Arthur Laurents & Gypsy

[Reza]

NY Post

July 27, 2007 -- PATTI LuPone's name may be above the title - and she's giving a knockout performance as Mama Rose - but the real star of "Gypsy" at City Center is Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show's book and directed this revival.

That Laurents knows his way around a Broadway musical is, of course, no surprise. In addition to the 1959 "Gypsy," he wrote "West Side Story" and directed "La Cage aux Folles." Throw in his screenplays for "Rope," "The Way We Were" and "The Turning Point," and you have a genuine "showbiz legend."

(His elegant townhouse on St. Lukes Place has been a stop on tour buses: "This is where the man who wrote 'The Way We Were' lives!")

But consider this: Laurents turned 90 last Sunday, and with only three weeks in which to rehearse "Gypsy" he delivered a production that's as vital, gripping and moving as Broadway's favorite spark of youth, "Spring Awakening."

"At the age of 90, I'm wanted," Laurents says. "They want me to direct the Bible next."

Laurents' "Gypsy" came about because he was deeply unhappy with the 2003 Broadway version starring his friend Bernadette Peters and staged by Oscar-winning British director Sam Mendes.

"There was the Ethel Merman 'Gypsy,' the Angela Lansbury 'Gypsy,' the Tyne Daly 'Gypsy' and the Sam Mendes 'Gypsy,' " Laurents says. "I thought Sam did a terrible disservice to Bernadette and the play, and I wanted a 'Gypsy' seen in New York that was good.

"You have to have musical theater in your bones, and Sam doesn't," Laurents continues, taking, as his wont, no prisoners. "You can't put it there. I know. I tried. I gave Sam many notes, but he just couldn't do it. As they say in 'Gypsy,' 'Either you got it or you don't.' And he don't."

Whoa.

This is vintage Laurents. He's infamous - and feared - around Broadway for his direct hits.

"I really don't like to do interviews because if you ask me a question, I'll answer it and the result is trouble," he says, laughing.

His fierce candor and stinging wit blaze through his compelling 2000 memoir, "Original Story By," which contains this pithy description of John Guare: "a bow-tied playwright with a gift for networking and the knife."

Actors who've felt Laurents' lash are unlikely to forget it.

When Betty Buckley was doing "Gypsy" at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, she asked Laurents and Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics) to come see her. In her dressing room after the show, she asked Laurents what he thought.

"Well, it's not coming to Broadway," he replied. "Get that out of your head. In fact, it's not leaving New Jersey."

Buckley was shattered.

People close to Laurents say that, those flashes of brutality aside, he's a generous and deeply loyal friend.

"Arthur is not a mean person, although he can say mean things," one of his friends says. "Ninety-five percent of the time, he's a wonderful man. The other 5 percent, when he says something mean - well, that's off the charts. But he's usually right."

And when it comes to pinpointing a problem in a show, Laurents is in a class by himself.

"He's a very smart man of the theater," says veteran producer Elizabeth I. McCann. "He can put his finger on what is wrong with something in a moment."

With this production of "Gypsy," the ultimate backstage musical, Laurents says he worked hard to tone down the showbiz quality of such songs as "Let Me Entertain You" and integrate them into his tale of a hard-charging stage mother who comes close to ruining everyone she loves.

The result is a "Gypsy" that feels like a great dramatic play with musical numbers, rather than an old-fashioned Broadway musical.

Of LuPone's performance as Mama Rose, Laurents says: "Nobody's surprised at how strong and rapacious she can be. What's surprising is how playful she is. She's fun to be with. You think she's human for a moment, and then she cuts your head off."

Now that he's given New York a great "Gypsy," Laurents is gearing up for his next directing project - a Broadway revival of "West Side Story," scheduled to open next year.

"There was a revival in the 1970s that was no good," he says. "It was too white-bread. I've come up with a way of doing it that will make it absolutely contemporary without changing a word or a note.

"And what will annoy you is that I'm not going to tell you what it is."

michael.riedel@nypost.com