Mainly on Directing

by Arthur Laurents

  When you attempt something new or different or merely ambitious, don't trust in luck. There is no good luck in theatre—unless a critic's unexpected, unfathomable (even to you) rave is considered luck. Polish every detail; it's all in the details, in the individual moments. Halfway measures avail you nothing: going all out is the only chance. We were home, but we didn't let go, we locked in the details—with more smoke and mirrors: one more invention, one more surprise. The Cagelles paraded like the most elegant models, but when they were ready to remove their gilded coats, they didn't merely drop them in the wings. They moved gracefully into a row of arches that had come down, struck what seemed to be a narcissistic pose, and when the arches flew back up, the coats flew out with them and the creatures were now in Riviera beach pajamas, which allowed them to dance—they were all marvelous dancers. A trick, but tricks like that aren't as easy as they seem. They demand painstaking care and endless rehearsal. To work, they have to flow smoothly; when they do, the audience capitulates like children at the circus—or adults at the Cirque de Soleil. More smoke and mirrors ensured enslavement: another magical costume switch allowed highly skilled tap dancing. Then one last use, the most effective of all because it led back to character and story—always, always the goal. It's so difficult to find and get right, but without that, smoke and mirrors are just smoke and mirrors, theatrical devices to blind the audience to the emptiness on stage, the holes in the story, the lack of dimension in the characters. When used for something more than diversion and entertainment, they can make musical theatre memorable—like their last use in the opening number of Cage.

  In the France of La Cage aux Folles, the law made drag performers remove their wigs at the end of their act to prove there was no attempt to deceive the audience, and so the Cagelles ended the opening number by removing their wigs with a very theatrical flourish. Nonetheless, they didn't necessarily reveal their true gender: the longest, loveliest hair that tumbled down when the wigs were removed didn't belong to a woman but to a startlingly beautiful young man. This confused everyone, but by then, that was just what they wanted. What could be happier than an audience at a musical that gets what it wants? So happy, they didn't suspect the climax of the second act was being set up: Albin, in Chanel-like drag, pretends to be the boy's mother. From habit, he removes his wig at the end of a song sung to the boy, his fiancée, and her homophobic father. Mother Albin is exposed as a man; mass hysteria—and the play was positioned to make its point. All the parts rarely fall into place with just one stroke as they did at that moment. Joy for everyone—the creators, the executants, and, above all, the customers.

  That theatrical sorcery continued throughout the evening. The lovely young girl hired as the love interest wasn't much of an actress and less of a singer. The choreographer had to be allowed to win one battle: the girl was a lovely dancer. Unfortunately, as it turned out, her dance was radically shortened—as it often turns out, because musical theatre has severely diminished the audience's interest in Pierrot and Pierrette. She had her dancer moments nevertheless: at every entrance, she came in turning like a top, ending in a swoon into some male's arms. Why? Because on the page, her character was the ingénue, Pierrette, barely two-dimensional. The turning entrance gave her a quirky touch, and the swooning added humor and sex (the only sex in the play).

  If a style is established, a character can enter walking on her hands and the audience will buy it. The style of Cage was established in the first scene by the slightly off-the-wall but oddly real behavior of the two major characters and their houseboy, Jacob— a tricky character because he's black and gay and unbridled: a combination that can be lethal if the wrong line is crossed. Succumb to the temptation of unchecked screeching, as the tasteless revival did, and Evangelicals will rejoice. The key, as always, is emotional reality. The right emotional center and the character can safely do anything. A rejected and depressed Albin walks along the Croisette in a white suit with a white Panama hat and black sunglasses, dabbing away with a large white handkerchief edged in black. (I stole the handkerchief from John Gielgud in The Importance of Being Earnest.) Jacob, in a white Greek toga bordered with a black frieze, holds a large black-edged white umbrella over his adored “mistress” as they move in rhythmic grief to a classical dirge. The audience found it very funny. Smoke and mirrors.

