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.”