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

suspended in mid silent air. The music stops; the audience watches and waits. Then Harry grins and the orchestra plays “The Sound of Money,” a song Harry had sung earlier. An effective ending: applause started even as the curtain started down.

Then I had a last-minute idea I thought rang the bell figuratively as well as literally. It went in at the last Wednesday matinee in Boston. When the inheritance was mentioned and everything and everyone was suspended in a breathless pause, the silence was broken by the ping of a cash register. That was what made Harry grin, cueing “The Sound of Money.”

I loved it. The audience didn't. The ping shocked it into a unanimous, audible gasp of revulsion. When the curtain started down, there was no applause.

That it was a Wednesday-matinee audience of Boston ladies, that the shock and the gasp were really the reaction I wanted, I ignored. I ran scared. I cut the cash register and didn't even think of trying it again at a preview in New York.

Nothing in the show made the point of the story as economically, as theatrically, as well overall as the sound of that cash register. It was the kind of moment you remember long after you've seen the show. It might have helped Wholesale immeasurably. It might also have merely been a moment that came and went. But I cut it because the audience response had made me afraid the cash register was too much, too obvious, over the top, too naked a statement. In my gut it was right for the show and a directorial touch to be proud of, but I cut it because one audience had made me afraid.

When I returned to this country after living in Paris because I'd been blacklisted here during the Hollywood Witch Hunt, I wouldn't sign petitions or give my name or money to anything. It hadn't been easy to get my passport back, and quite simply, I was afraid. I can claim I was being practical, and in time the fear did evaporate. Pair that with one moment in a musical? One cut made because of one audience's reaction, one betrayal of oneself? Yes; the thwarted principle behind each was the same: do what you believe.

One misstep can set a pattern—in the theatre, particularly if the show concerned does well. Wholesale did very well for me, but my misstep set no pattern. It was a mistake, and when the air cleared, I wasn't easy on myself for making it.

After Tom died, my values got clearer and firmer. I wasn't going to do anything in the theatre unless it really excited me, and then I would do it the way I believed it should be done or not at all. That was tested several times during Gypsy; one provided a special lesson. A man I respected and whose opinion meant a great deal to me saw a preview at the St. James and called me the next day to tear the show to shreds. There wasn't a positive anything when he finished. I had overdone everything; Patti was terrible, angry from start to finish; “Rose's Turn” was totally incomprehensible and a mess; Laura's laughter when she walked off at the end was the cruelest thing he'd ever seen in the theatre. He followed up with a two-page e-mail that was vicious with details. The unexpectedness of the attack had shock value. I said nothing; I didn't answer his e-mail (but I printed it out as a reminder).

Because it was he, I was shaken. For a long moment. Then I heard him saying Patti's Rose was angry from start to finish. That, I could truly be objective about. Patti LuPone's Rose was more fun and funnier, sexier, more loving even in the early scenes than any Rose he or anyone else ever saw. He was wrong—dead, fabricated wrong. Clearly his opinion didn't come from a performance he saw on the stage of the St. James but from something askew inside him.

I never mentioned to him the phenomenal response of the audience every night, including the night he saw it. Nor did I mention later the phenomenal, unanimous response of the press. I didn't expect him to, either, and he didn't; but he had to know about it—he read the Times. Both audience and press were welcome validation.

And necessary.

No, you say?

Yes, I say. I remember the attack because I respected the attacker, just as I remember the praise because of my respect and admiration for the man it came from. But I would have done what I did without a word one way or the other from either of them or anyone else. That's what I learned from him.

Moral: do what you believe in.

(Laughing): Cant we put it another way that doesn't sound so much like a candidate for a needlepoint pillow? Never do what you don't believe in. Even if it's successful, it isn't worth it.

Really?

Really. Not for me. You won't keep me in my seat for your second act just because you're a hit. I won't expect you to stay in your seat for mine unless it's theatre as you dreamed it would be, or why am I doing it?

FIVE

Smoke and Mirrors

SINCE IT'S ALWAYS BEEN NEXT to impossible to find a happy homosexual on the Broadway stage who is still happy at the final curtain, the notion of a multimillion-dollar Broadway musical with two happy homosexuals on stage at the final curtain seemed completely impossible to me. That it would be adapted from a successful movie didn't make it any less so.

The movie was a little French farce called La Cage aux Folles. Its success in this country was surprising, for its hero was a drag queen. In France, drag is a tradition; in the United States, drag is a camp or a sin, frequently both. In Hollywood, there was a producer for whom camp, as much as box-office success, made the film a hot property. His