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

when Tony sings “Maria” two minutes later, it is not with reverence for a name, he is not a tenor in church singing of a virgin Maria, he is a lover, his passion exploding in variations on her name. Fortunately I didn't know, until Patrick told me, that what I was asking of Matt Cavanaugh was extremely challenging. His singing seems so effortless; there is never the feeling that so often occurs when “Maria” is sung—“Oh, God, will he hit that note?” He wasn't about hitting notes, he was about the emotion inside him. The aria—that's what it is—didn't end as it had before; it ended with a series of full, passionate “Maria”s followed by a gentle affirmation of Tony's love. Then, just before the last bars, he turns—and there is Maria on her balcony. It is to her that he sings that last, high pianissimo “Maria.”

When he climbs up to Maria's fire-escape balcony, they immediately are lost in a passionate kiss. They can't keep their hands off one another, can barely stop kissing long enough to sing “Tonight,” but they do, in voices belonging to a dream Tony and Maria who look the way a dream Tony and Maria should look, sing as they should sing, act as they should act. The love story is secured and the audience belongs to the lovers.

The initial reason for reviving West Side Story was that it would be bilingual. It is and it brings an exciting quality never before seen in musical theatre. But there was another dynamic that came later and was equally unique: the emphasis on acting. That brought the theme—love can't survive in a world of bigotry and violence— vividly to life with an emotional reality that was unexpectedly moving because of the acting of the entire company. West Side Story was lifted to a new level—the level Gypsy reached, the level I believe the musical play should reach.

In 1957, the first public performance of West Side was given at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Fifty-one years later the first public performance of a new, different West Side Story was given at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. The theatre was not as I remembered it; actually, both the building and the décor of the theatre had changed. The show itself was not as those who had seen the original remembered it. It, too, had changed but many of those who claimed to have seen it hadn't seen what they remembered seeing. Most had really only seen the movie, which I wished they hadn't. None of that mattered. The first performance told us what mattered: it was greeted with a roar of approval. Enthusiasm grew with each performance; the standing ovations came earlier and earlier.

It's infinitely easier to work on a show—and every show needs work—when the audience adores it and tickets are selling like mad, especially when foreclosure and bailout are the watchwords of the day. Easier to polish the performance, easier to deal with problems. There are always problems; and first on my list were the supertitles I hadn't thought necessary.

They ran in white on black rectangles on either side of the proscenium, a constant distraction whether read or not, because those flashing of white in every scene where a word was in Spanish pulled the audience out of the play. A bilingual script was meant to make the play exciting; instead, it was destroying it with those titles.

Some of this was because more had been translated into Spanish than I had intended, and I had been too lax (aka dumb) to realize this. “Rumble,” most obviously, had been translated as “puela,” which means “fight” in Spanish. Why? The Sharks spoke English, they would have said “rumble.” Anita makes a point of speaking English while Bernardo insists on speaking Spanish. Her big speech to Bernardo in the scene before “America” was mistakenly in Spanish. It would be easy to restore it to English, but it was the whole approach, the insistence that supertitles were necessary, that had to be addressed. Making the decision unilaterally, I threw them out.

There was curiosity, anticipation, excitement before that first no-title performance. “Rumble” had replaced “puela,” and I had inserted some English where I thought it necessary to help the story or to let the audience know what a scene was about. In the scene before “I Feel Pretty,” Maria said in English, “Tonight is my wedding night.” Her scene with Chino, which follows, was all in Spanish except for his last line said in English, the language of the traitor: “He killed your brother.” Its impact after only Spanish was devastating.

The audience reaction left no doubt: the titles were removed permanently. “I Feel Pretty” stopped the show as it always had, but for the first time the scene with the duet of “A Boy Like That” and “I Have a Love,” followed by a brief passage in English with Schrank, got a hand it had never gotten before. I had also cut the projections used during the Balcony Scene and “One Hand, One Heart.” As a result of the double stripping down, the audience was totally involved the entire evening, surely the purpose of a play. There were always standing ovations at the end; usually not until major players took their bow. On the night the supertitles were eliminated, the entire audience stood up the moment the curtain rose after the play ended. Sweet validation.

Why? is the most important of questions, certainly the most important a director can ask. Beginning with himself: why is he a director? Not having any desire myself to direct, I was pressed into service during the dress rehearsal of my first play, Home of the Brave. The director, Michael Gordon, was feuding bitterly with Ralph Alswang, the scenic designer, over a window shade. Mike would order the stage manager—Jimmy Gelb, a Chekhovian character he knew from the Group Theatre—to lower the shade and shadow the room; Ralph would sneak on stage to raise the