Quote of the Day (Rene Balcer, on “Law And Order’s” Jerry Orbach)

"I always think about the show as before Jerry and after Jerry. You saw the weariness of 25 years of crime-fighting in New York written on his face."—Law and Order executive producer Rene Balcer, on star Jerry Orbach’s performance as Det. Lennie Briscoe, quoted in Amy Chozick and Ellen Gamerman, “'Law & Order' School of Drama,” The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2010

NBC’s announcement that it was canceling Law & Order has sparked all kinds of retrospectives on the Dick Wolf cops-and-lawyers show, analysis of What It All Meant (for a typical example of the latter, see Bruce Headlam’s “This Crime Spree Made New York Feel Safe,” in The New York Times)—and, given the cast members that shuffled on and off over the 20-year-life span of the program, fan and critical summations of their favorites.

The last is an easy call for me. I watched the show with close to religious intensity for the dozen years when Jerry Orbach played Lennie Briscoe. 

After he died of prostate cancer in 2004, the modus operandi of the show remained the same—plots “ripped from the headlines,” lightly fictionalized to add some complications to the case—but its animating spirit had fled.

Other actors, capable in their way (e.g., Dennis Farina) might assume the role of the older detective, but what Orbach brought to the part--that crucial seen-it-all commitment to getting a dirty job done day after day—could never be replaced. 

Perhaps viewers sensed that, too— viewership was down by slightly more than half from a decade ago.

Generations of big-screen viewers have grown accustomed to the idea of “The New York Actor”—an individual who, sometimes by virtue of ethnicity, but always through sheer force of personality, imparts the force and electricity of the streets. Think Cagney, Garfield, DeNiro.

It shouldn’t have been surprising, on a show which, according to Chozick and Gamerman, employed nearly 21,000 individual actors over the years, that television produced, in Orbach, its own answer to movies’ New York Actor.

Diminished force might have been a necessity on a smaller screen. For two decades, as a young-to-middle-aged actor, Orbach had taken on landmark stage roles in The Fantasticks, Promises, Promises, Chicago, and 42nd Street. In the ‘80s, he had good, but only subsidiary, roles in high-profile movies (Prince of the City, Dirty Dancing). 

He was constantly working, but he was made for more, and it had to be slightly disappointing to him.

Orbach had read for the roles of Max Greevey and Phil Cerreta before finally being cast as Briscoe. The role fit from the beginning. (You wonder how much the show’s writers even patterned the part on Orbach: like his character, he was the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother.) 

You couldn’t miss the asperity in Briscoe’s quips over a newly discovered corpse, the disbelieving challenge to a rich suspect’s alibi, or the anger directed at slick defense attorneys or other cops who violated his code of partner ethics.

Wolf kept the focus across the years on the case rather than the characters’ personal lives, but you always sensed more of a huge backstory behind Briscoe: the stress of the job, the years of drinking, the wrecked marriage, the fractured, guilt-ridden relations with his children. 

If his lanky frame looked slightly hunched over at times, no wonder—he seemed to be carrying not only the weight of his history, but of an entire city that could come apart at any moment without his and his partners' efforts to check criminal chaos.

In the late 1990s, Orbach provided me with one of those close encounters with celebrities that New York-area residents have come to expect but that, more often than not, still delight them. 

During intermission at a Saturday matinee for a Roundabout Theatre production, I blinked at the sight of the Law & Order actor a few feet from the bar, more erect in real life than on the small screen, engaged in conversation with someone.

My reticence—and strong belief that people deep in conversation should not, as much as possible, be disturbed—kept me from saying anything—a respite from importuning fans that celebrities must cherish.

If I could have managed to say anything relatively intelligible, it would have been that, with the skill he brought to his craft every week, he not only embodied all of us, but exemplified the best of us.

This Day in Theater History (“Chicago,” Cynical Musical Before Its Time, Opens)

June 1, 1975—Chicago, a musical from composer John Kander and lyricist partner Fred Ebb, opened at the 46th Street Theater to respectful reviews on its way to a 936-performance run. But it took two more decades for the times to catch up to this mordant take on two Roaring Twenties murderesses who become media superstars.