  The reaction to the show continually astonished us. Previews began in Boston in a torrid July. (West Side Story had begun previews in Washington in a steaming August. Does that advise opening in a heat wave? I think not.) The first preview had the audience on its feet, even in the upper balcony. The next morning, the line at the box office was so long, the producers threw caution and money to the only-metaphorical wind and brought coffee and doughnuts for everyone, even passersby on their way to work. The critics raved; the chief Boston critic made the show his personal baby and offered suggestions he expected to be taken—a dicey position I'm not sure I quite wriggled out of as we made needed changes on our own. Equally astonishing was the reaction of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. The distinguished couple announced that except for My Fair Lady, La Cage aux Folles was the best musical they had ever seen in their lives. I thought they had lost their minds.

  The Kanins saw the play several times. Then Garson did something that was fairly common back then but is almost unheard of today. We weren't friends: I'd been on the council of the Dramatists Guild with him; Ruth had flirted with starring as a Holocaust survivor in a black comedy of mine called Big Potato, but then decided she didn't have the stamina for a role so large. I knew them, that's all; but Garson called me at my hotel with a suggestion to help the new ending I had given to a shaky new comedy quartet in the second act. The suggestion gave the button to the number something I hadn't seen it needed: reality of place—Albin had entered from his bedroom when he clearly should have come from outside the house and entered through the front door. Where was all my insistence on reality? Forgotten in trying to get as many laughs as possible out of an intrinsically not very funny number. But Gar spotting that important flaw surprised me, because reality had never been evident in his work—which shows how much you can read from someone's work, or how little. Anyway, most gratefully, I jumped at his suggestion and the number really landed.

  Back then, that was what theatre people did—help one another. They went out of town, eager with anticipation for a new play or musical; help was available to friends or just peers and colleagues. Today, anyone out of town to see something on its hopeful way in brings a metaphorical prayer rug which is mentally unrolled and knelt on; forehead is then touched to the floor in prayer for the disaster that the new effort has been whispered to be—a little insurance can't hurt. Back then, people were enjoyable and generous; not today, twenty-five-plus years later. The theatre today is star-entombed, largely unadventurous, centered on being profitable entertainment. Twenty-five-plus years ago, entertainment was also a goal—television's influence was firmly entrenched—but not the goal; there was room for the original, the innovative, and the ambitious, politically as well as artistically. The theatre season of La Cage aux Folles was also the season of Sunday in the Park with George. Sunday won the Pulitzer Prize; Cage swept the Tonys. Prestige for one, box office for the other—and a bio line for both.

  The artistic value of prizes, including the Nobel, has always eluded me. Their luster is tarnished by too many unworthy winners, by the politicking involved, and by the insistence that there be a winner even though the candidates are unqualified and often chosen by unknown anointers. The real value of a prize like the Tony is its purpose: boosting box-office sales, interest from the road, the foreign market, stock and amateur rights—in other words, money. Artistic value can't be claimed when in the year I'm writing this, neither LoveMusik, the most original and inventive musical on Broadway in years, nor its director, Hal Prince, who this late in his career showed what the future of Broadway musicals might be, was nominated for anything but oblivion. Yes, the show's splendid leading actors were nomina
ted; yes, the show had obvious faults: for one, the audience was uncertain where it was and what was going on until twenty minutes into the play; for another, the off-putting German accents used by the German characters should only have been used when they came to America, not in their homeland. But not to acknowledge the production's equally obvious accomplishments was to fail to realize what music theatre can be when it dares. Hal Prince had a slew of Tonys to boast about in his Playbill bio, but I suspect just a nomination for LoveMusik might have meant more to him than some of his winners—understandable, but, I think, mistaking the worth of the prize. What I really don't understand are actors who boast of nominations for a Tony or a Drama Desk or a Lower Hemisphere Award in their bios—the same actors who wind up with: “Thanks to Marci, Dwight, Jocko, Mom and Rex, the best company ever, my dresser, Uta Hagen and Jesus.”

