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

show a “fable.” I had directed it twice before, each time seeing it from a different angle because of a different Rose. Yet, sitting around that table, I kept making discovery after discovery about every character, beginning with Rose and Uncle Jocko in the opening scene. Directing a revival of Gypsy became as exciting as directing a new play. I was charged up, as creative as I had ever been. My ninetieth birthday was a month away, but when you are caught up in giving new life to something you love, you are whatever age you were the first time you gave it life.

The opening scene of Gypsy was key. Usually it's played with Jocko a comic trying to eke out a laugh until the star playing Rose makes her famous entrance down the aisle and takes over the audience, the stage, and the show. Musical theatre, perhaps, but not a musical play—not even a scene in a musical play, because a scene requires at least two of the people on stage be fleshed-out characters who interact. This time, for the first time, Jocko became a character and Rose became more than a star doing a turn.

All the actors needed was there in the script—if the director looked for it and led them to it. Jocko has been doing his Kiddie Show so long that he's sick of it—sick of the mothers, sick of the kiddies, sick of the audience, sick of everything except a sexy girl probably too young for him. Her sister is a contestant, which makes her blatantly a shoo-in. Playing Jocko is tricky, because he must be likeable enough for the audience to enjoy him but not so likeable that the audience will resent Rose for destroying him. Everything serves the story.

Watching from out front, Rose must have seen the favoritism, but gives no sign of it when she climbs on stage. She's seemingly just a mother concerned with her daughter-contestant, Baby June. All friendly charm, Rose prances over to Jocko, smiles down to the drummer, waves to the lighting man—happy with herself, happy with her girls. Then Jocko laughs at her and Rose turns on him like an adder. The scene—it is now a scene—explodes: the play has begun.

Once that process started, Gypsy is such a rich field that the actors couldn't wait to dig into all the scenes. The deeper they dug, the still deeper they wanted to dig. When had rehearsals for a musical been exciting merely by exploring the text of a scene? Never; the text of a musical had never really been explored. Now, the company couldn't wait to get back to that table, explore more, go farther or correct and refine. Even during previews, we went back to the table.

• • •

But what of what the audience comes for, the musical numbers? Gypsy is famous for them but they became a problem I hadn't foreseen because of an incident with Laura Benanti at her audition.

Louise is a very difficult part to cast: she begins as an awkward, vulnerable, not noticeable teenage tomboy and ends up a glamorous, sexual, sophisticated, tough Star. I had seen and been interested by Laura Benanti on stage, but nothing had prepared me for what she did at that audition. Clearly, she had it all and could do it all. My sole concern was whether she would respond to direction from me. I asked her to sing “Little Lamb” again, but with a different approach, one I had been thinking about when I began taking a fresh look at the show:

Louise is really miserable when she sings “Little Lamb.” There was the perfunctory verbal acknowledgment of her birthday and a few skimpy presents, but the focus as usual and always was on June and The Act. A line that had always been in the lyric now justified the approach: “Little cat … why do you look so blue? … Is it your birthday, too?” By the time Laura got to that line, tears were glistening in her eyes; by the time she got to the end of the song, tears were in the eyes of everyone in the room.

That was encouraging, both about Laura and about a fresh approach to the songs. Encouragement, however, can lead to expectations, and expectations are a one-way ticket to disappointment. At the start of rehearsals, Laura Benanti was unsure and not very good, certainly not as good as I was convinced she could be, and wary of me, to boot. I was fertile with explanations, but from Marty Pakledinaz, whose costume fittings can often be confessionals, I learned that Laura's previous show had been a bad experience for her because of the director: an explanation I hadn't thought of, and one that was reassuring—but the next director invariably pays, I was paying, and if it continued, we both would be in trouble. How was I to get her trust? That's a problem every director has with every actor to some extent, and every director has his or her own way of dealing with it, from heart-to-heart talks to ignoring it. My way was to treat Laura Benanti as the actress I believed she was and try to help her as that actress. What was her acting problem? Trying to play young rather than what the young Louise was feeling. In a quiet corner of the rehearsal hall during a break, I told her that and just that. No bells rang, no tears came to her eyes; she didn't throw her arms around me; but it was a seminal moment all the same. She relaxed—visibly. Sitting around the table, we started discussing what was going on inside Louise, how overtly she would express it, and when signs of the woman she was going to be would begin to appear. She now came early to rehearsal, she loved rehearsing, and I loved directing her.

The right button is what the director always has to find, the button that will free the actor to give the