Man, even the Leiber obit in Playbill Online sells the guy short, concentrating mainly on Smokey Joe’s Cafe while mentioning in passing that Stoller co-wrote the score for The People in the Picture and that Leiber/Stoller songs figured in jukebox or revue shows such as Dancin’, Rock ‘n’ Roll! The First 5000 Years Ring of Fire, All Shook Up, the Peggy Lee show Peg and of course Million Dollar Quartet.

Read their amazing tag-team autobiography Hound Dog and you’ll find Leiber and Stoller enthralled by live theater at a young age. When not writing million-selling pop hits, they spent untold hours trying to crack the musical theater firmament with scores for a wide variety of stage projects.

In the book, they drop theatrical references throughout the book. When they began to produce other artists, including the Greek-chorus-style pop group The Shangri-Las, Leiber and Stoller wanted to be credited not as producers but as “directors.”

Plus they approached pop songs as little plays. Here’s how Stoller describes the writing of the Peggy Lee classic “Is That All There Is?” (Lieber had crafted the song’s despondent spoken-word verses after reading Thomas Mann for the first time.):

Stoller: Jerry and I had been talking about stretching out as writers, and when he gave me these verses I saw this as the perfect vehicle to do just that. Jerry’s vignettes ached with the bittersweet irony of the German cabaret. I wrote music that I hoped caught the spirit of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Then we got a call from Hilly Elkins, who was managing Georgia Brown. The English singer-actress known for “As Long as He Needs Me” was finishing her Broadway run of Oliver! and heading back to London for a TV special. She needed a song. When she heard those vignettes, she was convinced that that was it—except for one thing.
“It needs a chorus,” she said, “something for me to sing between verses. The spoken parts are beautiful, but it needs something else.”
Jerry and I agreed. We happened to have a chorus lying around, a leftover section from another song that didn’t work. It came complete with lyrics. We played it for Georgia and she loved it.

Leiber and Stoller worked hard on the score of a musical based on Mordechai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The show died in try-outs, the songwriters claim, because Richler wouldn’t take the time to fix his libretto. They also wrote the yet-unproduced musical Oscar, based on the Peter Finch film The Trials of Oscar Wilde, working directly with the film’s director Ken Hughes. They quote two of the songs in their Hound Dog book: a rant for Lord Queensbury, which begins “Homosexuals, oh, how I hate them, oh, how I loathe the bloody lot/ Why don’t they just exterminate them, exterminate them on the spot?” and a ballad titled “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”

The Hound Dog chapter about Smokey Joe’s Café begins with mentions of much more audacious musical stage projects that never came to be:

Stoller: We weren’t thrilled that out many attempts to get a musical on Broadway had been in vain. Other efforts like The International Wrestling Match, songs we had written to turn an off-Broadway [sic] play—a Brechtian apocalyptic melodrama—into a musical, hadn’t taken off.

Yet having wanted to crack the format of book musicals for decades, when Smokey Joe’s Café began gestating, Leiber and Stoller insisted that it not have a book, that “the songs are their own stories.” They fell out with a choreographer/director over this exact point during workshops in Chicago, which led to Jerry Zaks coming in as director and agreeing that no book was needed.

Two Quotes About Lenny Bruce… plus recently rediscovered photos of Gary Cavello as Lenny Bruce in a production of Julian Barry’s play Lenny that I directed for New Haven Theatre Co. in February of 2000. (Other actors in the photos: Kim Mikenis in red, Rob Rocke in purple and Craig Gilbert in yellow.) Photos by Kathleen Cei.

In the early sixties I gained inspiration from two red see-through discs pressed by Fantasy Records. The first, Lenny Bruce’s Picnic in a Graveyard, will make me laugh for a hundred more years. For a long time I found myself imitating his nasal whine and sharp barbs. There’s not enough space here to talk about Lenny Bruce. In ’61 I hitched to New York to see him at the Village Vanguard. Chuck Isreals, a Brandeis classmate and bass player sharing the program with Lenny, introduced us. Even knowing his routines by heart, his spontaneity amazed me. Once, during one of his monologues, there was a loud thud on the floor above; he jumped on a chair, pounded on the ceiling, and screamed out, “Hey Frankenstein, quit jerkin’ off!” He completely cracked me up. Of all today’s comedians, only Richard Pryor can top the Bruce on quick-draw humor. ‘Tis a pity Lenny’s gone. I dedicated Woodstock Nation to him. We all know Lenny’s story. Mother fuckin’. Shit. Piss. An Anglo-Saxon hero.

—Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (Perigree, 1980), page 123.

Back then, the Bay Area was just surging with bohemian-type artists and performers; they blanketed the coastline like the city’s famous fog. Raw, new talent emerged—people who were willing to push the satiric envelope just a little further. I became friends with emerging talents Ronnie Schell, Jorie Remus, and a young talented housewife-turned-comedienne, Phyllis Diller. They were all performing at another great club in San Francisco, the Purple Onion. I was so impressed with the talent of these people that I called Herbert Jacoby at the Blue Angel in New York. “Herbert!,” I told him excitedly, “you must book these people, they are all fantastic!” Eventually he did, along with another struggling unknown, Lenny Bruce.

I wish I still had that piece of cardboard. I recorded his parody on an album called Boo Hoo Ha Ha, and Lenny received a royalty check for the sum of fourteen cents. When he showed it to me, I said, “So, you gonna cash it?” “No, he said, gleefully, “I’m going to keep it and fuck up their books.”

—from How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years—A Memoir, by Kaye Ballard with Jim Hesselman (Back Stage Books, 2006, $24.95)

I spent an hour and a half on the ‘phone yesterday with Stephen DeRosa, an actor I’ve long admired. DeRosa’s coming to Hartford later this month.

DeRosa and I talked for an hour and a half, about many many things. But mostly he gushed and gushed about the greatness of Arthur Laurents.

I shared his admiration, and was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t yet read Laurents’ autobiography, Original Story by Arthur Laurents, though I knew its recent follow-up Mainly on Directing (2009). I went to the library yesterday afternoon expressly to find Original Story, but couldn’t. So I downloaded it from Kindle last night.

This morning we all found out that Arthur Laurents died yesterday.

A lot  has been written about Arthur Laurents. A little too much about his outspokenness and irascibility, if you ask me. Writers who defend their work and speak their minds, especially in supposedly collaborative situations like musical theater, should be should be treasured, not denigrated.

Clearly he could hold a grudge. But he could also release a grudge, as is detailed in Patti Lupone’s recent memoir, when he allowed her to take on the role of Mama Rose in Gypsy after years in which the actress and the playwright hadn’t been talking.

He clearly cared about making shows better more than he cared about hurting feelings along the way. Laurents proved his instincts time and again. Even when shows got away from him—Nick & Nora being the most notorious example—there was lots to admire and appreciate. His writing remains singular and challenging, regularly dealing in difficult emotions not often dramatized, and tricky to perform, on mainstream stages: clinical insanity (Anyone Can Whistle), class and culture (I Can Get It for You Wholesale, set in the Jewish garment district of New York), the African-American civil rights movement (Hallelujah, Baby!), foreign affairs (the marital kind, in Time of the Cuckoo) and guilt—as Stephen DeRosa said yesterday, “except for Tony and Maria, everyone is West Side Story is guilty. This show is so groundbreaking.”

As DeRosa put it, “Arthur wears his heart out in the open. Any opinion he has, he gives it at that moment. He’s a man of the greatest integrity. I think that word is the right word: integrity. He is wildly devoted to the theater.”

The West Side Story revival is a case in point. Not only was Laurents involved, he was still updating and tweaking work a show he’d written half a century earlier. It was his idea to add Spanish-language scenes to this new production; he’d seen a production done entirely in Spanish, and was impressed by how intimate the scenes between the Sharks gang members, and with Maria and her friends (“I Feel Pretty) seemed when the characters spoke in their native language. So he added swaths of Spanish to the show.

Stephen DeRosa personally benefited from Laurents’ hands-in approach to any project. DeRosa plays Glad Hand, the well-meaning goofy adult who referees the showstopping Dance in the Gym sequence. When Michael Mastro was cast as Glad Hands for the 2009 Broadway revival, the role was revisited and suited to him. When that revival went on tour and DeRosa was cast, that tiny yet crucial comic-relief part was re-revisited. “I got new jokes,” DeRosa says. “My part, rewritten by Arthur Laurents—brilliant, 93-year-old Arthur Laurents.

“Pretty fucking thrilling.”