Mainly on Directing

by Arthur Laurents

  The scenes in the burlesque dressing room shared by the three characters in various combinations had become moments strung together. The line wasn't clear; finessing an unclear moment was frequent; there seemed to be unnecessary repetition. As director, I had to face that the way the characters and their relationships had developed, the play as written didn't always work. The solution was to play against the text in places. Fortunately, the director knew the author, and the author knew how to play against the text and where it would help. Together, they brought it off. The play finally came triumphantly together without any moments I couldn't look at. We were ready for the critics just in time.

  The producers didn't quite agree. They were extremely pleased with the production and said so over and over, each of them, all of them, but they weren't exactly mad about the new ending. Jack Viertel, speaking for all of them, sent a long e-mail. It was carefully thought out and written, highly complimentary about the book of Gypsy, but mistakenly singled out Roses admission that she had done everything for herself as the climactic moment which justified mother and daughter walking off together to end the play. This was what they did in 1959, but not in 1989; it was impossible for them to do now. The climax, as I said above, comes with Louise saying “Like I wanted you to notice me?” and Rose's consequent breakdown. Once the truth is exposed, it can't be pushed back in the closet. Rose tries to play Louise as she always has, but she can't, because Louise is gone. Her customary con game is merely amusing to the Gypsy Rose Lee who walks away laughing. It's devastating to Rose. Once again, she is being walked out on. For an uncharacteristic moment, she's down—but only for a moment. What keeps her going is what has always kept her going: her dream. And there it is in big, bright lights: ROSE! Her life; she reaches up for it, the lights start to flicker out one by one, but she chases after them to stop them from going out. She reaches up for them; as the curtain comes down, she still is reaching—she always will be.

  That's the ending. It's the only true ending and I kept it. This Gypsy is the first to attract a young audience. The ending is one of the first things they talk about. They didn't expect an ending that true in Broadway theatre.

  The call came while I was getting dressed for opening night. “You can't repeat this or someone will get fired,” the friend said. “Ben Brantley is a rave for Patti and the whole show.”

  A moment of pure, uncomplicated joy. The New York Times had actually changed its opinion of Patti LuPone in print. She had finally fulfilled her potential. The Times rave wasn't only for her; it was for Boyd and Laura and Leigh Ann and Tony, for the whole company and what I had achieved with them. The holy effulgence shone on this new Gypsy. Proud? Very.

  As I went uptown to the theatre, question followed question: Should I tell Patti before the show? Wouldn't she then give the greatest opening-night performance of her life? Could I tell her? Hadn't I been asked not to tell anyone? Or was it just not to tell anyone who would repeat it?

  I walked into Patti's dressing room. Only she and Matt, her husband, were there, both running higher-than-normal opening night temperatures. She looked so small next to him. Matt Johnston is big, a big, handsome guy I had become very fond of. He was more nervous, more frightened, more worried, more everything he wouldn't be if he knew what I knew. Patti would look taller; she would be taller. I told them.

  “You can't repeat this to anyone,” I said, and repeated what I had been told about Brantley's review. Patti's eyes flooded with relief. She held out her arms and we hugged for so much that was unsaid and didn't have to be said until much later when you relive and keep reliving every moment you never really thought would happen.

  Matt was in a very different place. “Did you read it?” he demanded.

  “No, but the person who—”

  “If you didn't see it, we don't know it's true!” He was passionate.

  “Matt—” both Patti and I began. But the stakes were higher for him than for anyone in that room. “Unless we see it, we can't be sure.”

  He had lived through her getting hurt before. He was terrified she would be hurt again and he couldn't face the thought. That's love.

  The newspapers were unanimous raves for Patti and the show. The weeklies were even better. The box office brought hope to the producers. Work hasn't stopped on the performance, and won't. Patti calls her performance “a work in progress;” I regularly have rehearsals around a table, and the company loves them. The show is a rare experience, certainly in this theatre in this day: it's loved.

