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

men in drag. At the end of the show, the Cagelles saw the same men on their feet applauding them. When I watched in the aisles to check the audience response, the white of Kleenex taken out of purses invariably caught my eye at the moment when Jean-Michel, juvenile and son, acknowledged Albin as his mother. Also sentimentality? At least an emotional response. At the beginning of the second act, there was a rather corny number in which musical-comedy Riviera sailors and waterfront types instructed Albin on how to be a man. Scott Salmon, whose choreography throughout the show was consistently remarkable, did what he could, but what can you do with however determined but still basically chorus boys pretending to be butch seamen? Director and choreographer then worked in tandem. George Hearn was given the image of a boy who had been called “faggot” all his life, and the dancers, who could identify, were the cowardly bullies kicking the sissy underdog. The number acquired not depth, as much as that was desired, but a dimension that removed it from the toothpaste-smiling world of musical comedy. The emotion was on the stage, not in the audience; but at least it was somewhere. In today's theatre, it is rarely anywhere.

The advent of AIDS took more of a toll on the company than on the box office—perhaps because of the absence of sex in the show; perhaps because of the fantastic costumes, which graced the show with an aura of unreality; perhaps because the audience didn't want to believe in the reality of the plague. Considering the preponderance of gays in the cast, the number of the afflicted was relatively small. The first to fall was a Cagelle who had steadfastly maintained he was straight. When he became infected, there was no schadenfreude; when he died, everybody mourned. No one was mourned more than Fritz Holt—executive producer to some, superb PSM to others, beloved by company, crew, everyone, closest of friends to me. One day he walked into my living room—it seems long ago and not so long ago—stretched out his six feet four inches on my couch, and opened his shirt. A port for AZT had been implanted in his chest.

“Do you want to live like that?” he said. “I don't.” And he didn't. He went dancing at the Saint and continued to do drugs.

He was directing a national company of Cage when I got a phone call: “Fritz is sick.” I went to rehearsal. I hadn't seen him in two weeks; I was told to be prepared—which, of course, was not possible. His long hair had fallen out in clumps, he had lost pounds—he was always wanting to lose weight, but not this much, this way—and his eyes were all terror. I gave a good performance; by then, I'd had a little practice. I took over rehearsals. Less than a week later someone came in and said Fritz was dead. I lost it then; everyone in the room did. We just sat for a moment, and then we went back to work—not because the show must go on, though it must and should, but because we didn't know what else to do.

Death always seems recent to me, I've lived through so many. The latest, Tom Hatcher from lung cancer, was really recent. We were together for fifty-two years. I'm unable to live through the empty space; I can only survive.

AIDS didn't end the run of La Cage aux Folles. What did end it was what began it. The air rights to the Palace Theatre, our home for four years, were sold to a chain that wanted to build a new hotel over the theatre. It was contractual time for construction to begin. The show had to move out, but that was fine: we were set to move to the Mark Hellinger. The Moonies, however, wanted the Hellinger for their tabernacle. They offered Allan Carr a lot of money—Allan, not the show, not his investors, his partners, his cronies; Allan. He took it, and that was the end of La Cage aux Folles, the musical. He was why it began; he was why it ended. It was always his show. He went back to his Ingrid Bergman house in Beverly Hills, where he waited to end his run.

• • •

Cage was a singular experience. As a director, I learned so much in a variety of areas, largely by taking chances and going where instinct told me to go. The most important learning usually comes from pain, but here it came from the opposite: the love that was as much a part of each company in this country and abroad as the title of the show. A simple life lesson: enjoy the work while you're doing it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. If you can be proud of the result, you've succeeded, no matter what happens. With La Cage aux Folles, I succeeded. Neither the show nor I will go down in any books (the Tonys roster doesn't count for me), but I succeeded and had an amazingly good time doing it.

P.S. Everyone made money.

SIX

Why?

“WHY DID I DO IT?” asks Rose. A familiar question at one time or another to anyone, including the director of a flop musical. After Nick & Nora, I asked myself why I did it. The answer was friendship—no, not excusable, but a trap for anyone in any role in the theatre. I also asked myself why I persisted with it even though Tom had told me it was doomed and I should stop. The answer to that was ego: I could get it on—I did. And I could get it to work—I couldn't. There are all sorts of reasons I would like to claim, like the show being dead in the water before it opened because of false allegations made in a carnivorous press during too many weeks of previews; but the fact is, the show flopped.

Now put the question in the