television at night. One of his favorite programs is The Newlywed Game, which, he says, gives him an insight into the lives of working-class Americans. He has a fond spot for his fruit trees -- grapefruit, orange and papaya -- and talks to them the way he might like to talk to his actors. "Goddam you!" he says. "Deliver!"