Everybody here? This afternoon’s run-through of the new musical The First Wives Club — based on the 1996 movie and Olivia Goldsmith’s 1992 novel — is about to begin in a rehearsal room at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
Everybody isn’t. “Stop! Where is Karen?” demands director Francesca Zambello, referring to Broadway veteran Karen Ziemba, who portrays Annie, the perpetually apologetic “wife” played by Diane Keaton in the movie.
Continues Zambello dryly, “OK, things are going well.”
Anxious group scurrying ensues. From somewhere, Ziemba — apologetically — materializes to take her place alongside the other wives: Barbara Walsh, who plays doting Jewish mother Brenda (movie: Bette Midler) and former Broadway Dreamgirl Sheryl Lee Ralph, who is transforming Elyse, the character played by Goldie Hawn in the film, from an insecure blond actress into a glamorous black pop diva. (Ralph replaces Adriane Lenox, who dropped out of the cast for health reasons before rehearsals began.)
Also here is Rupert Holmes — Tony Award winner for The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Tony nominee for the book for the Broadway musical Curtains, which premiered at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in 2006 — writer of the book for First Wives Club. Holmes smiles and points to his neck. “If you see this vein in my neck at any point, you are probably seeing something in the show that you will never see again,” he says pleasantly.
Everybody’s here. Let the opening number, Wedding Belles, begin.
At this point in the rehearsal period — just more than a week before the first preview performance — it would be incorrect to say that Holmes wrote the book for First Wives Club. Rather, Holmes is still writing the book. Just as the former Motown songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland remain in the middle of rewriting the music and lyrics they’ve been polishing for two years, and choreographer Lisa Stevens (Disney’s High School Musical 1 and 2 in London’s West End and on tour; Bombay Dreams) is working up a sweat crafting the energetic dance moes.
Even this close to unveiling First Wives Club to the public, the phrase “work in progress” remains an understatement for this Broadway-bound production getting its first outing at the Old Globe. The show opens Friday.
And right now, the vein in Holmes’ neck is probably as good an indicator as any as to which way the creative wind is blowing.
Steady at the helm is Zambello, who is crossing out dialogue, moving things around, monitoring the emotional temperatures of the cast and pulling it all together. Although she remains deeply involved with opera, serving as artistic adviser to San Francisco Opera, where she is directing Wagner’s Ring cycle, she has come to prefer directing more populist entertainment. Her last high-profile musical was Disney’s The Little Mermaid on Broadway.
Although the rehearsal process for any production is essentially the same, the creation of a new musical has more moving parts than presenting a revival. “It’s always easier to do the second production,” jokes Old Globe artistic director Louis Spisto.
Spisto says the budget for the Old Globe production is about US$2.5 million — a fraction of what the show will cost to produce on Broadway, where budgets for musicals routinely pass the US$10 million mark. Old Globe audiences will see a fully staged show, but with perhaps a slightly smaller ensemble and fewer musicians in the pit.
And although First Wives Club has a commercial future, the Old Globe is a non-profit theatre, so the performers trade lower-than-Broadway salaries for the chance to be part of something new. While the Old Globe does not share producer credit with Paul Lambert and Jonas Neilson — the show is being presented by “special arrangement” with the Broadway producers — the Old Globe will be a profit participant through the life of the Broadway production as well as major touring productions of the show, as the regional theater originating the show.
For readers who missed the novel and movie, First Wives Club tells the story of three well-off, middle-aged New York City women whose perfect marriages crumble when their husbands indulge their midlife crises by hopping into bed with younger women. In the Old Globe production, all three of the girlfriends are played by the same actress, Sara Chase. The philandering husbands are portrayed by Brad Oscar, John Dossett and Kevyn Morrow.
Zambello won’t get her most reliable input until the two weeks of previews that follow the five-week rehearsal period — when the laughs, fidgets and silences of the audience begin to shape the show. Audience reaction, Zambello says, provides needed perspective after actors have heard the comic lines so often they don’t seem funny anymore.
“You do a lot of work the day and afternoon before each preview,” she says. “You generally can only work on one scene, or one dance. ... It’s always a race against the clock.”
The Old Globe has established something of a reputation for shepherding new musicals to Broadway: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty, A Catered Affair and a revival of Damn Yankees. Creating a new musical in temperate, beachy San Diego, say the people involved, is like being at a summer camp — a scary, vein-popping kind of summer camp that offers nonstop rehearsals instead of archery and crafts, and evenings of Shakespeare at the Old Globe’s outdoor amphitheater instead of campfires and s’mores.
