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

a pair like those they don't make anymore—the Lunts, Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward—in this Gypsy: Patti LuPone and Boyd Gaines. Rehearsals of their scenes made the days too short.

Their songs, however, were written for characters in a story; their potential was inherent. As scenes, they had an unexpected and unfortunately undesirable effect; they highlighted another unanticipated musical problem: some songs didn't belong in the show now, not the way the show was being played. They were simply musical-comedy numbers, meant only to entertain. They had never been intended to be anything but musical-comedy numbers meant only to entertain. The story didn't need them; there were no layered lyrics—clever lyrics, yes, lightly comic lyrics, yes, but lyrics that simply said what they said, period. No subtext, no text of much consequence at all. What rabbit could be pulled out of what hat to make them fit into a musical play?

No composer and lyricist knew more about writing a theatre song than Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim; why, then, were those songs written like musical-comedy numbers? Because of when they were written—1959, the Golden Age of Musical Theatre. But musical comedy had not been banished. Every show, even the most aspiring and ambitious, paused routinely for songs that were meant to be just entertainments or showstoppers or simply “divertissements,” as Lenny Bernstein called West Side Story's “I Feel Pretty” and “Gee, Officer Krupke.” (His linguistic virtuosity prompted me to write a stage direction for West Side: “Braggadocio and Con Brio cross upstage hand in hand.”) The contrast of “If Momma Was Married,” for example, with the musical scene “You'll Never Get Away from Me” as Patti and Boyd were playing it, made “Momma” seem even more a number in another show. It was essential that it be pulled into the play, because it came at a turning point in the story. That made it the first real challenge to this Gypsy being a musical play.

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Less than midway through the first act, there is a scene between June and Louise, two sisters who barely know each other. With no warning or reason but lots of clever rhyme and a bouncy Viennese vamp, the girls launch into “If Momma Was Married.” The melody is very pretty, the lyric is cleverly comedic, and combined with terrific close harmony at the end, the song brings down the house. It probably would have worked as it was even in this Gypsy. But that scene, brief as it was, was dense, packed with emotion no June until Leigh Ann Larkin had ever shown. Where we were with both sisters in the scene and with what it had become, I didn't want to settle for what “worked.”

No rehearsal day is productive if the director hasn't had to choose whether or not to settle for what “works.” With “Momma,” there was no choice. The sisters themselves and their relationship had become so complex and involving, and far too much subtext had surfaced, to allow them to bounce girlishly into a bright waltz. I knew Patrick could augment musically any new note I came up with, but what I had to come up with was how to get those girls into the bloody song; how to get the song into the scene. It had to be part of the scene, because it came at a point in the act where it would tell the audience either that this was a very different Gypsy or that this was a Gypsy that didn't know what it was.

The key was to ask the same question about the song that is asked about any scene in any play: what is it about? What is “If Momma Was Married” about? Two sisters who barely know each other and suspect that their mother is the reason: a start. Not a start for bouncing into a jaunty waltz, though. Well, then ease into it—and Patrick did.

June is the one who is tough on their mother; let her start off with a spoken wish that “if Momma was married … [I would be free and happy].” The music begins softly; it's still a three-quarter beat, but it's gentle, unemphatic. Louise repeats June's words over the melody for them, but with a different meaning, which comes clear as she slips into singing the lyric lightly, picking up speed and volume as she goes—and soon it's the same song with a different meaning and consequently sounds altogether different.

But where does the song go? Nowhere, really, since it has no story to tell. Nothing happens, nor is there any emotional development in the lyric for the girls. But a lot has been unearthed in the scene: the sisters have acknowledged there is something missing in their relationship; they have hinted they wish it were otherwise; they have even suggested Rose is what has kept them apart. When you want to take off, suggestions can be wings. The story that made the song a scene didn't have to be imposed, it wasn't pasted on; it was waiting in the characters and their relationship, and it came to life during the song.

At the first notes, the sisters are strangers, miles apart; as they sing, they discover each other through their shared attitude to the Act, draw closer by their feelings about Rose, even closer by the desire to have what each never did: a sister. What ultimately brings them together is laughter, shared laughter at Rose's vaudeville Act that has kept them apart. By the last triumphant note, the sisters are sisters who love each other. Every night, the grasp of each other's hand on that last note brought a thunderous roar that stopped the show. “If Momma Was Married” worked.

The second act of Gypsy is deceptive and tricky, which may sound redundant but isn't. All but the first scene takes place in the world of burlesque, raising bawdy expectations that are not fulfilled. In this version, the burlesque houses and strippers are tawdry and tired, absent of sex except for