Mainly on Directing by Arthur Laurents (read more books .TXT) 📕

He knew he was dying of lung cancer, but he didn't want me to know. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't. He had survived colon cancer. I knew he was having some sort of breathing trouble, but still, that hadn't stopped him from taking our annual three-week ski holiday in Switzerland. I was extremely adept at denial, and since I was unable to imagine a world without him, the possibility that he wouldn't beat this cancer too never occurred to me. Yes, I know; but it didn't.

Looking back, I realize the main reason he wanted me to direct this Gypsy was that he knew it would help me if I were busy after he was gone, doing what I liked doing and, in his mind, should be doing. To Tom, I was an unappreciated director who didn't direct as much as I should have. He was certain that with my help, Patti LuPone would finally fulfill her potential and New York would again have a Gypsy that Gypsy deserved. He urged me to commit— this is hindsight—so he would know while he was still here that I would be doing what he believed I should be doing after he was gone. What he asked, I did. But before the production could get under way, cancer won. Fulfilling his wish, my directing Gypsy became an act of love.

I didn't know the production was for a limited three-week run at City Center, a Moorish barn just outside the theatre district. It wouldn't have mattered if I had; it didn't matter until I went to work there. I simply wanted to direct Gypsy with Patti LuPone, and doing it away from Broadway was a plus to me. Of course I didn't know then what City Center was or how it functioned. If I had, I never would have directed that Gypsy—which would have been a whopping mistake. Ignorance can bring unintentional bliss.

City Center was primarily a booking agency for everything from dance companies to tango singers. It hadn't produced a full-scale musical in decades. What it did produce was its very successful Encores! series: revivals of old musical comedies in concert versions—meaning abbreviated texts that actors perform script in hand, wearing suggestions of costumes before suggestions of scenery in front of an on-stage orchestra. Jack Viertel, the artistic director of Encores!—the exclamation point is part of the name— had seen Patti in Gypsy at Ravinia and was hell bent on bringing her to City Center to launch its new Summer Stars series. Jack was the de facto producer of Gypsy—unacknowledged, because he was employed by, and thus under the jurisdiction of, the Center's Ninth Floor, where its managerial offices emulate Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell. This is best illustrated by an e-mail from the Floor's Führer.

He made it clear that this was a City Center production and would be done in the City Center way. If we pushed back he would “nickel and dime [us] at every turn.”

If the Ninth Floor had read the front page, they would have known how important the e-mail is as evidence of stupidity as well as cupidity. To them, Gypsy was just another Encores! with a few extra trimmings.

Fortunately, I didn't have to take them on alone; I had what every director must have, even in a situation that isn't ugly: a production stage manager who could fill in any blank I couldn't. Craig Jacobs, the best PSM I know, enabled me to do the production I wanted despite City Center. It was never easy or smooth going, but that didn't matter. I was more excited by the work I was doing than I had been for a long time—maybe ever, because I wasn't seeking anyone's approval.

As it turned out, Tom would have been more than pleased. So I thought when we opened. Over time, I progressed from thinking he was pleased to believing he is pleased. Yes: is. And that has made life pleasurable again. No one would have smelled incense and heard temple bells or scoffed at that more than I would have back before the moment when all went lopsided and changed so radically. But dealing with death can make a skeptic deal with possibilities that weren't acknowledged, let alone accepted. Dealing with death is dealing with how to go on living—in my case, what had been a wonderful life. The summer of City Center, I got an e-mail from Mike Nichols about Gypsy that I wished so much Tom had read; today I believe of course he has read it and is infinitely pleased for me that Gypsy had made Mike Nichols “realize again and for the first time in a very long time that the theatre is still the best thing we have.”

No praise means more than praise from a peer you respect and admire. It came in other e-mails, in notes and phone calls from friends, acquaintances, people who were just familiar names in the theatre, even a bona fide critic, however former: Frank Rich. Long a fervent admirer of Gypsy, he saw the production three times during its brief run and sent me an ecstatic e-mail.

What made Mike Nichols and Frank Rich, what made others, what made all of them react so strongly to this Gypsy? What made the audience cheer and scream all during the play at every performance? What made closing night the most extraordinary night I've ever seen or heard of in the theatre?

More than 2,500 people, from the celebrities in the orchestra to the audience in the third balcony, stood and applauded and hollered and cheered for almost fifteen minutes. Fresh roses made it difficult to walk on the stage. “None of us had ever experienced anything like that in our careers,” said the City Center's stage-management report. “We chose ultimately to leave the curtain out. We brought the houselights up, the audience remained in place, screaming itself