The process, Holmes says, is always easier away from the distractions of New York. He arrived from the Big Apple about midway through the rehearsal period after keeping in touch with choreographer and director via video conferencing “so I could see the expressions on their faces when they said: `This scene needs to be shorter,’ “ Holmes says.
“Most of the time, I write brand new musicals,” he says. “But it’s always exciting to write a musical or play of something that has existed in another medium. I get to write scenes that might have happened in the film, or the play version of a musical — but didn’t.”
For First Wives Club, the idea was to take a deliberate detour from, well, the first Wives Club.
Unlike another recent show about women’s empowerment based on a movie — 9 to 5: The Musical, which premiered in Los Angeles last year — First Wives Club is not a period piece. Though 9 to 5 is set in the 1980 movie’s pre-Internet era, First Wives Club is updated from the mid-90s to 2009.

The novel’s author, Goldsmith, died in 2004 at 54 of complications from cosmetic surgery. And Holmes says he never considered contacting the movie’s screenwriter for input. “I knew from the beginning we were going to make huge, fundamental changes in the story, including having Elyse be a black vocalist,” he says.
Holmes and Zambello thought that racially integrating the cast would give the story a more contemporary feel. Adds Holmes: “I wanted to make sure there was one vocal timbre in our cast that would be the kind of sound that we associated with so much of the music of Holland-Dozier-Holland.”
But aren’t Holland-Dozier-Holland, also known as HDH, most associated with Motown hits of the 1960s, writing for the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops and others? Zambello says that, even though these songs hail from a bygone era, the women would have grown up with those tunes, whose popularity continued for decades after their release on vinyl.
“These songs haven’t gone away,” Holmes says. “Everybody knows you can’t hurry love; everybody knows to stop in the name of love, for gosh sakes, before you break my heart. Our  ‘wives’ were hearing these songs when they were five, six or seven years old and started wondering what dating would be like, what boys would be like. And here are these women who now are seeing that maybe it’s not all as simple as that.”
One thing about portraying the complicated lives of complicated women is very, very simple: Even in 2009, opportunities to play multifaceted lead roles are hard to come by for actresses on the far side of 50. All three jumped at the chance.
The decision required some quick schedule changes for Ralph, 52, who had booked a tour for her one-woman show, Sometimes I Cry: The Lives, Loves and Losses of Women With AIDS, when the chance to step into the role of Elyse came up. She’s still playing catch-up. “Girl, it was like rolling a big snowball uphill, and then suddenly you turn around and it’s rolling downhill,” she says. “In the first 10 days, I lost five pounds. If I were 22 and doing Dreamgirls — bring it on! But that was a long time ago.”
But Ralph is proud of what Elyse represents. “I say it’s the Michelle Obama effect; the black girl is coming into her own,” she says. “I’m the smartest of the group, I’m the wealthiest of the group, and I was the one who graduated at the top of her class.”
Recent Broadway credits for Walsh, 54, include a Tony-nominated turn as Joanne in the 2007 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company and a Tony-nominated performance as Trina in Falsettos. “At my age, honey, to originate a role in a musical? It is always a lifelong dream,” Walsh says.
She finds her character — no-nonsense, earth mother Brenda — a refreshing change from the brittle “cougar” roles she finds herself offered of late. “She’s Everywoman; there’s something about her that is universal,” Walsh says.
Ziemba, 51, a Tony winner for her role in the musical Contact, says of her character, Annie the pleaser: “She’s not the kind of woman that we want to feel that we are, but inherently women are caretakers, whether they are the CEO of a company or a nurse. I feel like people are with me; we all know people like Annie.” Though the musical is about a sort of midlife girl group, First Wives Club also represents a comeback for a senior boy band: HDH. The Holland brothers and Dozier, who are all in their late 60s, ended their musical partnership in the mid-1970s. With one foot out the door on his way from Los Angeles to San Diego to watch a rehearsal, an enthusiastic Brian Holland coined a word for the reunited team’s first experience with a stage musical: “Exuberating!” First Wives Club is not a jukebox musical. The hit makers are writing new songs for the show, borrowing from Motown tradition. Dozier credits his experience growing up in Detroit, listening to the gossip at his grandmother’s in-home beauty shop while he swept the floors, for his insight into the pain of women done wrong by their men. “It would all sink in, like a sponge,” Dozier reminisces. “When it came time for me to look for subject matter, I went back to this place. This raises similar issues to some of the things we wrote in the 1960s, that championed women’s causes.”