If music is no longer lovely

"There is never an evening when, somewhere in the world, the music and lyrics of Jerry Herman are not being sung by a lady in a red headdress, or a lady with a bugle, or a middle-aged man in a wig and a boa."



As producer and playwright Bill Rosenfield put it:

Whether it is sentimental (Song On the Sand) or triumphant (Before the Parade Passes By), Jerry Herman’s music is about optimism. And that is as it should be, given the fact that the first Broadway show he saw, and the one that changed his life, was Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun starring Ethel Merman. Seeing that show with its unparalleled parade of great songs and featuring a larger-than-life musical comedy heroine (and star), Jerry discovered a passion for the theatre and for “showtunes.”

The clarity and joy that is the hallmark of an Irving Berlin song is clearly Jerry’s greatest influence. Songs such as It Only Takes a Moment or If He Walked Into My Life are remarkable for the directness of their emotions, and have lyrics and melodies that are at once dramatic and musical. That musical thrust of a clean, pure melody is what Jerry Herman does best...

...for his work in the musical theatre he has won Tonys, Grammys, Gold records, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, three Variety Critics Awards, and the Johnny Mercer Award. Louis Armstrong’s recording of Hello, Dolly! is the most popular number ever to come out of a show. Jerry was also elected into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame and the Theatre Hall of Fame.

His first Broadway show was Milk and Honey in 1961, followed by Hello, Dolly!, Mame, Dear World, Mack & Mabel, The Grand Tour, La Cage Aux Folles and Jerry's Girls), as well as a Christmas television spectacular (Mrs Santa Claus) featuring Angela Lansbury, and, notoriously (as I featured way back in 2008), the Vegas-extravaganza-that-never-was Miss Spectacular.

Madam Arcati and I went to a BBC gala in his honour in 2007, and en masse "our gang" saw the Menier Chocolate Factory production of La Cage Aux Folles not once but twice in 2007-8, and the Open Air Theatre production of Hello, Dolly! in 2009. We're still waiting for someone to revive Mack & Mabel or Mame in London.

Mr Herman has always been "up there" in the pantheon of our house favourite musical theatre maestros alongside the likes of Mr Sondheim, Mr Cy Coleman or Messrs Kander & Ebb, and his is a very sad loss - who's left now to create the magical world of razzmatazz and va-va-voom we so adore?!

Like this...

Angela Lansbury, Chita Rivera, Carol Channing, Christine Ebersole, Christine Baranski, Kelsey Grammer and company - I Don't Want to Know/The Best of Times is Now (Jerry Herman's Kennedy Center Honors tribute, part 2)

If music is no longer lovely,
If laughter is no longer lilting,
If lovers are no longer loving,
Then I don't want to know.

If summer is no longer carefree,
If children are no longer singing,
If people are no longer happy,
Then I don't want to know.

Let me hide ev'ry truth from my eyes with the back of my hand,
Let me live in a world full of lies with my head in the sand.
For my memories all are exciting.
My memories all are enchanted,
My memories burn in my mead with a steady glow;
So if, my friends, if love is dead,
I don't want to know.



RIP, Gerald Sheldon "Jerry" Herman (10th July 1931 – 26th December 2019)

Dress me! dress me! dress me!

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Hans Conried. I suppose you know yours."



It was the centenary on the weekend of that marvellously fruity actor Hans Conried.





When, on his appearance on their show, The Monkees kept disrupting him as he tried to perform his lines, Mr Conried looked straight at the camera and said: "I hate these fucking kids." Unsurprisingly, it was not broadcast.



According to IMDB: "His distinctive voice made him a popular radio performer during the 1930s and 1940s. In the following four decades he had a lucrative second career doing voice work for animated feature films and television productions; he was best known as the voice of "Captain Hook" in Peter Pan (1953)."

He went on to carve a not-insignificant career on US television, in numerous shows including Make Room for Daddy, Love, American Style and The Lucy Show, as well as on stage (he was in the original cast of Cole Porter's 1953 Broadway hit Can-Can).





