He Just Keeps Rolling Along

Except for the day he was struck with polio as a 3-year-old, Nov. 27, 1989, marked the worst 24 hours of Garth Drabinsky’s lifetime.

On that afternoon, Drabinsky’s partners in Cineplex Odeon Corp., which he had built into the second-largest film exhibition company on the continent, orchestrated his firing. He had changed the way Americans went to the movies, but his extravagant spending and determination to have everything his way alienated most of his fellow directors, most notably those from MCA, the Hollywood entertainment giant.

Used to dispatching orders with imperious aplomb, Drabinsky had the terms of his departure dictated to him like a surrendering general. All that was left to him and longtime business associate Myron Gottlieb were the Pantages Theater in downtown Toronto, just restored to the gilt-edged grandeur of its 1920s heyday, and its new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera.”

When the curtain fell on that evening’s performance, Drabinsky summoned the “Phantom” troupe backstage and explained what had happened.

Long afterward, Drabinsky would write with characteristic vitriol of “those dark days of corporate double-dealing,” but what came through that night was his pain, not his anger. They were a family, he told the group--though he made clear that he was the father--and they would persevere. He and Gottlieb already had formed a new company, Live Entertainment Inc., or Livent, to keep the play in production.

Seven years later, Drabinsky has indeed persevered--and more.

Livent’s production of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein classic “Show Boat,” as reinterpreted by director Harold Prince, arrives at the Ahmanson Theater next Sunday, laden with five Tony Awards and some of the most ecstatic critical notices in recent memory. Less than a month later, on Dec. 8, Livent’s original musical adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” premieres here in Toronto in what is shaping up as one of the most anticipated offerings of both the U.S.’ and Canada’s theater seasons.

But “Show Boat,” which also is playing on Broadway and in Chicago, and “Ragtime” are just part of the Livent empire. The publicly traded company today accounts for about one out of every five dollars spent on commercial theater box office in North America. Moreover, from a suite of Toronto offices ornamented with pieces from his acclaimed collection of contemporary Canadian art, Drabinsky now seeks no less than to reinvent the American musical theater.

Drabinsky’s rapid comeback from fired film executive to world-class theatrical impresario might strike some as improbable. It is in fact typical of a life story worthy of melodrama, beginning with a childhood spent in a long, painful but ultimately successful battle to stave off paralysis.

In his 20s, Drabinsky discarded a promising law career to make movies, producing what at the time was the most expensive film in Canadian history--a horror movie called “The Changeling” with George C. Scott, in 1978. Shifting to film exhibition at Cineplex Odeon, he pioneered the multiplex and upgraded theaters all over North America, by some accounts saving the industry from the threat posed by the home videocassette recorder. Now at Livent, he says with offhand bravado, he has set a course to “build a fiscally strong, healthy company and produce great work that will hopefully last a generation.”

“He never takes no for an answer and he’s never met a hurdle he can’t climb,” summarizes Canadian film producer Robert Lantos, who has been Drabinsky’s sometime associate and sometime competitor.

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There is little doubt about the source of this determination; Drabinsky, 47, carries the reminder of his childhood polio in his scarred and weakened left leg. He recalls that when he walked on stage to receive his first Tony Award, for “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1993, all he could think about was whether the television cameras captured his limp. But the virus also taught him, in the words of his autobiography, “Never give up. Never yield. Always dig deeper.”

The aggressive personality born of those childhood struggles runs counter to some of Canada’s most beloved national stereotypes; Drabinsky is brash, uncompromising, impolite, entrepreneurial and intensely competitive--the un-Canadian. In one memorable incident while he was still at Cineplex Odeon, Drabinsky secretly bought the front half of a building that housed a competitor’s multiplex. He sent in a stealth team of carpenters to wall off the theaters from the door to the street and then commenced negotiations to buy the rest of the building. He got it.

Toronto’s clubby arts and business communities often regard such sharp competitive instincts as unwholesome anyplace but on the hockey rink. So, for a long time Drabinsky was something of an outsider to these worlds. Of late that has changed somewhat; success apparently breeds welcome. He’s even enough of a celebrity to appear in radio commercials for a local newspaper.

The critics, however, have not disappeared. The flip side of the Drabinsky determination, they say, is a certain disregard for the feelings and opinions of everyone else.

“There are a lot of horror stories about Garth and I’d expect 95% of them are true. He’s just not a nice man,” said Marlene Smith, a fellow Toronto producer.

But most of Drabinsky’s detractors will not speak for quotation. Even those rooting against him admit that for the time being at least he seems to be on a roll.

Drabinsky does not include his name in the advertising for his shows and you have to search through the program to find it mentioned, but his opinion and presence are evident in everything that happens at Livent, from casting decisions to office renovation to selecting a production’s poster art. Gottlieb remains a fixture on the business side but dodges the spotlight.

Drabinsky’s vision calls for Livent to create original productions and revivals and play them on a circuit of its own theaters across Canada and the United States, backed by its own advertising and marketing team. It also can produce the soundtrack recordings, make all the costumes and merchandise every T-shirt, coffee mug and key chain carrying the logo of one of its shows.

