If there were opening night jitters at “Hello, Dolly!” two weeks ago, the cast and crew at Riverside Theatre could take comfort that there was family in the audience.
Francine Pascal, sister of the late Michael Stewart, who wrote the musical’s book and many more besides, flew in for the performance at the invitation of Cynthia Bardes, an avid Riverside board supporter, after the two women met at a women’s networking luncheon in New York.
Bardes has recently been writing children’s books and Pascal is the creator of the hugely successful “Sweet Valley” books for teens. Written by a team of ghostwriters, the 152 volumes have sold 100 million copies, spinning off a TV series, merchandise and talk of a movie.
For Pascal, the visit to Vero marked a first. Though she has seen “Hello, Dolly!” countless times, it was the first time she’d seen a regional production.
Touring Riverside’s behind-the-scenes efforts that morning, she was not expecting such a state-of-the-art facility. “I think this is terrific,” she said, as she passed through a swarm of crew members backstage. With only hours to go before curtain, they were working intently on the still dismantled, partly unpainted pieces of one of the most elaborate sets Riverside has ever mounted.
Near a veritable aviary of feathered hats in the wings, three interns stopped to shake hands as they dabbed paint on a parade float, its mannequin still missing its top half.
In the vast scenery shop, Pascal seemed awed at the intricate detail on Victorian storefronts and the candy-colored cars of wooden train that would carry the actors through Yonkers.
“I can’t get over the fact that they create them here,” she said, expecting that sets would have been rented. “And then chop them up.”
For a small-town theater to have the sort of budget that allows for sets to be demolished once a show has closed might have hinted at the caliber of the show she would see that night. Still, it seemed to surprise her, according to Bardes and Oscar Sales, Riverside’s head of marketing.
“Riverside should be very proud of this production,” she told Sales.
Judging productions is a second vocation for Pascal. While she continues to generate new books for teens, she’s also one of 24 voters of the Tony Awards. She’s required to go to every single show, every single season.
“At the end, it feels like 100,” she says. “There are days I go to a matinee and evening performance and then the next day, I see another. In the beginning I thought I can’t do that, but well, I have no problem.”
Pascal believes her brother was in the forefront of change that brought musical theater to what it is today. “If ‘Oklahoma!’ was the first one with music and lyrics that advanced the story,” she says, “then I think my brother’s time perfected it. ‘Dolly’ is a perfect example. I think ‘Dolly’ is the best example of American musical theater. That book is seamless. I wouldn’t change a word. And I’m like a tiger at the gate.”
Michael Stewart, who died in 1986 at the age of 63, got his start working on comedy sketches for big-name comedians of the 1950s, at one point working on the Sid Caesar show. Once he started writing for Broadway, his output was prolific. Among his biggest hits, besides “Dolly”: “Bye-Bye Birdie,” “Carnival!,” “George M.!,” “Barnum,” and “42nd Street.”
Before Carol Channing was hired as the original Dolly on Broadway, Pascal and her brother went to see her perform in a cabaret. “She was the Carol we all know onstage. But I didn’t expect that when we went back stage. She was still Carol! But it was such a great personality.”
Since then, Pascal has made a point of seeing every Dolly cast in a Broadway production. She has remained close friends with Jerry Herman, Stewart’s longtime collaborator, who now lives in Miami. “Collaborations are not always perfect, but they got along perfectly,” says Pascal. “They were a perfect pair.”
When, after her brother’s death, she set about revising the play “Mack & Mabel” for Connecticut’s Goodspeed Theatre, Jerry Herman “just took me along. He was extremely kind with me,” she recalls.
Pascal also revised Stewart’s book for “Carnival!” for a production at the Kennedy Center in 2007, which drew glowing reviews.
And her husband John Pascal, a newspaper columnist who died in 1981, also gets a credit line for collaborating with Pascal and Stewart on “George M!”
Pascal and her daughters have for years spent summers in the south of France, but her main home is still midtown Manhattan, in an apartment in an old Stanford White-designed building, close to the theater district.
“We lived on the fifth floor and my brother lived on the fourth floor. We were all very close,” she says. “He was a great big brother.”
Though he always lived alone, Stewart had a partner for the last 12 years of his life: Mark Bramble, who was also his frequent collaborator, including on “42nd Street” and “Barnum.”
Stewart had come out as gay much earlier in life, and his parents, recalls Pascal, were always accepting, ahead of their time in that regard. “Life was not easy for him, being gay at that time was absolutely not easy, and they were just so understanding and so supportive,” she recalls.
Her mother, who lived to be 100, and her father, who died at 87, lived to see every show he wrote, she says. “They were there for every opening night. They were beautiful people, straight out of central casting. I adored them.”
Stewart knew early he wanted to work in theater and after graduating from Queens College, he entered the Yale School of Drama. Pascal, who is much younger, was only a child at the time. But she remembers that when he left New Haven, he moved straight back to New York. “He was writing cabaret acts and he’d bring his laundry home,” she says.
That her parents, a businessman and a housewife, would produce two writers might have been hard to predict, never mind that Pascal would marry a third, John, whom she met while she was studying journalism at New York University.
Nearly all their married lives, they worked from home, he typing his newspaper column and phoning it to the Tribune, the Times, and finally Newsday.
When they were first married in 1965, they wrote soap opera scripts together.
“We had to turn in a script a week, and we were given one paragraph,” she says. “I stole that idea for ‘Sweet Valley.’ ”
Because the shows were serialized, they were supposed to watch the last week’s shows. “We never did,” she says with a laugh. “We’d be at our typewriters and we’d hear the head writer’s footsteps coming down the hall and start typing furiously so we could hand him the script.”
And she wrote for movie magazines – more fiction, she says. “You would just sit there and make up stuff. Like Connie Francis’ wedding. I never met Connie Francis. I wrote about this touching scene between her and her father – thank God the father was still alive. I made it all up.”
On the opening night of “Hello, Dolly!” in 1964, they went as a group to Sardi’s, the famous after-theater hangout. The show was “marvelous,” Pascal says. But they were anxious to see the reviews. With her husband working for the Tribune at the time, he called in at 11 p.m. from the phone booth in the middle of Sardi’s and had someone in the newsroom read him the review.
“It was so dangerous,” Pascal says, laughing. “He would repeat it to me, and I would repeat it to the room. If it had been bad, it would have been horrible.”
Needless to say, the review was a rave.
The show, which held the record for Tony awards – 10 – for 35 years, has had three Broadway revivals and is set for another next year, with Bette Midler in the lead role.
“I couldn’t be happier,” says Pascal. “It’s a brilliant choice. Fabulous.”
