Is Jerry Zaks the most beloved director in the history of modern theater? Well, he is if the accolades heaped upon him by such stars as Nathan Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, Kristin Chenoweth and Lewis J. Stadlen at the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life gala (held December 2003), which also honored Tovah Feldshuh, the award-winning and acclaimed star of Golda's Balcony] are any indication. It was a love fest for the three-time Tony Award winner, who obviously has as much of a devilish sense of humor as those who were "roasting" him.
Stadlen, who co-starred with Lane in Zaks' productions of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor and the 2002 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, as well as following Lane in the role of Max Bialystock in The Producers, razzed the director about his well-known habit of smoking huge cigars.
Zaks makes no excuses. Smoke he must. Big, awful-smelling [well, to anyone who doesn't like cigars] stogies! But the award-winning director abides by New York's strict smoking regulations. Even during the long hours of rehearsals, he only smokes during breaks.
In the next few weeks and months, as he presides over City Center's Encores! May 6-9 production of the 1961 Tony Award-winning musical Bye, Bye, Birdie, which is a comedy about an Elvis-like rock singer's induction into the Army, and next season's eagerly-awaited revival of 1984's Tony-winning Best Musical, La Cage aux Folles by Jerry Herman, don't be surprised to find the director on the sidewalk sending smoke rings into the strata.
For the interview, since he can't smoke in his Jujamcyn Theater offices high atop the St. James Theater on Manhattan's West 44th Street, we crawled out a former window onto a unique Theatre District patio.
Though he has nothing to do with the current revival of Wonderful Town, Zaks, who's represented on Broadway by the hit revival of Little Shop of Horrors, says that the former musical holds a special place in his heart.
Zaks' story is a poignant and fascinating one, not only about the ability of anyone being able to follow their dream, but also doing it against great obstacles. After managing several months in hiding and being undetected, his father and uncle were arrested by the Nazis. On the train to a death camp, they got the guards drunk. When the guards passed out, they jumped the train and miraculously managed to escape. After the war, the family remained in Germany, living in Stuggart. Zaks' father made the decision to immigrate to the U.S. in 1948 when Zaks was 20 months old. Here, he says he had as typical an American childhood as any native-born. Upon Dartmouth College, he went into pre-med.
"It seemed like the logical thing to do," he says, smiling. "I had absolutely no interest in theater. I even took a job in a Hanover, New Hampshire hospital drawing blood! I was on my way."
Then, his sophomore year, he went to see a college production of Wonderful Town by Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Leonard Bernstein. "It changed my life. That's what drew me into theater. I'm still amazed at what a wonderful score that show has."
When the musical was revived the following Spring, Zaks gave up all thoughts of medicine to audition for it, "And I got a part," he states. "Soon, I was not only singing but also dancing! I moved well, so I was quite a good faker as a dancer. In Wonderful Town, I played eight parts -- Irish cop, Brazilian Navy admiral, beatniks."
Bitten by the theatrical bug, he auditioned for as many shows as he could when he returned for his junior year. At first, Zaks was reluctant to follow his theatrical dream because it wasn't something his family encouraged -- "especially when they had their hopes set on me becoming a doctor!" To them, he says, "the idea of going into theater was the waste of a good education."
Then he considered studying law on entering an MFA program at Smith College in 1967. Not long after, he saw casting notices for a summer theater program at Dartmouth. He couldn't resist, and it was there that he qualified for his Actors Equity card. Arriving in New York in the Fall of 1968, he was a regular at Broadway and Off-Broadway open calls. His first break came playing young Thomas Edison in a production by the Park Foundation [the forerunner to TheaterWorks, USA], where he worked for three years while studying with famed acting instructor Curt Dempster, a founder of the Ensemble Studio Theater, of which Zaks is a founding member.
Zaks made a living acting for ten years: On TV, in the early 70s, he had a cameo on "M*A*S*H"; in the early 80s, a featured role on "The Edge of Night," appeared in the made-for-TV "Attica"; in movies, such as "Outrageous Fortune," "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Husbands and Wives"; on Broadway and Off in Grease, the 1978 revival of Once in a Lifetime, Tintypes, Talley's Folly and Isn't It Romantic?
In 1994, he made a rare return to acting, handling the title role in a concert of Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick's Broadway smash Fiorello!
When asked what he remembers as his most memorable performance, it's not a role he played onstage. "One of my greatest thrills," states Zaks, "was participating in the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to James Cagney. I sang and danced 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'"
At the recent Encores! "Bash" concert, celebrating City Center's 60th anniversary, audiences got a sample of Zaks' hoofer past. The program presented songs from musicals revived at City Center between 1943 and 1968. As a tribute to New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who was responsible for creating the City Center entity, Zaks began the show with "The Name's LaGuardia" from Fiorello!.
There was a change, well, in direction when a friend came to him with a play he was to do the lead in and wondered if he'd direct it. "I read it and laughed out loud," reports Zaks of Soft Touch by Neil Kupsberg. "We staged it at the Ensemble Studio. Two SRO audiences roared with laughter, and I was smitten with this new discipline. I went into directing reluctantly, continuing to think of myself as an actor."
But not for long. He worked with Christopher Durang in 1981 on Beyond Therapy so, a few months later, when at the Ensemble Studios he came across Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, he was anxious to read it. And then to direct it. "I was fortunate to cast Elizabeth Franz, who was brilliant, as was the entire cast. It was such a success, we did it for Andre Bishop at Playwrights Horizons and then made the move to Off Broadway [on a double-bill with The Actor's Nightmare]. It was provocative, smart, fun and different. The characters were extraordinarily far out. I insisted on believable behavior between the actors: Make it real, make it real! It ran for several years and is still running someplace."
