Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Watched Gypsy in school last Thursday. A very engaging student production. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents. Mother Rose was hungry for stardom for her daughters. When the older one June eloped, the younger one Louise bore the brunt of maternal attention until she gained fame as a stripper and renamed herself Gypsy Rose Lee. The musical also bore witness to the fall of vaudeville and the rise of burlesque. Then on Sunday, with TB I watched The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess , directed by alumnus Diane Paulus, and adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre Murray from the original folk opera by George Gershwin, DuBose, Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Crippled Porgy took Bess in after her man Crown killed someone and had to flee. Crown returned to claim his woman, and Porgy killed him after a struggle. I have not watched the original, but was told by a colleague that the adaptation cut a few of Porgy's arias, and so shifted the attention to...

Band of Thebes directed me to this Guardian article "A life in musicals: Arthur Laurents." Two snippets: The vicissitudes of Hollywood defy analysis, he says, but Broadway shows go wrong for the same reasons. When the script for the musical Wicked was in development, the producers came to Laurents for advice. He told them they didn't know what the show was about. "They said, yes, it's about Oz. I said no it isn't. I said it's about the friendship of two girls. I said start tracking that. That whole thing made the show an enormous success." * He wrote a play a week for army radio, where he learned economy and banished the notion that "length equals importance". His single greatest discovery was that "emotions precede thought, emotions determine thought; plays are emotions". Full article.