November 18, 1964—
Alan Alda and
Robert Ludlum (in the image accompanying this post) reached the top of their professions within a year of each other in the 1970s, but a decade before the
M*A*S*H star and the master of the paranoid thriller had collaborated on a far different project: the two-character comedy
The Owl and the Pussycat, which premiered at Broadway’s ANTA Theatre on this date.
The three-act comedy originated from a mostly New Jersey braintrust before its 427-performance run on the Great White Way, at a theater that, for almost two decades, furnished various kinds of entertainment—celebrity-studded productions, burlesque, a repertory company—to audiences in Bergen County: the Playhouse on the Mall, one of the nation’s first professional theaters owned by, and located in, a shopping mall.
I was only dimly aware of the history of the playhouse at the former Bergen Mall in Paramus—and not at all of this particular episode—until I came across
a retrospective by Glenn Garvie in (201) Magazine.
Several reasons make this play and venue worth recalling as cultural history:
* to show the surprising livelihoods pursued by celebrities (in this case, Ludlum) before they make it big;
* to spotlight the moment when a celebrity (in this case, Alda) receives a first significant notice;
* to highlight the sometimes-jaw-dropping transitions a property can undergo before landing in cinemas; and
* to trace not just why some institutions last, but why others don’t.
If you’re like myself, if you’ve heard of
The Owl and the Pussycat at all, it’s because of the 1970 movie starring George Segal and Barbra Streisand.
That adaptation was dramatically changed from the play that theatergoers saw in New Jersey and New York, not just because of the usual challenges in “opening up” the action but because Streisand’s hooker character had been played originally by the talented African-American actress Diana Sands. (You might recall the latter—who died all too young—from the film
A Raisin in the Sun.)
An interracial romantic comedy—and not just an interracial romantic comedy, but one featuring a prissy male writer and a bawdy female prostitute—was close to TNT in the 1960s. It was one of many risks, though, undertaken by Ludlum.
Arts management—in effect, Ludlum’s business as producer at the mall—represents far more of a crapshoot than other industries such as retailing. In an enterprise such as a chain retailer, once the brand is launched, even if a visionary founder leaves, relatively competent managers can keep matters on an even keel, at least for awhile.
The arts are different. Promoting plays is not like selling cornflakes, and the challenges of handling high-talent but high-maintenance thespians are not like those of stretching out all one’s low-paid sales clerks over an entire schedule. Although a product might be known (or will be in short order), even a well-known play or leading man might not be enough to save a show torn asunder by critics.
From what I’ve heard, Ludlum had personality to spare—a quality that
did transfer over from one profession to another. Nearly 30 years ago, as a stringer for a local paper, my editor told me about her encounters with Ludlum, who, like Alda, had been a longtime resident of Leonia, not far from the theater:
“Very, very nice guy,” she recalled. “When his first novel came out, he autographed my copy. ‘Not bad,’ I thought after reading it. When his second book came out, he gave me a copy, too. ‘Pretty good, too, but it sounds a bit like his first,’ I thought. When the third appeared, same thing. That’s when I realized he was writing the same book all over again.”
All of this was part of the creation of the Ludlum Brand—something that other bestselling genre writers, such as Mary Higgins Clark and John Grisham, to name a few, have learned how to do since then.
In later years, Ludlum would equate “suspense and good theater.” He certainly had experience with the latter. In the 1950s, he worked primarily as a stage and TV actor, including appearances in some 200 television dramas, before becoming a producer at the North Jersey Playhouse.
The venue for that—the Grant Lee Theater in Fort Lee—didn’t satisfy Ludlum. He approached Allied Stores, the department store company that owned and developed the new Bergen Mall in that burgeoning retail capital of the U.S., Paramus, about working a playhouse into their plans.
Allied was amenable. The Bergen Mall was not yet enclosed, but, like many of the other large centers being constructed at the time, it wanted to create an image of, if you will, a suburban downtown. (Think of plenty of retailers, plus more than enough parking, and you’ll get the idea.) They would eventually add an ice-skating rink and a bowling alley, too, to their lineup, so a theater fit right in.
