Mainly on Directing

by Arthur Laurents

  Even in Boston, where the rewritten show was a hit, he kept after me, concentrating on Elliott, who was drenching the first rows with sweat when he danced. We called Dr. “Miracle” Max Jacobson in New York; he prescribed a pill that stopped the sweating but dried up Elliott's vocal cords so he couldn't sing. Merrick flew in replacements from Hollywood. One of them was Michael Callan, who as Mickey Calin had been the original Riff in West Side Story:: very magnetic, and he danced without watering the first rows. When I finally said “Enough!” and told Merrick to stop wasting his money on plane fare because I was not going to fire Elliott, Nora Kaye (who was assisting her husband, Herb Ross, with the choreography) burst into tears—not because of any principle upheld but because she believed in Elliott's talent. Dancers, like other minorities, stick together.

  Some months after the show opened in New York, Merrick brought in another West Side alumnus, Larry Kert, who did replace Elliott. By that time, Elliott and Barbra were living happily together in Harry Hart's red West End Avenue apartment and their eyes on the next yellow brick road.

  When a show is in trouble, out of town or in, the director has got to move and to move fast in behalf of every name on the billboard, which put together don't spell mother but the whole show. The terror-prompted rewrites Jerome Weidman handed me in Philadelphia were bewildering, even embarrassing.

  “If I give these to the cast, they'll laugh,” I told him.

  “I meant them to laugh,” he said, laughing himself. Jerome Weidman meant for the actors to laugh at his rewrites? Fear, bluster, but he said that sentence quote unquote.

  There was my resolve to respect the authors and there was Weidman's sentence, which kept reverberating. I thought more rewriting was needed; he didn't—or he didn't think he could do more. And I didn't disagree with him: I dropped my resolve and picked up the yellow legal pad and the Blackwing pencil.

  The charge of anti-Semitism, I ignored. The protagonist of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the antihero played by Elliott Gould, is a Sammy Glick cousin in the garment industry. There will always be those who say such a character is anti-Semitic; their number will depend on how successful the show is. The actual impediment to Wholesale's success came largely from fidelity to its source: the novel. Novels are better adapted to the screen. Generally loosely structured, their ruminative qualities are unsuited to musical theatre, where economy and bold strokes are a necessity. They are what give a show pace and drive; walking in the footprints of a novel throws off the rhythm, both in individual scenes and in the show as a whole.

  Cutting and editing Weidman's script to clean out dross and get pace came easily. Rewriting dialogue to replace statements of theme with brief, pointed emotional outbursts brought qualms but wasn't hard. Restructuring to bring kinetic energy to the scene-song predictability, to syncopate its rhythm theatrically, wasn't so easy, but I knew where to dive in. I hadn't done so before because of my determination to respect the text. Respect shouldn't come with the territory; it should be merited.

  Just before we left Boston, I made a mistake I've never forgotten. I've never made it again.

  The last scene in the play, a coda really, was a brief meeting between a down-and-out Harry and Ruthie, the girlfriend he had jilted. She still wants him; he's not interested in her until she mentions she's inherited a little money. Back to life comes Harry with a wild-eyed grin that makes the audience laugh even as it shudders.

  I staged the scene in front of the drop that suggested Seventh Avenue. Racks of dresses were pushed across the stage from both sides, criss-crossing each other to music. One crossing rack revealed Harry; another, from the opposite direction, revealed Ruthie. They smile, she wistfully, he politely; they make talk, and she mentions her inheritance. Everything is suddenly suspended in mid silent air. The music stops; the audience watches and waits. Then Harry grins and the orchestra plays “The Sound of Money,” a song Harry had sung earlier. An effective ending: applause started even as the curtain started down.

  Then I had a last-minute idea I thought rang the bell figuratively as well as literally. It went in at the last Wednesday matinee in Boston. When the inheritance was mentioned and everything and everyone was suspended in a breathless pause, the silence was broken by the ping of a cash register. That was what made Harry grin, cueing “The Sound of Money.”

  I loved it. The audience didn't. The ping shocked it into a unanimous, audible gasp of revulsion. When the curtain started down, there was no applause.

