When the gaggle of producers on Nick & Nora added my refusal to fire Tina Paul, our choreographer, to the weekly water-boarding they gave me, I called Jerry and asked if he would come see the show. Tina's work with a company of nondancers impressed him. And the show? He liked it, but … But what? Something, he didn't know what, was wrong. We talked at length, as only friends do. Neither of us could figure out what that something was, but there was something.
Too late, I figured out what it was; but it would have been too late at the outset. The musical was based on the Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Dashiell Hammett's famous characters Nick and Nora Charles. Except that by the time the musical was being birthed, Nick and Nora Charles weren't as famous as William Powell and Myrna Loy; in fact, they no longer existed. The world knew the Thin Man movies only as the lubricated adventures of William Powell and Myrna Loy. The actors in the musical, no matter how good Joanna Gleason and Barry Bostwick were—and they were very good—didn't have a chance. That was the something wrong with the show.
Why did I go to London to take over West Side Story? Jerry had come to help when I asked, I went when he asked. Happily, I wouldn't have two problems I had the last time I directed an English company of an American musical, Gypsy with Angela Lansbury: teaching the very insular English actors how to speak American and implanting them with energy. Twenty-five years later, the English (and Australians) could speak regional American and were capable of burning up the stage. Moreover—an important credential for playing West Side—there had been a large influx of people of color in Britain, so they all knew about prejudice, including their own. What that company didn't know was how to use what they did know in their performances—largely because they had been directed by an American choreographer practiced in putting out companies of West Side Story as by the established numbers.
The dancing was typical of what was wrong. It was advertised as Jerome Robbins's choreography, but it wasn't—it was his steps. What the steps meant, why they were doing them, the dancers were never told. The same was true of the songs, and as for the book—well, Maria and Tony were in love, Riff and Bernardo didn't like each other, and Anita was easily upset but had great extension. On the plus side, they were young, they were extremely attractive, they sang and danced beautifully, and they couldn't have been hungrier for help. In two weeks, they learned an enormous amount—and so did I.
From the misbegotten 1980 revival, I knew the scenery and costumes needed to be changed. The scenery, I couldn't do anything about, but I could light it differently. Directors should get down on their knees in gratitude to a lighting designer like Howell Binkley who did Gypsy with me and is doing the new West Side Story I'm preparing. The costumes, I could do something about—not enough, but something. It may have been authentic in 1957 for gangs to wear jackets to a dance, but in 1998, they looked like chorus boys. Out went most of the jackets, in came windbreakers and rolled-up shirt sleeves. With the girls, out came the scissors. Skirts were slashed from calf length to knee length and higher; necklines were lowered. It all helped.
A cardinal sin was committed: I fiddled with the choreography—beginning at the beginning with the first dance, the Prologue. A Jet, as choreographed, reaches over a wall to whack a Shark with a sack of flour; in London, he hit him over the head with a blackjack. I fiddled more with the dialogue—safe territory because that was mine. Most effective of all, and truest to life, Tony and Maria were as sexual as possible. They had absolutely beautiful voices, but to sing “Tonight” together, they had to get their tongues out of each other's mouth. In their bridal-shop scene, marriage seemed essential if what they were about to do was fruitful.
It was a very happy time for the cast, for me, and for the producers. I also learned about the pitfalls in West Side Story: some brought on by the passage of time were anticipated, some that I had thought were there weren't, some I hadn't realized were there were always there. More than anything else, I learned that what was most needed for any new production was a fresh, original look at the show. What that was, I had no idea. In 1998 in London, it didn't matter. The audience was too delighted to see the show done again and with passion and excitement to boot. In 2006 in New York, a new idea mattered.
In that year, there was a frenzied campaign for a revival of West Side Story on Broadway in 2007. Why? Presumably, to honor its fiftieth anniversary, but not incidentally that anniversary was a good selling point, not only for Broadway but for a subsequent tour, both of which could mean a lot of money. Money was the first priority in the country. Well, isn't theatre supposed to reflect the time?