  About a month after we opened came another prized e-mail from Mike Nichols. This time, Tom read it with me.

  FOUR

  How To

  IN THE THEATRE, billing is more important than money and power is more important than either, because it begets both. When the director of a musical is also the choreographer, his power is absolute; the show is totally in his hands. Or so it would seem if the hands belonged to Jerome Robbins. But what if the producer was of a dying breed? What if he was notoriously intimidating, if his name was David Merrick and his nickname the “Abominable Showman”? Trouble in River City. And Merrick wasn't even the sole producer of Gypsy; he was co-producer with Leland Hayward.

  Hayward-Merrick was a marriage of convenience: each had a property the other wanted. Hayward wanted the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, owned by Merrick; Merrick wanted the rights to Jerome Robbins, owned by Hayward. Merrick wanted Jerry because he was the pre-eminent director/choreographer and, subtextually, because Jerome Robbins was the touch of class David Merrick wanted. Both producers wanted me to write the book— which gave me the power, but only until I decided whether I would or wouldn't. Merrick wanted me because the established stalwarts Betty Comden and Adolph Green had come a cropper trying to write about Gypsy Rose Lee whereas I had just come off West Side Story. Never mind that the author of the book of a musical about love destroyed by the bigotry and violence of gangs wasn't exactly type casting for the author of the book of a musical about the striptease queen of America. West Side Story, however, had been an artistic success, giving me a touch of that class Merrick wanted so badly. Hayward's reason was much simpler: he wanted me to write the book because Jerry wouldn't do the show unless I did.

  Jerry's insistence on me was an insight into how he functioned as a director. We had begun West Side Story close friends; we ended barely speaking. He couldn't have cared less—I was his choice to write Gypsy. Ironically, the show I wrote was not the show he envisioned. He complained that it was my show, not his; still, it was a success and he accepted due credit—not as much as he hungered for, but the world of entertainment is crowded with the insatiable who can't receive all the credit they hunger for, because it doesn't exist.

  With the occasional exception, the most successful directors don't allow personal relationships to get in their determined way. Jerry, as director, preferred repeat collaborators like Betty Comden and Adolph Green or Lenny Bernstein who were also his good friends. But if their work didn't suit him, he could and did drop them or the project without stopping to change shoes. That wasn't atypical behavior; there is no director's handbook for morals. Or for success, commercial or artistic, unfortunately—that's the handbook that would really sell, more to seekers after commercial success than artistic. There are two or three firm ideas what is artistic and how to attain artistic success, but no one has a clue what is commercial and how to attain commercial success—the biggest are purely accidental. Why the vast majority of musical makers seek the commercial rather than the artistic may be because they at least know what they don't know, and anyone can win the lottery.

  Jerry refused to put Gypsy into rehearsal until he had a box around his name. My contract called for equal billing. Stalemate. Solved by Merrick giving me an extraordinarily larger royalty—which really was paid by Leland Hayward, not Merrick. Once he had won the battle for the box, Jerry set about exercising the power now firmly in his directorial hands and Merrick set about trying to disabuse him of the belief that
he had that power. If Leland Hay-ward had a function, it was to protect Jerry, but he wasn't around enough to do it. He and his glam wife, Slim Hawks, wafted in and out of rehearsals on their way to and from the Colony Club, and then to and from wherever the beautiful people drank their martinis dry in Philadelphia. They were good for morale, though: they adored whatever they saw when they were in the theatre.

  Merrick was bad for morale, which made him feel good. His curious belief was that a producer gets the best out of author and director if he can set them at each other's throats like Rottweilers. The box-around-the-name dust-up provided him with his antagonists: Jerry and me.

  Merrick's shenanigans struck me as funny. He prowled the back of the New Amsterdam roof in New York, where we rehearsed, and the back of the Shubert in Philadelphia, where we tried out, constantly muttering that the director was killing the golden goose. “Turkey lurkey!” he warned, making me laugh and making him wonder why I was laughing. He made a daily pit stop to needle me with variations on one theme: Jerry might be a great choreographer, but this was a book show; Jerry couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag and was ruining my show.