However, it is for his portrayal of "Dr Terwilliger" (described as the "first gay villain") in the camp classic (and box-office disaster) The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T for which we love him most - especially this scene:

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T - Doe-Me-Doe Duds

Come on and dress me, dress me, dress me, in my finest array!
Cause just in case you haven't heard
Today is doe-me-doe day!

Dress me in my silver garters, dress me in my diamond studs
Cause I'm going doe-me-doe-ing in my doe-me-doe duds!
I want my undulating undies with the marabou frills!
I want my beautiful bolero with the porcupine quills!
I want my purple nylon girdle with the orange blossom buds
Cause I'm going doe-me-doe-ing in my doe-me-doe duds!

Come on and dress me! dress me! dress me!
In my peek-a-boo blouse
With the lovely inner lining made of Chesapeake mouse!
I want my polka-dotted dickie with the crinoline fringe
For I'm going doe-me-doe-ing on a doe-me-doe binge!

I want my lavender spats and in addition to them
I want my honey-colored gusset with the herring bone hem
I want my softest little jacket made of watermelon suede
And my long persimmon placket with the platinum braid
I want my leg of mutton sleeves and in addition to those
I want my cutie chamois booties with the leopard skin bows
I want my pink brocaded bodice with the floofy fuzzy ruffs
And my gorgeous bright blue bloomers
With the monkey feather cuffs
I want my organdie snood and in addition to that
I want my chiffon Mother Hubbard lined with Hudson Bay rat
Dress me up from top to bottom, dress me up from tip to toe
Dress me up in silk and spinach for today is doe-me-doe day!
DOE-ME-DOE DAY!

So come and dress me in the blossoms of a million pink trees!
Come on and dress me up in liverwurst! and Camembert cheese!
Come on and dress me up in pretzels, dress me up in bock beer suds! Cause I'm gooooo-ing
...doe-me-dooooooooo-ing...
in my doe-me-doe duds!

A work of utter, breathtakingly camp genius - that I rightly featured (as an adjunct, admittedly) to my famous "Top Ten of the most extravagantly camp moments in cinema" post over at Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle.

And, by way of a bonus - a particularly scary scene that was cut [alongside many of the original film's musical numbers, in their entirety, and latterly destroyed] on the grounds of being "too outré" for Fifties audiences:

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T - The Dungeon Song

Hans Georg Conried, Jr. (15th April 1917 – 5th January 1982)

"Brek-kek-kek-kek"

Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans - Invocation and Instructions to the Audience (BBC Proms 2010)

From the very opening number, whereby we were instructed: "Please don't fart. There is very little air and this is art", we just knew we were in for a good evening. And so it was, indeed - as a little gang of us huddled into the teensy-tiny confines of the fabulous Jermyn Street Theatre in Mayfair last Friday for not just any old show, but the première of a Stephen Sondheim musical!

The Frogs is not the best-known of the modern-day Master's work, of course. It began as a short art-house-piece way back in 1974, for which Mr Sondheim had merely been asked by its "creator" Burt Shevelove (who "freely adapted" it from Aristophanes, of all obscure sources) to contribute a few songs. It was not a huge success even in those experimental times, despite its semi-aquatic staging (in a swimming baths!), and despite the presence in the chorus of a couple of young gals who were definitely destined for greater things - Miss Sigourney Weaver and Miss Meryl Streep! However, that other theatrical maestro Mr Nathan Lane had other ideas, when he "even more freely" re-worked it (with the collaboration of Mr S, who wrote more songs for it) back in 2004...

We had no water in our theatre of course, but we did have a fabulous cast with fabulous voices, energetic choreography, a (very) quirky storyline and even quirkier score (typically Sondheim: hints of Brecht & Weill, hints of Gershwin and even of Lerner & Loewe in places; lots of staccato and overlapping harmonies) to entertain us. That doyenne of all things arty, Miss Libby Purves [recently treated like shit by the BBC as they axed her Midweek Radio 4 programme after 33 years] (writing in her Theatre Cat blog) has the lowdown:

Here’s the god Dionysus, deprived of his Noël Coward smoking jacket and unconvincingly disguised as Herakles in a lion skin. He’s having a panic attack on a ferry across the Styx while a chorus of marauding frogs sings a menacing staccato and Charon the ferryman sleeps off a spliff. The frogs represent apathetic conformity – “Brek-kek-kek-kek! Brek-kek-kek-kek! Whaddya care the world’s a wreck? Leave ’em alone, send ’em a check, sit in the sun and what the heck?”.