Like another Kander-Ebb musical associated with director-choreographer Bob Fosse, Cabaret, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Broadway audiences were psychologically prepared to embrace such cynicism.

Nor, evidently, were voters at the Tonys. Though the production featured scads of talent—stars Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, and Jerry Orbach along with Kander, Ebb and Fosse—it did not win a single Tony despite 10 nominations. Its major competition, A Chorus Line, grabbed not only attention for the innovative way in which it was brought to term (the workshop method), but grabbed hearts in its tale of what a motley group of musical gypsies and misfits would do for love of the theater.

That vision—at heart, a deeply sentimental one—was nothing like the cheerfully dark spirit that animated Chicago. And so, the show, though not the kind of cult failure that was making Stephen Sondheim a legend during this decade, was a financial disappointment for backers, running for only a bit more than two years.

Two decades later, Ann Reinking, successor to Verdon as Fosse’s lover-muse, and Bebe Neuwirth reprised the roles of Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly in New York’s “Encores!” musical series. The show’s been running without interruption (except for a few changes in venue) on Broadway ever since—more than seven times its original run.

To some extent, this new-found longevity has been fueled by curiosity: i.e., audiences turning out to see how different actors, like previously known for their vocal or terpsichorean skills, turn out in parts created for theatrical legends. (Melanie Griffith is especially noteworthy among the brave and/or foolhardy.)

But stunt casting only goes so far to explain this phenomenon. To a larger extent, America’s mood over the last 15 years has been far closer to that of the Roaring Twenties than it had been in the 1970s.

That change in the zeitgeist is understandable. Journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins had used the case of two Chicago women indicted for crimes of passion a month apart to send up the same seedy Windy City milieu of ethically challenged journalists and crooked officials in the justice system that Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht would in The Front Page.

But by the time the show was adapted for film in the 1942 Ginger Rogers vehicle Roxie Hart, the world had moved far beyond the obsession with petty crimes of the Prohibition Era. There were relentless dictatorships to be overthrown by young men drafted out of virtually every American community. Roxie was no longer ready to kill a two-timing lover; instead, she was fretting that a German or Japanese bullet would find him before he had a chance to make it home to her.

Even the mid-1970s were not quite right for a musical with Chicago’s pitch-black heart. The spirit of liberal idealism had not yet abated. Watergate had discredited an administration bent on undoing liberal reforms. In fact, the mid-term elections the previous fall had left Democrats even more dominant on Capitol Hill than before. Woodward and Bernstein had exposed Presidential misdeeds, and the combined grinding of government and the legal profession proved, as the reigning cliché of the time had it, that “the system worked.”

The 1990s were a whole different world. Americans no longer looked to a single trusted news source like Walter Cronkite at 7 o’clock. Now, with cable TV, there was a 24-hour news cycle to fill.

And, instead of a simple story like Roxie’s, featuring sex, murder, and fast-talking attorneys, Americans sat transfixed by the O.J. Simpson saga, a case featuring would-be stars for the prosecution, defense and the judge’s bench, puzzling over sex, murder, and race.

The breathtaking cynicism on display in—and bred by—the Simpson case created an especially fertile environment for Broadway audiences. If they hadn’t before, they surely understood now what Roxie’s legal/media mouthpiece, Billy Flynn, meant by the “Ol’ Razzle-Dazzle”—they’d seen Johnny Cochran apply it, generously and unashamedly.

Those same audiences now sensed, at last, what Fosse had been getting at, too, a generation earlier. His heart attack during the writing of the show’s book with Ebb only quickened his grasping for all kinds of experiences, no matter how ill-advised or self-destructive.

Virtually everyone in the musical, except for Roxie’s hapless schmo of a husband (who gets to sing “Mr. Cellophane” for his pains), is out for everything they can get: money, fame, sex—above all, a piece of the action. Everything moves fast because for them, like the madman musical choreographer-director who brought them to life, that’s the only way they can think of to ensure time isn’t outrunning them.