Mainly on Directing

by Arthur Laurents

  There were three ways to accomplish that: by the look of the show, by the attack on the musical numbers, and—odd though it seemed then—by the acting. The acting most of all. The development of musical theatre and the diminishment of star power and musical prowess were giving acting an importance equal to singing and dancing. Not that it often lives up to that ranking now, nor that it's easy to do. The contrary, really. Few musically trained performers are comparably or even fairly well-trained actors. Moreover, acting in a musical is different from acting in a play. It has to be heightened; the actors have to be larger than life in order to make the transition fluid from speaking to singing or from walking to dancing. Consciously or unconsciously, experienced musical performers know this; ironically, it may make them too larger than life even for a musical. At the first note of the rehearsal piano, out comes the equivalent of that invisible cloak tossed around by their counterparts playing Shakespeare and out the window goes believability. What must come first, what is basic to acting in a musical, is grounding the performance in emotional reality. That, of course, is basic to acting in a play, to acting in anything; but in a musical, that reality is harder to find and even harder to hold on to, because it is so covered with the language of the musical. The director's first task—and it's worth all the time it may take—is to make sure every one of his actors locates his emotional reality.

  Good directors argue whether casting is 50 percent of direction or 60 percent, but for all directors, good and not so, the first line to cast is for a star. The part of Harry Bogen in Wholesale was a starring role, but no one—not David Merrick, not his staff, not an agent in town, not I, not even the authors—believed we would get a star to play it. Harry was an antihero; antiheroes tend to be unpleasant rather than loveable, and a musical star wants to be loved. He might settle for being liked if he can still be accepted as a leading man. After fifty, he conceivably might consider playing an antihero because it could make him seem younger—forty, hopefully. Harry, however, was young as well as unpleasant. Thus, no one looked for a star in our firmament.

  Then one turned up: the young, very popular singer Steve Lawrence. He didn't care if Harry was unpleasant; it was a juicy part, and he was so eager to get on stage, he volunteered to audition. His wife, Eydie Gormé, as good a singer and as popular a performer, came along to read with him to give him confidence. Neither had ever acted, but both had charisma which gave them a strong stage presence. Both were clearly very nice—making him wrong for Harry but making her right for Ruthie, the girl who wanted Harry. I offered her the part, but she was too much like the role: it was her fella she wanted—she wouldn't work without him.

  The theatre-party vendors assured Merrick Steve Lawrence would sell, even better with Eydie Gormé. Merrick left the decision to me, proving he knew the cons as well as the pros. Steve Lawrence was so very nice and so eager, it was hard for me to say no, but I knew the show didn't stand a chance with him as Harry, pace theatre parties. The only chance it did have to succeed commercially was for it to succeed artistically. To achieve that, it had to be even tougher and funnier (which would make it tougher) than it was—and to be more a musical than it was in fact. Technically, the presence of songs made Wholesale a musical, but it wasn't in its bones. This wasn't being semantic; I Can Get It for You Wholesale was only nominally a musical. Basically, it was a dramatization of a novel with interpolated songs.

  • • •

  Is there a theatre form more difficult to create than the original musical? Apparently not, judging by the rarity of good originals; and most of those aren't all that original. Urinetown, Spamalot, and The Drowsy Chaperone are all examples of the trend to pastiche and, to some degree, all are in debt to Forbidden Broadway for teaching how to profit from the use of old musicals. Equally rare are good new musicals derived from a source, any source: plays, films, novels, short stories, biographies, pieces of journalism. “Desperate people do desperate things,” Rose says in Gypsy; there isn't a conceivable source that hasn't been tapped. But to what end? In the beginning, even before the word, there was the question: why is it a musical?

  Examine the components and begin with the beginnings of the story, because the book is where it all begins if the ambition is musical theatre. There are musicals, and successful ones, that began with a collection of songs aimed at being musical theatre. The Boy from Oz and Jersey Boys are two; both hit their primary target: the box office. The former told an interesting story badly, but it had Hugh Jackman, an exceptionally talented new musical star; the latter told a familiar story with verve and energy. The result: more entertainment for Broadway. It's music, however—songs that come from characters who come from the story—that is the making of good musicals, assuming the authors have found the right story to tell. That assumption brings up another question: what makes a story the right story for a musical? Subject matter? Setting? Characters? What?

  Begin with a dry news report: a cave explorer is trapped and unable to move in a Kentucky cave. That doesn't immediately bring visions of rehearsal pianos and leg warmers, but it became Floyd Collins. Begin with a somewhat legendary but unsuccessful nineteenth-century play about pubescent sexual angst in a stifling, repressive society. That doesn't even hum and jig, let alone sing and dance, not even with the pubescent agonizers aged up to late adolescents. Nevertheless, Spring Awakening became better known and successful as a musical-theatre piece. What made these unlikely subjects musicals? Their creators' response to the source material. They heard song and saw musical movement where it seemingly wasn't. In both shows, the musical response had to triumph over flawed books, but triumph it did.