The Frogs

But as the God of theatre, our hero is on a quest to bring back a great playwright – George Bernard Shaw of all people – to improve the world with questioning.

There are many fingers in this mad frog pie. Aristophanes, the Ancient Greek playwright who wrote, for the feast of Lenaia, about a journey into Hades to bring back the dead Euripides. Then Burt Shevelove who updated it to include Shaw and Shakespeare in debate, and Stephen Sondheim who wrote the music and lyrics, and had it performed in the unfriendly acoustic of the Yale swimming pool. Now add Nathan Lane, who fell for it as if for “a little homely rescue dog”, messed about and wrote new bits. And here it is at the ever-adventurous Jermyn.

Rarely have I been in a more Marmite show. A couple left furiously at the interval, not getting it at all: another woman rhapsodised in the interval expressing surprise that they didn’t adore it like her, then unaccountably picked up her many bags and left ten minutes in making the rest of the row stand up for her. Me, entrancedly amused mainly by the Sondheim lyrics, I stayed and enjoyed the character of Pluto the underworld king as a leather queen with a whip, the assorted choruses, and the very funny advent of Martin Dickinson as George Bernard Shaw himself, pompous, emitting his famous epigrams and excoriating the frivolity of Shakespeare and his "Purple patches on borrowed rags".

Dionysius holds it together, the affable Michael Matus alternately alarmed, determined, and nicely gushy as the top Shaw fanboy, praising his “gravity of subject and levity of manner”, which actually describes this whole show quite nicely. The duel of quotations between Shaw and Shakespeare is wonderful, with quite the right winner.

So I enjoyed it, crazy as it is, and the music – piano, woodwind, trumpet and cello, is beautifully Sondheim, and Grace Wessels directs with cheerful speed. It feels more like a clever college romp than anything else, but it is a romp composed by a genius, an eloquent wise clown. For Sondheimites, it has the buzz. Or croak.

For the record, nobody left halfway through the show when we went. Nobody farted to my knowledge, either. In fact the audience was generally, as we were, enraptured.



Like Miss Purves, we loved the interplay between the somewhat effete Dionysus (god of drama and of wine) and his slightly-nerdy slave Xanthias (George Rae) that holds the story together (with some funny throwaway lines such as “Viagra - the god of perseverance”), the humour of the dominatrix Pluto (Emma Ralston) complete with Cage Aux Folles-style fan-dancers, the hilarious Beetlejuice-esque Charon (Jonathan Wadey), and the sheer camp effect of the ensemble cast playing not only the central Greek Chorus roles but also myriad other characters (Chris McGuigan plays both the macho Herakles and a handmaiden to Persephone(!), Martin Dickinson plays Shaw, Nigel Pilkington Shakespeare, Li-Tong Hsu plays "Virilla" the highly-sexed Amazon, and Bernadette Bangura is Dionysus' love Ariadne).

There is a lot to take in in this show, and it certainly is unlike anything else in Sondheim's repertoire (aside from the fact that some of the "hooks" herein sound somewhat familiar to anyone who may have seen his much later Into The Woods). It is definitely not like anything else currently showing in the West End. And for that, we are somewhat thankful.

The Frogs at the Jermyn Street Theatre is now completely sold out, and closes on Saturday 8th April. However, it is definitely worthy of a run at a bigger (not too big, hopefully) West End Theatre, fingers crossed.

There is no-one else remotely as good as either of them

Two significant theatrical birthdays coincide today, as Michael Coveney observes in WhatsOnStage:

Happy Birthday to the grand old men of musical theatre, and I'm not talking Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's almost freakish that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim, the transatlantic giants of the genre, share the same birth date, 22nd March, though ALW is a mere stripling at 67 years, Sondheim a justly venerated 83.

Both composers, both geniuses in their own individual ways, tread warily and respectfully around each other, but their supporters, mostly on the Sondheim side, are like rival fans of the two Manchester football teams: vociferous, bitchy and unaccommodating. Lloyd Webber, in their eyes, always wants to please the public whereas Sondheim wants to change an art form. Guess who most critics prefer.