Moreover, by developing most of its productions in Canada, where the American dollar stretches about 30% further, Livent incurs significantly lower costs than it would in the United States.

The company owns or operates two theaters in Toronto, with a third slated for construction, and one in Vancouver. Livent also is renovating historic theaters in New York and Chicago. In addition to the three companies of “Show Boat,” Drabinsky’s current productions include the Toronto staging of “Phantom,” now in its seventh year; Canadian rights to “Sunset Boulevard,” which has moved to Vancouver after a disappointing run in Toronto; and tours of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music of the Night.”

Also on the Livent agenda are Harold Prince’s new version of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” opening on Broadway this spring; a 1998 Australian production of “Show Boat”; an upcoming revival of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Pal Joey,” with a revised book by Terrence McNally; a celebration of the life and work of the late Broadway director-choreographer Bob Fosse; and musical adaptations of the movie “Sweet Smell of Success,” as well as “Ragtime.”

Toronto theater critic Kate Taylor describes “Ragtime” as “sort of an acid test” for Drabinsky, since it is the first fully original Livent musical. The production, with a book by McNally and music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, is scheduled to open Dec. 8 in Toronto. Livent already has released a recording of songs from the musical in Canada and plans the show’s New York debut next year as the first production in its renovated theater near Times Square.

In another Drabinsky innovation, “Ragtime” was developed over nearly two years with extensive workshop performances, in some instances before demographically profiled test audiences.

“It used to be that you’d take your show on the road for two weeks of previews in Boston and work on it there before New York, but the kind of work we’ve done on this show couldn’t have been done in two weeks in Boston,” playwright McNally said in an interview. “This allowed us to work with a lot of calm. . . . I think it’s the way more and more musicals are going to be developed. At least, it’s the way they should be.”

Frank Galati, the director of “Ragtime,” called Drabinsky “both sophisticated as a businessman and very sensitive as a theater artist. . . . A producer is an artist as well. He’s the one who creates the opportunities for the people he brings together to work and Garth realized this team . . . would need time to develop the material.”

Prince, who has worked with Drabinsky over seven years on five shows, agrees.

“He’s a creative producer; he’s entirely supportive,” Prince said. “He does not talk about what will the audience like or what are the demographics of this or that potential project. Now, I’m sure when I’m not around, there is talk of what they like and what they don’t like, but . . . scratch beneath the surface and the man is a showman. He’s a theater lover.”

Drabinsky’s devotion to detail is such that he has been known to inspect the gloss on the brass fixtures of his Toronto theater and instruct ushers in the proper way to seat customers.

“The good side of Garth is that you know Garth’s in charge. The bad side is he’s in charge of everything,” said Toronto television and radio arts commentator Richard Ouzounian, who spent a year as Prince’s assistant on “Phantom.” “He’ll tell you if he thinks you’re gaining weight. He’ll tell you if he doesn’t like what you’re wearing.”

Drabinsky’s intensity also can assert itself in screaming tirades at employees and anyone else within earshot. Smith said she once walked into his office and found him yelling into the telephone about a broken appointment. It turned out he was telling his mother he couldn’t come over for dinner that night.

He also retains a competitive zeal that recognizes few boundaries. When rival Toronto producer David Mirvish was building a new theater in 1992 to house the first Canadian production of “Miss Saigon,” Livent, which also had wanted the show, insisted the city enforce municipal parking regulations to the letter. As a result, Mirvish was forced to build a $4.5-million parking garage, delaying the “Miss Saigon” premiere by six months.

This year, after Livent lost Canadian rights to the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Rent” to Mirvish, Drabinsky effectively blocked his competitor from playing the show in the only large, unoccupied theater in downtown Toronto by suing and claiming prior rights to the stage. The theater, which is owned by the provincial government, counter-sued, blaming Livent for millions of dollars in lost revenue. Both suits are still pending.

Ouzounian, an admirer, finds Drabinsky’s contradictions fascinating, if sometimes impenetrable.

“He does have a distinctly warm side that he chooses not to present to the public; he chooses the abrasive side,” Ouzounian said. “Even when Garth is being the bad boy, there’s a good boy screaming to get out.”

Drabinsky himself seems disinclined to much public introspection. “Closer to the Sun,” the 520-page autobiography published when he was 45, speaks frankly of the emotional toll of his stricken youth and admits that he often chose business over his family, leaving his wife, Pearl, to raise their two children, Alicia, 21, and Marc, 18, alone. But it is otherwise largely a meticulous accounting of his business life.

Asked what he learned from the experience of writing the book, Drabinsky replied, “Nobody gave me a damn thing in my life. I had to work hard for everything. It also confirmed to me that a lot of the decisions I made were the right decisions.”

But he also conceded to a certain longing for public acceptance that might surprise those exposed to his more bombastic side.

“I guess you can never feel embraced enough, because that ultimately is the most satisfying aspect of being in the arts: public acceptance of what you do. Not just by your peers, but by the public at large,” he said.

Voluble but guarded with the media, there is a studied quality to some of his interview answers. He is still the lawyer presenting his argument--and never conceding a point.