  The value of smoke and mirrors to the success of a production is on a par with their value to the success of a director's career. More than the audience is fooled: nothing can make a director a Director quicker than one highly praised concept musical. Is that what directing is—expertise with smoke and mirrors? What about the performance, the acting? Who is responsible? Who is really responsible for the smoke and mirrors? Is it the director or is it the choreographer or the designer or even the author? Who stages the songs—the director, the choreographer, or both in tandem?

  That last question was rhetorical in the day of La Cage aux Folles because the good choreographers, the grand choreographers— Robbins, Fosse, Bennett—were directors as well. Since I was directing Cage, it would have been pointless to ask one of those icons to choreograph, and might well have been regarded as insulting: the egos involved were not small. Consequently, there were few Broadway-experienced choreographers to consider for Cage— two, to be factual. Only two! Pathetic. For the others, Broadway experience was confined to being a gypsy and a onetime assistant to a second-tier choreographer/director. As it turned out, the quality of work had nothing to do with consideration of the two candidates with résumé.

  Is it because plot is a basic ingredient of theatre that it infects theatre people and makes them prone to plot and connive? More often than not, a homegrown plot takes over what should be a simple, straightforward act like acquiring a choreographer. One of the two choices (ordinarily, I thought two the most desirable number in the world, but the production side of theatre isn't romantic, it's business)—one of the two was intrigued; she liked the score and liked how I saw the numbers. But I smelled a rat. Why? I'm not sure. Something seemed to be holding her back; what, precisely, I never did find out. Rejecting the job, she said she wasn't right for the show; but that's the out we all use when we want to reject an offer diplomatically. Was co-directing what she was after? I brought it up; she denied it—but since she became a hyphenate the first chance she got, that was probably what I smelled. I wasn't disappointed; my first choice was Bob Avian, who worked closely with Michael Bennett almost from the beginning of his meteoric career all the way up to A Chorus Line. When we met, I liked him, I felt we were in sync (how we see what we want to see!). Jerry and I were in his living room, waiting for Bob to arrive to head upstairs to the studio and go over the score with him in detail when the phone rang: Could he bring Michael? Michael Bennett, of course; there was no other Michael those days. I didn't smell a rat, I saw a rat—and it was a big one.

  This was the musical-theatre version of Bill Clinton's first run for president: with Hillary, her husband said, we the people were getting two for one. With Michael, Avian said, we the Cage people were getting two for one. I didn't want another director; neither did Jerry. We wanted Avian solo, and I said so, but that didn't end the game. Michael phoned: charming, admiring, another fan of Gypsy. Nevertheless, it was clearly Allan Carr who would be getting two for one and not I. Michael was offering to make Cage his next musical, and where Michael Bennett was ranked in the Broadway hierarchy, that was an offer that was not to be refused. But Jerry Herman and I had chutzpah: we refused.

  I thought it would end there, but it didn't. Allan Carr, like every producer of a musical, went looking for a Broadway theatre for the show with the theatre owner ponying up a sizeable investment. Like every musical producer, he went to the Shuberts: they have most of the best musical houses. The Shuberts were Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs. Today only Gerry is left; Bernie is only a theatre. (Gerry is also a theatre; the Shuberts own them both.) Gerry was more than willing to give Allan a major Shubert house plus an investment of $500,000. He had only one requirement: replace Arthur Laurents with Michael Bennett.

  Gerry and Bernie were as intense as lovers in their rivalry for the affection of Michael, but Michael Bennett would have been chosen by anyone on Broadway. Not by Allan Carr, though. Allan chose me. Imagine! Maybe to give the (manicured) finger to a Broadway that regarded him as a silly Hollywood queen; maybe because he sat through all those backer auditions and was impressed; maybe it simply was ego, insisting on backing the horse he entered the Broadway derby with. Whatever the reason, not another producer on Broadway would have done what he did. The God that loves loyalty among gays was pleased: Allan's loyalty paid off bigger than his dreams—and his dreams were enhanced by coke. La Cage aux Folles ran for four years, had several national companies, played London and Sydney, and made a fortune— more for Allan and his cronies than for his investors. He didn't come from Broadway and he never planned to stay on Broadway; maybe that's why he conquered Broadway.