The truth is they both seek popular approval, of course, and they have both been revolutionary innovators. Lloyd Webber's two major musicals written with lyrics by Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, will remain in the repertoire for as long as Puccini's Tosca and Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow and, who knows, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Cats and Starlight Express are brilliant eclectic vaudevilles, exploring every kind of rock musical and operatic style in effervescent pastiche, while Sondheim's best shows - my favourites (not necessarily the same thing) are Company, A Little Night Music and Into the Woods - reinvent the genre as urban satire, fairy-tale, operetta; and of course he rewrites his own brilliant lyrics.

Although the first productions of Company and Night Music each ran a year here, neither was a commercial smash, nor was (or is) Assassins, for all its mordant vitality. ALW's Phantom of the Opera runs for ever because it touches a nerve about the music of seduction, the agency of love and the splendour of its rock romantic expression; and the music is on a constant switchback between that romance and the heart of darkness in the Phantom's labyrinth, while Sondheim does a similar thing in combining surface atmosphere with ghoulish revelation in Sweeney Todd.

Both write "proper" music to put it mildly. The first half of the finally disappointing Stephen Ward contained some of Lloyd Webber's best continuity, or underscoring, while Sondheim's Passion, which I can live without, has some of his finest arioso and harmonic moments. If there's a musical context for Lloyd Webber's inspiration you find it in Prokofiev as well as Puccini - it's worth remembering that when Dmitri Shostakovich, arguably the greatest composer of the 20th century, saw Superstar in London shortly before he died (twice, on successive evenings) he lamented that he could not have written something similar himself, admiring particularly the writing of a core rock band orchestration overlain with full symphonic strings, brass and woodwind. And Sondheim hails from the greatest days of the Broadway musical and indeed wrote lyrics for three of them - West Side Story, Gypsy and (music as well) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Both writers owe a lot to Cameron Mackintosh. Mackintosh produced Cats and Phantom and Side By Side By Sondheim, the 1976 cabaret that really put Sondheim on the map in this country. And when Cameron celebrated his 30 years in show business in 1998, ALW and "Steve" (as I called him by the end of our one and only chance encounter in a London pub, when I had the privilege of buying him two very large gin and limes) collaborated for the first and only time at a royal gala in the producer's honour.

On film at that gala, they shared the same piano and an item (devised by Sondheim) which wedded the tunes of "Send in the Clowns" and "Music of the Night": "Isn't he rich? Isn't he square? Isn't he working the room, somewhere out there? Send in the crowds... Acts on his whims, took a big chance, seeing his anagram said: Cameron, Romance. He went to France. Send in the crowds." The tune shifted to 4/4 time: "Night time falling, Cameron keeps calling. Posing questions, questions with suggestions... suddenly appearing, always interfering; but here we are, and cheering as we might, the man who flogs the music of tonight."

Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber - Duelling Pianos (Hey, Mr Producer!, 1998)

About the only other thing they have in common is having written an Oscar-winning film song for Madonna (ALW in Evita, with Tim Rice, and Sondheim in Dick Tracy), and both are struggling to adjust to the changing musical theatre scene. One problem they share is that there is no-one else remotely as good as either of them, nor do they have the benefit of a great musical theatre producer like Mackintosh, last of a breed, I reckon. ALW's influence has been immense in terms of the industry and side issues like sound systems and orchestration, while Sondheim has unwittingly created a more baleful legacy in his imitators and American musical theatre writers who simply can't get out from under his skin, or his shadow.

Still, with two Sweeney Todds coming up - one at the ENO with Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson (semi-staged, for 13 performances only, hardly an auspicious launch for the supposedly money-making ENO deal with Michael Grade and Michael Linnitt), one in a pop-up pie and eel shop on Shaftesbury Avenue, cheekily gazumping ENO on Cameron's patch - and Gypsy soon to storm the Savoy, Steve ain't going away... nor is ALW, though I'm not the only one to worry about space songs for Sarah Brightman, his muse and inspiration on Phantom, and his unlikely-sounding collaboration with Julian "Downton Abbey" Fellowes - the Downton chief location, Highclere Castle, is handily close to ALW's country pile on the edge of Watership Down - on Jack Black's School of Rock.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim (born 22nd March 1930)

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22nd March 1948)

Hello Jerry!

