Search results for ""author arthur laurents""

Best known for the hit musicals West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing socially minded plays such as Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo. He also garnered impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading, as unleashed in his lively 2000 autobiography, Original Story By.Laurents passed away early in 2011, but not before writing The Rest of the Story, in which he revealed all that had happened in his life since Original Story By, filled with the wisdom he gained in growing older and a new perspective brought on by Laurents' experience of deep personal loss, including the death of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher.Laurents' style remains engrossing and brutally honest. His voice is still highly intelligent, loving, generous, and gracious. He remained committed to his artistic vision to the very end, as captured in the epilogue, which he completed only days before his death. The book ends with a loving and insightful coda by Laurents' good friend and the editor of this book, David Saint.

Read more less

As a playwright screenwriter and director Arthur Laurents has a unique place in the history of theater. In this moving exhilarating and provocative account he presents readers with a front-row look at the making of two of the greatest musicals of the American stage ÊWest Side StoryÊ and ÊGypsyÊ. He writes in rich detail about his new bilingual production of ÊWest Side StoryÊ along with his most recent production of ÊGypsyÊ how it began as an act of love and how that love spread through the entire company and resulted in a ÊGypsyÊ unlike any other.ÞLaurents offers behind-the-scenes details about the musicals he directed including ÊI Can Get It for You WholesaleÊ its producer David Merrick (the Abominable Showman ) and its (very young) stars Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould. He dishes on Stephen Sondheim's ÊAnyone Can WhistleÊ which starred Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick marking the debut for each in musical theater. And he recounts the challenges and surprises that came with the making of ÊLa Cage aux FollesÊ the first big Broadway musical that was gay and glad to be.ÞThroughout the book is enriched by Laurents's two loves ä his love for the theater and his love for his partner of fifty-two years Tom Hatcher who shared and inspired every aspect of his life and his work. ÊMainly on DirectingÊ presents an unforgettable portrait of an artist working with other artists a unique close-up look at today's American musical theater by a man who's been at its red-hot center for more than five decades.

Read more less