DR Matthew.. As promised...
-The following is from and copyright of The Washington Post:
For Laurents, Time to Revise & Shine
By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 14, 2004; Page C05
"Don't look at the numbers, don't look in the mirror. . . . Never retire and never die," advises Arthur Laurents. "And I love what I do."
The 86-year-old playwright has been in Washington following his own advice, and his passion, staging a drastically revised version of "Hallelujah, Baby!" Now in previews at Arena Stage, the 1967 musical about race in America opens Thursday and runs through Feb. 13, a co-production with the George Street Playhouse of New Brunswick, N.J.
Long before "Baby!" Laurents had joined the top echelon of Broadway scribes, writing the books for "Gypsy" and "West Side Story," "Anyone Can Whistle" and "Do I Hear a Waltz?" His first play, "Home of the Brave," dealt with anti-Semitism in the military, circa 1945. He's written scripts for films such as "Anastasia," "The Turning Point" and "The Way We Were," the latter two based on his novels.
"Hallelujah, Baby!," with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, follows the life of an ageless African American woman through several decades of the 20th century as she deals with ever-changing, and yet never-changing, racial attitudes.
Lena Horne was slated to play the lead in the original production. "I wrote it for Lena. We were extremely close and I knew her. The character was a very hard-edged, angry, funny, sexual tigress," Laurents says. But Horne dropped out of the show for personal reasons.
"At that point we should have dropped the project," he says, "because she was unique. . . . And then along came Leslie." Leslie Uggams took over the role and won a Tony Award for it, though Laurents says he "lost interest" after the role was changed to suit Uggams's girl-next-door image. The 1967 "Baby!" was not a hit; it ran only 293 performances.
Laurents recalls how hard it was in the turbulent 1960s to find African American actors willing to appear in a white-written show about race. "There was enormous resentment and resistance," he says. This time, he senses that the actors are comfortable with the revised material and with him. "The black people in this company know how I feel, which is about as unprejudiced as a white American can be. That's probably because I'm gay and Jewish. This whole company's incredible," Laurents says.
The Arena production is about 60 percent new. He cut several songs, added new lyrics (by the late Green's daughter, Amanda Green) and restored a song that Styne had cut in a fit of what Laurents calls "Broadway panic." That song, "When the Weather's Better," expresses a longing for kinder, more just times and ends the show "with a question," Laurents says. The final word, punctuated as it appears in his script, is "WHEN?!"
Laurents is now writing a play titled "A Country Made of Ice Cream," about the absence of outrage and activism in a nation filled with moneymakers and materialists. He quotes a line from "Hallelujah, Baby!" about speaking up: " 'You don't want, you don't get.' I really believe in standing up and being counted."
