By the time the company got on the stage for rehearsal, the orchestra was on stage. With my full agreement. What had happened? Money.
Jack Viertel came to me with a proposal: he could get an extra $200,000 out of the Ninth Floor for the physical production if I agreed to have the orchestra on the stage and freed up the space for more high-price seats down front. That $200,000 was the equivalent of an extra $2,000,000 for a comparable production on Broadway. In the theatre, as everywhere, the modus operandi is to accept or reject flat out rather than make an effort to figure how it might be possible to have it both ways. I wanted the money; I did not want the actors to play in front of the orchestra on stage—but that was where the orchestra had to be for me to get the money. There had to be a way for both Jack and me to get what we wanted. I went to Jim Youmans, our scenic designer.
City Center's stage is extremely deep, so deep that I had asked Jim to cut the stage in half with a scrim. Jim smiles more than any other designer I have ever worked with; the smile is both real and a cover for one of the most interesting and endearing people in the theatre. Behind the scrim, he halved the stage with another scrim, the area between the two reserved for Rose's fantasy world. Jim is the most talented designer of minimalist scenery I know; but this wasn't about scenery, it was about space. The question that needed an answer was: if we put the orchestra against the back wall and put a third scrim in front of it, could we have all the musicians on stage without their being seen? Jim measured; we could. Without those little lights on their music stands being seen? A black scrim would hide them, he assured me.
When you get what you want, you want more. I began searching for moments when the orchestra on stage could work to the advantage of the play. Three popped up immediately: during Tulsa's number, during “Rose's Turn,” and, most potently, during what is arguably the best overture to a musical. For me, the only possible rival is Candide, but after its overture, the music for the play is thwarted.
Gypsy would begin by having rich red curtains part and scrims lift, one by one, to reveal the orchestra, painted with light as only Howell Binkley can. Seeing the dramatically lit orchestra play that overture would silence the chatter that customarily goes on during overtures; instead, the show could start the audience on a high. But then what? The Jocko scene would have to be a letdown unless something unexpected happened before it started. And something did. As the overture came to its end, the scrims that rose to reveal it came down in the same sequence in which they came up, the last being a black scrim that blotted out the orchestra during the closing bars in time to bring down a peeling gilded portal, holes in its rotting frame and rips in its hanging, tattered swags, that said Dead Vaudeville/Dead Dreams. That portal set the tone for the whole show. It startled the audience: this was not going to be the Gypsy they expected. But they applauded the overture and cheered—something they had never done before.
The theatre audience has not necessarily been dumbed down by what's presented to them these years. It still has an imagination, and it still can use it, even with revivals. It's hungry to see a new light on an old scene.
Paradoxically, what started this Gypsy on the road to that memorable closing night was another of the Ninth Floor's inadequate schedules, this one the heedless lack of rehearsal time.
On West Forty-fifth Street, I would have been given four or five weeks with the full company. On West Fifty-fifth Street, out of the central Broadway district, City Center scheduled two weeks with the full company. I bargained: if I used only the four leading players and one pianist, could I have one more week? Jack agreed and got the Ninth to agree. I took that as an opening: with his help, I managed, player by player, to inch the number up to nine.
We started sitting around a table that first day—Patti LuPone, Boyd Gaines, Laura Benanti, Leigh Ann Larkin, Jim Bracchitta, four other actors, and I. Except for a piano in the corner, it might have been the first rehearsal of a play, not a musical. The picture was familiar. For the last ten years, most of my work in the theatre has begun sitting around a table at the George Street Playhouse across the river in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with its unique artistic director, David Saint. George Street seeks new plays; David, who has directed several of mine, is the best director who ever has. Venecia, a new play Tom and I found in Buenos Aires, David produced at George Street. Tom translated; I adapted and directed, with Chita Rivera starring as the old blind madam of a whorehouse with one customer. A lot of rehearsal time was spent sitting around the table even though Venecia is fantasy, farce, and even has a musical number. When I revised and directed Hallelujah, Baby! that began around a table too. We didn't stay around the table as long as we should have. Well, it was a musical. Why, then, did I stay around the table with Gypsy?
So much of Gypsy is about growing up and older that it needs to be rehearsed in sequence. That was impossible at City Center, because the little kids were absent from rehearsal. It was also impossible to stage more than a piece of a scene, because even though the nine players included character men, there was always one character who wasn't covered. So there we were that first day with nothing we could do but sit around the table: nine players and I like nine actors sitting around a table with a director for a play. Gypsy wasn't a play, it was a musical; musicals aren't rehearsed sitting around a table. But it wasn't a musical comedy, it was musical theatre; it might even be a musical play. Couldn't it at least be rehearsed as though it were?
The first thing I said to the nine players was “Gypsy is a musical for actors.”
In 1959, it hadn't been cast that way; in 1959, acting was hardly a priority in musicals. It's of incalculable help to the director of a revival to look back at the state and customs of the form (in this case, the musical), the theatre in general, even the world at the time of the original production. Then he can begin to understand why certain moments seem foolish today while others weren't given their due back then. Gypsy has its share.