  With Floyd Collins, the suspense inherent in the central situation was vitiated by the equally inherent lack of physical action; the stasis inherent in the story was countered by what tended to be more padding than invention. What made the piece a triumph of musical theatre was Adam Guettel's dazzling score, especially an innovative, mesmerizing vocal line. With Spring Awakening, again the heartbeat was the musical element. I'm hardly drawn to rock, but Duncan Sheik's throbbing yet lyrical score was a knockout, lifted sky high by Bill T. Jones's totally original, charged musical staging. Together with dynamic lighting and well-directed performances by the young leads, they overcame shallow lyrics and repetitious scenes in a story that is old hat today.

  All credit to the creators, however: any subject matter can conceivably make not just a successful musical but exhilarating musical theatre.

  A digression, but not entirely irrelevant. The standard ingredients for supposedly surefire musical theatre are larger-than-life characters, a story brimming with opportunities for theatricality, some humor, and an answer to the first question a director must ask about any theatre piece: what is it about? A paradigm source: The Skin of Our Teeth. Every requisite on the list and ten more. No wonder it's been made into a musical only God (and the Thornton Wilder estate) knows how many times. Nevertheless, it has never worked as a musical. Why not? Because it already is a musical; it just doesn't have music.

  A proviso to the assertion that any subject matter can make a musical: no one asks why the characters are singing. But if no one does, why don't they? Nine times out of ten, not because of the characters, but because of the style in which their words and music are written and the setting for the story.

  Choose an unlikely subject to sing about: the weather. No storms: too dramatic. A humid summer night, then; outdoors in a crowded city. The song? “Too Darn Hot,” from Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate. Sung by whom where? A couple of tap dancers in the alley outside a stage door where sculpted bodies loll on fire escapes and hatch covers, fanning sexy faces and gymnasiumed torsos, and mopping unlined brows before their owners join the tapsters and begin dancing feverishly in the humidity. The choreography gets increasingly energetic and acrobatic to chorus after chorus after chorus until the chorus is pouring sweat. Why the endless dancing if it really is too darn hot? Because the number appears natural in the greasepaint style of this reviva
l, and the exhausted audience gives it a big hand.

  Years earlier, another song on the same unlikely subject was sung by very different characters in a very different style of words and music in a very different setting: a New York City tenement. The source was Street Scene, the naturalistic Pulitzer Prize play by Elmer Rice. Chunks of the original dialogue were kept by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes, who found its musical equivalent in their first song: “Ain't It Awful, the Heat?,” sung by blue collars hanging out the tenement windows and slumping on the stoop in front. The people, the music, the idiomatic words, all perspired. Singing seemed completely natural.

  • • •

  The one time out of ten when the characters themselves are the reason singing seems natural, it's because of what they are as characters. Much larger than life outside, but it's what's inside that produces the music. Sweeney Todd is frighteningly still outside, Rose is cheerfully threatening outside; inside, both are frustrated fury. His emerges icily, then builds angrily until it erupts into an almost operatic volcano of hatred and vengeful determination; hers starts with a brassy, jokey drive, then builds angrily until it shatters in a jazzed-up rage of hatred and wrenching determination.

  The characters themselves can also be why they don't sing— or shouldn't sing. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady has several what are called songs, but he doesn't sing them; he talks them rhythmically—not because Rex Harrison, who created the role, couldn't sing, but because Henry Higgins was too buttoned up, too much the pedant, too emotionally repressed to sing. Then he falls in love. Then and only then, for the first time in his hitherto dried leaf of a life, Henry Higgins sings, Rex Harrison sings, a haunting love song: “I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” (Also sung by Marlene Dietrich in her cabaret act, without a change of pronoun and with equal effect. Love levels.)

  Sometimes a character sings before he should. This was the case in Do I Hear A Waltz? by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim and me. The character was not a he but a she—the heroine, Leona Samish. Leona had come to Venice to find love but was too wary, too suspicious, too emotionally throttled. She herself says that when she falls in love, she'll hear a waltz—i.e., music. That, then, is when she should have sung, but she was trilling away long before that. I should have known it was a mistake: the musical was adapted from my play The Time of the Cuckoo (later disguised as a movie travelogue called Summertime), and no one knew Leona better than I. But I was too eager to get the show on and checked my musical brains. Singing too early muddied the character and weakened the show.

  Ideally, a song in a musical-theatre piece should be a one-act play with a beginning, middle, and end. Such a song moves the play forward and almost stages itself for the director. Unfortunately, most songs in musical theatre are still songs of musical comedy: the lyric states one thought, repeats it over and over, and ends with a slight verbal twist. Essentially, nothing happens emotionally and the song goes nowhere, forcing the director into staging that is static or the choreographer into whipping up compensatory frenetic dances from nowhere. Most of the songs in I Can Get It for You Wholesale were of that nature, but I had a cast that included two beginners who became stars, Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould (who played Harry), and two former stars, Lillian Roth and Harold Lang. Most of the others were exceptional dancers, a few were exceptional singers, and all could act. With that company, the prosaic flatness of Wholesale and its songs could be given theatrical life. The director could use his imagination, trusting his players to make his inventions work. They made mine even seem inspired.