There were two certified choreographers to choose from for the golden dancing goose, but who to direct? Who to be responsible for the production? The question was unsettled, settled, unsettled in meeting after meeting of the rights-holding estates until it was fortunately too late to get any production ready in time for the anniversary. During all the backing-and-forthing, however, something remarkable happened. That much-needed-and-wanted fresh, original approach to a revival had surfaced. It came from Tom Hatcher.
Tom always had a project going in addition to his day job. The most lasting was the beautiful twelve-acre private park he created in Quogue, where we would sit on a special bench every day and talk. Even now, every day I'm in Quogue, I sit on that bench and talk to him.
A less grand project was his prescient desire to learn Spanish. He worked hard at it, spending two weeks in Ecuador, where Quito has the best Spanish-teaching school in the world. As he became fluent, he travelled South America avidly and regularly. I went with him occasionally—love is togetherness, but it benefits from separation now and then. In Buenos Aires, we became friends of F&F—Federico and Fernando, agents, translators, facilitators, entrepreneurs. They knew everybody, were known by everybody and not quite placeable by anybody except those at the American embassy who knew Federico in his other life as the Argentinean cultural and legal adviser. In the theatre, anything in English went into Spanish courtesy of F&F. They were eager to get a production of West Side Story done in South America, in Buenos Aires. One was done, but not in Buenos Aires, in Bogotá, and not by them.
I had been to Bogotá with Tom, but when that West Side was done by a local company in Spanish, he was there alone on opening night. He reported back on the production in excited detail. What most fascinated him was that the hometown language being Spanish, the Sharks were the heroes and the Jets were the villains. That sent mind and blood racing.
“If we could equalize the gangs here,” I said, “both would be the villains they are.”
“Why not have the Sharks speak Spanish?” Tom said.
And there it was—the reason for a new production. It excited me and now I wanted to direct it.
It excited everyone who heard Tom's idea. At first, I didn't tell them it was Tom's—I didn't want it dismissed. We had removed ourselves from the social world of the theatre a long time before, because he was dismissed as my “boyfriend.” Liked and enjoyed, even lusted for, but victim of an attitude highlighted in my play 2 Lives: when he fetched a drink for someone at a party, the person who had asked for it was gone when he came back. Subterranean homophobia is as strong as, perhaps even stronger than, its racial equivalent.
Working out the use of Spanish wasn't as simple as anticipated. Anita sings how much she wants to be an American. She would therefore sing in English, not Spanish—the jokes in the lyric of “America” wouldn't work in Spanish, anyway. She would also be determined to speak English even to Bernardo, who would be equally determined to speak Spanish. That would need revisions. So would the section in the dance hall when Bernardo speaks to Maria. It would be in Spanish, which Tony would not understand, though he would get the gist. And when Bernardo is killed, it's the end of English for Anita: “A Boy Like That” has to be sung in Spanish.
The challenge revved me up, but I couldn't handle it alone; I wasn't bilingual. I hadn't anticipated the need to, because Tom was so fluent in Span
ish. He would be there to help as I worked on the script and in rehearsal as I worked on the performances. And then he wasn't there. He died of lung cancer on October 26, 2006. Fifty-two completely shared years. Loss is hard, it's difficult, it's sometimes impossible, but, as I slowly learned, I was fortunate to have those fifty-two years.
“The show must go on” isn't always just a joke or a cliché. West Side Story literally did have to go on. It was already contracted for; after a pause for the Gypsy Tom had urged me to do—a year's pause because of its move to Chernobyl, aka Broadway—work began, though with not as much enthusiasm. I ran into difficulty trying to get a script in Puerto Rican Spanish. MTI had one, but it looked as though it had barely survived tropical dry rot. Another script turned up that was in Spanish, not necessarily Puerto Rican, but scenes were missing. I suspended hunting and called F&F. They had always wanted to do West Side, they were friends, they had to have a script of West Side Story in Spanish.
They did. It had been vetted by Tom, and his corrections were on it in his familiar handwriting.