His famous competitive brawls are represented as battles against monopolistic competitors, broken promises and attempted illegalities. “I am not a vindictive person,” he said in response to a sometime characterization. “I never have been. But I’m not going to sit by idly and let people do things that are clearly, absolutely illegal. I just won’t do it.”

Drabinsky is similarly disdainful of the film industry, which he regards largely as an economic and ethical abyss from which he is happily exiled.

“There’s nothing to miss,” he said. “The ‘excitement’ of sitting on a set yelling to a director to get the damn shot finished off already, we’ve got to move on to the next scene? And then sitting in the dailies the next day and seeing the shots that were missed and how many re-shoots you must do? Then you fight over the post-production process. . . . Let me tell you something, I’ve very much been there. It is not a glamorous experience.

“Producing theater is a whole other wonderful collaboration. It never stops from beginning to end and that’s what’s so wonderful about it. . . . And overall, you’re dealing with a much higher caliber of individual responsibility. That’s not to say there aren’t responsible people in the movie business, but I don’t have to have tirades where people carry on complaining about the size of the expense budget for their entourage. There is no expense budget and there is no entourage.”

Drabinsky’s first entry into live theater came in 1978, while he was still making movies. His million-dollar production, called “A Broadway Musical,” opened and closed on the same night in New York. It was nearly a decade before he ventured back to the stage.

His rise in the theater has paralleled, and to a great extent propelled, Toronto’s emergence as one of the most significant centers for English-speaking theater in the world. He and Mirvish expanded the local market mainly by pulling in American ticket buyers who view Toronto as a less intimidating and less expensive alternative to Broadway. About half the audience for Toronto’s big musicals is from south of the border.

(Mirvish, interestingly, is opening his own original musical here within days of Drabinsky’s “Ragtime.” His production, an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” written and directed by John Caird with music and lyrics by Los Angeles songwriter Paul Gordon, also may move to Broadway next year.)

One of the things that drew Drabinsky to “Show Boat” is that, as Harold Prince says in his production notes, “it is the first great contemporary modern musical. The first to merge the traditional, happy-go-lucky naivete of Broadway musical comedy with serious themes.”

Drabinsky first saw “Show Boat” in 1990 at the London Palladium. “It was not a good production,” he recalled. “. . . However, I did take away a huge understanding of the import of the show . . . the exploration of racism, miscegenation, alcoholism, family breakdown and so forth.”

He found an enthusiastic partner in Prince, who has refashioned the narrative and reintroduced songs left out of some past productions.

The announcement that Drabinsky would stage “Show Boat,” however, triggered a short-lived but vehement protest by some Toronto black activists, who complained that the musical would reinforce racial stereotypes. The protests were based mainly on reading the novel from which the play was drawn, and dissolved soon after the production opened here. When “Show Boat” moved to Broadway, it won raves from the black media.

Like “Show Boat,” “Ragtime” also deals with the corrosive influences of racial intolerance. The saga of three families in turn-of-the-century New York, “Ragtime” also follows the struggles of poor immigrants and newly industrialized workers.

“ ‘Ragtime’ is a story about rebirth, about living with change and the forces change unleashes . . . a story that speaks to our lives today,” Drabinsky told the cast on the first day of rehearsal.

Drabinsky and Prince also are developing a musical based on the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager who was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1915 for a murder he did not commit. The case led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, an organization that has honored Drabinsky for his charitable efforts.

Drabinsky shrugs off questions about the commercial viability of “serious” musicals.

“ ‘Show Boat’ right now is being booked to the year 2000. So I don’t know what’s risky and what isn’t risky. I’ve seen fluff fail big time,” he said.

The financial health of Livent is a frequent topic of speculation in Toronto’s theatrical community, especially given Drabinsky’s penchant for expensive promotion and high ticket prices. Perhaps unfairly, he has not fully shaken the reputation gained a decade ago as the high-flying executive of debt-ridden Cineplex Odeon.

Livent last year wrote off $8.9 million (Canadian) in pre-production costs on its critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and Drabinsky admits that the Canadian production of “Sunset Boulevard” is unlikely to turn a profit. Still, Livent had enough hits in the pipeline to report a net income of almost $11.8 million (Canadian) in 1995.

“I’m not going to bat a thousand. The company will not bat a thousand. . . . There are going to be other disappointments over the years. When you have enough winners, you don’t worry about the odd one that doesn’t do as well as you would have liked,” he said.

Right now, he has no plans to change his commercial formula.

“I look for shows that can contribute constructively to an enlightened form of argument on the problems that plague society today.”

Beyond that, there is one more criterion.

“They really have to make me cry a lot, I guess. That’s a fundamental point. If I can’t shed tears in the course of 2 1/2 or three hours, then I don’t think a musical’s going to work for me.”

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* “Show Boat,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens next Sun., 4 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Also Nov. 25, 8 p.m. Dark Nov. 28. Holiday schedule: Dec. 23, 25-28 and 31, 8 p.m.; Dec. 26 and 28, 2 p.m.; Dec. 29, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 23. $35-$75 (Dec. 31, $55-$95). (213) 628-2772.

“Ragtime” opens Dec. 8 at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts in North York, Toronto. (416) 872-2222.