April
20Broadway’s Kings and Queens
Show business memoirs tend to be stuffy and self-protective. That’s why I admire that old pro, Arthur Laurents, for writing a book that is downright, well, bitchy.It’s called “Mainly on Directing,” and its stories weave in and out of Laurents’ various hit shows – “Gypsy,” “West Side Story,” La Cage aux Folles,” and the like.
On Cage, Laurents relates how Allen Carr, who was the total Hollywood producer, not a creature of Broadway, insisted on Laurents to direct the show, over-ruling the Shubert Organization’s insistence on Michael Bennett.
Why was Carr so insistent? “Maybe to give the (manicured) finger to a Broadway establishment that regarded him as a silly Hollywood queen,” opines Laurents. Now 90, concludes: “The god that loves loyalty among gays was pleased. Cage ran for four years and had several national companies.”
Laurents can be caustic about the work of fellow directors, especially Hollywood directors. Robert Wise’s movie version of “West Side Story” was downright “embarrassing,” Laurents writes. “The overacting of the peroxided, Max Factored Jets,” he wrote, was exceeded only by “their Day-Gloed, Carmen Miranded girl friends.” Advises Laurents: “Don’t rely on memory, view it again, just the first ten minutes, and you will be aghast.
Fortunately no movie re-make is being planned, and the newly re-imagined “West Side Story” on Broadway, of course, is this season’s runaway hit.
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