A director's work begins long before the first day of rehearsal—at the moment he opens the script. Which will be different by the first day of rehearsal, even for a revival. For me, with West Side Story, work obviously began even before that due to the bilingual factor. Tom's death was an unexpected rupture that diminished my enthusiasm for the project, but the arrival of his script, corrected in his handwriting, was a message that sent me back to work with more than just renewed enthusiasm. I went back with the love that drove Gypsy.
Although I set about cobbling together the bilingual version myself, someone was going to be needed to vet my questionable Spanish. It was Kevin McCollum who suggested asking Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was busy preparing the transfer of their In the Heights from Off Broadway to Broadway. Nevertheless, Lin readily agreed to help. Who were these people, and why were they so helpful?
There are no coincidences or accidents, but there is often one hand washing the other, and occasionally even an act of pure generosity. Kevin and his partner, Jeffrey Seller, were producers of Lin's musical about Puerto Rican Americans in far uptown New York City, as well as the executive producers, partnered with the Nederlanders, of this new bilingual version of a musical set not as far uptown on the west side of New York. But Lin? Why did he agree without hesitation? A partial answer: he was brought up on West Side Story, he admired and respected it and always had. But there is the rest of the answer: Lin-Manuel Miranda is a generous young man, in an old-school tradition that is almost gone.
Even while working on the script, a director is mentally assembling the team to bring his vision of the play to theatre life. For West Side, my choice would obviously be the same team that worked so brilliantly on Gypsy, and it was, but any director with sense and/or experience knows there's a good chance he will be thrown a curve. I was thrown two.
The first and more important was by Craig Jacobs, but that I understood. He was burned out. Gypsy had been difficult enough, West Side Story was going to be more difficult—because of the way I envisioned the production—and he wanted to go back to Phantom of the Opera, where he had been production stage manager for eleven years. He had been on loan to Gypsy from Hal Prince, Phantom's director and an old friend of mine dating back to the original production of West Side, where he was the most active producer. But I went even farther back with his inestimable wife, Judy, the only person I would eagerly have lunch with. I knew her from early Hollywood when she palled around with her imaginary friend, Bessie Glum, and I wrote a play for her twelfth birthday called Queen Lear which had only one speaking part—Judy's.
Craig would still check performances of Gypsy twice a week. Most helpful of all, he would do what I most needed him for and what he did better than anyone in the theatre: he would make out the schedule for West Side Story from its first day of rehearsals through its tryout in Washington. That was going to be tortuous and tricky, previewing through the Christmas holidays up to pre-Inauguration frenzy, all during days of financial yo-yo hysteria to prevent a Depression.
The second curve was thrown by Marty Pakledinaz, and was a clean hit to the heart. On Gypsy, only Craig had been closer to me. During the time between City Center and the St. James Theatre, Marty and I had continued discussing the theatre we wanted to be part of and talked about West Side Story as that kind of theatre. However, Marty had an offer from another director he “loved” to do a quasi-new musical—“quasi” because the score was old Gershwin songs and the show was being star-tailored. The two shows were scheduled for the same rehearsal date. Marty chose the quasi. What I didn't understand and still don't was Martin Pakledinaz choosing that kind of theatre.
Before Tom's death, I would have been angry at Marty. Now I felt disappointed that the friendship was over. Too unforgiving? The loss of Tom has made me treasure the few true friends I am fortunate to have; admittedly, they are few. A friend cannot be replaced; a designer, even one as good as Marty, can be. His replacement was David Woolard, a man whose work I had never seen. Why did I choose him? Well, I knew of no other costume designer right for the job; I interviewed two or three and wasn't encouraged. But David was highly recommended by Jim Youmans and Howell Binkley of the Gypsy team, who had worked with him before and often. I knew Jim and Howell well, I trusted them, and they were choosing a designer they would have to work with. A team that likes working as a team is essential for a director.
When I met David, we connected almost from the moment he sat upright yet relaxed on my sofa. He's laid-back where Marty is always on the verge of something jittery. The decision was cinched when after I explained how I saw the production, David used one telling word to describe how he saw the costumes: dangerous. With, once again, Dan Moses Schreier, the best of sand designers, the West Side Story team was complete.
