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

only-metaphorical wind and brought coffee and doughnuts for everyone, even passersby on their way to work. The critics raved; the chief Boston critic made the show his personal baby and offered suggestions he expected to be taken—a dicey position I'm not sure I quite wriggled out of as we made needed changes on our own. Equally astonishing was the reaction of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. The distinguished couple announced that except for My Fair Lady, La Cage aux Folles was the best musical they had ever seen in their lives. I thought they had lost their minds.

The Kanins saw the play several times. Then Garson did something that was fairly common back then but is almost unheard of today. We weren't friends: I'd been on the council of the Dramatists Guild with him; Ruth had flirted with starring as a Holocaust survivor in a black comedy of mine called Big Potato, but then decided she didn't have the stamina for a role so large. I knew them, that's all; but Garson called me at my hotel with a suggestion to help the new ending I had given to a shaky new comedy quartet in the second act. The suggestion gave the button to the number something I hadn't seen it needed: reality of place—Albin had entered from his bedroom when he clearly should have come from outside the house and entered through the front door. Where was all my insistence on reality? Forgotten in trying to get as many laughs as possible out of an intrinsically not very funny number. But Gar spotting that important flaw surprised me, because reality had never been evident in his work—which shows how much you can read from someone's work, or how little. Anyway, most gratefully, I jumped at his suggestion and the number really landed.

Back then, that was what theatre people did—help one another. They went out of town, eager with anticipation for a new play or musical; help was available to friends or just peers and colleagues. Today, anyone out of town to see something on its hopeful way in brings a metaphorical prayer rug which is mentally unrolled and knelt on; forehead is then touched to the floor in prayer for the disaster that the new effort has been whispered to be—a little insurance can't hurt. Back then, people were enjoyable and generous; not today, twenty-five-plus years later. The theatre today is star-entombed, largely unadventurous, centered on being profitable entertainment. Twenty-five-plus years ago, entertainment was also a goal—television's influence was firmly entrenched—but not the goal; there was room for the original, the innovative, and the ambitious, politically as well as artistically. The theatre season of La Cage aux Folles was also the season of Sunday in the Park with George. Sunday won the Pulitzer Prize; Cage swept the Tonys. Prestige for one, box office for the other—and a bio line for both.

The artistic value of prizes, including the Nobel, has always eluded me. Their luster is tarnished by too many unworthy winners, by the politicking involved, and by the insistence that there be a winner even though the candidates are unqualified and often chosen by unknown anointers. The real value of a prize like the Tony is its purpose: boosting box-office sales, interest from the road, the foreign market, stock and amateur rights—in other words, money. Artistic value can't be claimed when in the year I'm writing this, neither LoveMusik, the most original and inventive musical on Broadway in years, nor its director, Hal Prince, who this late in his career showed what the future of Broadway musicals might be, was nominated for anything but oblivion. Yes, the show's splendid leading actors were nominated; yes, the show had obvious faults: for one, the audience was uncertain where it was and what was going on until twenty minutes into the play; for another, the off-putting German accents used by the German characters should only have been used when they came to America, not in their homeland. But not to acknowledge the production's equally obvious accomplishments was to fail to realize what music theatre can be when it dares. Hal Prince had a slew of Tonys to boast about in his Playbill bio, but I suspect just a nomination for LoveMusik might have meant more to him than some of his winners—understandable, but, I think, mistaking the worth of the prize. What I really don't understand are actors who boast of nominations for a Tony or a Drama Desk or a Lower Hemisphere Award in their bios—the same actors who wind up with: “Thanks to Marci, Dwight, Jocko, Mom and Rex, the best company ever, my dresser, Uta Hagen and Jesus.”

The value of smoke and mirrors to the success of a production is on a par with their value to the success of a director's career. More than the audience is fooled: nothing can make a director a Director quicker than one highly praised concept musical. Is that what directing is—expertise with smoke and mirrors? What about the performance, the acting? Who is responsible? Who is really responsible for the smoke and mirrors? Is it the director or is it the choreographer or the designer or even the author? Who stages the songs—the director, the choreographer, or both in tandem?

That last question was rhetorical in the day of La Cage aux Folles because the good choreographers, the grand choreographers— Robbins, Fosse, Bennett—were directors as well. Since I was directing Cage, it would have been pointless to ask one of those icons to choreograph, and might well have been regarded as insulting: the egos involved were not small. Consequently, there were few Broadway-experienced choreographers to consider for Cage— two, to be factual. Only two! Pathetic. For the others, Broadway experience was confined to being a gypsy and a onetime assistant to a second-tier choreographer/director. As it turned out, the quality of work had nothing to do with consideration of the two candidates with résumé.

Is it because plot is a basic ingredient