Mainly on Directing Arthur Laurents (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📖

Matt Cavanaugh is not twenty-five, but if he is a compromise, I'll take one like him every time. Tony is older than the other Jets and Matt looks younger than he is and as good as Tony should look. He is an actor and has a voice that is not only beautiful but an anomaly these days: it's really trained. He also has a depth and passion I suspect he didn't know he had that exploded during rehearsals, exposing his vulnerability and enabling me to make the play what it was always meant to be but never quite was: the story of Tony and Maria.

We had no Maria. Hundreds of girls had been seen but there was only one possibility. She had every quality needed for the role except the one that couldn't be compromised: she wasn't Latino. It was regrettable, especially to me, because she was an exceptionally good actress. Unfortunately, the only thing about her that was Latino was her high school Spanish.

Every city in the country having been combed and still no Maria, the casting calls went out to Spain, Cuba (worry about the State Department later), Mexico, and South America, except Argentina. Argentina was mine; Argentina, which meant Buenos Aires, with its own Broadway for American musicals in Spanish and two schools of musical theatre and F&F. I called them.

As usual, Federico said Tom was taking care of me, and apparently was up to date because F&F did indeed have a Maria. The perfect Maria, according to Federico, at the moment appearing as the beautiful bitch in Hairspray. That didn't strike me as much of a recommendation for West Side Story and Leonard Bernstein—pace Tom—but I was told I could judge for myself: the perfect Maria was on YouTube. YouTube. In 1957, when we couldn't find the perfect Tony or the perfect Maria, there wasn't even the Internet, but in 2008 on YouTube there was a girl named Josefina Scaglione. One viewing, and instinct said she would be our Maria: incredibly beautiful, with an incredibly beautiful voice, and incredibly, beautifully young.

She taped a DVD for us, singing “Tonight” in English sublimely and acting the first bridal-shop scene in English impressively, particularly considering who was playing Anita behind the camera—Federico Gonzales of F&F. The producers flew her to New York to audition. In person, she was even more perfect: more beautiful, a trained singer, a trained actress, a trained dancer, bilingual, charismatic, could take direction, and was just twenty-one, a girl in this country. But Buenos Aires is a European city; at twenty-one, Josefina was a young woman, not the lemonade girl she looked like, and in touch with her deepest emotions. She could go unexpected places as an actress and she did: in rehearsal she turned out to be an inventive comedienne. Directing her was a joy and a lesson. Since she was fluent in English, I forgot my own experience when I lived in Paris and had been fairly fluent in French (not anymore, alas). Is anyone totally fluent in a second language without living for years where it is the first language? I didn't watch my idioms with Josefina so there were times when she would say: “Arthur, I haven't understood one word you said for the last three minutes.” I had to laugh. The whole company and crew adore her.

With one exception, the show was cast. Joey McKneely, who is meticulous and demanding, auditioned every dancer available until he was satisfied he had the best. But why not? West Side Story is considered a dance show, and at that point I still thought it was. The leading dancing role, Anita, still hadn't been cast. The original Anita, Chita Rivera, had every step she danced choreographed for her by Peter Gennaro, who knew her special talent and exploited it. Anita not only had to dance that strongly in the first act but to sing and act with even more power in the second. Small wonder we were a week from rehearsal with no Anita and seriously worried. Then came a candidate who had to be persuaded to audition.

Karen Olivo dazzled me the first time I saw her, which was Off-Broadway in Lin Miranda's In the Heights. She was a dancer but not of the caliber needed for Anita. She knew Joey McKneely felt that, and was hesitant about auditioning. But she very much wanted to play Anita. When Karen read, I looked at David Saint: this was an actress. But more: you looked at her even if she merely stood there and seemingly did nothing—“seemingly” because there was always something felt and true to the character going on inside her. I asked her to make an adjustment to how she was playing the scene. She did, easily. She sang “A Boy Like That” with a voice that matched her fury. She sang in English but she was bilingual and could have sung in Spanish if the lyric had been available. I needed to find out one thing more. I asked her if she would mind singing the song again but this time not angrily, as it had been done originally, as it is always done, but with the pain Anita must be feeling because Bernardo had just been killed. She took a moment, and then sang. By the end of the song, without any vocal or physical histrionic, she was in tears, everyone in the room was close to tears, and I had decided Karen Olivo had to play Anita. Then she danced for Joey.

Joey admired Karen for having the guts to audition for him, knowing what little regard he had for her dancing, and said he would do everything possible to help her dance the role. When Karen read the audition scenes, there wasn't one reading I had ever heard in my head but they were hers and they were right for her Anita. I thought, but didn't say, that if she couldn't dance Anita as choreographed by Peter Gennaro