Ethel continued to perform precisely as she had opening night. The notes were the same, the voice was the same, all looked and sounded the same; but as the run went on, there was an emptiness, because there was nothing underneath. Jerry had taken her by the hand and led her where she was to go, but how she got there and why she was there, she didn't know. He wasn't the kind of director who could have told her, but I'm not sure any director could have—certainly no director she would have accepted. She once said: “Buddy DeSylva said watching Ethel Merman is like watching a movie. I never change.” It didn't occur to her that someone else might not consider that a compliment. It was true, though: her performance didn't change, not a beat. Not even with Jack Klugman, her leading man, trying hard to keep her fresh and alive. He guided, he cajoled; she revered him, she respected him, but eventually she wore him out. He was, for him, walking through the show right beside her. Still, Ethel Merman's rote was more exciting than almost anyone else's freshness, because there was always that voice. Moreover, her performance had become legendary, and people saw what they had been told they would see. They still see it today, even though they never saw it.
A week after it opened, Merman's Gypsy made a dream come true that I'd had since I was a kid. I would arrive at a flashing theatre in my limousine driven by my uniformed chauffeur, walk down the aisle with my lover while the orchestra played the overture to the newest musical hit in town. Well, it was a rented car, but I walked down the aisle with Tom Hatcher, who was far better than the lover I had dreamed, while the orchestra played an overture far better than the overture I had dreamed, to the newest musical hit in town, which I had written but which I hadn't even dreamed. Dreams rarely come true, less rarely are bettered. Small wonder I kept remembering this one—until the other day, when I cut off the memory.
Back in 1959, walking down the theatre aisle with Tom and me was a lovely girl named Kathleen Maguire. She and Tom had met and become close friends in summer stock in Elitch Gardens in Colorado three years earlier. Elitch Gardens with summer stock is long gone, not missed because not remembered, though it very much should be. Kathleen went on to play the lead in an Off-Broadway revival of my play The Time of the Cuckoo, which Shirley Booth had starred in on Broadway. Kathleen was better for the play but not for the box office. There, the memory held beautifully. When Tom died of lung cancer, what I had blocked from that memory ten years earlier came unblocked: Kathleen had died of breast cancer.
Even the happiest of memories can be vulnerable. There are others, from other Gypsys—more thrilling, more exciting, more lasting, I suspect. But that was my only memory of a dream come true.
Merman's “Rose's Turn” effected two unanticipated changes in Gypsy, each calling on a different function of the director. The first began with a mild brouhaha early in the Philadelphia tryout.
Too often the creators of a show think they've made a great point clearly and are puzzled that the audience doesn't get it. We were all so sure, so proud that Rose's admission she had done everything for herself and not for her daughters was not made as it customarily is in musicals—by being spoken in a scene. This being new Musical Theatre, it was sung in “Rose's Turn.” But the audience didn't hear it. They wanted Rose to admit she had done it all for herself, and we were certain she did in the number, but the Philadelphia audience didn't agree. In Philadelphia, they were dissatisfied, even with their Ethel.
Time goes fast out of town with a show, even faster when there's an important problem to solve and the only way to solve it is a way you don't want to go: Rose had to admit she did it for herself in dialogue. Reluctantly, a few clarifying lines were added to the brief scene that followed “Rose's Turn,” and everyone was happy.
Except Merman. She refused to say the new lines. No Rose she played was going to say she did it all for herself. Steve argued that she had said it in the lyric, why wouldn't she say it in dialogue? “I don't say it in the lyric,” she snapped at the lyricist. “I say ‘Starting now, it's gonna be my turn.’”
Ethel Merman may not have been the swiftest, but she knew what she sang better than the man who wrote the words. She knew better than all of us. We were hearing what we wanted to hear, but it wasn't there.
