All this prompted more notes from me which Sam tried to deal with. A backdrop with the word “hotel” in huge letters was added to the arrangement of furniture meant to be the hotel rooms. Rose has rented a room for herself and her two daughters but crammed it with the four boys in the act. Along comes a suspicious hotel manager and she has a problem: how to hide the boys from the hotel manager in a set without walls for them to hide behind. While the new backdrop identified the place, it didn't have walls. Rose's problem was still how to hide the boys in a set without walls for them to hide behind. When I directed Gypsy four years later at City Center in New York, the production had no walls because we had almost no money. How did I solve the problem of hiding the boys? I cut the suspicious hotel manager: nobody had to hide. Who says the author shouldn't direct?
In truth, I had long wanted to make that cut. The whole section with its farcical running in and out of slamming doors was part of what is called a block-comedy scene. It had nothing to do with the story, but in 1959, when the show was first done, such a scene was a convention of the musical. Even in 1973 in London— particularly in London—it didn't matter that the slamming doors held up the story. The English are brought up on that kind of farce. That was the first time I directed the show, however, and I wanted to kill the author. The scene was a bitch to stage, but it was also a bad detour on the new road I was trying to take the show because of Angela Lansbury, who was acting Rose. By 1989, I wanted to get rid of the scene, but with Tyne Daly, who could make sense of almost anything, it was getting big laughs and I didn't have the guts. When I did in 2007, it was because Tom Hatcher had died. His opinion was always my guide; I knew he would have applauded the cut, so with no hesitation and much love, I finally made it. The hotel room played faster, just as funny and so much better for the play, because the story continued to be told.
What that HOTEL backdrop did was exemplify my inability to play the role Scott Rudin had cast me in. I couldn't transfuse the musical sensibility lacked by the director and his designer into their bone marrow. After a while, page after page of notes, particularly the same notes by the author, understandably become an irritant to the director. The author doesn't want to give up on a show he knows and loves. All the same, he has to face that he can't direct by proxy any more than he can transplant the musical in his bones. In the end, practically and artistically, there can be only one voice to call the shots: the voice of the commander-in-chief. That is the voice of the director.
No Walls was in vogue for revivals of American musicals in New York long before Gypsy—mainly in productions by British directors, such as the recent ill-conceived Fiddler on the Roof. In that new look at an earthy musical, the shabby shtetl where Jews struggled to survive was a polished hardwood floor and a grove of beautiful birch trees with a full orchestra at one side, ready and waiting to strike up the hits. Why would any Jew want to leave? Perhaps because none of the residents were Jews. Never mind that the musical wasn't in any bones on display in this production; sensitivity to the basic material wasn't, either. Tevye, the heart of Fiddler, was played by an excellent character actor, but one not right for this show. He lacked the heart, he wasn't musical, and if he was a Jew, it was successfully hidden.
The No Walls concept is not wrong per se for musicals. Anyone Can Whistle, Floyd Collins, and Spring Awakening, to name three exceptions, would suffocate within walls. Each is without walls not because of a whim or a concept; the work itself calls for a fluid stage. And that's the point—a point as important for a director as having the musical in his bones, if not more so: everything stems from the basic material.
Spring Awakening, first staged Off-Broadway, was an exception in another way: it exploded with the first original musical staging in years—the extraordinary work of Bill T. Jones. Like Balanchine and Robbins, who were brilliant both in ballet and on Broadway, Jones is a choreographer with his own dance company but his bones jump with theatre musicality. Although he was not the director, his musical staging enhanced the play immeasurably. Typical was his use of the microphone that has become deliberately visible in today's musicals because of the hip-hopalong desire to attract a young audience with elements familiar from rock concerts. The “spring awakening” is the awakening of sexuality in teenagers. The shape and size of the mics used by Jones, the way the boys pulled them out of their clothing and held them, didn't leave the audience debating whether “microphone” was a synonym for “phallus.” It undoubtedly awakened more sexual fantasies than the real display of phalluses I saw decades ago in a Peter Brook production of Seneca's Oedipus at the Old Vic in London, starring John Gielgud and Irene Worth, with the chorus, half-nude, chained to balcony pillars so they could hang without falling off. At the end, everyone sang “Yes, We Have No Bananas” as a six-foot phallus, then an eight-, then a ten- were carried on stage and finally topped by a gilded twenty-footer wheeled down the center aisle. It may have been Seneca and the Old Vic, but it drew a young audience.
I suppose “Yes, We Have No Bananas” could be sung to Spring Awakening's phallic microphones, but will Bill T. Jones and Michael Mayer, the musical's director, still be flourishing four decades from now, as Peter Brook still is, forty years after Oedipus? If so, will they be seeking new ways of doing musicals as Brook still seeks new ways of doing plays, or will they still be doing rock? Will I still be doing Gypsy? Somebody will be doing Gypsy.
Understandably, no director wants to mount a replica of the original production of a musical. But this is often carried to the extreme of refusing to duplicate memorable moments from the original because they were memorable, and because the director is too anxious for the production to be hailed as his, with his name in the ad quotes. Actually, it isn't possible to replicate an original, but even if it were, the goal of a revival is to add a fresh take on the material while not losing what made the original worth reviving— a difficult balancing act. The key is to look at the material with fresh eyes rather than merely with the desire to do something different. Or the desire to sing, like Rose, “For me! For me! For me!”