  That it was a Wednesday-matinee audience of Boston ladies, that the shock and the gasp were really the reaction I wanted, I ignored. I ran scared. I cut the cash register and didn't even think of trying it again at a preview in New York.

  Nothing in the show made the point of the story as economically, as theatrically, as well overall as the sound of that cash register. It was the kind of moment you remember long after you've seen the show. It might have helped Wholesale immeasurably. It might also have merely been a moment that came and went. But I cut it because the audience response had made me afraid the cash register was too much, too obvious, over the top, too naked a statement. In my gut it was right for the show and a directorial touch to be proud of, but I cut it because one audience had made me afraid.

  When I returned to this country after living in Paris because I'd been blacklisted here during the Hollywood Witch Hunt, I wouldn't sign petitions or give my name or money to anything. It hadn't been easy to get my passport back, and quite simply, I was afraid. I can claim I was being practical, and in time the fear did evaporate. Pair that with one moment in a musical? One cut made because of one audience's reaction, one betrayal of oneself? Yes; the thwarted principle behind each was the same: do what you believe.

  One misstep can set a pattern—in the theatre, particularly if the show concerned does well. Wholesale did very well for me, but my misstep set no pattern. It was a mistake, and when the air cleared, I wasn't easy on myself for making it.

  After Tom died, my values got clearer and firmer. I wasn't going to do anything in the theatre unless it really excited me, and then I would do it the way I believed it should be done or not at all. That was tested several times during Gypsy; one provided a special lesson. A man I respected and whose opinion meant a great deal to me saw a preview at the St. James and called me the next day to tear the show to shreds. There wasn't a positive anything when he finished. I had overdone everything; Patti was terrible, angry from start to finish; “Rose's Turn” was totally incomprehensible and a mess; Laura's laughter when she walked off at the end was the cruelest thing he'd ever seen in the theatre. He followed up with a two-page e-mail that was vicious with details. The unexpectedness of the attack had shock value. I said nothing; I didn't answer his e-mail (but I printed it out as a reminder).

  Because it was he, I was shaken. For a long moment. Then I heard him saying Patti's Rose was angry from start to finish. That, I could truly be objective about. Patti LuPone's Rose was more fun and funnier, sexier, more loving even in the early scenes than any Rose he or anyone else ever saw. He was wrong—dead, fabricated wrong. Clearly his opinion didn't come from a performance he saw on the stage of the St. James but from something askew inside him.

  I never mentioned to him the phenomenal response of the audience every night, including the night he saw it. Nor did I mention later the phenomenal, unanimous response of the press. I didn't expect him to, either, and he didn't; but he had to know about it—he read the Times. Both audience and press were welcome validation.

  And necessary.

  No, you say?

  Yes, I say. I remember the attack because I respected the attacker, just as I remember the praise because of my respect and admiration for the man it came from. But I would have done what I did without a word one way or the other from either of them or anyone else. That's what I learned from him.

  Moral: do what you believe in.

  (Laughing): Cant we put it another way that doesn't sound so much like a candidate for a needlepoint
pillow? Never do what you don't believe in. Even if it's successful, it isn't worth it.

  Really?

  Really. Not for me. You won't keep me in my seat for your second act just because you're a hit. I won't expect you to stay in your seat for mine unless it's theatre as you dreamed it would be, or why am I doing it?

  FIVE

  Smoke and Mirrors

  SINCE IT'S ALWAYS BEEN NEXT to impossible to find a happy homosexual on the Broadway stage who is still happy at the final curtain, the notion of a multimillion-dollar Broadway musical with two happy homosexuals on stage at the final curtain seemed completely impossible to me. That it would be adapted from a successful movie didn't make it any less so.

  The movie was a little French farce called La Cage aux Folles. Its success in this country was surprising, for its hero was a drag queen. In France, drag is a tradition; in the United States, drag is a camp or a sin, frequently both. In Hollywood, there was a producer for whom camp, as much as box-office success, made the film a hot property. His name was Allan Carr. Famous, locally anyway, for his insane parties at the old Ingrid Bergman house in Beverly Hills and then for cleaning up with Grease, Carr was serious about Cage for Broadway. He took off his caftan, put on a blue blazer, and came east to turn a camp French film into a camp musical, innocently certain he had a smash hit on his hands. He wanted me to direct.

