Mainly on Directing

very American. “What does that mean?” Ward sniffed. That he never bothered to find out was clear from his scenery; that he didn't even bother to find out who Rose was was clear from his dowdy costumes for Bernadette. Whatever Anthony Ward had in his bones, it wasn't musical or authenticity. There are still Brits who think we are their colonials.
The scenery for Gypsy, like the scenery for all Donmar productions, had no walls. This makes sense at the Donmar Warehouse in London, where walls would block the audience from seeing what's going on. It made no sense at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway in New York, because there was no clear reason why there weren't walls. The absence of walls in any set that was supposed to be a room left the audience unsure where a scene was taking place—in a kitchen, for example. The lack of walls wouldn't have mattered if the pieces that made up the set had been carefully chosen to convey “kitchen.” Instead, all the rooms were composed of the same brown doorways, brown chairs, and brown table, all pushed around the stage by actors and/or stagehands in meticulously choreographed moves to music. The arrangement of doorways, chairs, and table changed for each scene, but the end result was always brown doorways, chairs, and table in an unidentifiable location. Style, yes—but for Kafka, not Gypsy.
No walls ruptured the rhythm of the show. Intended to speed the pace by cutting the time for scene changes—which it did—it unfortunately also slowed the pace markedly during the scenes themselves. When there are walls, a character can enter and exit in almost no time because he comes on stage unseen behind a wall and merely has to open a door and appear. When there are no walls, he has to come on stage in full view of the audience and decide how to get to that door at the right moment. He can't race to it without attracting unwanted audience attention, but if he walks slowly, pretending to be invisible while knowing he isn't, trying to time it so that he won't have to wait at the door but can open it on cue the split second he gets there, it may take him almost a minute to cross from the wings to the door. In real time, a minute may not be much, but in theatre time, a single minute can seem like five. Not only is the pace slowed, not only are entrances not the surprise desired, but the audience's attention is split between watching the characters on stage and watching the actor sneaking out of the wings trying to pretend he isn't.
All this prompted more notes from me which Sam tried to deal with. A backdrop with the word “hotel” in huge letters was added to the arrangement of furniture meant to be the hotel rooms. Rose has rented a room for herself and her two daughters but crammed it with the four boys in the act. Along comes a suspicious hotel manager and she has a problem: how to hide the boys from the hotel manager in a set without walls for them to hide behind. While the new backdrop identified the place, it didn't have walls. Rose's problem was still how to hide the boys in a set without walls for them to hide behind. When I directed Gypsy four years later at City Center in New York, the production had no walls because we had almost no money. How did I solve the problem of hiding the boys? I cut the suspicious hotel manager: nobody had to hide. Who says the author shouldn't direct?
In truth, I had long wanted to make that cut. The whole section with its farcical running in and out of slamming doors was part of what is called a block-comedy scene. It had nothing to do with the story, but in 1959, when the show was first done, such a scene was a convention of the musical. Even in 1973 in London— particularly in London—it didn't matter that the slamming doors held up the story. The English are brought up on that kind of farce. That was the first time I directed the show, however, and I wanted to kill the author. The scene was a bitch to stage, but it was also a bad detour on the new road I was trying to take the show because of Angela Lansbury, who was acting Rose. By 1989, I wanted to get rid of the scene, but with Tyne Daly, who could make sense of almost anything, it was getting big laughs and I didn't have the guts. When I did in 2007, it was because Tom Hatcher had died. His opinion was always my guide; I knew he would have applauded the cut, so with no hesitation and much love, I finally made it. The hotel room played faster, just as funny and so much better for the play, because the story continued to be told.
What that HOTEL backdrop did was exemplify my inability to play the role Scott Rudin had cast me in. I couldn't transfuse the musical sensibility lacked by the director and his designer into their bone marrow. After a while, page after page of notes, particularly the same notes by the author, understandably become an irritant to the director. The author doesn't want to give up on a show he knows and loves. All the same, he has to face that he can't direct by proxy any more than he can transplant the musical in his bones. In the end, practically and artistically, there can be only one voice to call the shots: the voice of the commander-in-chief. That is the voice of the director.
No Walls was in vogue for revivals of American musicals in New York long before Gypsy—mainly in productions by British directors, such as the recent ill-conceived Fiddler on the Roof. In that new look at an earthy musical, the