  He himself believed his dire predictions for Gypsy: the show had Robbins cancer, he had seen the X rays, the odds were against survival. Because Merman's last show, Happy Hunting, had been a flop, there was no life at the box office in New York, only a minimal advance, which the discouraging word heard from Philadelphia hadn't increased. Unless we got really good reviews, he confided, we'd close in three weeks. And considering the mess Jerry was making, close in three weeks he was certain we would.

  “If you really believe that,” I goaded, “why don't you sell your share to Leland and get out?”

  He mulled that over for less than two seconds, then smiled. He was agreeable. Leland was more than agreeable. The deal was made, but a deal with David Merrick was a David Merrick deal, which meant it was open ended.

  Opening night in New York, it was he, not Leland, who came over to my table at Sardi's, holding out the New York Herald Tribune review with Walter Kerr's famous opening line, “The best damn musical I've seen in years!” “This is for you,” he smiled, happier than I'd ever seen him. But the review was for his show. He had waited and had never signed the deal. In every sense, Gypsy was a David Merrick production.

  Leland took it with grace and good humor. At heart, he wasn't really a producer. He married famous, classy ladies and he had his table at the very classy Colony, but his business was his roster of famous, classy clients. Basically, Leland Hayward was an agent. David Merrick was a producer. His life was producing; he loved producing, he loved theatre. Today, there is a desperate need for producers who really love theatre as theatre, not for what it can do for them and their investors. David Merrick, of the slippery reputation and the slipping toupee, really loved theatre. He understood that there were two basic kinds and he produced each under a different rubric: the commercial Hello, Dolly! was produced by David Merrick; the artistic Marat/Sade was produced by his Foundation. What is surprising and encouraging is that his artistic ventures had a much higher percentage of success than his commercial ones. But it was the commercial successes that made the big money that enabled him to take risks, and he was always ready to take them.

  That was why I persuaded Steve Sondheim that we bring our unconventional Anyone Can Whistle to Merrick. David was hardly blind to what the show was. He wasn't afraid of it or of me directing as well as writing (anathema to producers, ignoring the history of the theatre), but he believed it called for unconventional producing. A smaller theatre—the Royale, as the Bernard B. Jacobs was called then, rather than the usual big musical house like the Majestic (where it ended up, literally)—and a smaller orchestra, sixteen rather than the usual twenty-odd. That was for starters. His objective was to lower production and running costs so that he would have extra money to promote the show after the mixed reviews he was certain it would get. To me, as director more than as author, this made eminent sense. To Steve, this was just an everyday household word I am still waiting to appear in the New York Times: bullshit. He believed Merrick didn't like his score and didn't want to give him the full orchestra he wanted. So the authors rejected Merrick: “You can't fire us, we quit,” as Steve saw it. I like to think Whistle would have been different if David had produced it. And it would have been—if only because we wouldn't have had to do the thirty-two auditions we needed to raise the money for the Kermit Bloomgarden production. Kermit had no power; I had no power; the show had no power. The result was inevitable, but we were blind to that. It's common to be blind to the obvious traps that lie ahead for musicals.

  Ideally, a director should know what and what not to expect from the producer before the contract is signed. After all, they know each other's résumé, they discuss the script and the score, they talk. The director and the authors talk. The director and the actors talk. Everyone talks—but before the first week of rehearsal is over, all parties realize they haven't been speaking the same language.

  Ideally, the producer functions as the eyes and ears that can point out to the director and the authors the difference between their intentions and what is on the stage. In practice, everyone needs glasses and no one quite understands exactly what anyone else's intention was or is.