  I didn't want to direct: drag turned me off. In life, I was introduced to it at my first meeting of the Gay Activists Alliance at the old Firehouse in the Village. Tom Hatcher had joined the Alliance much earlier and brought me into the fold. When I walked through the Firehouse door, I felt I was politically home again. The battered jeans, the scraggly beards, the “Point of order! Point of order!”—all the appurtenances of the left-wing past I had been missing were there. The desired effect of the Hollywood Witch Hunt had been silence. Now that silence was broken, and by more than the usual voices overshouting each other. This was a kind of screeching from fiery protesters with wild mops of hair in embroidered tunics worn over battered jeans and muddy work boots: drag queens of the gay revolution—aka transvestites ranting against “straight” gays who, they claimed, were ashamed of them and trying to push them out of the Gay Liberation picture. They were right; they still are.

  Drag in the theatre wasn't to my taste, either. I didn't and don't consider all-male productions like Clifford Williams's As You Like It at the Old Vic in London in the sixties as drag. Brilliant acting added a new dimension to the play: was Orlando in love with Rosalind as a woman or as a man pretending to be a woman? Real drag I first saw in the theatre—a facsimile of theatre, really—much earlier, in Greenwich Village, where abbreviated versions of hit Broadway musicals were performed with switched-gender casts. A Pal Joey featured the most elegantly witty Vera I've ever seen. Played by a man dressed as a woman, Lynne Carter was technically a drag queen, but too good an actor to be slotted in any category. Still, drag it was.

  The unforgettable Charles Ludlam, who had his own theatre on Sheridan Square, was also an actor and also a drag queen. His drag in Camille was ridiculous, as was everything he wore and did, most spectacularly his classic Mystery of Irma Vep with Everett Quinton. I never saw as much of Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company as perhaps I should have; the drag on stage inevitably became tiresome to me because of the exaggerated costumes and the camp humor that came with it mercilessly. A limitation on my part? I also think certain Samuel Beckett plays are the Emperor's New Clothes.

  I don't dismiss out of hand. I always went, I always saw. Years ago, when the theatre was awash in New Theatre, I got Richard Poirier to go with me to a Richard Foreman Ontological-Hysteric Theatre play. As customary, the stage was sectioned with lines of string, and light bulbs wavered at random. When the play was over, the author of The Performing Self was succinct: “A crock,” he said. Does that validate my opinion? Does the wholesale acclaim of the upper intellectual strata validate every stage direction by Beckett? Time validates, but how much, and for how long? The avant garde does influence now and then, but everything changes except the avant garde. Eventually, praise be, theatre returns to character and story. Ideas come naturally and so, happily, can passion, scorned though it is at the antiseptic moment.

  I'm still open to the new; I go, though not as often as before. I want to leave a theatre glad I came; now it's an effort not to leave at the intermission. Nor am I alone. There is a distinct trend to intermissionless works. Once in a while there's water in the Sahara: Spring Awakening. I admired and enjoyed it. The reviewers went overboard. The work would forever alter musical theatre, they announced. So did the authors. It won't. Does that matter? If the creators of the show believe it, yes; if the readers believe it, yes, because the next time they read it, they will cry wolf. What I think will have a lasting influence in Spring Awakening is the musical staging. It's truly an innovation in staging musical numbers. There have been changes in doing such: the snaking microphones across faces, including those of lovers trying to kiss, in Rent; the handheld phallic microphones the boys whip out in Spring Awakening as though they were whipping out their penises, which is what they are meant to look like—but not in Jersey Boys, where a handheld microphone is a handheld microphone. All the flaunted microphones have been influences that I doubt will last—they're too limiting. There's also John Doyle's use of instruments: very effective in a humorous Sweeney Todd, annoying in a manufactured Company (which was in desperate need of a choreographer), a gimmick if used again. The musical staging in Spring Awakening, however, is direct from the characters, the story, the milieu, the passions, and thus points where to go and what to do when you get there: think, imagine, create.

