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

“If we could equalize the gangs here,” I said, “both would be the villains they are.”

“Why not have the Sharks speak Spanish?” Tom said.

And there it was—the reason for a new production. It excited me and now I wanted to direct it.

It excited everyone who heard Tom's idea. At first, I didn't tell them it was Tom's—I didn't want it dismissed. We had removed ourselves from the social world of the theatre a long time before, because he was dismissed as my “boyfriend.” Liked and enjoyed, even lusted for, but victim of an attitude highlighted in my play 2 Lives: when he fetched a drink for someone at a party, the person who had asked for it was gone when he came back. Subterranean homophobia is as strong as, perhaps even stronger than, its racial equivalent.

Working out the use of Spanish wasn't as simple as anticipated. Anita sings how much she wants to be an American. She would therefore sing in English, not Spanish—the jokes in the lyric of “America” wouldn't work in Spanish, anyway. She would also be determined to speak English even to Bernardo, who would be equally determined to speak Spanish. That would need revisions. So would the section in the dance hall when Bernardo speaks to Maria. It would be in Spanish, which Tony would not understand, though he would get the gist. And when Bernardo is killed, it's the end of English for Anita: “A Boy Like That” has to be sung in Spanish.

The challenge revved me up, but I couldn't handle it alone; I wasn't bilingual. I hadn't anticipated the need to, because Tom was so fluent in Spanish. He would be there to help as I worked on the script and in rehearsal as I worked on the performances. And then he wasn't there. He died of lung cancer on October 26, 2006. Fifty-two completely shared years. Loss is hard, it's difficult, it's sometimes impossible, but, as I slowly learned, I was fortunate to have those fifty-two years.

“The show must go on” isn't always just a joke or a cliché. West Side Story literally did have to go on. It was already contracted for; after a pause for the Gypsy Tom had urged me to do—a year's pause because of its move to Chernobyl, aka Broadway—work began, though with not as much enthusiasm. I ran into difficulty trying to get a script in Puerto Rican Spanish. MTI had one, but it looked as though it had barely survived tropical dry rot. Another script turned up that was in Spanish, not necessarily Puerto Rican, but scenes were missing. I suspended hunting and called F&F. They had always wanted to do West Side, they were friends, they had to have a script of West Side Story in Spanish.

They did. It had been vetted by Tom, and his corrections were on it in his familiar handwriting.

A director's work begins long before the first day of rehearsal—at the moment he opens the script. Which will be different by the first day of rehearsal, even for a revival. For me, with West Side Story, work obviously began even before that due to the bilingual factor. Tom's death was an unexpected rupture that diminished my enthusiasm for the project, but the arrival of his script, corrected in his handwriting, was a message that sent me back to work with more than just renewed enthusiasm. I went back with the love that drove Gypsy.

Although I set about cobbling together the bilingual version myself, someone was going to be needed to vet my questionable Spanish. It was Kevin McCollum who suggested asking Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was busy preparing the transfer of their In the Heights from Off Broadway to Broadway. Nevertheless, Lin readily agreed to help. Who were these people, and why were they so helpful?

There are no coincidences or accidents, but there is often one hand washing the other, and occasionally even an act of pure generosity. Kevin and his partner, Jeffrey Seller, were producers of Lin's musical about Puerto Rican Americans in far uptown New York City, as well as the executive producers, partnered with the Nederlanders, of this new bilingual version of a musical set not as far uptown on the west side of New York. But Lin? Why did he agree without hesitation? A partial answer: he was brought up on West Side Story, he admired and respected it and always had. But there is the rest of the answer: Lin-Manuel Miranda is a generous young man, in an old-school tradition that is almost gone.

Even while working on the script, a director is mentally assembling the team to bring his vision of the play to theatre life. For West Side, my choice would obviously be the same team that worked so brilliantly on Gypsy, and it was, but any director with sense and/or experience knows there's a good chance he will be thrown a curve. I was thrown two.

The first and more important was by Craig Jacobs, but that I understood. He was burned out. Gypsy had been difficult enough, West Side Story was going to be more difficult—because of the way I envisioned the production—and he wanted to go back to Phantom of the Opera, where he had been production stage manager for eleven years. He had been on loan to Gypsy from Hal Prince, Phantom's director and an old friend of mine dating back to the original production of West Side, where he was the most active producer. But I went even farther back with his inestimable wife, Judy, the only person I would eagerly have lunch with. I knew her from early Hollywood when she palled around with her imaginary friend, Bessie Glum, and I wrote a play for her twelfth birthday called Queen Lear which had only one speaking part—Judy's.

Craig would still check performances of Gypsy twice a week. Most helpful