THE WAY HE WAS

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4040/28/

Ave atque vale
Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Arthur Laurents, 1917-2011

'To me, there's nothing like the overture ending and the curtain going up,’ Arthur Laurents told me. ‘I think that's the most exciting moment in the theatre. And I wish we still had curtains.’

He outlived curtains. He lived long enough to direct a smash hit musical about gays, La Cage Aux Folles, and then see it clobbered by a smash hit gay plague called Aids. He wrote the first hit musical about Puerto Ricans, West Side Story, and lived long enough to see it become politically incorrect, to the point where a Massachusetts School District banned it as racist. He survived the blacklist and half-a-century later survived a play about the blacklist, Jolson Sings Again, when the bold, brave, passionately committed producers so supportive of his script's important message cheerfully screwed him over. But he kept going, directing Broadway revivals of his two biggest hits, Gypsy and West Side, as recently as 2008 and 2009, which makes him the first nonagenarian helmer on the Great White Way since the 96-year old George Abbott directed the hit revival of On Your Toes back in the Eighties. Away from the theatre, he wrote novels, and Barbra Streisand's nightclub act, and adaptations of his novels for Barbra Streisand movie vehicles - The Way We Were, with Robert Redford. For a writer who was essentially a Broadway guy, he had a three-decade career in Hollywood, stretching from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in 1948, starring his then lover Farley Granger, to The Turning Point in 1977, a ballet movie starring Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft and Mikhail Baryshnikov, with a plot deriving from Laurents' affair with ballerina Nora Kaye when she was still married to the grandson of President Martin van Buren and directed for the screen by her subsequent husband Herbert Ross. Lots of Broadway types have lived that kind of life but Laurents is rare in capturing it in a spectacularly brutal memoir, one of the few showbiz autobiographies worth reading, and one that lives up to its title: Original Story By...

Arthur Laurents' curtain finally fell last week, at the age of 93. He may have liked that moment when the overture ends and the curtain rises, but he gave us two great openings that both disdain convention. West Side Story (1957) begins with no words but a musical 'Prologue' to accompany the Sharks and Jets dancing out their mutual hostility. At the end of the sequence, the Shark leader cuts the ear of a Jet, and a police whistle is heard. It's an opening unlike any ever seen on Broadway, and it could easily have seemed ridiculous: Tough guys prancing around? But audiences bought it: Leonard Bernstein's music was spiky, urban, finger-snappy - and tragic. Laurents understood that you needed to tell the customers upfront the language in which this story would be told. West Side's curtain-raiser encompasses the show's musical, choreographic and dramatic ambitions.

Two years later, on Gypsy, he did it again. Or rather he didn't. He did something entirely different. The show opens with a "conventional" overture, except that it's the overture to end all overtures. When it got to the blaring strip-joint bump'n'grind E-flat shrieks, Jule Styne instructed the second trumpet to blow the roof off. By the end of it, the audience were already on the show's side. The curtain went up on Uncle Jocko's Kiddie Show in Seattle, and a stage filled with grotesque moppets in tacky, homemade costumes. Suddenly, from the back of the auditorium, a rasping voice shouts, "Sing out, Louise!", and barging her way down the aisle comes the ultimate stage opening, Mama Rose, played by Ethel Merman. What an inspired opening: In effect, the leading character hijacks her own show and disrupts the opening number. Brilliant. Laurents' second great curtain-raiser.

He told me a story about the opening night in 1959. Laurents, Styne and their lyricist Stephen Sondheim were standing at the back of the theatre. When the audience began to applaud during the overture, Jule was delirious. "They're applauding my music!" he squealed. "They're applauding my music!"

"They're applauding the trumpet player," said Sondheim, sourly.

Laurents lived out at Quogue on Long Island with the same man for half a century, a fellow called Tom Hatcher. I went out there to interview him a couple of times and, if I get a moment to prowl through the archives, we may dust off for those tapes for an audio special. I learned a lot from him about why certain moments in certain plays work, and certain others don't. He loved musicals but he didn't write the bits of them that theatregoers love - the songs. Instead, he wrote the "book" - the story. Very few people know what a "book-writer" does. The common misconception, even among those who are aware that such a profession exists, is that the book-writer is responsible only for the dialogue scenes - for connecting up the bits between the songs - whereas, in fact, he's the guy who enables the numbers, framing the entire drama from which the songs spring. 'The way I always work is I do an outline,' said Laurents, 'in some cases indicating song titles, but certainly indicating where the musical material is. I've worked principally with Steve Sondheim as a lyricist and we work very closely together. So he then feels free to what he calls "raid" the dialogue.' In West Side Story, when it was decided that Tony needed an 'I am' song early in the show, Bernstein and Sondheim wrote 'Something's Coming' with much of the lyric and many of the images - 'whistling down the river' - 'raided' from Laurents' dialogue.

