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Lerner sent an outline of his idea to Bernstein. Their only previous collaboration, in 1957, had been on a new Harvard hymn, but Bernstein agreed to write the 1600 score. After five weeks of rehearsal in New York, the show opened in Philadelphia to devastating reviews and the play doctoring began immediately. Jerome Robbins and Mike Nichols traveled to Philadelphia and quickly fled. Director Corsaro left "by mutual agreement" with the company. Bernstein reportedly wanted to deal himself out too, but was persuaded to stay.
Eternal Optimist. By the time 1600 reached its next road stop, Washington, Producers Roger L. Stevens and Robert Whitehead signed a new director-choreographer team: Gilbert Moses, 33, and George Faison, 30, both black activists who had worked together on the hit black musical The Wiz.
"When I came in," Moses told TIME's Edward Tivnan, "my feeling was that Lerner and Bernstein had three years or so to bring out their product. The result was Philadelphia. I had no sympathy for what didn't work. Whatever I thought was too long, too laborious, too repetitive, not theatrical enough, I cut." Lerner, Bernstein and even the producers were barred from some rehearsals. Moses complained about "superficiality" in the book; Lerner, having begun the project in outrage over Nixon Administration excesses, found himself holed up in the Watergate Hotel rewriting far into the night.
Whole songs and chunks of dialogue disappeared and new material had to be learned. Sets and costumes changed. "It was Dunkerque," recalls Routledge. "I never knew how I would get to the end of the show. Sometimes I didn't know which way I was facing." Adds Howard: "I couldn't sleep or eat. I found it hard to focus my mind on what I was doing onstage. I became a zombie, an automaton." But, says Howard, the endless changes that were made in the show were only "like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Lerner was the "eternal optimist," says 1600's arranger, Sid Ramin. "He thought the problems were solvable—if he only had a few more days." Moses wanted to take the show to Los Angeles, confident that "clarification would have come out of another three weeks" of work. But with expenses totaling $100,000 a week, the producers decided to face Armageddon in New York.
Although the coming disaster was clear to all, it still astonishes the survivors. Says Ramin: "We would attend these meetings with Lenny and Lerner in the same room. It was marvelous to see these minds meet, so brilliant. We'd leave thinking that everything was fabulous." There were many versions of why all efforts to fix 1600 failed: Bernstein's score was more like an opera than a musical comedy; the show was racist; the chorus couldn't act; Corsaro botched the staging; the producers, not having put up the original money, didn't exert enough control; and so on. But almost everyone agreed that the overriding problem was Lerner's original idea. Says Ramin: "No amount of staging, acting, choreography or whatever was going to save the book."