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Moving the multicolored pavilions of Camelot toward Broadway, Lerner and Loewe last week were in Boston, bumping into the great shades of past tryout seasons, from Babes in Arms to South Pacific. (Richard Rodgers once swore he would never open so much as a can of sardines without going to Boston first.) A uniquely American practice, the road tryout is as formalized as the judicium Dei the ordeal of the Middle Ages. The road ordeal is by rewriting and cutting, by sleepless nights and interminable waiting, by cold coffee and warm highball, by panicky rumor and wild hope. Severely tested along with everyone else is the audience, which has to sit through long scenes already marked for destruction. As a production is laboriously dragged from town to town (before Camelot reaches New York, its railway fares and freight charges alone will reach $35,000), a playwright sometimes tosses everything but his last will and testament into the first draft to see what will go. A merchandising mentality ("Give them what they want") can sacrifice a song, a scene or a whole play to the whim of a weary tryout audience. But in experienced, honest hands, the road ordeal can also lead to the kind of relentless self-criticism in which Lerner, Loewe & Co. were caught up last week.
Unreal City. Boston, in the view of its Broadway visitors, is a city as unreal as Morgan le Fay's forest, consisting of just a few buildings and a couple of dozen cabs. As Camelot principals were shuttling back and forth between the gilt Shubert Theater and the plush Ritz-Carlton Hotel, everyone was rewriting Camelot. Bit players were suggesting changes to chorus girls. Even floor waiters appeared to have a new second act under their silver dish covers recalling Moss Hart's adage that when a show is in trouble, room service invariably seems awful.
Still on everyone's mind was the trouble that had very nearly turned Camelot from a musical into a medical. In Toronto, where the show opened six weeks ago, Lerner led off with a bleeding ulcer, was in hospital for ten days. Director Moss Hart followed with a coronary thrombosis (his second), went off to the same hospital, same room, and indefinitely out of Camelot.
No one had forgotten that Costume Designer Adrian had died soon after beginning work on the show last year. A wardrobe mistress' husband was found dead in their New York apartment. The chief electrician was hospitalized with bladder trouble. Actor Burton took on a virus that almost choked off his singing voice, and the traditional "company cold" spread to Sir Lancelot (Robert Goulet), was even worse in Boston than Toronto. A chorus girl ran a needle through her foot onstage. Frederick Loewe, who himself suffered a severe heart attack two years ago, was temporarily felled by influenza. "We are all quitting," said one stage manager. "We will be replaced tomorrow by hospital orderlies."