That was the first and only time Merman refused to do what she was asked. Nor could she be budged. She sat in her dressing room, arms folded, lips tight, waiting for us to admit she was right. She was right about what she sang, but she wasn't right about what was needed for the show and the audience. We all tried to convince her, but it came down, inevitably, to that awkward moment when nobody wants to be the director, including the director. The star has dug in her heels, she has to be moved off the dime. Push has to come to shove, and it's the director who has to do the pushing and shoving. Well, after all, he is the director, ha ha ha; he's in charge, it's his show. Otherwise, it's the star's show, and then everyone can go home.
We left Jerry alone with Merman.
The new dialogue went into the show. What he said to her, neither of them ever told.
There is scarcely a show with a star where the moment that defines whose show it is, star's or director's, doesn't arrive, usually in the star's dressing room. When I directed Anyone Can Whistle, which Steve and I had written with no regard for conventions, the defining moment came in Lee Remick's dressing room just two days before the New York opening.
One minute after her first entrance in the show, Lee, to a racing musical accompaniment, tore into an extremely long speech so deftly and with such amazing speed that she brought down the house and got an ovation. She was home but not free, for at the end of the scene, she sang her first song, “There Won't Be Trumpets.” “Trumpets” is first-class Sondheim, but it's not an easy song and it's rangy. Lee couldn't really sing it. Not only did she not have the musical in her bones, she didn't have much in her modest voice. The number died, hurting her and hurting the show. It was her only song in the first act (of three), but it had to go.
My first hurdle was Steve. He had fantasies about Lee at that time, but he didn't deceive himself about the number. He asked I leave him out of any confrontation with Lee—which I did and as director should have. As Rose says: “You gotta take the rough with the smooth.” Nobody more so than the director.
My relationship with Lee had been set the first day of rehearsal. After the reading of the play, I took her to lunch, she being Star One of three (the other two were Angela Lansbury and Harry Guardino). Not your usual movie star, she was bright, genuinely nice and unthreatening. Or so I thought—until even before we had ordered a drink of anything, she said without even a glaze of sweetness, “If Angela Lansbury walks off with the reviews in Philadelphia, I walk.”
Philadelphia was where we were having our paltry ten-day try-out. At the first preview, the ladies' room caught on fire, filling the theatre with smoke and panicking the audience; at the third preview, a dancer overran the stage and fell into the pit, smashing a saxophone and sending the musician who played it to the hospital, where he died of a heart attack; and the day of the second preview, Henry Lascoe, the veteran actor who played opposite Angela Lansbury, dropped dead in the wings. A director never knows where help will come from or in what form, but he had better be ready, even for an assist from death.
Unbeknownst to me, Henry had been sabotaging me with Angie. Her role was the commanding mayoress of the town, he was her fawning comptroller; she had the laughs, he had the feed lines. Henry convinced Angie that playing as aggressively as I directed her made her a mean bitch the audience disliked, and so it didn't laugh. The Achilles' heel of most actors—of most people— is the desire to be liked. In the movies, Angela Lansbury had made a career by being a dazzling villainess. Her reviews were always better than good (she was magnificent in The Manchurian Candidate), and she was liked by the audience as well. But believing Henry, she played passively. He got the laughs she didn't get, and the audience liked him, not her. Where was I, the director? Stupidly worried that because of lack of experience, certainly i
n musicals, Angela wasn't able to do on stage what she did so wonderfully, wickedly on screen. Henry rescued both of us by dropping dead. She was forced to drive her scenes and play the character. The laughs came; she heard them; she began having a good time; she gave the audience a great time—and the play got a lot better.
Moral: believe in the actors you cast. If they're not being as good as you thought they'd be, assume it's your fault and find the way to get to them and help them fulfill their potential without killing off the obstructive actor playing opposite them.
Another moral: to retain your own reason in a stressful time— which is what out-of-town with a musical always is—be careful to whom you listen. Kermit Bloomgarden, one of the producers of Whistle, a man who regularly produced both Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, asked me to heed the advice of a wise man. The man turned out to be his teenage son, on holiday from prep school. Another producer lectured me that the success of a show depended on seemingly small things. Which can be true—but with Whistle, the all-crucial small thing was a new dress for Lee Remick, the star. Not too long after her lecture, that producer was hospitalized with Alzheimer's.
