Broadway Unbound

NEW YORK — Mark Morris waves a cigarette in the air, adding his own punctuation to the orders he is whispering into a phone. With a sudden lurch, the phone slams down and a great hand goes out in greeting. Morris and Paul Simon have agreed to talk about Simon’s new show “The Capeman” on this sunny autumn morning, but Simon is a bit late.

“Let’s go,” Morris directs. He points his visitor into a chair and launches into his explanation of the musical, which opens at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre in January. “Just because it’s Broadway,” he is saying, “well, that just means it’s bigger and more expensive.”

Morris is often labeled the bad boy of dance (a term that he calls “lazy journalism” now that he has moved to theater and opera), and his title as director normally would mean that he is the stage boss of this production; Simon, the underling.

But this is the Paul Simon of Simon & Garfunkel, the Paul Simon of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Mrs. Robinson” and “Graceland.” This is also the singer, songwriter and lyricist who has spent almost a decade creating this musical about a Puerto Rican youth who wore a black cape when he killed two boys in New York almost 40 years ago.

Simon’s production of “Capeman” is expected to cost a whopping $11 million, and some critics have suggested that it is so expensive because he is maintaining control as he learns the theater trade from the ground up.

Technically, Simon is not only lyricist and composer, but until recently he was also the main producer of the show, the one who basically dug up the money, including “a couple of million,” as he figured it, of his own. In recent months, his manager, Dan Klores, has also signed on to help as a co-producer.

So when Simon walks into the room a few minutes later and settles into a metal chair beside Morris, it quickly becomes clear that no matter who has the title, Simon is running the show.

“All anybody said to me through this whole thing was ‘It’s backward, the way you’re doing this,’ ” Simon says as he and Morris grimace over watery coffee from a machine downstairs.

“They kept telling me the director will do this and the director will do that, and the director will hire the choreographer, and I’m thinking, ‘No, you know that’s going to have a big effect on the music. And what if the director doesn’t see it the way I do?’ ”

Morris nods at a job description he had approved, perhaps even encouraged, many months ago. Morris agreed to be the director-choreographer in January after Simon fired his second director, Eric Simonson of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Simonson had taken over after “Capeman’s” creator became disillusioned with his first director, Argentine native Susana Tubert.

So Simon and Nobel laureate poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who made the musical into “one long poem,” as Simon puts it, began to look for another director. It was a mission that the songwriter now says kept leading him back to Morris, who already had agreed to be choreographer.

And when the famous avant-garde choreographer finally accepted the director’s duties, “it was like a jolt of electricity to the whole thing,” Simon explains.

“Once Mark was there, then all of these problems that I felt were so overwhelming, well, I was able to break them down into smaller bites,” he says.

“He’s a great leader, and I was trying to put together a team that could function as a team. . . . I’m happy to work with somebody, but I don’t want to work for somebody after I wrote this whole thing. I don’t want to be working for the director.

“A lot of directors I talked to . . . said basically, ‘I take a piece of work. I go back. I think about it. I ingest this piece of work. And then, it comes out as an expression of my work.’ ”

Morris chuckles at this image and talks about his own contributions to “Capeman”--how the movement of the play was grounded in the music, how much it was like the operas he has directed before.

As he talks, his massive mane of gray and black hair bobbing behind him, Simon listens intently. The singer nods in places, frowns at others, ready to leap into the conversation as soon as Morris finishes a thought.

In some ways these two--one from modern dance, the other from rock music--are an odd match.

Morris, for example, is tall and flamboyant; Simon is small and serene.

Morris is so full of energy that he does not sit, it seems, but struggles to contain himself as close as possible to the chair. Simon, by contrast, is cool, any pre-opening anxieties tucked inside the Elvis T-shirt and beneath his baseball cap.

While Simon speaks in long, almost therapeutic riffs, Morris interjects--darting into the conversation with a comment or critique or witticism and then handing center stage back to Simon.

It is only after spending a little time with the two that it becomes apparent that they are opposite enough to be interesting, enough alike to work together on the same artistic adventure.

At 41, Morris is best known for his own company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, which has continued to perform while he has been directing his first Broadway musical. His most famous work, “The Hard Nut,” is a raucous Pop art version of “The Nutcracker Suite.” But Simon now says that it was after seeing a series of Morris pieces featuring the music of Stephen Foster that he wanted Morris to take over the choreography of his show.

“We’re all specialists,” Morris says, explaining how they were still adapting and changing parts of the production with two months to go.

In truth, as a newcomer to Broadway, Simon needed specialists, and during the last few years he carefully courted each one, including Morris. He wanted Bob Crowley of “Carousel” to do the sets and costumes. Sting, a neighbor of Simon’s and his family, got the singer and designer together.

Simon also persuaded some of the most famous names in Latin music--Ruben Blades, Marc Anthony and Ednita Nazario--to play the lead roles in the show.

Despite all this talent, however, Simon describes his trip to Broadway as a somewhat harrowing experience. Like Jimmy Buffett and Barry Manilow and other singers from his era who are trying to move onto the big stage, the 56-year-old Simon faced a kind of artistic culture shock.

After years of being the central star featured on a recording or tour, Simon suddenly found himself one of a huge corps of artists and managers and money men who all had strong opinions about what works and what sells on Broadway.

“It was a job that I loathed, I hated,” Simon says of his efforts to raise money for his first full musical.

“I’m not sorry I did it, because I didn’t want somebody coming in there and making some business decision that would affect the artistic quality of the work.