With Bishop at Lincoln Center, Zaks helmed to great acclaim John Guare's House of Blue Leaves [Tony and Drama Desk, Best Director] starring the amazing Swoosie Kurtz, the revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes [Tony and Drama Desk nominee, Best Director] starring the incredible Patti LuPone and, in 1990, Guare's celebrated Six Degrees of Separation [Tony and Drama Desk, Best Director], starring the sensational Stockard Channing.
Zaks was firmly on the map as a sought-after director. The modest success of his Front Page revival was quickly overshadowed by the runaway success of his production of Ken Ludwig's Lend Me A Tenor [Tony and Drama Desk, Best Director], which starred Philip Bosco, Victor Garber and Tovah Feldshuh [the aforementioned star of Broadway's Golda's Balcony and a Jewish National Fund Tree of Life honoree with Zaks at the December gala].
When Zaks directed [Tony and Drama Desk Awards] the acclaimed 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls, many critics wrote that he'd reinvented that classic musical. "They didn't know what they were talking about. I doubt if any had seen the original. Maybe the movie, which was a different ballgame, or some revival."
Actually, Zaks did attempt to reinvent it. "I wanted to present it scenically in a way that was different from the alternating 'in one' full-stage sequences of the original," he explains. "But it wouldn't let me. It's written that way. The reason then was stage craft limitations. We brought modern technology to it. The look may have been colorful and different, but not a word or a piece of music was changed. It was everyone meaning what they were saying, as if it was happening for the first time and as if their lives depended on it!"
Keeping it real, in other words -- a philosophy Zaks remains true to. In a recent interview for this column, Hunter Foster of Little Shop said, "It helps that the show is inherently funny and that Jerry knows how to mine humor, [but] he was careful to get us to base our performances on truth as opposed to just doing shtick. With a show as loved as Little Shop, there are high audience expectations, so you don't want to disappoint. I'm sure there were temptations, but ... Jerry saw to it that we kept things reigned in. It was a constant reality check."
There were great successes: Smokey Joes's Cafe, the Funny Thing... revival [both Tony and Drama Desk nominated, Best Director]; modest successes: Swing!, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the 2000 Roundabout revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner; and failures: Face Value, The Civil War, Epic Proportions, the premiere of Sondheim's Assassins and 45 Seconds from Broadway.
Who remembers the failures? It's the successes that count. And because of his, Zaks became bi-coastal, as much in demand to direct theater here as to direct TV on the West Coast. In addition to directing the highly acclaimed film Marvin's Room, he's also directed such long-running, highly-rated sitcoms as "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Frasier." There were failures here, too: "Kristin," starring Kristin Chenoweth [now the acclaimed star of Broadway's Wicked], and "Bram and Alice," starring Alfred Molina [Broadway's current Tevye in the Fiddler on the Roof revival].
What is the fundamental difference between directing theater and directing TV? He's quick to respond: "Power. That's what it comes down to. In my limited experience, the nature of the job in theater is general. The nature of the job in episodic TV is not. You're hired on a weekly basis for a show on which the cast has been together for years. You are brought in to get the shots. If you have a suggestion the writers or actors find helpful, you can make it. I've been fortunate that they've been inclined to listen to suggestions I make, but I would never claim to be the boss. That's the show runner [who usually carries the title of executive producer]. He or she has the writers' and actors' ears the way a director would in theater and is responsible for maintaining the thread of the storyline.
There are exceptions. "When James Burrows [son of director/writer Abe Burrows] directs a series pilot," says Zaks, "and goes on to direct every episode, he clearly has authority and influence. Philip Rosenthal [executive producer of "Everybody Loves Raymond"] is a theater person, and he looks at every taping as an opening night. He wants it to be as perfect as possible, so he can get that first-time, genuine audience response. As a result, they rarely, if ever, have to sweeten their shows with canned laughter."
On the sound stage, Zaks doesn't work from a control booth but from a podium. He views what the cameras are getting through TV monitors. He doesn't call shots but does call "Action!" and "Cut!" He explains, "The real work's done in the editing room, where they get a show down to a running time of 22 or 44 minutes. The "Raymond" scripts are so meticulously crafted that they change only ten percent in the course of the production week."
What about the myth that if you're Broadway, you're not respected in Hollywood? "I found people receptive. It helped that I had a bit of a positive reputation from my Broadway work." He adds that a little humility helped. "I made it clear to my crews that I knew very little about the camera choreography and that I'd need their help. I didn't come in and pretend to know something I didn't know."
According to insider theater sources, Zaks is also that type of director. He appreciates feedback. "It's the best way of working," he insists. "I don't know how else to do it. I encourage my actors and team to express ideas. You never know what the source of a good idea is going to be, so it's good to protect the possibility of having as many as possible. You can be the general of the enterprise but entertain suggestions. Then you have to decide whether to use them or not."
Zaks also has a reputation of maintaining respect among his actors. It's known that, during rehearsals, he discourages actors from commenting on the performances of peers and, as he puts it, "using another actor's performance as a reason for not being able to do what was expected of them."
What he does, he notes, "What any director does, is thousands of little jobs. One of those is to bring to life what's on the page. If an actor's attention is on the way to say a line, or trying to get a laugh, the audience will not get what's being said. You don't want an actor to be so busy playing a character that he forgets the situation the character's in. If the script's funny, all we have to do is breath life into it.
"I insist that the actors mean what they say," he adds, "that they get the attention off themselves and onto the other actor. If an actor can make another actor look more important, he or she becomes more interesting to the audience. It works. You can take it to the bank."
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