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Times Steps: My Musical
Comedy Life
by Donna McKechnie with Greg
Lawrence
and
I Could Have Sung All
Night
by Marni Nixon with Stephen Cole
Book Reviews by I
Could Have Sung All Night (from Billboard Books, written with Stephen
Cole, foreword by Nixon's lifelong friend and colleague, Marilyn Horne).
In Time Steps, McKechnie does not shy away from the darker moments of
her life, nor does she spend undue time rehashing overly familiar stories. The
creative process by which A Chorus Line was created, for instance, which
has been discussed in detail in several other books, is given a brief but
interesting new perspective. However, McKechnie manages to cover a very busy
career with a surprising amount of detail, such as her work in the chorus of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, playing Philia in the
national tour of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and on
to her famed collaborations with Michael Bennett in Promises, Promises,
Company, and the seminal A Chorus Line. On a more personal side,
she also covers running away from home in her teens, her famous short marriage
to Bennett, and her battle with rheumatoid arthritis. McKechnie's fresh,
determined personality is apparent throughout her narrative which is written in
her frank, warm voice.
In discussing one's accomplishments, it must be difficult to appear not
falsely modest and also not self-congratulatory, but McKechnie manages it with
seeming ease. She has been through some rigorous psychoanalysis in the last few
decades which inform her discussion of her life choices; she now recognizes a
tendency to hide her feelings and, to a certain degree, she thinks this tendency
to bottle things up may have contributed to her falling into ill health in the
early 1980s. Her victory over the condition may be in part due to her growing
ability to accept and express her feelings at the time. McKechnie is a major
success story for victims of rheumatoid arthritis, and her discussion of the
holistic approach she took to recovery may offer inspiration to anyone afflicted
with the condition.
McKechnie includes plenty of fun stories about some of her more famous
performances. She describes her battle to keep "Tick Tock," her solo dance
number, in Company when director Hal Prince wanted to cut it, she covers
what it was like to work with dancing legends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon's on
Fosse's last project before his untimely death, the 1987 touring production of
Sweet Charity in which she had starred. As McKechnie had always been a
Michael Bennett dancer, she felt particularly happy that she finally got a
chance to work with Fosse, the other great choreographer of her generation.
Marni Nixon, though known
to most musical theatre fans primarily as the singing voice of Deborah Kerr in
the The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and, perhaps
most famously, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, has had an extraordinarily
diverse and successful career. She has worked personally with Igor Stravinsky,
was chosen as a concert soloist for Leonard Bernstein (before the dub job on
West Side Story), performed on Broadway in The Girl in Pink
Tights, won four Emmy Awards for the children's program Boomerang,
and has sung with a host of great orchestras around the world and played such
opera roles as Violetta in La Traviata and Musetta in La Bohème.
She has also played both Anna in The King and I (in which she wore
Deborah Kerr's actual costumes from the film) and Eliza in My Fair Lady,
the latter of which was the first New York revival at City Center in 1964 and
was performed after she had recorded Hepburn's songs, but before the film was
released.
Nixon's affiliation with major composers was even reflected in her
nineteen-year marriage to film composer Ernest Gold, with whom she had three
children. Though Nixon and Gold spent some early years of their marriage in New
York, the majority of Nixon's life has been on the west coast. As a child in
California, she earned money for voice lessons by performing as an extra and in
bit parts in many Hollywood movies of the 1940s. In 1946, she did her first
dubbing job when she was asked to sing a song for Margaret O'Brien in The
Secret Garden.
Only a few chapters of this
life story cover "the dubbing years," but Nixon does reveal some interesting
facts about those processes, particularly the extraordinary give-and-take she
was allowed in her work with Kerr on The King and I in which she actually
learned some of Kerr's staging so they could work together to create one
seamless performance. She also reveals that, in addition to her songs, she was
brought in to loop some of Natalie Wood's dialogue in West Side Story,
including Wood's final "Te adoro Anton."
Nixon's personal life was never free from turmoil as she dealt with Gold's
infidelity, the shocking suicide of her sister-in-law, her own perfectionism and
several tempestuous relationships. Through it all, she seems to have kept her
sense of humor and always managed to land on her feet. During her second
marriage, she was diagnosed with cancer, and today she attributes much of her
survival to what she terms her "Angel Network" – the group of friends and family
who gathered around to support and help her through that time. When she relapsed
and had to go into chemotherapy years later while appearing on Broadway in
James Joyce's The Dead, she proved, once again, that she would always
deliver, even in the toughest of circumstances.
I Could Have Sung All Night makes use of some slightly fussy narrative
devices such as jumps forward and backward in time and has some minor errors
(such as when she mistakenly says "We Kiss in a Shadow" was dropped from The
King and I film), but both Nixon's story and McKechnie's Time Steps are direct and straight-forward stories of extraordinary careers. They should be
fascinating reads for anyone interested in music, theatre, dance or show
business.
posted on Sept 28, 2008 8:26 AM ()
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