Mainly on Directing

performance.
If Gypsy's director had been a man whose concern was for the show rather than for his position, the choreographer wouldn't have been permitted even to put that dance into rehearsal. It brought the story to a dead stop and eliminated the song that established Louise, who is the heroine. But Jerry was director as well as choreographer, and he was more secure as the latter. Understandably: it was through dance that he best expressed his creativity. Directing, however, gave him complete control.
Words are a director's medium—to communicate with actors, to explicate the text, to uncover the subtext. Unfortunately, Jerry Robbins wasn't comfortable with words. If he sometimes lashed out at actors, it was in frustration because he couldn't find the right words to explain what he wanted. With dancers, language was physical: he could demonstrate with movement; words were footnotes. With dancers, he could command and demand and still receive adulation; with actors, he received stony stares.
When the hotel dance went, Jerry's interest in the show visibly diminished. He felt there was no opportunity to do what he did best. The strip didn't really work; he knew that and had intended to complete it before we left Philadelphia, but he never did, because he had lost interest in Sandra Church, the actress he had chosen to play Louise. She couldn't have been bettered in the first act, but she was lost in the second when Louise becomes Gypsy Rose Lee. She shrank from standing up to Merman in the pivotal scene where Gypsy confronts Rose and levels her. This was an Actors Studio actress who laughingly introduced her own mother as “Rose.” Her inability to use that annoyed Jerry; his inability to help her use it annoyed him even more. He gave up on the strip.
Gypsy Rose Lee's success had come from what she said while stripping, not from what she did. I had written remarks for Sandra as Gypsy, but Jerry wouldn't allow her to try using them; she wasn't capable, he said. His interest in her was gone; so was his interest in a musical number he had counted on to show what he could do. He had already created one of the most memorable numbers in musical theatre—“All I Need Is the Girl,” which moves and thrills the audience every time. But for Jerry in Philadelphia, disconnected from the show he was directing, unhappy with his lack of opportunity as a choreographer, all he saw was a small number he had knocked off for two characters, one of whom not only didn't dance but, as the number was worked out, was played by me, to whom he had begun to refer to Gypsy as “your show.”
Theatre egos automatically trigger derision, but a strong ego sometimes is precisely what wins the derby. Ethel was Jerry's choice; he was determined she would be a winner. What he didn't know about acting, he knew about Ethel. He could not have functioned better as a director in the place most vital to the success of the show: Ethel Merman's performance.
It came down to “Rose's Turn.” The emotions behind “Everything's Coming Up Roses” she dealt with vocally: that voice was a trumpet call to Armageddon. The scenes were also taken care of vocally. I wrote endless stage directions: “picking up speed … getting louder, faster, exploding … a pause … slower now, quieter, softer.” They were all over the script, plus a few “happily”s, “angrily”s, “savagely”s, but tempo and volume worked best. If she was questioned why she was doing what she was doing, she held up the script and, like Adelaide lamenting in Guys and Dolls, pointed and said: “It says here, ‘faster, louder.’”
Jerry used his version of that technique for directing her in “Rose's Turn.” This was unknown territory for her: a complex, coarsely funny, then wrenching dramatic aria, it was set to musical patterns unfamiliar to her. The tricky rhythms were a challenge she could be drilled to meet, but the emotional demands were unchartered waters she would have drowned in had Jerry not been there. He five-six-seven-eighted every moment for her as he would for a dancer, demonstrating as he went: sashaying and bumping, pacing and prowling side by side with her as she mimicked him mimicking her. They didn't probe for subtleties or subtext. He trusted the Sondheim words would speak for themselves if she spat them out with that Merman diction. He was detailed, he was painstaking— and it worked. When she hit that last “For me!” it was Ethel Merman triumphant. She knew all about a show being for her.
Ethel continued to perform precisely as she had opening night. The notes were the same, the voice was the same, all looked and sounded the same; but as the run went on, there was an emptiness, because there was nothing underneath. Jerry had taken her by the hand and led her where she was to go, but how she got there and why she was there, she didn't know. He wasn't the kind of director who could have told her, but I'm not sure any director could have—certainly no director she would have accepted. She once said: “Buddy DeSylva said watching Ethel Merman is like watching a movie. I never change.” It didn't occur to her that someone else might not consider that a compliment. It was true, though: her performance didn't change, not a beat. Not even with Jack Klugman, her leading man, trying hard to keep her fresh and alive. He guided, he cajoled; she revered him, she respected him, but eventually she wore him out. He was, for him, walking through the show right beside her. Still, Ethel Merman's rote was more exciting than almost anyone else's freshness, because there was always that voice. Moreover, her performance had become legendary, and people saw what they had been told they would see. They still see it today, even though they never saw it.
A week after it opened, Merman's Gypsy made