  Ideally, everyone should be striving for the same goal. With West Side Story, we were, a major reason why the show succeeded. Power was never an issue. After its success, the ego-power shit hit the fan, but that didn't matter in the long view. The goal had been achieved, the work was completed; the triumph resulting is in evidence to this day. The active producers, Hal Prince and Bobby Griffith, joined the first producer, the loyal Roger Stevens, in time to provide enough power to balance Jerry's.

  For the first-time director of a musical, the power is hardly in contest. The producer has done the hiring, the producer is taking the risk; the power is in his hands. As a result, throughout rehearsals, the director is looking over his shoulder for his replacement lurking in the shadows. Not an inspiriting way to work, assuredly not if you're working for a producer like David Merrick, and my first time out as director of a musical was working for him on I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a curious choice for each of us. It was adapted by Jerome Weidman from his best-selling novel and upped with music and lyrics by Harold Rome. The material wasn't particularly fresh: its central character, Harry Bogen, was an antihero, unusual perhaps for a musical but familiar because he was a smaller, paler, less theatrical Sammy Glick. Weidman's setting was not glittering Hollywood but the garment industry—and not the colorful side, as in The Pajama Game, that birthed tune-bright songs and dances, but the drab side known as the rag trade, which in Wholesale inspired songs like “Ballad of the Garment Trade,” to be sung (according to the stage direction) by the company marching down Seventh Avenue (how did Harold Rome imagine that would be staged?); “Eat a Little Something,” a plea by Harry's not unexpectedly Jewish kvetch of a mother; and a climactic dirge for his bankrupt clothing company: “What Are They Doing to Us Now?” Merrick had made his theatre name (and a good deal of money) with Harold Rome's musical Fanny (the word “musical” may seem gratuitous, but read the sentence without it), which explains to some extent why he wanted to produce Wholesale. Why he wanted me to direct it, I had to assume, was because he couldn't get anyone better. Or perhaps, to be a little kinder to myself, because he knew Wholesale needed a director unafraid of gritty material, and what was grittier than West Side Story? Gypsy?

  But why did I want to direct something so flawed, so unmarked for success? The question was asked by Tom Hatcher, the first theatre question he asked me. We had been together five years, but in the beginning he had been an actor. Deciding he wasn't good enough, he became a contractor—why and how is for another place—which led to real estate in Quogue: an easier progression to follow, but details are also for another place. Success there led to the security to ask that first question; in our fifty-two shared years, he asked a great many more. Eac
h, like the first, was precisely the right one to ask and was asked when and how it was best for me. I trusted him, I respected him, and soon, I depended on him. Every director needs someone to ask those questions, but not someone whose job depends on him, who reveres him blindly or is afraid to challenge him or isn't as smart as he is. Fortunately, I had Tom. I still hear his voice.

  My answer to his first question was the undecorated truth, because I was secure with him: I wanted to direct Wholesale because I wanted to direct a musical and David Merrick had asked me. Secondly, and I admitted it was second, because I believed I could make something out of the piece, however flawed. Tom raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I may have encouraged myself to believe what I could accomplish—it's often necessary to do that, and it helps—but I really did believe I could bring Wholesale home.

  Uncharacteristically, Merrick didn't flaunt his power. The budget was small, but that didn't faze me. I knew the show needed imagination more than money. A limited amount of the latter forces an almost unlimited supply of the former. He let me have the cast and designers I wanted. He gave me complete freedom at rehearsal.

  I Can Get It for You Wholesale's strength—if it had one, and if it didn't, what it did have that could be made into a strength—was a tough, cynical attitude toward society. Harold Rome was a political being; his score emphasized that side. To me, Wholesale had the advantage of not being an ordinary Broadway musical. I wasn't unaware that it was not a desirable Broadway musical, either, except that it had a sarcastic energy, a drive, a reality almost exotic for musicals that gave it a touch of importance—or could have were it better written, and if the authors had the musical in their bones. Harold Rome, for all his experience, didn't any more than Weidman did. My task was to bring the show to theatrical life and make it seem as good as they thought it was.