  I agreed to direct Cage because I thought the production would never happen. Allan Carr had come a cropper trying to produce it, his first Broadway adventure, with a Vegas touch. The Cage aux Folles set on the French Riviera in the movie was to become The Queen of Basin Street, set in New Orleans, for the musical, with direction by Mike Nichols, choreography by Tommy Tune, score by Maury Yeston, and book by Jay Presson Allen (who began with the stage direction “The décor is early faggot,” and that's as far as I read). The combined royalties of these boldface names guaranteed financial failure for producer and investors, as Fritz Holt and Barry Brown told Carr, who promptly hired them as executive producers. They fired everybody. The resulting lawsuits were lost by all except Maury Yeston, who got a small royalty; and the boys— producers and creators alike are always “the boys,” except when they're “the ladies”—started out afresh by approaching me.

  Why me? Because Fritz and Barry's first production—and their first success—was the Gypsy I had directed with Angela Lansbury. It was also their only success so far. We'd had a lot of fun and become friends in the process; they were still stagestruck—and they were broke. I said yes because it would keep them on Allan's payroll until he—and they—faced the fact they would never find enough investors. Certainly not at a time when the battle between gay liberation and political homophobia was intensifying, and the longer-and-longer-running box-office queens were syrupy sung-through scenic spectacles from London.

  Then Fritz told me they had signed Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein for the project. The Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! and Mame and their title songs was very right for La Cage aux Folles; the Harvey Fierstein of Torch Song Trilogy was, to me, the contemporary gay voice. Both were very excited that I (presumably) was going to direct. (They loved Gypsy. What musical-theatre aficionado didn't?)

  “Wait till you see Jerry's house,” Fritz said, urging a meeting. “There's a trapeze on the top floor where you'll work!” The meeting was scheduled. Fritz was very enthusiastic. (He was always enthusiastic, even the day he died of AIDS.) He glossed over the fact that the boys had nothing on paper: they had “terrific ideas.” And as he was on his way out the door: “Oh, by the way, Allan doesn't have the rights to the film, but he does have the rights to the original play by Jean Poiret—it's a knockout!” I'm a qu
ick reader, and I read the play before the meeting at Jerry's. It was not a knockout; the meat and potatoes of the story were in the film, not the play. Some people buy a house without looking in the closets.

  But Jerry had written a song.

  Jerry Herman had a profitable hobby: buying and decorating houses, and selling them quickly. The studio where he played that crucial song for Harvey and me was on the top floor of his own Jerry Herman—decorated house in the East Sixties. He sat at a polished grand piano with that trapeze hanging overhead. The song was typical of the anthems sung by the heroine in all his musicals—except that this one went much further. To be sung by a gay man, it had balls and anger; a relevance to the times made it political, intentionally or not. Jerry played and sang it with a passion that made me sit up. It was his anthem; it became ours, the gay community's: it became the Gay Anthem. It was called “I Am What I Am.”

  Jerry meant for it to end the first act, sung by Albin, the drag-queen hero, but neither he nor Harvey knew where Albin was singing it or why he was singing it at that particular moment. There wasn't an outline; they hadn't really talked; they didn't have “terrific ideas.” The original play asked more questions than it answered. They looked expectantly at me, their (presumed) director, for answers—and judging by my reaction to the song, why not?

  It had really gotten to me. I began to answer my own questions. The song had to be sung in drag; that would mean sung in the nightclub where the play took place, but not as a number, because then it would merely be a message sung by a performer, not a character; and not without a motivation, because then it would merely be a number in a show. It had to be an emotional outburst, but what did it burst out of? I was so wired by the song that in two minutes, more or less, I had answers, and the first act began to take shape. If the opening number of the Broadway show was also the opening number of the cabaret show at the Riviera nightclub, and if that number was a chorus of drag queens singing “We Are What We Are,” it would set up both the whole show and the ending of the first act.