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

told Carr, who promptly hired them as executive producers. They fired everybody. The resulting lawsuits were lost by all except Maury Yeston, who got a small royalty; and the boys— producers and creators alike are always “the boys,” except when they're “the ladies”—started out afresh by approaching me.

Why me? Because Fritz and Barry's first production—and their first success—was the Gypsy I had directed with Angela Lansbury. It was also their only success so far. We'd had a lot of fun and become friends in the process; they were still stagestruck—and they were broke. I said yes because it would keep them on Allan's payroll until he—and they—faced the fact they would never find enough investors. Certainly not at a time when the battle between gay liberation and political homophobia was intensifying, and the longer-and-longer-running box-office queens were syrupy sung-through scenic spectacles from London.

Then Fritz told me they had signed Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein for the project. The Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! and Mame and their title songs was very right for La Cage aux Folles; the Harvey Fierstein of Torch Song Trilogy was, to me, the contemporary gay voice. Both were very excited that I (presumably) was going to direct. (They loved Gypsy. What musical-theatre aficionado didn't?)

“Wait till you see Jerry's house,” Fritz said, urging a meeting. “There's a trapeze on the top floor where you'll work!” The meeting was scheduled. Fritz was very enthusiastic. (He was always enthusiastic, even the day he died of AIDS.) He glossed over the fact that the boys had nothing on paper: they had “terrific ideas.” And as he was on his way out the door: “Oh, by the way, Allan doesn't have the rights to the film, but he does have the rights to the original play by Jean Poiret—it's a knockout!” I'm a quick reader, and I read the play before the meeting at Jerry's. It was not a knockout; the meat and potatoes of the story were in the film, not the play. Some people buy a house without looking in the closets.

But Jerry had written a song.

Jerry Herman had a profitable hobby: buying and decorating houses, and selling them quickly. The studio where he played that crucial song for Harvey and me was on the top floor of his own Jerry Herman—decorated house in the East Sixties. He sat at a polished grand piano with that trapeze hanging overhead. The song was typical of the anthems sung by the heroine in all his musicals—except that this one went much further. To be sung by a gay man, it had balls and anger; a relevance to the times made it political, intentionally or not. Jerry played and sang it with a passion that made me sit up. It was his anthem; it became ours, the gay community's: it became the Gay Anthem. It was called “I Am What I Am.”

Jerry meant for it to end the first act, sung by Albin, the drag-queen hero, but neither he nor Harvey knew where Albin was singing it or why he was singing it at that particular moment. There wasn't an outline; they hadn't really talked; they didn't have “terrific ideas.” The original play asked more questions than it answered. They looked expectantly at me, their (presumed) director, for answers—and judging by my reaction to the song, why not?

It had really gotten to me. I began to answer my own questions. The song had to be sung in drag; that would mean sung in the nightclub where the play took place, but not as a number, because then it would merely be a message sung by a performer, not a character; and not without a motivation, because then it would merely be a number in a show. It had to be an emotional outburst, but what did it burst out of? I was so wired by the song that in two minutes, more or less, I had answers, and the first act began to take shape. If the opening number of the Broadway show was also the opening number of the cabaret show at the Riviera nightclub, and if that number was a chorus of drag queens singing “We Are What We Are,” it would set up both the whole show and the ending of the first act.

Very relieved, the boys beamed. Harvey had been a drag queen but had never written a musical. Jerry had written scores and contributed to books, but it was the director who usually took the material and shaped it for the show. What I had just done was what they expected me to do: take something that had been written, that anthem, and figure how to make it work. They were elated; they had their director; La Cage aux Folles was under way.

Was it? Was I really hooked by one song?

Perhaps because I was a playwright, one of the things that attracted me to directing musicals was the opportunity to be creative and inventive. It was constantly knocking, and I loved answering as I had just done. It was tempting to sign on (and make Fritz happy as well), but something else weighed in more heavily. That something had always been there, but I had let my distaste for drag and camp get in the way.

Two homosexuals at the center of a musical. Two gay men. Two gay men happy at the final curtain. Of a big Broadway expense-account musical. Was that possible? Reaching higher: a Broadway musical to which the unconverted came and left glad they came? Questioning the beliefs they held before they came? Was that possible? Could that be achieved?

Wasn't it worth a try?

Was that a question for a director?

If a director has political convictions, does he bring them into the theatre? Does he let them influence what play he chooses to direct and how he directs it? Rhetorical questions; of course he does. “I Am What I Am,” Torch Song Trilogy, and the authors' eagerness for me to take charge