Mainly on Directing

a dream come true that I'd had since I was a kid. I would arrive at a flashing theatre in my limousine driven by my uniformed chauffeur, walk down the aisle with my lover while the orchestra played the overture to the newest musical hit in town. Well, it was a rented car, but I walked down the aisle with Tom Hatcher, who was far better than the lover I had dreamed, while the orchestra played an overture far better than the overture I had dreamed, to the newest musical hit in town, which I had written but which I hadn't even dreamed. Dreams rarely come true, less rarely are bettered. Small wonder I kept remembering this one—until the other day, when I cut off the memory.
Back in 1959, walking down the theatre aisle with Tom and me was a lovely girl named Kathleen Maguire. She and Tom had met and become close friends in summer stock in Elitch Gardens in Colorado three years earlier. Elitch Gardens with summer stock is long gone, not missed because not remembered, though it very much should be. Kathleen went on to play the lead in an Off-Broadway revival of my play The Time of the Cuckoo, which Shirley Booth had starred in on Broadway. Kathleen was better for the play but not for the box office. There, the memory held beautifully. When Tom died of lung cancer, what I had blocked from that memory ten years earlier came unblocked: Kathleen had died of breast cancer.
Even the happiest of memories can be vulnerable. There are others, from other Gypsys—more thrilling, more exciting, more lasting, I suspect. But that was my only memory of a dream come true.
Merman's “Rose's Turn” effected two unanticipated changes in Gypsy, each calling on a different function of the director. The first began with a mild brouhaha early in the Philadelphia tryout.
Too often the creators of a show think they've made a great point clearly and are puzzled that the audience doesn't get it. We were all so sure, so proud that Rose's admission she had done everything for herself and not for her daughters was not made as it customarily is in musicals—by being spoken in a scene. This being new Musical Theatre, it was sung in “Rose's Turn.” But the audience didn't hear it. They wanted Rose to admit she had done it all for herself, and we were certain she did in the number, but the Philadelphia audience didn't agree. In Philadelphia, they were dissatisfied, even with their Ethel.
Time goes fast out of town with a show, even faster when there's an important problem to solve and the only way to solve it is a way you don't want to go: Rose had to admit she did it for herself in dialogue. Reluctantly, a few clarifying lines were added to the brief scene that followed “Rose's Turn,” and everyone was happy.
Except Merman. She refused to say the new lines. No Rose she played was going to say she did it all for herself. Steve argued that she had said it in the lyric, why wouldn't she say it in dialogue? “I don't say it in the lyric,” she snapped at the lyricist. “I say ‘Starting now, it's gonna be my turn.’”
Ethel Merman may not have been the swiftest, but she knew what she sang better than the man who wrote the words. She knew better than all of us. We were hearing what we wanted to hear, but it wasn't there.
That was the first and only time Merman refused to do what she was asked. Nor could she be budged. She sat in her dressing room, arms folded, lips tight, waiting for us to admit she was right. She was right about what she sang, but she wasn't right about what was needed for the show and the audience. We all tried to convince her, but it came down, inevitably, to that awkward moment when nobody wants to be the director, including the director. The star has dug in her heels, she has to be moved off the dime. Push has to come to shove, and it's the director who has to do the pushing and shoving. Well, after all, he is the director, ha ha ha; he's in charge, it's his show. Otherwise, it's the star's show, and then everyone can go home.
We left Jerry alone with Merman.
The new dialogue went into the show. What he said to her, neither of them ever told.
There is scarcely a show with a star where the moment that defines whose show it is, star's or director's, doesn't arrive, usually in the star's dressing room. When I directed Anyone Can Whistle, which Steve and I had written with no regard for conventions, the defining moment came in Lee Remick's dressing room just two days before the New York opening.
One minute after her first entrance in the show, Lee, to a racing musical accompaniment, tore into an extremely long speech so deftly and with such amazing speed that she brought down the house and got an ovation. She was home but not free, for at the end of the scene, she sang her first song, “There Won't Be Trumpets.” “Trumpets” is first-class Sondheim, but it's not an easy song and it's rangy. Lee couldn't really sing it. Not only did she not have the musical in her bones, she didn't have much in her modest voice. The number died, hurting her and hurting the show. It was her only song in the first act (of three), but it had to go.
My first hurdle was Steve. He had fantasies about Lee at that time, but he didn't deceive himself about the number. He asked I leave him out of any confrontation with Lee—which I did and as director should have. As Rose says: “You gotta take the rough with the smooth.” Nobody more so than the director.
My relationship with Lee had been set the first day of rehearsal. After the