Ludlum’s proposal was audacious: a theater for every new mall built by Allied. I’m not sure how close they came to fulfilling this ideal, but even getting it started in Bergen County was an undertaking. The space created by architect
Drew Eberson reflected more of his vast experience in designing cinemas than stages per se, but in the end, he had managed to come up with the first legitimate theater built on the East Coast in more than a generation.
None of Ludlum’s novels could have compared with his decade at the Playhouse on the Mall in terms of bizarre events and individuals, unexpected reverses, paranoia, disasters and hairbreadth escapes:
* A leading man died midway through one production's run, requiring an emergency stand-in, Ralph Meeker, for the last six shows;
* Before the Playhouse was built, a middle-aged, unemployed stand-up comedian from Englewood hung out in the lobby of the exhibition hall where the plays were first staged, his eyes bulging as he offered fabulous deals on aluminum siding. Eventually tiring of his sales pitch, the comic busted out on his own—though Rodney Dangerfield never returned to the Playhouse as cast member or standup comic;
* Shelley Winters chose to appear in the Playhouse’s production of Two for the Seesaw, even though she was already committed to the film The Young Savages. The solution: Winters rehearsed with Sydney Pollack for Seesaw on the stage adjacent to Savages, flew back east, traveled with motorcycle escort from Newark Airport to Paramus, and acted with her leading man for the first time on opening night. The result: in the actress’ words, “perhaps my best performance on any stage.”
* On the second night of his appearance in a pre-Broadway tryout of a new play, comedian Jackie Mason—not long after being banished from the Ed Sullivan Show—panicked in the last two minutes and walked off the stage.
* Another comedian, Henny Youngman, disrupted the timing of one show with so much ad-libbing that an Actors’ Equity hearing was called to compel him to stop the practice.
* Arlene Francis was a popular attraction at the playhouse, but also made special demands: lots of makeup for her sensitive skin, a special gel on lights so she would appear to best advantage, and even, on one occasion, approval of a coffee table for the set.
In addition to bringing in celebrities, Ludlum also liked to salt his productions with youngsters who later went on to greater fame. In early 1968, a 23-year-old brunette first made the chorus of
The King and I, then stayed longer, into the winter, as a bit player in
This Was Burlesque. Four years later, Adrienne Barbeau was playing the divorced daughter to the title character
Maude.
Another future CBS star also got a career boost at the Playhouse. Alda ended up headlining at the playhouse six times, though
Owl (written by Bill Manhoff, himself a Newark native) attracted the most positive notices.
By the time I got to know the Playhouse on the Mall, for a matinee performance of
Cabaret in my senior year of high school, it was eight years after Ludlum departed, determined to try for a career in writing novels.
Several successors had either been edged out or thrown up their arms at the prospect of reviving the venue, and the idea may well have crossed the mind of the producer at the time of my visit:
Mike Iannucci, husband of
Ann Corio, whose
This Was Burlesque was putting fannies in the venue by putting on performers who shook theirs onstage.
Elsewhere in the mall was a Carmelite chapel. By 1979, Iannucci might have believed that, all things considered, some sort of supplication to the Almighty might be in order, since he was being forced out by Allied Stores for failing to keep up with the rent.
A couple of years later, the Playhouse was being used again, this time by the Center Stage Company, a group that had started out in my hometown, Englewood, and had staged revivals of works like Moss Hart’s
Light Up the Sky and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s
The Incomparable Max.
I was pulling for the group to succeed, since I liked their choice of plays and a classmate of my oldest brother’s was in the troupe. But their effort, too, collapsed.
In 1986, Allied Stores finally announced that the theater would close for good, with the space converted to retail use.
But as the song goes, everything old is new again. The Bergen Mall has now been redeveloped as Bergen Town Center, and the shopping center industry as a whole, in looking for non-retail tenants to supplement their store lineup, is returning to something like the original conception that many developers had for the industry.
You have to wonder, given that, if, risk or no risk, theaters might not play a part, in more large retail environments, as tenants. After all, theater fans don’t forget the magic of make-believe, and I’m sure that there are many people like myself who can still summon memories of a play or performer at the Playhouse on the Mall.