  Example: “Ballad of the Garment Trade,” scripted to be sung marching down Seventh Avenue. Because the settings were so ordinary and untheatrical, I had the whole show designed in stark black, white, and gray with an arbitrary slash of color for each scene: morning blue for the kitchen, lipstick red for the nightclub, tarnished gold for the office, etc. There was a modestly stunning backdrop of the city that suggested Seventh Avenue. The company could have marched east and west, north and south in front of it to the martial rhythm of the song, singing its litany of the risks of being in the dress business—a presumably comedic litany: “If you're not [a success], you haven't got a pot to sew with.” Even if I had thought the lyric could be depended on, it didn't get anywhere, and the marching wouldn't, either. So I had the song sung by various workers in the dress house Harry had taken over (by cutting corners and throats) as they built his new showroom-with-a-stage for a rag-trade fashion show that climaxed the number and the act.

  This set up the climactic number in the second act, “What Are They Doing to Us Now?,” sung by the employees (led by a magnetically intense Barbra Streisand despite incongruous Anna May Wong fingernails) as the pieces of the showroom and the furniture were literally taken out from under them. What made it especially effective was that by the time the plaintive number came around, the audience knew each of the people involved as a character and what the loss of the business meant to each of them. That was because each actor had gone beyond the printed page and created a person.

  “Eat a Little Something” had another lyric that repeated one thought, went nowhere, and thus presented a staging problem. In the script, Harry's mother (Lillian Roth) sang the song; then Harry confessed to her that he had betrayed his partner, stolen his money, and destroyed the business. Intercutting the song and the monologue made a moving one-act play.

  I Can Get It for You Wholesale began its out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia. I Can Get It for You Wholesale bombed in Philadelphia. It bombed badly: the reviews even said it was anti-Semitic.

  With the authority of experience, I can say that in that situation, it's worse to be the director than the author. Much worse in a musical, because there are more people—more authors, more producers, more actors, more crew, more world—who look desperately to the director to have the answer, to make it all nice and jovial and a hit. Before directing my first musical, I had decided that unlike other directors, I would put the authors first and respect their work. Rome, Weidman, and I had worked like a pot-head ménage à trois during rehearsals. They brought me presents (cashmere!); they wanted me, rather than Herb Ross, the choreographer, to stage the songs. Then Philadelphia and bombs away. Now whose side was I on?

  It's right and it's necessary to respect the authors' work. But for a director to position himself “on their side” is asking for trouble and ignoring that there can be only one side for a director: the show's side. Not even his own side—meaning how he has directed the piece or executed his conception (assuming he has one, and these days he would be drummed out of the corps if he didn't). Nor can he be on the star's side, should there be a star; for while it's true that if the star doesn't work, the show doesn't work, the star has to work for the show. I remember a meal at Sardi's with Barbara Harris—one of the most sublime musical actors I have ever seen—after a preview of The Apple Tree. She brushed aside my praise (she couldn't accept compliments anyway) to ask a question that answered itself: “But the show doesn't work, does it?” She knew; she had asked it before and had known the answer about On a Clear Day. The show is what matters, the show the audience sees on the stage, not the show so many involved think they see. The director has to see and hear what the audience is seeing and hearing, particularly when what is being seen and heard is not working; and alas, alack, and lackaday, what was on that stage in Philadelphia was not working. When that happens, everyone involved, top to bottom, turns to the director.

  Whether they turn with hope and confidence or with fear and desperation depends not only on the director's record and reputation but on the face he wears when he comes to the first meeting after those reviews that have struck terror. Terror can engender panic, insanity—at the least, clinical depression. Usually, the tension is relieved by firing the costume designer, but Wholesale's designer wasn't important enough to be fired (the legendary Theoni Aldredge in her first Broadway musical), and anyway, Merrick wasn't about to spend money on a replacement.

  He came to the
panic production meeting in a surprisingly jovial mood. He was anticipating the Rottweilers would be unleashed. I disappointed him. I was calm and genial (fear successfully hidden) and laid out what I thought had to be done. Jerry and Harold agreed, went off to work, and I went off to face the company.

  The trick, in those sessions, is for the director, when he speaks, to look intently just to the right of the eyes of someone in the fifth row; then, at intervals, to shift to someone farther back and to one side, then to the other side—always careful to look at a forehead, never, never in anyone's eyes. What the Father of Us All is doing is trying to convince, not a band of frightened players, but a bunch of skeptical actors who nevertheless are eager to be convinced of what he's trying to convince himself: that the problem with the show is easy to fix. When Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers came to accursed Philadelphia to see what Gypsy‘s problem was, they said: Fix the doorknob on the dressing-room door in the last scene and that will do it. Literally, that's what they said. Well, that was Gypsy, and they weren't right anyway.

  Wholesale had one problem the cast knew. How they knew was a mystery, but they always know, and how is always a mystery. They knew the producer wanted to fire Elliott Gould, the leading man, and Barbra Streisand, who was stealing the show, or would have been had there been a show to steal. Merrick thought both were too homely. They couldn't have disagreed more; they were falling in love. Merrick went after me like a dog after a bone to fire them; he was relentless—he wouldn't quit until he got that bone. He was all smiles, but it was undeclared war.