Free Broadway Tails by Bill Berloni Page A

the first to trust me and give me the chance to demonstrate my talents to the Broadway community.
    In September 1981 I was again contacted by
Annie
’s general managers because they were representing Martin’s new musical
The First
—the story of Jackie Robinson. It was a baseball musical about breaking the color barrier and accepting people for who they are. Martin was born and raised in New York City, and Jackie Robinson had been one of his heroes when he was growing up. As they were conceiving the musical in rehearsals, they decided they needed a very strong finish to the end of the first act, when Jackie Robinson takes the field for the first time at Ebbets Field. Historically, the crowd booed and jeered. Knowing that Jackie Robinson was verysuperstitious, someone in the stands threw a black cat onto the field, where it died. Despite all that, Jackie Robinson played the game and became one of the all-time greats.
    They decided to have David Alan Grier, the young, unknown actor from Yale who was playing Jackie Robinson, come center stage. We hear the crowd boo, jeer, and shout racial slurs. The writers decided that it would be amazing to have a real black cat land on the stage as the curtain came down—a brilliant idea. Martin came to me again, knowing that I was now successfully providing the dogs for the new
Annie
road companies. His confidence in me, and the recognition I was receiving from other Broadway directors and producers, made me think I should give this a try. All I had to do was figure out how to train a cat.
    I took the same approach that I had taken with Sandy and fell back on the experiences I had with animals as a kid. My mother loves cats, so we always had them when I was growing up. I remembered that the cats were very independent. They were friendly, but if you called them, they usually ran the other way. If you picked them up, they would stay with you a little while, and then get off your lap. They didn’t show any desire to do anything for humans, except at feeding time. I remembered how, no matter where they were, they would come running when they heard the can opener. Then they would rub against my mother’s legs, demanding their food. I thought this was the one thing a cat could be counted on to do—come when it was feeding time. The question was, could I find a cat that would be motivated to do that eight times a week, on a stage, in a Broadway theater, in front of 1,500 people?
    True to my promise that I would always try to use rescued animals in shows, I went back to the best resource I had—the animal shelters in and around New York City. I was looking for a cat that was very outgoing, that was sure of himself, and that would want to eat every night at the same time. When I called my friends at the shelters and told them what I was looking for, they really thought I had lost my mind. But with all thegoodwill that I had given to these shelters, people were willing to let me look. While I had thought that shelter dogs had a poor life, I was really saddened by the state of the cats—thousands and thousands of kittens being born wild because people didn’t spay and neuter their cats. Cats that were emaciated, cats that were frightened, cats that were sick, cats that had been abused—and, at that time, much less likely to be adopted than dogs. In and around the New York City area, I was able to view 200 cats in a day.
    At the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York I found exactly what I was looking for—a black cat that came right to the front of the cage and wasn’t afraid of strangers. He was a very large tomcat that might have been someone’s pet at one time, because he was somewhat domesticated, not wild. He was slightly emaciated, so I knew that he was probably very hungry. I took him out of the cage and brought him into the examining room. He stood purring on the examining table, being petted. I opened a can of cat food and he dove in with a