JakartaForum-nytimes - Arthur Laurents, the playwright, screenwriter and director who wrote and ultimately transformed two of Broadway’s landmark shows, “Gypsy” and “West Side Story,” and created one of Hollywood’s most well-known romances, “The Way We Were,” died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Scott Rudin, a producer of the most recent Broadway revival of “Gypsy.”
Mr. Laurents once described writers as “the chosen people” and said he was happiest when sitting alone and putting his “daydreams and fantasies down on paper.”
He did so in various genres. His film credits include Hitchcock’s “Rope”; “Anastasia,” with Ingrid Bergman; and “The Turning Point,” with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine. His screenplay for “The Way We Were,” withRobert Redford and Barbra Streisand, was adapted from his novel by the same name.
But the stage was his first love, and he wrote for it for 65 years, turning out comedies and romances as well as serious dramas that often explored questions of ethics, social pressures and personal integrity. Early on, he once said, he realized that “plays are emotion,” not simply words strung together, and it became his guiding principle.
A milestone was “West Side Story,” the 1957 musical for which Mr. Laurents’s book gave a contemporary spin to the tale of Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues and the Capulets, the families of the doomed young lovers, were now represented by the Jets and the Sharks, warring street gangs in Manhattan.
It was a plot device that had been discussed several years earlier by Mr. Laurents, the director and choreographerJerome Robbins and the composer Leonard Bernstein. Initially, Bernstein was to have written both the music and lyrics, but he eventually accepted Mr. Laurents’s suggestion that a co-lyricist could ease the burden of composition. Mr. Laurents then brought in a talented newcomer named Stephen Sondheim, who eventually wrote all the lyrics for what became his Broadway debut.
“What we really did stylistically with ‘West Side Story’ was take every musical theater technique as far as it could be taken,” Mr. Laurents wrote in a 2009 memoir. “Scene, song and dance were integrated seamlessly; we did it all better than anyone ever had before.” Two years later, with “Gypsy,” Mr. Laurents helped create what is regarded as one of Broadway’s best musicals.
With music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Mr. Sondheim, “Gypsy” is the story of the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee as seen through the eyes of her domineering mother, Rose. The show, directed by Robbins and starring Ethel Merman as Rose, was a hit. (Mr. Laurents did not write the screenplay for the less-successful 1962 film version withRosalind Russell.)
Mr. Laurents directed a 1974 revival of “Gypsy” in London and on Broadway with Angela Lansbury in the lead, then staged it again on Broadway in 1989 with Tyne Daly as Rose.Bernadette Peters starred in the 2003 Broadway revival, directed by Sam Mendes.
Four years later he agreed to direct a limited-run revival of “Gypsy” as part of the Encores! summer concert series at City Center. This time, Patti LuPone played Momma Rose. He decided that the production would be a tribute to his longtime partner, Tom Hatcher, who had urged him to direct it before he died in 2006. Mr. Laurents was determined, as he put it, to make it “an Event.”
In his 2009 memoir, “Mainly on Directing: ‘Gypsy,’ ‘West Side Story’ and Other Musicals,” Mr. Laurents recalled making “discovery after discovery about every character” as he planned the revival.
The City Center production was a triumph for both Mr. Laurents and Ms. LuPone, and in March 2008 a full-fledged staging of “Gypsy” opened to rave reviews on Broadway. The show received seven Tony Award nominations, including one for Mr. Laurents, who was on the verge of his 91st birthday. The winners included Ms. LuPone, as best leading actress in a musical.
Still another version of “Gypsy” was being proposed in January, when Mr. Laurents, continuing to work into his 90s, met with Mr. Sondheim and Ms. Streisand about a new film adaptation, with Ms. Streisand as Rose.
Mr. Laurents also credited Mr. Hatcher with providing the spark that led to the hit revival of “West Side Story” in 2009. Mr. Hatcher had seen a production of it in Bogotá, Colombia, and suggested that a Broadway revival could benefit from having the Sharks, its members of Puerto Rican heritage, speak Spanish.
“And there it was,” Mr. Laurents wrote, “the reason for a new production. It excited me and now I wanted to direct it.” (A few months after the opening, some of the Spanish lyrics were changed back to English.)
As he saw it, the challenge was “erasing the ’50s without violating what made ‘West Side Story’ the classic it has become.” For one thing, he was determined to find the right cast — performers who could act as well as they could dance and sing. The much-anticipated revival opened in March 2009 to largely enthusiastic reviews.
A compact, elegant man, Mr. Laurents could be as convivial as a raconteur and as equally blunt. In a single interview in 2004 he dismissed a Sondheim-Burt Shevelove musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ “Frogs” and said Nathan Lane had “made it worse” in aLincoln Center production; that Jerome Robbins was “a monster”; that David Hare’s play “Stuff Happens” was “a paste job”; and that Robert Anderson’s “Tea and Sympathy” was “a fraud.”
Mr. Laurents collected his share of brickbats as well. At various times critics deemed his work predictable, preachy or sentimental.
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