With Gypsy, there's no reason for that problem. Every production is ipso facto going to be different from every other because a different actress is going to be playing Rose, and the production takes its character from her. Visualize Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, or Patti LuPone as Rose and you know you will see five very different Gypsys. If the director accepts that and molds his show accordingly, his goal is easier, although God knows the execution isn't. If he ignores the essence of his star and insists on fighting both her and the very strong material to impose his “concept,” he should not complain if he fails—which he will.
Sam Mendes, like other directors who came to musicals after a reputation made directing plays, came eagerly and stayed. There is almost no one in the theatre in any capacity who doesn't come to the musical sooner or later, perhaps because nothing epitomizes theatre more. Not incidentally, there's also more money to be made. All come eagerly, but few stay or are asked to stay. Playwrights are the least eager, because the book writer's job is the most thankless and garners the least recognition. Yet even Edward Albee succumbed to the lure. At David Merrick's behest, he replaced Abe Burrows as writer and director on the musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. That highly anticipated show was a fiasco in tryouts before Edward took over, but after he did, it didn't even open. He did achieve a certain amount of musical-theatre fame, however, with one line he wrote for Mary Tyler Moore as Holly Golightly. To a prison matron, America's then-sweetheart said: “Get your hands off me, you big dyke!” The musical was not in Edward's bones. What was in his bones, he attempted to put into the show, but his Holly Golightly and his concept of the world around her was so alien to Capote's that the musical was neither one man's vision nor the other's, and had to fail. Similarly, Sam Mendes's cynical concept of Rose—a character who is forever on a joyous rampage of crazed optimism—and his bleak concept of the Depression world around her had to
result in a production so at odds with itself that it, too, had to fail.
If a director comes to musical theatre without the musical in his bones, he can be a liability; if he also insists on his misconception of strongly written material, he will be a fatality. That director would be better off trying to revive a musical that is so weakly written, it might well benefit from a radically new concept. If it succeeds, the director will get accolades. Of course, the acclaim will delude him, but that's not unusual in the theatre—or anywhere else. But will it succeed if that director doesn't have the musical in his bones? In a little theatre of his own, perhaps, but not in the arena.
TWO
Guiding Stars
PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T EVEN ALIVE when she was performing know Ethel Merman had the musical in her bones. As did people who never saw her. Seeing her isn't necessary. Hearing that voice does it, and they've heard it in a recording or on a television clip, the unmistakable voice with impeccable diction. No wonder she was the First Madam of Musical Comedy. Could she act? The question was never asked. Even when musical comedy was overtaken by musical theatre, the question wasn't asked. With Annie Get Your Guns glorious cornucopia of a score, who needed to act? It wasn't asked of her for the less glorious Call Me Madam or the inglorious Happy Hunting, either. They were musical comedies: nobody was asked to act. When musical theatre arrived for her via Gypsy, the question was asked: could the Merm act?
More often than not, the director of a musical theatre piece finds himself searching for exploitable qualities in his stars, actual or so billed, sometimes because of limited acting ability, sometimes because of thinly written roles. Given a pliant actor and a creative director, the resulting illusion fools most of the people most of the time.
Merman was a Roman-candle star who knew how to strut on stage and perform, but not how to act. For Gypsy, she needed tutelage—not an unusual task for the director of a musical, but one some directors disdain and some simply don't know how to perform. If it's a star who needs help, that entails standing up to the billing, but most directors have difficulty just getting off their knees. The director in this case shared a history with the star. They knew each other's laundry and they liked each other. He was not very articulate, but he spoke her language. Jerome Robbins was, in fact, the ideal director for Ethel Merman.
His basic problem had nothing to do with his star but was essentially, and remained essentially, his basic problem with the show: his concept didn't come from the material—a common problem for the director who wants the show to be His Show with a box around it. Jerry conceived of Gypsy as “a panorama of vaudeville and burlesque.” A panorama is a background; it doesn't focus the show because it doesn't have any relation to the first question the director must ask and answer about any show he is to direct: what is it about? Gypsy can be directed to be about various things: parents who try to live their children's lives, children who become their parents, or—what I intended—the need for recognition. Obvious in Rose, the need is common to every character in the play; for the title character, the need for recognition is from her mother—a need for love. That was the point of identification for me as author. Back in 1959 Tom Hatcher and I had been together for five years; my life had been transformed, and it remained so for forty-seven more until death did us part.
Choosing what a show is about is not a textbook choice. Beginning with casting, it influences everything: what the director tells his actors, how he stages them, and where he puts the emphasis in each scene and song.
When Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and I started writing Gypsy, Jerry was casting and rehearsing the London company of West Side Story. It took us only a little more than three months to finish. By that time, he was trying out West Side in Manchester, England, and our show wasn't a panorama of anything. It was the portrait of a woman who has been called the Lear of musical theatre.
