Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb Read Online Free PDF

profound dialogue inserted in the absolutely wrong place, and I have a fondness for painstakingly elaborate plot twists that lead nowhere. I wanted to write a play that would capture as many shades of this kind of, admittedly,
questionable
humor as possible, and thought the perfect venue for nonsense of this ilk would be a murder mystery. For the most part, the intentionally cheesy nature of the plot, characters, and dialogue of
Moose Murders
came across as intentionally funny on the page. I don’t remember anyone ever reading the script and telling me “this is a
good
play,” but just about everybody who read it said “this is a
funny
play.” One of the main reasons John and I got along so well is because we both thought this kind of “bad” and “funny” would transfer easily onto the stage. In hindsight, I think our biggest downfall (if I had to pick
one
) was our tendency to equate “funny” with “good” in just about all aspects of our working relationship—especially in the beginning when there were plenty of easy laughs to egg us on.
    When I first met John, he had recently purchased author John Hershey’s old suite at the Dakota, the gargoyle-festooned building of countless legends, located on the corner of West 72nd Street and Central Park West. It was outside this building in December 1980 that Mark David Chapman had gunned down John Lennon. Lennon’s wife, Yoko, and son, Sean, still lived here when John moved in, as did Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall, among others. But what excited me more than anything else the first time I boarded the mahogany-paneled elevator that would take me to the headquarters of Force Ten, was that I was actually inside the “Bramford,” the home of the fictional couple Rosemary and Guy Wood-house from
Rosemary’s Baby
, one of my favorite films.
    This first summit meeting at the Dakota happened in late January of 1982, and had been called specifically to address a growing dissatisfaction with the lack of aggressiveness we all perceived to be coming from the Johnson-Liff Associates casting office. For several weeks, now, Geoff, Vinnie, and Andy had been chatting about the working habits of certain actors (so-and-so is always late to rehearsals; so-and-so is a notorious drunk, etc.), and endlessly discussing the relative merits of “ensemble” actors as compared to “percentage” and “name-above-the-title” actors—and yet not one actor of any category had signed on to the production of
Moose Murders
.
    All the “forces-that-be” were in attendance for this meeting: John, Lillie, and vice president of Force Ten, associate producer of
Moose Murders
, and graduate of (you guessed it) Carnegie Mellon, Ricka Kanter Fisher.
    Most people found Ricka Kanter Fisher to be as sharply intimidating as her three-pronged name. She had a strong jaw, a razor-edged tongue, and an eaglelike gaze that could penetrate steel. Everything about her was intense, including her sense of humor and her sense of loyalty. I liked her a lot.
    “I’m sick and tired of the way they just humor us,” said Ricka, referring to Johnson, Liff, and Zerman.
    “When I
tell
them to do something, they’ll go ahead and do it,” said John. “But that’s not enough.”
    “We need them to take some initiative,” insisted Lillie, whom I was meeting for the first time this afternoon.
    Unlike her husband, Lillie could be very outspoken—but this was something I wouldn’t really see for myself until we were much further along into the production. For now, all I saw was an uncommon blend of poise and vitality that came very close to matching my mental image of what a real Houstonian should look like. She had the kind of physical beauty that sends men off to their garrets to write pages and pages of gushy poetry. It was as if she’d stepped out of a Victorian cameo broach, thrown on a pair of designer jeans, and gone outside just long enough to let the sun burn off all that ivory veneer. And yet she