Tales like these are routine for directors of musicals, particularly nowadays, when the number of producers is almost as large as the cast, and of that number, perhaps only one actually knows how to produce a musical. The tales are not important in themselves except as theatre anecdotes; what gives them real importance is how congenially the director reacts to the advice, for that affects how forthcoming the money will be to get that new dress, to have more rehearsal time, to market the show. Part of the director's job in this theatre we struggle with today is to direct the producers and the investors along with the actors.
Meanwhile, Lee Remick awaits my answer to her threat to walk.
Her challenge took me completely by surprise, but she was a movie star, and no woman becomes a movie star without being a killer. It's cultural, true of any woman in a position of power, political or corporate. Lee, never having been in a musical or having any real stage experience, might have been frightened and in need of reassurance. Whether she was actually frightened didn't matter; I had to treat her as if she was. So I smiled and said, “I'll bet you five dollars”—this was in the sixties—“you'll get the reviews in Philly and New York.”
The musical was in Angela Lansbury's bones. She was a far superior singer, dancer, performer, and a better actress as well. But the critics, how often are they blinded by a pretty face? Even the gay critics—especially the gay critics. Opening night, Lee Remick gave me a mounted five-dollar gold piece.
She wouldn't have if “Trumpets” had remained in the show. When I went into her dressing room to explain why I thought the song should be cut, I told her the truth, at least as I saw it—the only truth anyone can tell, except Fundamentalists, who know their truth is The Truth. I think a director must tell his truth. I think everyone in a working situation must, because only truth has a chance of helping. It doesn't have to hurt, as those who don't tell it profess to believe. It's a matter of how you tell it and why you're telling it. If you're really telling it to help, you'll phrase it right.
I didn't tell Lee she wasn't able to sing “Trumpets.” I told her the song was wrong for her voice; that that first speech of hers was an aria that got her such an enormous ovation, any song following so soon after was in unwinnable competition; that it left her in an impossible position, one in which, as the heroine of the play, she couldn't afford to be and one in which the play couldn't afford to have her. Left unsaid was that “Trumpets” was her only song in the first act, while Angie had—how many songs?—one more than were originally in the score.
A director has to be a seducer. Before rehearsals of Whistle began, Angie sent me a letter from Hollywood withdrawing from the show because her house was in danger of mud-sliding off a cliff, because her children needed her home, because she wanted out. Fear, I decided, rightly or wrongly. I wrote her a letter reminding her that she had made a commitment, that commitments must be honored, that she was an honorable woman, and so forth, but not too much and so on. I meant all of it, but I do good letters, and as this one went on, it became a seducer's letter. And it worked. (Several years later, the situation was repeated with a play of mine she asked to be in and then pulled out of; that time, the seduction didn't seduce. Consistency is a hobgoblin.)
She came to New York; we met at Steve's house to discuss the show. Quite quickly the actress who was not appreciated at MGM and had to battle for roles worthy of her displayed what she had learned from the battles. As calm as Lee would be later at that lunch—where do movie actresses learn the code of behavior?—she stated she wanted another song to show another side of the mayoress. Steve and I were so happy to have her back in the show, we would have agreed to a hymn. Of course, it was he who had to do the work, and he did. She got her song: “A Parade in Town.” It's one of the best in the show.
Lee knew none of this, fortunately. It would have intensified the already intense tension in her dressing room that day when I told her I wanted to cut “Trumpets.” As it was, she sat very still, her face the face from our first lunch. I shut up and waited—a long, silent wait. Then: “I'd like to be alone,” she said, and I left. After an interval, a flurry of mink coats and blue suits from William Morris arrived and marched into her dressing room. Another wait; then a mink emerged.