Gypsy is perhaps the greatest of all Broadway musicals. It's dramatically indestructible, which is why it's revived endlessly on Broadway itself, but it's musically appealing enough to have produced more cast recordings than any other show. You still dispute that 'greatest' tag? Well, okay, it's the most Broadway of Broadway musicals. 'When they came to me,' Laurents told me, 'I said it isn't any good. Who cares about this woman who was the striptease queen of America? And then I thought: make it about the mother. And then we have parents and children, and that's why it's eternal. That's viable any day. The idiom of the characters was kinda trashy gutter talk, and you needed kinda trashy gutter music. That's not to disparage Jule. He wrote very gutsy music, but in that idiom.'

'Too many writers write self-pity,' Jule Styne explained. 'Audiences hate that in characters. In Gypsy, when Rose is deserted by her daughter, she's broke, the act's washed up, we could have had her sing about how miserable she is. Instead, we turned the moment in on itself.' Rose seems dazed. And then she turns to Louise, the other daughter, the mousy nondescript who sewed June's costumes, and says: look at her, look at the new star. Styne gives her a classic, exuberant, look-out-world showtune:

   You'll be swell!
   You'll be great!
   Gonna have the whole world on a plate!

But, in the context of the show, it's a woman driving off the cliff. At this point in the play, Styne and Sondheim have to top Arthur Laurents' powerful dialogue - not for personal reasons, but because in a musical what's sung has to soar beyond what's spoken. Styne's tune starts at the top of the register and blasts off. It's a hell of a first-act finale, an epiphany - but it wouldn't exist had Laurents' book and plot and characters and dialogue not enabled it.

He did that a lot. 'I wanted "Gee, Officer Krupke" in West Side Story,' he said. 'I felt we needed a comic moment for the dramatic tension: in my opinion that makes it stronger. And I was very clever: I sold it to them on sheer gall. I said it's like the porters' scene in Shakespeare, and it was a high-toned enough argument to get it through. But it only works in a tense dramatic situation; that's the only thing that justifies it. They shifted its position in the movie, and it doesn't work. But it works on stage because kids particularly would kid around when they're in danger of real trouble. And dramatically it's tiresome when you're in a sober, serious situation and you have sober, serious dialogue and music. The audience is way ahead. But writers think if someone comes out with this enormous kvetch it makes it important. It doesn't. It lacks wit, it lacks attitude, it’s all so obvious.'

He found a lot of recent theatre 'obvious'. 'They call these Lloyd Webber things "through-composed". They're not through-composed - they're sung ... incessantly. But that's not the same thing.'

Fair enough, but where were all the geniuses? Where was Bernstein? 'We all wanted to do something again after West Side,' said Laurents, 'and Lenny was hipped on it being important. He kept saying, "It's gotta be important." And it just seemed such a truism but I said to him, "If it's good, it'll be important." He was too carried away with that because of his classical peers saying to him, "You are going into the gutter when you write that Broadway stuff." He was a victim of classical snobbism, and he went out of his way to complicate his talent. Years later, Lenny and I started to work on a piece called Alarums And Excursions. I had given him a three or four page treatment, and he was excited about it. And then he began writing it and that's where the opera thing came up. He was making it into an opera and I did not want to write an opera. I don't like opera very much, because the language is twisted to fit the music and I'm a playwright. I don't like this repetition of words that one has in opera to make it fit the notes. Ten times they say, "Go, go, don't stay, go, please don't stay, go." And I've gone by then.'

His best shows are never gone. Half a century on, a show that lost the Tony Award to The Music Man remains the benchmark. I love the way, whenever celebrity know-nothings venture into the field, they proclaim that theirs will be the first show worth seeing since you-know-what. Terry Hands, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, proclaimed his epic bomb Carrie The Musical as the first serious 'music-drama' since West Side Story; the choreographer of another mega-flop Bernadette hailed his show as the most ambitious dance musical since West Side Story; Elton John, before the stage version of The Lion King, used regularly to talk about his plans for a musical that would be the most important breakthrough since (all together now) West Side Story.

But Arthur Laurents actually wrote West Side Story before there was a West Side Story for it to be the most important breakthrough since. And that's what counts.


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