In His Book, Broadway is Tops
Peter stone gave up the lucrative but lowly life of a screenwriter for
the more satisfying world of stage.
By Patrick Pacheco
New York- Half lounging on a divan in the library of his Manhattan townhouse,
writer Peter Stone imagines a scenario in which some old studio hacks
sit around a commissary table at lunchtime, wondering what the hell ver
happened to the guy who wrote dozens of films, won a Emmy for “the
defenders” and an Oscar nomination for “charade” and
the award itself for “Father Goose.” And then disappeared.
“Has anybody heard from Stone” He was a figure and suddenly
he’s not around. He doesn’t work anymore.”
“They say he’s in the theater.”
“The what?”
“ In Hollywood they have no idea where I went,” says the
68-year-old Los Angeles-born renegade son of a writer and producer (Tom
Mix serials, Shirley Temple movies) with a wry smile. “My own agents
out there don’t know what I’m doing. They don’t get
what the theater is. It’s small potatoes.”
Small potatoes to Hollywood, perhaps, but not to Stone, who grew up
steeped in Movies (he attended Shirley Temple’s sixth birthday
party), but who also recalls taking a bus down to the old Biltmore Theatre
to see the “second or third” road company of some musical
from New York with few people in the audience.
Since 1961, the writer has become one of Broadway’s premiere musical
book writers, carving out a lifestyle for himself that includes an East
Side brownstone and an estate in Amagansett where he spends most of his
time with Mary, his wife of 38 years.
Dressed in khakis and a sweater, a cheap watch strapped to his wrist,
he is an avuncular presence, with the weary sophistication of someone
with more than two dozed Broadway shows under his belt and the magisterial
patter of a man who, as president of the Dramatists Guild, the national
organization of playwrights, lyricists and composers, is a leading spokesman
for the theater.
Though he occasionally returns to screenwriting (1995’s “Just
Cause,” starring Sean Conery), Stone is in hot demand for his theater
craft, having won four Tony Awards- for “1776”, which enjoyed
a successful revival last year; “Woman of the Year”(1983); “The
Will Rogers Follies” (1991); and “Titanic, the Musical,” the
1997 Tony Award winner for best musical, the national tour of which opens
in L.A. next Sunday at the Ahmanson theater.
Indeed, Stone is so successful at what he does that Tommy Tune’s
musical adaptation of “Easter Parade” was put off for a year
until Stone could find time to work on it. While overseeing rehearsals
on the national tour of “Titanic,” Stone is also currently
in rehearsals for the revival of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get
Your Gun”, whose book he has revised. That show, starring Bernadette
Peters and Tom Wopat, opens on Broadway in February, after which he completes
his revision of the book of “Finian’s Rainbow,” set
for a revival next season.
Then too, there are his projects with John Kander and Fred Ebb (a musical
mystery called “Curtains”) and Jimmy Webb (“Love Me,
Love My Dog”).
Musical book writing is a difficult and often thankless task because,
as Stone, is wont to say-with only a slight hint of exasperation- “nobody
knows what a book is”. Forget the Hollywood philistines. Even Broadway
aficionados are confused by exactly what he and his ilk contribute to
a show. Ever hear of Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music”?
Arthur Laurents’ “Gypsy”? Michael Stewart’s “Hello
Dolly!”? Chances are these book writers weren’t even mentioned
in the reviews for these classic shows. The Theater Hall of Fame, a wall
of names in the Gershwin Theatre voted in annually by the drama desks
of newspapers around the country, does not include one artist who is
solely a book writer.
“People think it’s the jokes, the dialogue, but that’s
the smallest part,” Stone ways, “It’s really concept
and structure. And without that, there’s no musical. You can have
the best score in the world, but if the book is weak, it won’t
work.” The structure for “Titanic” came comparatively
easy, given that the story of the greatest maritime disaster in history
is “perfectly ordered” for drama in Stone’s opinion.
Confined not only by rime and space, it has a class structure of Edwardian
society reflected in the first, second and third classes of the passenger
roster, and the historical characters-from the owner of Macys’ and
his wife, who chose to die together, down to the bellboys, all under
15, who all went down with the ship- were rich and colorful, redolent
of the values of a vanished era.
“Can you imagine today’s group of billionaires, standing
there, putting on their evening clothes, taking out a silver flask of
brandy and going down with the ship because that was the code?” asks
Stone of the courage and cowardice that are now part of Titanic lore.