"I have a lot of friends who get up most mornings and go to jobs they absolutely hate. I don't think that's what life is about and I'm so fortunate that I actually love what I do." Jerry Herman



Composer, producer and musical genius Jerry Herman was born on 10th July 1931.

From The New York Daily News in 1998:

Jerry Herman sure knows how to crank out a hit tune.

In a career spanning nearly four decades, the songwriter has come up with one show-stopper after another for such beloved Broadway musicals as Hello Dolly, La Cage Aux Folles, Mame, Mack and Mabel.

Though critics and theatre snobs sometimes sneer that his work is oh, the horror! too accessible, Broadway audiences adore his instantly hummable melodies and catchy lyrics. Even someone who's never set foot in a theatre can probably sing a few bars of Hello, Dolly! or Mame or We Need a Little Christmas.

Writing hit songs comes easy to Herman. Some of his best in "Dolly" and "Mame", for instance took less than an hour to compose.

"I'm so fast it frightens me," he says. "I don't tell producers that, though, because I'm afraid they'll lower my royalties."

Happy 80th birthday to the man behind some of our best-loved shows here at Dolores Delargo Towers!

Jerry Herman's Kennedy Center Honors tribute, part 1

Angela Lansbury, Chita Rivera, Carol Channing, Christine Ebersole, Christine Baranski, Kelsey Grammer and company - I Don't Want to Know/The Best of Times is Now (Jerry Herman's Kennedy Center Honors tribute, part 2)

“When they passed out talent, Jerry stood in line twice.” Carol Channing

http://www.jerryherman.com/

[Of course I have written much about this beloved man before. Previous blogs about Mr Herman over at Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle may be found here, here and here.]

"You are the one"

The young Cole Porter (8 June 1891–15 October 1964) was almost hurled in the direction of a musical career by by his doting (and rather influential in small-town America) mother. She apparently financed his school orchestra in exchange for guarantee that he would get to play the violin solo, ensured his musical compositions were published and performed, and used her influence on the local media when they reviewed his performances. It is safe to say he may well have been a bit of a spoilt child...

Emerging from the finest schools, including Yale and (briefly) Harvard, Cole Porter had an impeccable education. And, like many other privileged young gay men, Mr Porter kept up a proper front for his family while clandestinely indulging his burgeoning sex life. Perhaps the number of football fight songs he wrote in Yale and his post-college sexual preference for large strong men were not entirely coincidence.

During the First World War (in which he did not actually fight, despite his stories to the contrary) he lived in Paris, a city renowned for its free-and-easy attitude towards sex and sexuality even then. The parties he attended (and hosted) were apparently fabulous, with guests from the elite of European (and US) society including members of the Italian nobility, gay orgies, cross-dressing, music, champagne and recreational drugs. [Sounds fab!] There he met wealthy American socialite Linda Lee Thomas, who was to become his wife and muse.

Miss Thomas, eight years older than him and one of Mr Porter's financial as well as emotional supporters, was more than happy to overlook his sexuality in exchange for his erudite and entertaining company and a share in his glamorous life. In return he was more easily able to concentrate on making a successful musical career. Despite their obvious long-standing adoration for each other (they stayed together, on and off till her death in 1954), their marriage was entirely sexless. According to the New York Times, however, "Marriage did not diminish Porter's taste for extravagant luxury. The Porter home on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was a palatial house with platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin."

Cole Porter also carried on his constant pursuit of affairs with men (one of them ballet star Boris Kochno) for the rest of his life. He seemed to specialise in trysts with "rough trade" such as sailors and rent boys, often going cruising with his old friend the actor Monty Woolley. Allegedly one night, a young sailor they drove up to on the street asked outright, "Are you two cocksuckers?" Wooley smiled and said, "Now that the preliminaries are over, why don't you get in and we can discuss the details?"

John Barrowman & Kevin Kline - Night and Day

It was Hollywood, however, that really catered to Mr Porter's hedonistic tastes, and his pool parties and gay affairs were the stuff of legend.