A DVD of a highly praised fiftieth-anniversary revival of West Side confirmed for me that the passage of time had made it even more of a minefield than I had thought ten years earlier when I directed it in London. Why? Because, an accurate replication of the original, it showed too clearly that the most difficult problems stemmed from portraying the Jets as likeable tough little thugs. This misconception was reflected in the opening Jet song, staged as a fifties musical-comedy number, and in “Gee, Officer Krupke,” a vaudeville comedy showstopper. The kids in gangs today are angry, vicious, and violent, heedless killers, but they were in the fifties, too. They haven't changed, the theatre has. Somehow, they would have to be played as what they are.
Then there was the second-act ballet. As beautiful as much of the dancing is, no matter how you slice it, the second-act ballet is still the second-act ballet. Lovely dancing with a generalized emotion or two in a self-conscious dreamworld. Half a century ago, it was part of the show; today, it has to be made part of the play. Not an easy task, but hopefully achievable if a very different approach is used. A challenge, all this, for me to communicate to Joey McNeely, who has been replicating Jerry's choreography for years all over Europe as well as here, and for him to execute with his assistant, the lovely Lori Werner. They are perfectly balanced: Joey is constantly fired up, ready to take off; Lori is his control tower.
The new approach was equally difficult and became more so each day for Patrick Vaccariello, the music conductor, who was totally tuned in to what I wanted played and sung differently in Gypsy and achieved it brilliantly. I can't envision doing a musical without Patrick. That music, however, was Jule Styne; this was Leonard Bernstein, much more complex and sacrosanct. The fine line that had to be walked with this new approach, erasing the fifties without violating what made West Side Story the classic it has become, was a new approach I explained at a production meeting of the whole team.
Production meetings are the most fertile ground for the ideas that transform a show. They can pop suddenly out of anyone's mouth to influence, shift, elevate the direction of the show. At one early meeting, I heard someone who turned out to be me explain a conception as though it were
the result of much thought but in reality had just occurred to me that minute. Why? I have no idea, and since it's decades since I was in analysis, no therapist to help. West Side Story was about how love cannot survive in a world of bigotry and violence. It exists, then, in a world of its own—a Renaissance world, the world of Romeo and Juliet, the greatest love story ever told and retold. It wasn't necessary to relate all this; just the word “Renaissance” excited the room. Everyone got it and used it. The fire escape that Tony climbs to reach Maria became a baroque balcony that resembles a fire escape. The color of Tony and Maria's costumes reflects the Renaissance: a Della Robbia blue rather than a Jet or Shark color.
We had a three-hour production meeting on the subject of color. In the original production, and thus in almost every production since, the Sharks were in purple, red, and black, the Jets were in blue and yellow. Solid colors made the dance at the gym vividly theatrical in 1957. Today, that highly lauded treatment would make the gangs and their girls seem like chorus boys and girls. David Woolard devised a new approach. The color that individualized each gang was on each costume but in many different ways—some large, some small, even as small as a headband or a scarf around the neck, but the gang alliance was clear. Life imitated art when in Nyack, Jim Youman's hometown, a high-school girl wearing a neck bandana the color of her boyfriend's gang had it yanked off by a member of a rival gang. In less than ten minutes, war broke out with knives and even axes. No killings but several hospitalizations. The immediate cause: color.
At the first meeting of the whole production team, I claimed two things were going to make this West Side Story unique and unlike any other that had ever been done anywhere. First, of course, was that it was going to be bilingual. I didn't realize, however, until auditions, when scenes were read in Spanish, that the difference was going to be even more dramatic than Tom and I had imagined. Latinos are more passionate and less inhibited than gringos or Anglos or whatever hyphenated immigrants you want to label the rest of us. Even read with script in hand, their scenes were on fire, and funny even without understanding the actual words. The Jets were going to have to dig deep to hold their own. That led directly to the second element that was going to make this West Side Story so special.
Mainly on Directing Page 16
