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

to its level. The taint of melodrama and glitz had been removed. It had as much emotional intensity, if not more, because its scenes went deeper and carried more weight. Totally unexpected.

There was one factor above all others that made this Gypsy extraordinary. Roll your eyes if you will, but the production was driven by love, beginning with Tom. That was what had made him urge me to do the show with Patti. Mine for him made me determined this Gypsy wasn't going to be like any Gypsy I or anyone else had directed before. When he died, loss told me more about love than I had ever known. For me, nothing in life is more important. Nothing in this production was more important.

Gypsy was always about the need for recognition—which is also a need for love of one kind or another. It reaches its climax in the very last scene of the play, between Rose and Louise, when Rose admits she did it all for herself and then answers why: “Just wanted to be noticed,” she says.

“Like I wanted you to notice me,” says her daughter—meaning “Like I wanted you to love me.” Wanted, past tense; and Rose, the no-longer-wanted mother, breaks down in tears.

Love was always the subject; it just needed a spotlight.

Love for Gypsy was shared by everyone in the rehearsal hall. Not the love the company had when it arrived—the love of the show as a favorite musical. Once we began work around the table, discovering there was so much more to be mined than they had suspected, the actors fell in love with Gypsy—really in love. That made the work better, and that made them better. Not just this player or that—everyone. And the better they got, the more they loved what they were doing; and the more they loved their work, the better the whole show got and continued to get, until the first audience told us it was even better than we had thought.

Love was driving everything. I'd never been happier in rehearsal, because of the mutual love affair with the company. It began, as it had to, with Patti—a lightning journey from testing each other the first day to mutual trust and enjoyment of each other by the third. Seeing that, Boyd and Laura came along, the others followed like groupies, and the rehearsal hall was suffused with love that transformed the time and the place and the work. When the company moved into the theatre, that love flooded the stage, poured over the footlights into the audience, which bathed in it and sent back waves of its own night after night until the night it wouldn't go home.

How could that Gypsy not be extraordinary?

The City Center run was limited to three weeks, the first of which was largely previews. The adulation excited during those three short weeks paled beside the citywide love affair after it closed. Only a ticker-tape parade was lacking. I might even have begun to believe I was really that good, but I left for Quogue immediately after closing night to prepare Tom's memorial.

It was to be on August 24, his birthday and our anniversary, under a tent in his park—his park because he had turned acres of what had been a dark jungle of trees strangled with bittersweet into the most serene place on the planet. What he called “rooms” were small areas of variegated plants and shrubs and flowers separated by sunlit corridors formed by so many different trees: birch, maple, evergreen, tulip, and the sequentially blossoming fruit trees—pear, cherry, apple. The park was what he created, year after year; the summer day of his memorial was so perfect he must have created it, too. He had to have been there; he was there. All the people who spoke felt his presence; all the people who strolled through the “rooms” after the ceremony to discover more of him felt they saw him as I remembered him: wearing his torn straw hat to shield his fair skin while riding his lawn mower around his park. There was no mention of Gypsy at the memorial other than the presence of three friends who had been involved with it at one time or another: Bernadette Peters, Tyne Daly, and Scott Rudin. But it had come into my mind at an odd moment for an odd reason.

When I spoke at the memorial, I held on to the tent pole the way I later held on to the proscenium of the St. James when I spoke at the invitation dress rehearsal. I looked at ease, but I was holding on in both cases, because my legs were shaking badly. At the St. James, they were shaking because I was embarrassed by the prolonged applause when I came on stage. At the memorial, they were shaking because even though I believed what I said—that he was there in the park and his spirit always would be—at that moment, I missed his physical presence so badly I literally couldn't stand it.

After City Center, London with Patti had been the plan, but no acceptable theatre was available for at least a year. No one seemed to care. The excitement at home in New York had turned everyone's eyes toward Broadway. Surprise? Hardly. No matter what the artistic level of Broadway, it is always the goal, the prize, the brass ring on the merry-go-round. Everyone in the theatre community said Gypsy belonged on Broadway; it had to go to Broadway now to show the audience what theatre can be. Producers were ready; theatres were offered; the company was available and half out of its head with desire. But there was a catch. In this world, obviously there would be, and obviously it would be money. The financing wasn't there—for one equally obvious, time-honored reason:

Considered a summer production, the show had not been reviewed by the magazines, but the newspapers that did offered unanimous raves for the show. And were ecstatic about Patti's passionate,