In 1959, Ethel Merman was the star; she set the breezy tone. In 1973, in London, Angela Lansbury was the star. A superb actress with a great voice, her Rose gave Gypsy a weight and meaning it hadn't displayed before. That it did then was almost entirely due to her Rose. In 1989, that process continued with Tyne Daly, the star making history with her savage Rose, but she was aided immeasurably by the first three-dimensional, moving Herbie, played by Jonathan Hadary, and the first credibly bland Louise to turn into a dazzling Gypsy Rose Lee—Crista Moore. It wasn't until 2006, however, that I cast the entire company—everyone, every small part, even one-line parts—with first-rate actors. Why shouldn't acting be as important a requirement for musical theatre as singing and dancing?
Everyone around that table at City Center was an actor, and every part got bigger because I asked everyone to know who he or she was in the play, why they were in the story, and what they wanted in any scene they were in, even if they didn't have a line. The fuller the character, the bigger the part becomes. When the whole company was around the table, that approach was applied to everyone: Why was someone a Hollywood Blonde or a Farm-boy? Why had they joined Rose's traveling circus? Did they want to be in show business, did they want to run away from home?— what did they want? Even if they didn't have a line, they had to know all that. This wasn't going to be a musical where anyone came on stage without a life.
What I expected from the nine major players by the end of the first week was that each would know who he was, what he wanted, and what he would do to get it. The excitement around the table that first morning was visible—but no one had to be cautioned that Gypsy was a show with a Star.
If the star of a play, let alone a musical play and one with a starring role that has been called the musical equivalent of King Lear, if that star isn't with the director all the way in every way, the tension will infect the company and nothing much will ever be accomplished. Play or musical, the performance will waffle and wobble and satisfy no one. The star at this table was Patti LuPone: famously controversial, a powerful actor with
a great voice for Rose. Great voices, great anything, can get in the way of a great performance unless the director is in control. Nothing was going to get in the way of this performance: Patti LuPone was indeed a star, but she was an artist first. There's a self-consciousness about calling anyone an artist, but she was and always will be, certainly in the rehearsal hall. Nothing could make her happier than sitting around the table, probing and exploring the text. She gave herself completely to the process with constantly stunning results. The company loved watching her work, loved exploring with her, loved her—to a point: they smelled the actress might turn Star on a dime. Rarely in rehearsal, but on stage, in performance, there was the danger that she would become too aware of the audience, wanting to possess it, control it, make it hers—the Star would trump the artist. That was her problem, which made it the director's problem, which made it my problem. She trusted me early on and I respected her early on. Nothing was going to separate us, and nothing did. But I was conscious of that Star problem and she wasn't.
Of the six days of rehearsal that first week, five were spent around the table. They were the most important days of the entire rehearsal period. Musicals had never been directed this way— every line examined as one does or should do when rehearsing a play—because no one thought the book of a musical could stand up to such examination. The high regard for the book of Gypsy might be used as an excuse for making it an exception to how musicals are rehearsed, but it shouldn't be. Even a musical with a weak book can benefit from sitting around a table and exploring what text there is. All sorts of moments can be found in unexpected places; subtext can be invented where none existed to give characters some depth and color. Look for the play that is beneath the show and the result will be a richer evening. There isn't a musical that won't benefit from adding acting to performing.
Those days of exploration around the table established for the actors what their goal was and how it was going to be achieved. They got what they had never so early, if ever at all, had before: a solid base from which they could move out and try this or that, knowing there was a secure core of the character underneath. It was still a musical, but they were taking it seriously as actors because they were being treated as actors. They thrived on it, so the show thrived on it. The result was a Gypsy new to everyone, including me.
I had written the book of Gypsy, ostensibly based on Gypsy Rose Lee's memoirs; three-quarters, however, was invention—which was why I called the show a “fable.” I had directed it twice before, each time seeing it from a different angle because of a different Rose. Yet, sitting around that table, I kept making discovery after discovery about every character, beginning with Rose and Uncle Jocko in the opening scene. Directing a revival of Gypsy became as exciting as directing a new play. I was charged up, as creative as I had ever been. My ninetieth birthday was a month away, but when you are caught up in giving new life to something you love, you are whatever age you were the first time you gave it life.
The opening scene of Gypsy was key. Usually it's played with Jocko a comic trying to eke out a laugh until the star playing Rose makes her famous entrance down the aisle and takes over the audience, the stage, and the show. Musical theatre, perhaps, but not a musical play—not even a scene in a musical play, because a scene requires at least two of the people on stage be fleshed-out characters who interact. This time, for the first time, Jocko became a character and Rose became more than a star doing a turn.
All the actors needed was there in the script—if the director looked for it and led them to it. Jocko has been doing his Kiddie Show so long that he's sick of it—sick of the mothers, sick of the kiddies, sick of the audience, sick of everything except a sexy girl probably too young for him. Her sister is a contestant, which makes her blatantly a shoo-in. Playing Jocko is tricky, because he must be likeable enough for the audience to enjoy him but not so likeable that the audience will resent Rose for destroying him. Everything serves the story.