  Now to answer the unanswered questions above: who is responsible for what musical staging, etc. I didn't digress as an attempt to duck answering; the questions are too important. The basic underlying issue is director versus choreographer for control of the performance.

  To risk an umbrella generalization, as a breed, choreographers are not too good with actors; consequently, they're not good at getting the performances that make musicals musical theatre rather than musical comedy. They're good with dancers, whom they understandably treat as bodies because they use them to create in the way authors use words and composers use notes. Actors have their own particular kind of creativity. They don't respond well to being used as putty. Even though in the end they may want to be told which way to go, they need to arrive at that point; they need to be treated as people. Even choreographers aware of that need have trouble getting an acting performance, because while they're fluent in the language of dancers, the language of acting is foreign to them. Their poetic metaphors are comprehensible (and flattering) to dancers; actors need less artistic and more specific speech to deal with subtext and unconscious emotions. The acting in the shining days of the choreographer/director shows was never quite as good as it could have been—not even in Fosse shows, which is odd, because the acting in his movies is very good. On the other hand, the acting in the movie of West Side Story is embarrassing (don't rely on memory, view it again, just the first ten minutes; you will be aghast at your younger judgment). The inept performances could be attributed to Hollywood's Robert Wise, who is screencredited with co-directing the movie with Broadway's Jerome Rob-bins. Wise, a former film editor, was the lauded director of several woodenly acted films—the movie version of The Sound of Music, for example, was his. Jerry, who at least asked for assistance in directing the acting of the original stage West Side, shared the Oscar for it with Wise (even though he had been fired during the shooting). The overacting of the peroxided, Max Factored Jets can be attributed to him, but not the reciting of Richard Beymer. But which of them was responsible for the pancaked Sharks in silk blousons and their Day Gloed, Carmen Mirandaed girls? Small wonder that three decades later, high-school students in Amherst who had only seen the movie, not the show, said West Side Story was anti-Puerto Rican and blocked a projected school production.

  Who is responsible for the smoke and mirrors? Varies. Who has the bigger name, the director or the choreographer? Who wants the responsibility? Who knows how to inspire designers? Who is more creative? That is the single most determining factor, a
s it should be. The single most important practical question is: who stages the songs—the director or the choreographer, or both in tandem? Even should it be the latter, it still will be who is first among equals, director or choreographer?

  A bravura song in Cage called “A Little More Mascara” provides a perfect example of the difference between a director's approach and a choreographer's approach in the staging and performance in comparing the original production and the recent revival. In the original, Albin (George Hearn at his best) is sitting in his sad cubicle of a dressing room. The dressing room is in midair, isolating Albin, visually making him lonely and alone. He sits at his dressing table in a corset with the “false boobs” he sings about mournfully, without makeup (George's white-on-white skin helped), an aging queen staring into the mirror at his wrinkles. His star as Zaza, drag Queen of Riviera Cabaret, is flickering out. As he sadly sings, the only thing that keeps him going is to “put a little more mascara on.” As he begins making up, he does just that: light base, eye shadow, false eyelashes, mascara. Brush on a touch of rouge, a little more mascara, lipstick, a little more mascara. Pull on a wig; pull up a gold-sequined dress hidden by the skirt of the dressing table; fasten it via a rhinestone collar (and Velcro); throw a feather boa around his powdered shoulders; step out from behind the dressing table, and lo and behold! There, on the top of a lighted stairway that slid out to greet him with an archway of twinkling lights coming down to frame him, there was Zaza! Undiminished, triumphant, Queen of the Riviera again! It was a highly theatrical staging and an emotionally moving performance.