Unlike James Cameron’s wildly popular movie, Stone’s version
of the Titanic story focuses primarily on the real characters involved
in disaster-the builder of the ship, the owner of the White Star cruise
line and the captain. As the ship steams toward its destiny, there are
snapshot scenes involving real and imagined passengers and crew, including
a social-climbing matron, a mysterious and sardonic widow and a romantic
stoker. Indeed, some reviewers have been critical that too much time
is devoted to documentary data and not enough to story line.
“It’s astonishing to me that the film didn’t use any
of the characters, invented them instead. Obviously, if you do that,
you’re going to fail, right? Well, anyway…”
Stone’s concept for the musical version of the Titanic story was
prompted by the idea that the ship’s sinking was the most dramatic
failure of the Industrial Revolution. Man forgot that there would always
by icebergs.
“To have thought the ship was unsinkable, as the builder, owner
and captain felt, was its doom,” the writer says of the characters
on whom the musical focuses. “So we constructed this thing: ‘Is
progress always progress?’ Because it’s very much part of
our time now. The Challenger disaster and the end of the millennium,
when the fear is that every computer is going to crash. In “Titanic,’ there
is this sense of nature as a force that humbles man, puts him in his
proper perspective.”
Another thing that tends to humble man, particularly theater artists,
is the hypercritical New York preview audience. Despite the present hit
status of the musical, “Titanic” endured on of the most troubled
pre-opening periods in recent memory, which daily headlines (“All
singing, all dancing, all drowning”) predicting its failure and
sour word of mouth spreading on the street. After the show opened to
mixed reviews, its commercial future seemed doubtful until the theatrical
community, in a weak your for musicals, bestowed the imprimatur of best
musical Tony on the show.
Stone dismissed the turbulent period, noting that “all musicals
are in trouble” during previews (the classic “1776” opened
to 60 people on a snowy night in Boston) because only then can audiences
collectively cue the creative team to what is right- or more important,
what is wrong- with what they’ve only thus far seen in the rehearsal
room. The pressure is usually on the book writer, because it is far easier
and faster to change scenes than it is to compose and implement new songs
or dances. Besides, adds Stone, his collaborators –the composer,
the choreographer, the director – usually have their won department
of personnel to share the burden. The book writer is a “department
of one.”
“I love it when a show I’m working on is in trouble, “Stone
says. “I’m an ardent puzzle doer, and I love solving the
puzzle of it. I like the process. I don’t like being in trouble
in New York; nothing pleases the theatrical community more than knowing
that a show is in trouble. And maybe had they succeeded – and the
show was very nearly destroyed by it – it might have been discouraging.
But they lost and we won.”
Asked if he misses writing for the screen, Stone recalled that he had
once compared the craft “in dignity as only second to picking cigarette
butts out of urinals.” His experience on “Just Cause,” for
which Connery insisted on changing his script so that he could wrestle
with alligators in the film’s climactic scene, did nothing to change
his mind.
“ I miss writing them, but I don’t miss what happens to
them after you write them,” he says. “Stars are now the producers,
because they are the motivating force to what gets done – half
Jim Carry’s salary is the entire budget for ‘Titanic” – and
stars don’t have the slightest clue of how to rewrite anything.
It hurts the pictures terribly. Minutes after the script leaves my computer,
it’s best I be put to sleep.”
For now, at least, Stone is comfortable with the autonomy and protection
that the theater provides for his work. He does worry, however, that
the incursion of corporate money on Broadway, along with the economic
pressure on a show to run six or seven years just to recoup its investment,
will lead to “user-friendly” entertainment at the expense
of more adventurous of difficult work. He has little admiration for what
he calls “the four British musicals from hell” – “Miss
Saigon,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Cats” and “Les
Miserables” – which in his opinion have “no book,” but
he is nonetheless optimistic about the theater’s future. He loved
the energy and boldness of “Rent,” and he’s bullish
about the “brilliant, very talented” composers coming along,
like Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), Adam Guettel (“Floyd
Collins”), and Paul Scott Goodman (“Bright Lights, Big City”).
Stone figures he has three or four more shows in him before he passes
the mantle on to the new generation, and he’s looking forward to
the puzzles in all of them.
“ ‘The Peter Principle’ – this notion that as
soon as you get food at something, you’re promoted to something
you’re not good at – isn’t going to work here. I’m
food at writing book musicals and I’m going to keep writing them.
I know I’m not going to sit down and write the Great American Play,
but I hope to do the Great American Musical. Maybe I’ve already
done it.”
Oh? “Of it’s kind, ‘1776’ will always be done, ” he
answers, referring to his musical about the terrible risks and odds faced
by the founding fathers in declaring independence form the British crown,
Then he adds, with a laugh, “I think it’s the best book that’s
ever been done for a musical, because there’s so much of it!”