“The song's out,” she said. “Don't mention it. Don't even talk to her for the rest of the day.” Then a smile: “She'll be fine.”
A good agent. Her name was Phyllis Rabb. No relation to Ellis Rabb, the most imaginative and underappreciated director in the American theatre. If PBS reruns its filmed version of Ellis's production of The Royal Family (it's available on DVD), read the play and then watch what a magical director can do with it. Nothing seemed contrived, because everything came from the heart. What a pleasure. What a lesson.
With Tyne Daly in the 1989 revival of Gypsy, the defining moment between star and director happened, not in her dressing room, but in the rehearsal room. From the first day of rehearsal, it was apparent she and I were headed for that Showdown at the OK Corral.
I liked her from our first meeting, which was at her audition on the stage of the Imperial Theatre. She had an irresistible smile, a lust for life in the theatre—and great legs. I was surprised how well she sang; the timbre of her voice was oddly similar to Ethel's. This Rose could be sexual, a motor I could use to drive the whole production. From what I had seen of her work, I assumed she was a good actress—perhaps a questionable assumption, since I'd only seen her on TV. She'd begun in the theatre, though, and came from a theatrical family. As it turned out, my assumption was justified: she was a very good actress—a stubborn one, but a damn good one.
She arrived for rehearsal with her beamish smile and armed: she called me “Mr. Laurents.” While she didn't overtly question any direction I gave her, there was always the slightly raised eyebrow, the polite question, the little grin that came and went like a sudden threatening cloud on the beach. Unexpressed challenge was always polluting the air, filling the rehearsal hall; the whole company was waiting for the gas to catch fire and explode. Which it did, when we came to the last scene of the first act, where Rose reads June's letter of defection.
Every actress who plays Rose approaches that moment as though she's crawled across the Sahara and seen water at last. She wants to cry and blubber her way into the lead-in to “Everything's Coming Up Roses,” even though Rose explicitly says, quote unquote, “This time I'm not crying.” Actresses, however, point to the text when it suits them; when it doesn't, they discover subtext.
I had told Tyne Rose is totally without self-pity: she never cries, not a tear, until the final scene of the play, where, in dialogue added pace Ethel Merman, Rose realizes she has never given her daughter the love she wanted. Then Niagara, Victoria Falls—go for all of it. Holding back on tears is unnatural for actresses. Wait two and a half hours before being allowed to go mad with w
aterworks? Very hard, and Tyne wasn't about to wait. She started to cry at the first rehearsal with the first words of the letter speech. The moment had arrived and we both knew it. So did everybody else in the room.
“I told you Rose doesn't cry” was all I said, but it was a fire alarm. Actors, pianists, stage managers, assistant stage managers, all went hurtling for the exit. In thirty seconds, only Tyne and I were left, mano a mano. In retrospect, it seems funny; at the time, it was scary, because it was the moment of Hemingway truth in the bullring for the director and the star. The director loses, he loses control of the show.
A director often has to be a psychologist, or lucky; I was both. I intuited Tyne was challenging me because she wanted me to be strong. This was her first musical; it was Broadway bound; she needed a strong director she could depend on to get her there— and more, belong there. That meant she would willingly, even happily, go as far as I wanted her to.
It took time. Rose is a rewarding experience, but it takes a good deal of work before her skin fits. Luckily, we had a substantial period on the road. The necessity for that cushion is too often overlooked by directors because they're overconfident. Also, they don't want to trek to Dallas and St. Paul and all the oversized barns in between. By the time we came into New York, Tyne had gone even farther than I asked. Rose was hers, she was her Rose—savage, sexy, funny, common as dirt, and absolutely wonderful. And there was a bonus: we had become good friends.
The other big change to Gypsy occasioned by “Rose's Turn” began with a piece of advice given by Oscar Hammerstein during the Philadelphia tryout and unfortunately taken. It took fourteen years to rectify the damage.
Mainly on Directing Page 3
