How the best show in town was born

In equally depressing 2009, Fields — the only woman to be named in America’s Songwriters’ Hall of Fame — was quoted, almost accurately, by President Obama in his inauguration speech. “Starting today,” he told his nation and the world, “we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again.” The words alluded to one of the songs Fields wrote with her long-time Hollywood collaborator, Jerome Kern, this one for the movie Swing Time. Others hits included I Can’t You Give You Anything But Love, Baby, and The Way You Look Tonight which won the duo an Academy Award for best song in 1936. Then there was A Fine Romance, which Field’s wrote for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Fields was quoted, almost accurately, by President Obama

So you can see why, when in the mid 1960s Cy Coleman found himself at the same party as Fields, he was a little hesitant to ask her if she would consider a collaboration. Coleman was a child prodigy at the piano, and by the time he met Fields he already had a Broadway show under his belt with Little Me. But for him, Fields was the best.

“He was absolutely dazzled by Dorothy’s talent,” remembers Coleman’s widow Shelby, who was in London recently for the opening night of Sweet Charity. “He loved her songs. He couldn’t really believe he was meeting her at that party, he was so excited. He walked up to her and asked if she’d like to write a song with him. He said he didn’t know where he found the chutzpah.”

Fields was in her late fifties. Coleman was in his mid thirties. But her response to Coleman was anything but dismissive. “Thank goodness somebody asked,” she said. Fields’s previous success, Redhead, had won five Tony Awards on Broadway. But that was back in 1959.

Sweet Charity started life as the Fellini film, The Nights of Cabiria. The musical theatre director, Bob Fosse, thought the film would make a good show and enlisted Neil Simon who, with Cy Coleman, had worked on Little Me. Simon turned the heroine from a prostitute called Cabiria into a dance-hall hostess called Charity. But Charity still had Cabiria’s romantic heart. “You run your heart like a hotel,” says one of her fellow hostesses. “You’ve got guys checking in and out all the time.”

When Fosse recruited Simon and Coleman one of the greatest ever Jewish writing teams was coming together. And when Coleman got his lyricist, the team was complete. But although Fields was brilliant at using everyday language for her lyrics — think of A Fine Romance — at nearly 60 she would be writing for characters less than half her age. She hit the streets of New York to find out what people said and how they said it. She wrote words and phrases down in her notebook. The result was the show’s hippest song, Rhythm of Life.

“There are a lot of very cool lyrics in that show,” says Shelby Coleman. “Cy told me Dorothy liked to work very early in the morning because she drank. She would pretty much be done by 10 or 11. And Cy had a jazz trio he would work with in the evening. He wouldn’t get home till 4am and then Dorothy would call and say: ‘I Just wrote the best lyric! You gotta hear it!’ That was Dorothy.”

Fields was not the only one who went to great lengths for research. So did the actress Gwen Verdon (Fosse’s wife), who created the role of Charity. “I heard that she worked for a time as a dance-hall hostess in some dark dive off Broadway,” says Matthew White. So some lucky, lonely punters paid a pittance to dance unknowingly with a Broadway star.

Sweet Charity opened at the Palace Theatre on January 29, 1966 and ran for 600 performances. In Bob Fosse it had Broadway’s greatest choreographer and director, with the possible exception of Jerome Robbins. With Neil Simon — aka the King of Broadway — writing the script, the story, though thin in plot is thick with wit. Lovers of the movie version might notice that Shirley MacLaine’s Charity gets lines that the stage Charity does not get to say. For instance, when the awestruck hostess sits in the posh, avant-garde Pompeii nightclub. In the film she looks at all the celebrities and says, “I’m the only person I never heard of.” You would think a great line like that would be a certainty for the stage show. But in Sweet Charity the songs are so clever, you do not miss it.

Take Hey, Big Spender. Before the show opened Coleman sent a couple of songs from it to Peggy Lee — Where Am I Going and If They Could See Me Now. But Lee wanted something else. So Coleman sent Big Spender and Lee’s sexy version took it to number one in the charts. But actually it is not a song about sexiness. Fosse’s stage interpretation reveals it to be about boredom. It is sung by the hostesses who move and sing like robots whose batteries are running down.

The trio of Simon, Fields and Coleman would work together again on another show, Seasaw, with Simon being parachuted in by the producers to save the storyline. They were after that same magical combination of book, lyrics and musical that White found such a delight to work with for the latest production of Sweet Charity. “Simon’s writing is just excellent,” says White. “And Coleman’s music is just sensational. And the lyrics — they’re superb.”

Until March 7 2010. Tel: 020 7907 7060