Watching from out front, Rose must have seen the favoritism, but gives no sign of it when she climbs on stage. She's seemingly just a mother concerned with her daughter-contestant, Baby June. All friendly charm, Rose prances over to Jocko, smiles down to the drummer, waves to the lighting man—happy with herself, happy with her girls. Then Jocko laughs at her and Rose turns on him like an adder. The scene—it is now a scene—explodes: the play has begun.
Once that process started, Gypsy is such a rich field that the actors couldn't wait to dig into all the scenes. The deeper they dug, the still deeper they wanted to dig. When had rehearsals for a musical been exciting merely by exploring the text of a scene? Never; the text of a musical had never really been explored. Now, the company couldn't wait to get back to that table, explore more, go farther or correct and refine. Even during previews, we went back to the table.
• • •
But what of what the audience comes for, the musical numbers? Gypsy is famous for them but they became a problem I hadn't foreseen because of an incident with Laura Benanti at her audition.
Louise is a very difficult part to cast: she begins as an awkward, vulnerable, not noticeable teenage tomboy and ends up a glamorous, sexual, sophisticated, tough Star. I had seen and been interested by Laura Benanti on stage, but nothing had prepared me for what she did at that audition. Clearly, she had it all and could do it all. My sole concern was whether she would respond to direction from me. I asked her to sing “Little Lamb” again, but with a different approach, one I had been thinking about when I began taking a fresh look at the show:
Louise is really miserable when she sings “Little Lamb.” There was the perfunctory verbal acknowledgment of her birthday and a few skimpy presents, but the focus as usual and always was on June and The Act. A line that had always been in the lyric now justified the approach: “Little cat … why do you look so blue? … Is it your birthday, too?” By the time Laura got to that line, tears were glistening in her eyes; by the time she got to the end of the song, tears were in the eyes of everyone in the room.
That was encouraging, both about Laura and about a fresh approach to the songs. Encouragement, however, can lead to expectations, and expectations are a one-way ticket to disappointment. At the start of rehearsals, Laura Benanti was unsure and not very good, certainly not as good as I was convinced she could be, and wary of me, to boot. I was fertile with explanations, but from Marty Pakledinaz, whose costume fittings can often be confessionals, I learned that Laura's previous show had been a bad experience for her because of the director: an explanation I hadn't thought of, and one that was reassuring—but the next director invariably pays, I was paying, and if it continued, we both would be in trouble. How was I to get her trust? That's a problem every director has with every actor to some extent, and every director has his or her own way of dealing with it, from heart-to-heart talks to ignoring it. My way was to treat Laura Benanti as the actress I believed she was and try to help her as that actress. What was her acting problem? Trying to play young rather than what the young Louise was feeling. In a quiet corner of the rehearsal hall during a break, I told her that and just that. No bells rang, no tears came to her eyes; she didn't throw her arms around me; but it was a seminal moment all the same. She relaxed—visibly. Sitting around the table, we started discussing what was going on inside Louise, how overtly she would express it, and when signs of the woman she was going to be would begin to appear. She now came early to rehearsal, she loved rehearsing, and I loved directing her.
The right button is what the director always has to find, the button that will free the actor to give the performance both want. That means the director being ready to take anything and try anything, even if it means making a fool of himself. I had found the right button to press for Laura, but there was one place where the only way to help her was to risk making a fool of myself—so what the hell, I did. To her enjoyment and the enjoyment of the few people allowed in the rehearsal hall, I simulated the strip for her. I may have looked like a fool, but it was obvio
usly fun; fun helps rehearsals.
The transition in that striptease from Louise as a naïve, untalented, awkward young girl into the sexually sophisticated, secure, witty Gypsy Rose Lee is an extremely difficult challenge for any actress. Laura took it in stride. She understood it emotionally, she was confident she could do it. The physical act of stripteasing was another matter, unknown territory. She'd never seen one, and willing as she was to try, she didn't have a clue where to begin. Underneath, she was afraid. She is very beautiful, with a beautiful body, but very far from being an exhibitionist—judging from how she dressed at rehearsal, the opposite.
How she moved had to come from who she was playing. At that early stage, I knew who that was probably better than she did. So with the help of a drummer and Patrick Vaccariello, our musical director, who was in happy sync with anything I wanted to do musically and became enjoyably essential to me as work progressed, but without the help of our ready, able, loveable, and stoical choreographer, Bonnie Walker, I walked a striptease for Laura Benanti. If I could do it, she could do it better: she had more to work with. As we went through each of the four strips that make up the number, she brought two elements that were all Laura Benanti and made the strip strikingly hers. One was an idiosyncratic sense of humor completely unexpected in a woman so beautiful; the other was a stripper's walk that Gypsy Rose Lee would have lusted for. From fearing the strip, she went to loving it and then, actress that she is, to perfecting every detail tirelessly. The curtain I had planned to use to end the number couldn't work with the City Center set—a situation directors have to face constantly. This time it was fortuitous, because a new ending was needed, something as special as Laura. Examining what curtains were available in City Center's archives, I found how to end the number with a use of curtains not seen before. In Rose's biblical mode, seek and ye shall find—so long as ye know what ye're seeking.
Mainly on Directing Page 6