“I didn’t like it at all, and I wasn’t used to it,” he says, referring to his dealings on the business side of Broadway. As a singer working with two recording companies during his career, “I was always treated . . . well . . . with respect. So I didn’t expect any of this kind of behavior that I’ve run into here.”

Simon does not elaborate, but his face begins to tighten as he recalls some disagreeable incident. He reaches over suddenly to borrow a cigarette from Morris.

As Simon smokes, delicately, like someone trying to find tobacco’s solace without breathing in its hazards too deeply, Morris continues the theme, in part to provide Simon relief from what is clearly an unpleasant subject.

“The tendency is when, frankly, non-artist types move into the actual arts management of the show--well, it makes the rough places plain.”

“Capeman,” in fact, will not be plain. It will not be the usual hoopla that draws the tourists from around the country for a staged “Lion King” or a restaging of “The King and I.” This is a complex story of the crime and redemption of Salvador Agron, who was a young member of the Vampires street gang when he killed the two boys almost 40 years ago.

Agron, known as the Capeman because he wore a black cape lined in red satin, snarled from the front pages of New York’s newspapers for weeks after he was caught. “I don’t care if I burn,” he told the world angrily. “My mother could watch me.” The young Agron quickly became the city’s youngest villain. He was convicted and sentenced to death at age 16.

After the state commuted his sentence to life in prison, the youthful punk grew into a sad, remorseful man during his two decades behind bars. A model prisoner, he learned to read and write, even publishing a small book of poetry. After he was released in 1979, Agron worked as a counselor for young people in the Bronx. He died of heart failure in 1986 at age 42.

It is not an easy story, especially for New Yorkers who have strong memories of the Capeman murders. And Simon and Walcott have refused to simplify their main character into an easy villain or an underdog hero. Agron, in life and onstage, embodies some of the worst and best in any human being.

“It’s not formulaic in the way that shows are encouraged to become,” Morris explains. His hands wiggle on the word “formulaic” to make it seem like an ugly, lowbrow life form. “I’m sure most of them don’t start out that way, but they kind of end up that way. ‘And now, here’s this number, whoa, and then here’s this part where we all cry. Or laugh. Or whatever.”

“Broadway is very influenced by Hollywood, and Hollywood is very much influenced by the cards,” Simon breaks in finally. “You come out and you get the cards from people and they tell you whether you should re-shoot the ending.

“Well, the same way here. First of all, I find it repulsive artistically, but I don’t even think it works, and I certainly wouldn’t be interested in doing that,” he says. Most of the money people were interested in learning how his show would be similar to other hits, not different. To most Broadway investors, the unconventional is scary.

“Business people like it when you can relate the show to something that already exists, and they don’t like it when you say, ‘This is going to be different,’ ” the singer-songwriter says. ‘That’s more chancy,’ they say. Well, it is more chancy.”

One comparison that Simon and his team often get is one to “West Side Story.” A Puerto Rican gang, singing and dancing onstage--isn’t that a takeoff on Sondheim and Bernstein’s famous musical?

“West Side Story,” for one thing, was really “Romeo and Juliet,” Morris and Simon answer, almost in unison. This is different--a multilayered show that you can enjoy for the pure entertainment but one you can also appreciate for its deeper sociological, emotional and artistic levels.

Moreover, “Capeman” won’t offend the Latin community, Simon hopes. With his success translating South African music for an American audience in “Graceland” (1986) and Brazilian music in “Rhythm of the Saints” (1990), Simon clearly wants to do much the same thing now with Puerto Rican music (see album review, above).

“You know, the Puerto Rican community in New York was traumatized by ‘West Side Story,’ ” Simon notes, as he and Morris prepare to return to rehearsals. “They were bruised by that, and that bruise is still tender after all these years.

“Now, everything we do, we run it past the cast--many of them are Latino--and ask, ‘Is this how it’s done? Is this right?’ ” Simon explains, whisking off his cap and rubbing his head gently.

But does that mean that the play will draw primarily Latino audiences?

“We don’t know,” he says. “I hope we’ll get a significant Latin audience to see the show because they are going to like it. But at this point we don’t know really who our audience is.”

Most investors want to know upfront who will probably be buying the tickets. The nostalgic suburbanite? The hip young entrepreneur? The rich kids?

But when one investor suddenly shaved back his contribution by $5 million recently, Klores says it took only a few hours before it was restored by newer investors who wanted to lure younger and more diverse audiences to Broadway.

Another investor suggested that Simon could ensure a big crowd if he made surprise guest appearances, say, once a week.

“That’s all I need, to stay on forever and go on once a week and perform,” he says, sighing.

“A video greeting, perhaps?” Morris suggests with a laugh.

Simon nods his head and smiles, not so much at Morris’ joke as at the sound coming from a stairwell outside the room. It’s a doo-wop number from the show, and the singers are enjoying themselves, experimenting with the harmony, laughing when it sounds right.

“It sounds good,” Simon declares, then launches into an explanation of how important the natural echo chambers in stairwells were to the history of doo-wop.

What is clear from talking to Simon and Morris and others connected to the show is that they are not trying merely to create a Broadway hit. As outsiders breaking into this closed world, they are aiming higher, hoping that “Capeman” will become a classic, another lure for other outsiders to gamble as they did to produce something new and different.

“Ultimately, if we achieve what we want artistically, if we entertain people and they get caught up in our story and they aren’t bored, then that’s it,” Simon concludes, “that is our best chance of having a hit.”

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* “The Capeman” begins previews Dec. 1 and opens Jan. 8 at the Marquis Theatre, Broadway and 46th Street, New York. (212) 307-4100.