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

be fired (the legendary Theoni Aldredge in her first Broadway musical), and anyway, Merrick wasn't about to spend money on a replacement.

He came to the panic production meeting in a surprisingly jovial mood. He was anticipating the Rottweilers would be unleashed. I disappointed him. I was calm and genial (fear successfully hidden) and laid out what I thought had to be done. Jerry and Harold agreed, went off to work, and I went off to face the company.

The trick, in those sessions, is for the director, when he speaks, to look intently just to the right of the eyes of someone in the fifth row; then, at intervals, to shift to someone farther back and to one side, then to the other side—always careful to look at a forehead, never, never in anyone's eyes. What the Father of Us All is doing is trying to convince, not a band of frightened players, but a bunch of skeptical actors who nevertheless are eager to be convinced of what he's trying to convince himself: that the problem with the show is easy to fix. When Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers came to accursed Philadelphia to see what Gypsy‘s problem was, they said: Fix the doorknob on the dressing-room door in the last scene and that will do it. Literally, that's what they said. Well, that was Gypsy, and they weren't right anyway.

Wholesale had one problem the cast knew. How they knew was a mystery, but they always know, and how is always a mystery. They knew the producer wanted to fire Elliott Gould, the leading man, and Barbra Streisand, who was stealing the show, or would have been had there been a show to steal. Merrick thought both were too homely. They couldn't have disagreed more; they were falling in love. Merrick went after me like a dog after a bone to fire them; he was relentless—he wouldn't quit until he got that bone. He was all smiles, but it was undeclared war.

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