The Works of Arthur Laurents: Politics, Love, and Betrayal, John M. Clum (2014)

Review of: The Works of Arthur Laurents: Politics, Love, and Betrayal, John M. Clum (2014) New York: Cambria Press, 214 pp., ISBN 978-1-60497-884-1, £66.99 Terrence McNally and Fifty Years of American Gay Drama, John M. Clum (2016) New York: Cambria Press, 236 pp., ISBN 978-1-60497-922-0, £69.99

Rope (1948)

In Hollywood in the 1940s, both prevailing morality and the Production Code made it impossible to produce a film about gay men. That made the filming of Rope, based on a play mirroring the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder case, in which two homosexual University of Chicago students kidnapped and murdered a fourteen-year-old boy, a particularly risky venture. Hitchcock made the venture even riskier by hiring a gay screenwriter, Arthur Laurents. The Production Code censors detected a gay subtext and suggested a few minor script revisions involving language and stereotypically gay behavior. Hitchcock chose to film the movie in real time, breaking at intervals of roughly ten minutes to insert a new reel of film. These long takes proved to be a hardship on the actors, who had to endure long retakes if someone fluffed a line, and set designers, who had to create breakaway furniture to enable uninterrupted camera movement. Although the gay subtext disturbed a few reviewers, it went largely unnoticed by audiences at the time. The film is considered inferior Hitchcock, not because of the subtext or casting, but because Hitchcock’s long takes worked against his strengths as a director, emphasizing linear movement and dialogue rather than pacing and montage.

Part of the Times, Personally and Professionally

During the early and middle part of the 1960s Betty Comden and Adolph Green were no longer splitting their time between working on shows for Broadway and movies in Hollywood, and as a result they were able to dedicate more time to their personal lives. And while they might have been spending time with the elite of New York’s society, they were not unaware of the issues facing the country. This informed a pair of stand-alone songs they penned with Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein as well as their next musical, Hallelujah, Baby! Featuring a book by Arthur Laurents, the show chronicled the African-American experience during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Uggams was the star of what was ultimately an unconventional tuner that had music by Jule Styne and went on to win a Tony Award as best musical

Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim

Although Stephen Sondheim has long been considered the leading writer for the American musical stage in his generation, and although many of his shows have become repertory fixtures, their original runs have tended to be relatively short, and his thematic engagements with conventional ideas of “America” have often been querulous. To understand better why “Sondheim” and “America” have thus often seemed not to map easily to each other, this chapter considers one of his famous flops,Anyone Can Whistle, in the context of his earlier collaborations with Arthur Laurents and as a show that set an agenda quite different from that of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II; this new agenda would sustain the remainder of his career to date.