A whirlwind life of sex and celebrities, carousing and creativity, fame and failures, protests and parlor games from Shubert Alley to Tinseltown: It could be anybody, right? But it specifically marks the colorful and sometimes contentious life of award-winning playwright/screen writer/director/musical theater collaborator/autobiographer Arthur Laurents that will be given the spotlight at a gala benefit: "Broadway at George Street" - for the George Street Playhouse on Monday January 29, 2001.
When we think of the creators of musicals we tend to think primarily of composers and lyricists. Yet it is the writer of the musical's book and/or the director of the musical that more often than not determines whether that show will become a classic or fade away. Laurents is definitely on the short list of most talented multi-talented creative forces in American musical theater. But Laurents's musical theater credits are only a portion of the forces that will drive the benefit, one that promises to be something to sing about. Other than raising money ("we're looking at $25,000 with a full house") Saint says that it is a nice way for our audience to feel they are in a private salon "with Arthur."
Laurents's impact on Broadway has been legendary. His colleagues and collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim. Audiences will have the opportunity to hear eye-opening, ear pricking, behind-the-scenes tales and recollections about their favorite shows and personalities.
For the gala occasion, the George Street Playhouse has obtained the services of celebrated cabaret and musical theater stars KT Sullivan (currently starring in the Off-Broadway revue American Rhapsody) and Lee Roy Reams (recently featured in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Victor/Victoria). They will sing songs from eight Laurents collaborations, including West Side Story, La Cage Aux Folles, Gypsy, and Do I Hear a Waltz. The musical entertainment will be augmented by host Lee Davis, who will talk with Laurents about his career and his book "Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood." While Laurents' accomplishments in musical theater will provide the core of the evening's entertainment, tales of his bi-sexually active, around-the-world adventures can also be counted on to add plenty of spicy sub-text to the event.
Even if Laurents's distinguished books for the landmark musicals Gypsy and West Side Story had not placed him among the giants of American theatrical literature, his tenderly romantic plays The Time of the Cuckoo (the film version, which he hated, was called "Summertime") and Invitation to a March (1960), and the musical Anyone Can Whistle, would endear him to theater lovers.
Laurents's active presence at and for George Street is appreciated by artistic director David Saint who says that Laurents has become a friend to him and to the George Street Playhouse, and is (with a chuckle) with A.R. Gurney and Anne Meara, "a member of my `over sixty-five playwrights club.'"
Asked if any topics are taboo, Saint says, "I've never met anyone who speaks so honestly and candidly about what he feels. Before I even met him, I was warned by others to be careful of Laurents, that he eats directors for breakfast. But we clicked the minute we met," says Saint, feeling that he could not have a stronger supporter than Laurents because Laurents will not, as Saint puts it "bullshit you or couch something in diplomacy; those who get to hear him at the benefit can expect "no holding back."
"Laurents is one of the few people whom the great Sondheim will listen to. He's not afraid to tell him what he thinks is wrong," says Saint, referring to the revised production of Do I Hear A Waltz, produced at the theater last season. Spotlighting Laurents for the benefit is well timed. He is currently at the theater directing his adaptation of Venecia, by Argentine playwright Jorge Accame. It immediately follows the current world premiere of A.R. Gurney's Human Events.
Laurents's relationship with Saint and George Street began with Saint directing Laurents play, Jolson Sings Again. Those familiar with Laurents's life and career know he was one among many theater professionals blacklisted by Hollywood. From a distance of more than 40 years, Laurents wrote Jolson Sings Again, which had a successful run at the George Street Playhouse in March 1999. The infamous HUAC hearings of the 1950s, and the probe of communists in Hollywood that caused career havoc and irreparable personal despair, were at the heart of the play that teamed Laurents and Saint. Laurents actually wrote Jolson Sings Again in 1992. However, it was not until 1995 that the play was given a pre-Broadway tryout at Seattle Rep. Saint became acquainted with Laurents while directing My Good Name at the Bay Street Theater, Sag Harbor, in the summer of 1998.
Although Laurents told me when I spoke with him during the run of Jolson that he was never a member of the Communist Party, he was blacklisted because of his association with a lot of left-wing causes. "They took my passport away, and it took me three months to get it back," he recalls. Laurents spent an extended period in Paris. I was curious to know if Laurents had ever written under a pseudonym during that time. "No," he said, laughing, "but I had one - Jack Ash - just in case."
In 1955 Laurents returned to Hollywood after the "witch hunt" was over. Of course, the agents were compelled to ask Laurents to write a statement stating that he was "not now, nor have ever been, a member, etc." They told him that it didn't matter what he was swearing to. So Laurents finished the statement with "a member of the shoeshine boys union." He said, "As long as they had your name on a piece of paper, they took it. I'm sure no one ever read it."
Laurents has received honors and awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Writers Guild of America, the Tonys, Golden Globe, Drama Desk and National Board of Review. Brooklyn born and raised, Laurents earned his BA from Cornell ("a crap degree," he says). Laurents continues to be an advocate of social and political issues about which he feels passionately. He and Sondheim, his long-time friend and collaborator recently rose up and spoke in support of a controversial New York theater district zoning plan that would permit theaters to sell air rights. Beginning with Home of the Brave (1945), a powerful play about anti-Semitism which Hollywood (for reasons of its own) turned into a film about racial prejudice in the armed forces, Laurents was in the vanguard in dramatizing with sensitivity and skill such controversial topics as homosexuality (Hitchcock's 1949 film "Rope"), mental illness (the 1948 film, "The Snake Pit"), "witch hunts" and black-listing in Hollywood ("The Way We Were"), and women's and civil rights reform (the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Hallelujah Baby). When I asked Laurents why he was not given screenplay credit for "The Snake Pit," he answered "I got screwed. It's a typical Hollywood story that I've included in my memoirs."
[Said memoirs, which I have just finished reading, are charged with not-so-typical stories about his ex lovers actor Farley Grainger and dancer Nora Kaye, ex-drinking partner Bill Holden; about such eccentrics as Hepburn, Streisand, Bernstein and Robbins; about escapades in Paris with Lena Horn, and charades in Hollywood with Gene Kelly. But, like the best of autobiographical story telling, the stories pointedly and poignantly reveal a talented man's reflective journey from self-doubt to self-determination. It's a terrific and titillating can't-put-it-down read.]
After more than a half century of writing on a wide variety of subjects for both stage and screen, 85 year-old Laurents says he continues to be haunted by the effects that McCarthyism had on private lives. On the brighter side, those at the benefit can expect to be haunted by some of the most beautiful songs ever written and by some of the most outrageous stories ever told. Besides his home in New York City, Laurents has shared a Hamptons beach home he built with the money he made from The Time Of The Cuckoo, with the same man - Tom Hatcher - for 40 years. That's also something to sing about.
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