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

If a director comes to musical theatre without the musical in his bones, he can be a liability; if he also insists on his misconception of strongly written material, he will be a fatality. That director would be better off trying to revive a musical that is so weakly written, it might well benefit from a radically new concept. If it succeeds, the director will get accolades. Of course, the acclaim will delude him, but that's not unusual in the theatre—or anywhere else. But will it succeed if that director doesn't have the musical in his bones? In a little theatre of his own, perhaps, but not in the arena.

TWO

Guiding Stars

PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T EVEN ALIVE when she was performing know Ethel Merman had the musical in her bones. As did people who never saw her. Seeing her isn't necessary. Hearing that voice does it, and they've heard it in a recording or on a television clip, the unmistakable voice with impeccable diction. No wonder she was the First Madam of Musical Comedy. Could she act? The question was never asked. Even when musical comedy was overtaken by musical theatre, the question wasn't asked. With Annie Get Your Guns glorious cornucopia of a score, who needed to act? It wasn't asked of her for the less glorious Call Me Madam or the inglorious Happy Hunting, either. They were musical comedies: nobody was asked to act. When musical theatre arrived for her via Gypsy, the question was asked: could the Merm act?

More often than not, the director of a musical theatre piece finds himself searching for exploitable qualities in his stars, actual or so billed, sometimes because of limited acting ability, sometimes because of thinly written roles. Given a pliant actor and a creative director, the resulting illusion fools most of the people most of the time.

Merman was a Roman-candle star who knew how to strut on stage and perform, but not how to act. For Gypsy, she needed tutelage—not an unusual task for the director of a musical, but one some directors disdain and some simply don't know how to perform. If it's a star who needs help, that entails standing up to the billing, but most directors have difficulty just getting off their knees. The director in this case shared a history with the star. They knew each other's laundry and they liked each other. He was not very articulate, but he spoke her language. Jerome Robbins was, in fact, the ideal director for Ethel Merman.

His basic problem had nothing to do with his star but was essentially, and remained essentially, his basic problem with the show: his concept didn't come from the material—a common problem for the director who wants the show to be His Show with a box around it. Jerry conceived of Gypsy as “a panorama of vaudeville and burlesque.” A panorama is a background; it doesn't focus the show because it doesn't have any relation to the first question the director must ask and answer about any show he is to direct: what is it about? Gypsy can be directed to be about various things: parents who try to live their children's lives, children who become their parents, or—what I intended—the need for recognition. Obvious in Rose, the need is common to every character in the play; for the title character, the need for recognition is from her mother—a need for love. That was the point of identification for me as author. Back in 1959 Tom Hatcher and I had been together for five years; my life had been transformed, and it remained so for forty-seven more until death did us part.

Choosing what a show is about is not a textbook choice. Beginning with casting, it influences everything: what the director tells his actors, how he stages them, and where he puts the emphasis in each scene and song.

When Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and I started writing Gypsy, Jerry was casting and rehearsing the London company of West Side Story. It took us only a little more than three months to finish. By that time, he was trying out West Side in Manchester, England, and our show wasn't a panorama of anything. It was the portrait of a woman who has been called the Lear of musical theatre.

For a long time, not only in rehearsal but even out of town in Philadelphia, Jerry refused to accept this. He hired a company for his panorama: vaudevillians and burlesquers—acrobats, jugglers, comics, strippers, showgirls, and dancers. He decided we needed a Minsky Christmas show: a full-length, prototypical burlesque sketch culminating in a big Santa production number. I demurred, arguing that any time neither Rose nor Louise was on stage, we would lose the audience, because we would lose the story. Jerry insisted. I wrote him his burlesque show. It was funny, but so filthy it would be dirty even today in New York. It died in Philadelphia, along with everything else in the show except the kiddie numbers. The Liberty Belles did not want to see their Merm be unpleasant to children—certainly not children presumably hers. Ethel Merman as a mother was itself stretching suspension of disbelief.

The failure of the burlesque sequence sent Jerry elsewhere to demonstrate what Jerome Robbins did for musicals. He tried to cut Louise singing “Little Lamb” to make room for a big dance number in the hotel corridor utilizing all the unnecessary people he had hired. The acrobats tumbled, the jugglers juggled, and the showgirls showed amidst dancers dancing relentlessly. The number had nothing to do with the characters or the story; it was meaningless. Surprising, that, because the first question Jerome Robbins always asked about any dance in a show was “Why are they dancing?” In the hotel, the guests were dancing because Jerome Rob-bins wanted a big dance number in a show that didn't call for dancing. It lasted one