"Porter became a centre of the social whirl wherever he went, particularly among the homosexual elite. He was the only person who ever threatened director George Cukor's pre-eminence in Hollywood's gay circles. In George Cukor: A Double Life, biographer Patrick McGilligan writes that these competing world-class egos were called "the rival Queens of Hollywood," but concedes that "Porter's was perhaps the more privileged invitation."

Linda felt so left out of Cole's life that she packed her bags and left for Paris. She only returned when a horse riding accident shattered Cole's legs, and she supported him as he rebuilt his career.

And what a career!

Cole Porter's musicals include Anything Goes, Broadway Melody of 1940, Kiss Me Kate, High Society, Can-Can, Panama Hattie, and the tantalisingly-titled Gay Divorcee and Something For The Boys.



Among the hundreds of songs that he gave us as his legacy are: What is This Thing Called Love?, Let's Misbehave, Night and Day, Love for Sale, Let's Do It, I Get a Kick out of You, You're the Top, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, De-Lovely, You'd Be So Easy to Love, Do I Love You?, Well, Did You Evah!, In the Still of the Night, It's All Right with Me, At Long Last Love, I've Got You Under My Skin, Begin the Beguine, Too Darn Hot, Always True to You (in My Fashion), Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, True Love and Just One of Those Things (among so many more).

Eartha Kitt - Let's Do It

An amazing man.

http://www.coleporter.org/

Farewell Mr Laurents

And so we bid another sad farewell, this time to stage writer and producer Arthur Laurents, who has died in New York aged 93.

Mr Laurents was not just any old theatrical, you know! He was the man who, with those other great luminaries Bernstein and Sondheim, created some of my all-time favourite classic stage musicals including West Side Story and Gypsy.


The "West Side Story" gang in 1957: Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Hal Prince, Robert Griffith (a co-producer, seated), Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins.

He worked with everyone who is everyone in theatre, including Jerry Herman (for whom he wrote the "book" for La Cage Aux Folles), Kander and Ebb, Betty Walberg, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Richard Rodgers and Jule Styne. He ventured into movies, worked with Hitchcock, and wrote the movie The Way We Were for Barbra Streisand.

Born into a radical family who had turned their backs on Orthodox Judaism, the young Arthur was taken by his father to see the musical No, No Nanette, and he was smitten. "All the girls were twirling their parasols and I thought that was just wonderful. That's when I got hooked. My dream was that some day I would walk down the aisle of a musical I had written, while the orchestra was playing. And I did, and it was Gypsy. That was the high spot of my life."

Equally fascinating is the story of how those three great gay men of theatre - Laurents, Sondheim and Bernstein - first met. Read my blog about it over at Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle from back in 2009.

Always waspish about actors and acting methods, Arthur Laurents once famously criticised Ethel Merman's acting and was attacked on the street in the gay West Village by a man who recognised him and shouted "Outrage! Outrage!" He described Lee Strasberg's sacred Actors' Studio - home of the controversial "method acting" style - as a place where "neurotics and alcoholics were mistaken for geniuses".

Even contemporary stars were not outside the reach of his acid tongue. He described Graham Norton, in his recent role in the West End production of La Cage Aux Folles, as "a sweet queen, who's totally earnest, totally untalented and unskilled. I thought oh, you poor man".

Facts about Arthur Laurents:

• In the 1940s a disciple of Freud's tried to "cure" him of homosexuality.
• At one time he was in, of all things, a Marxist study group with Shelley Winters; he was black-listed during the communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, when his passport was confiscated.
• He was a lifelong friend of Gore Vidal, and had affairs with stars such as Farley Granger before settling down with long-term partner Tom Hatcher.

The last line of Arthur Laurents's memoir, Original Story By, refers to Tom Hatcher, with whom the author lived for more than 50 years. "As long as he lives," he wrote in 2000, "I will."

Hatcher died in 2006. Mr Laurents outlived him by five years.

RIP another of the backbones of musical theatre.

Here is a fascinating interview with Mr Laurents from Out at the Center, a TV show of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of New York City:

Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents obituary in the LA Times