For a long time, not only in rehearsal but even out of town in Philadelphia, Jerry refused to accept this. He hired a company for his panorama: vaudevillians and burlesquers—acrobats, jugglers, comics, strippers, showgirls, and dancers. He decided we needed a Minsky Christmas show: a full-length, prototypical burlesque sketch culminating in a big Santa production number. I demurred, arguing that any time neither Rose nor Louise was on stage, we would lose the audience, because we would lose the story. Jerry insisted. I wrote him his burlesque show. It was funny, but so filthy it would be dirty even today in New York. It died in Philadelphia, along with everything else in the show except the kiddie numbers. The Liberty Belles did not want to see their Merm be unpleasant to children—certainly not children presumably hers. Ethel Merman as a mother was itself stretching suspension of disbelief.
The failure of the burlesque sequence sent Jerry elsewhere to demonstrate what Jerome Robbins did for musicals. He tried to cut Louise singing “Little Lamb” to make room for a big dance number in the hotel corridor utilizing all the unnecessary people he had hired. The acrobats tumbled, the jugglers juggled, and the showgirls showed amidst dancers dancing relentlessly. The number had nothing to do with the characters or the story; it was meaningless. Surprising, that, because the first question Jerome Robbins always asked about any dance in a show was “Why are they dancing?” In the hotel, the guests were dancing because Jerome Rob-bins wanted a big dance number in a show that didn't call for dancing. It lasted one performance.
If Gypsy's director had been a man whose concern was for the show rather than for his position, the choreographer wouldn't have been permitted even to put that dance into rehearsal. It brought the story to a dead stop and eliminated the song that established Louise, who is the heroine. But Jerry was director as well as choreographer, and he was more secure as the latter. Understandably: it was through dance that he best expressed his creativity. Directing, however, gave him complete control.
Words are a director's medium—to communicate with actors, to explicate the text, to uncover the subtext. Unfortunately, Jerry Robbins wasn't comfortable with words. If he sometimes lashed out at actors, it was in frustration because he couldn't find the right words to explain what he wanted. With dancers, language was physical: he could demonstrate with movement; words were footnotes. With dancers, he could command and demand and still receive adulation; with actors, he received stony stares.
When the hotel dance went, Jerry's interest in the show visibly diminished. He felt there was no opportunity to do what he did best. The strip didn't really work; he knew that and had intended to complete it before we left Philadelphia, but he never did, because he had lost interest in Sandra Church, the actress he had chosen to play Louise. She couldn't have been bettered in the first act, but she was lost in the second when Louise becomes Gypsy Rose Lee. She shrank from standing up to Merman in the pivotal scene where Gypsy confronts Rose and levels her. This was an Actors Studio actress who laughingly introduced her own mother as “Rose.” Her inability to use that annoyed Jerry; his inability to help her use it annoyed him even more. He gave up on the strip.
Gypsy Rose Lee's success had come from what she said while stripping, not from what she did. I had written remarks for Sandra as Gypsy, but Jerry wouldn't allow her to try using them; she wasn't capable, he said. His interest in her was gone; so was his interest in a musical number he had counted on to show what he could do. He had already created one of the most memorable numbers in musical theatre—“All I Need Is the Girl,” which moves and thrills the audience every time. But for Jerry in Philadelphia, disconnected from the show he was directing, unhappy with his lack of opportunity as a choreographer, all he saw was a small number he had knocked off for two characters, one of whom not only didn't dance but, as the number was worked out, was played by me, to whom he had begun to refer to Gypsy as “your show.”
Theatre egos automatically trigger derision, but a strong ego sometimes is precisely what wins the derby. Ethel was Jerry's choice; he was determined she would be a winner. What he didn't know about acting, he knew about Ethel. He could not have functioned better a
s a director in the place most vital to the success of the show: Ethel Merman's performance.
It came down to “Rose's Turn.” The emotions behind “Everything's Coming Up Roses” she dealt with vocally: that voice was a trumpet call to Armageddon. The scenes were also taken care of vocally. I wrote endless stage directions: “picking up speed … getting louder, faster, exploding … a pause … slower now, quieter, softer.” They were all over the script, plus a few “happily”s, “angrily”s, “savagely”s, but tempo and volume worked best. If she was questioned why she was doing what she was doing, she held up the script and, like Adelaide lamenting in Guys and Dolls, pointed and said: “It says here, ‘faster, louder.’”
Jerry used his version of that technique for directing her in “Rose's Turn.” This was unknown territory for her: a complex, coarsely funny, then wrenching dramatic aria, it was set to musical patterns unfamiliar to her. The tricky rhythms were a challenge she could be drilled to meet, but the emotional demands were unchartered waters she would have drowned in had Jerry not been there. He five-six-seven-eighted every moment for her as he would for a dancer, demonstrating as he went: sashaying and bumping, pacing and prowling side by side with her as she mimicked him mimicking her. They didn't probe for subtleties or subtext. He trusted the Sondheim words would speak for themselves if she spat them out with that Merman diction. He was detailed, he was painstaking— and it worked. When she hit that last “For me!” it was Ethel Merman triumphant. She knew all about a show being for her.
Mainly on Directing Page 2
