Mainly on Directing

a fan, an Anglophile, and he had a lot of lolly. After the first preview it was evident to everyone except Robert and his co-producer that this revival was in what is colloquially known as deep shit. My longtime partner, Tom Hatcher, came striding up the aisle as soon as the curtain came down and broke the news to Robert. Startled at first because Tom came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and deceptively looked it, Robert recovered quickly, and his experienced tongue got to work. Too easily upset on my behalf, Tom struck back, and they played a juicy little scene at the back of the orchestra. A theatre gossip columnist standing nearby reported the episode the next day, except that in his version the argument was between Robert and me. That might have upset me in the days before Nick and Nora, when the New York Times, in a futile effort to increase circulation, had its own theatre gossip columnist who destroyed me every Friday during our endless previews. Like the show, she didn't last.
As the credited producer, Robert put all his chips on Sam; he believed Sam did walk on water, as indeed he had at his reservoir, the Donmar. But this was Broadway, this was the Shubert Theatre, and unlike Scott, Robert didn't know what it meant to have the musical in your bones. Thus he couldn't see that it wasn't in Sam's or understand why it needed to be.
What does it mean, the musical wasn't “in his bones”? For that matter, what exactly does “in the bones” mean? Well, there is no exact definition: the expression encompasses a feeling for the rhythm of the musical as a whole as well as of the scenes and numbers within it, for why and when and how to highlight a moment and make it musical without actual song or dance, for how and when to implant the emotional reality that makes a performance musical theatre, not musical comedy. It's not a skill, it can't be acquired with experience, it can't be learned or taught or injected—it's an instinct. Even excellent singers and dancers don't make excellent musical theatre performers if, despite their gifts, despite their technique, despite all their experience, the musical isn't in their bones. In Rose's words: “You either got it or you ain't.” Unfortunately for Sam Mendes, his first directorial touch on Gypsy showed he didn't got it.
Gypsy starts before the director does, with that legendary, thrilling Jule Styne overture. Play the opening “I had a dream” chords (the show was a few years before Martin Luther King's historic speech) and the audience applauds as though cards have been held up in a television studio; it erupts over the trumpet solo in the burlesque section and roars its approval with the final orchestral flourish. It's flying on a musical high when the curtain rises on a noisy, brightly lit, garishly costumed rehearsal for Uncle Jocko's Kiddie Show, Seattle—as the illuminated signs say on either side of the vaudeville proscenium. During the brief scene, laughter comes fairly easily, because the audience is so exhilarated but also because it knows in its musical bones that something is coming that is going to send it even higher. And something does. Strutting down the aisle in all her vulgar glory is Rose. “Sing out, Louise!” she calls, and the roof of the theatre is knocked off. Gypsy is launched.
The rhythm and knowing drive to that opening beat were absent from the Mendes production. The overture worked its magic; the exhilarated audience was flying high; and then the curtain rose—on gloomy silence and the empty, cavernous stage of a dingy old theatre. Across the back wall, the designer added redundancy with one word in large, faded letters: SILENCE. A stooped, scraggy stagehand dragged himself out of the upstage shadows to cross oh-so-slowly downstage with placards to be inserted in the downstage light boxes. Before he had trudged halfway there, the audience had been lost. It had come down from its high and was ready for The Iceman Cometh. By the time Bernadette as Rose strutted down the aisle shouting “Sing out, Louise!” Gypsy‘s battery had died and she had to jump-start the show again all by herself.
The first five minutes of a musical are crucial: either the audience can be captured, in which case they are the director's, no matter what he or she does, until at least halfway through the first act; or they can be lost, in which case it will take some stage magic to get them back before the end of the first act, if ever. Never mind intelligence and craft, never mind desire, never mind talent. If the musical were in your bones, you would never follow that dazzling overture with the gloomy silence of an empty, cavernous hole and the long wait while an old stagehand trudged across a dreary stage.
Nor would you have continued to show it wasn't in your bones right up to the big climactic eleven o'clock number, “Rose's Turn.” For a director born for musicals, “Rose's Turn” is New Year's Eve in Times Square. It's his world and his stage on which to let his star loose theatrically. And legitimately, for the number takes place, not in reality, but in Rose's head, where she is “better than any of you!”—the greatest performer in the world, the star she had always wanted to be, hailed by wildly cheering fans. Raunchy, funny, sexy, vulgar, and underneath, always raging, always eaten up with hunger for the star she has never had on her door. She almost gets tripped up: there's a shaking passage where she questions herself. But she's Rose, and Rose doesn't give in or up: that eternal anger fuels her to insist on triumph, and triumph she does. The cheers in her head are louder than anyone ever heard in life.
Bernadette Peters's life in the theatre had made her more than ready. But that wasn't how Sam saw the number. Under his