Arthur Laurents

A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood

Original Story By

Gypsy, West side story, and other musicals

Mainly on directing

Stephen Sondheim

A Musical Fable

Anyone Can Whistle

Playwright, screenwriter, and director Arthur Laurents writes about directing Broadway musicals, especially Gypsy and West Side Story, about other musicals and other directors, interacting with producers, writers, and actors, and about life with his late partner, Tom Hatcher.

Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals

Mainly on Directing

THE STORY: A group of congenial friends have restored several adjoining houses in one of New York's more attractive neighborhoods, and plan to move in en masse--setting up a sort of urban commune. However, one of their number, a confirmed bachelor,

A Play

The Enclave

THE STORY: A CLEARING IN THE WOODS is in a sense a fantasy--in which a multitude of times and experiences are telescoped into a single moment. The entire life of a young woman is shown during the course of the play. Atkinson, in the New York Time

A Clearing in the Woods

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A Clearing in the Woods a Play

Play in Two Acts

The Bird Cage

The director, screenwriter, and playwright provides readers with a peek into his world, introducing the wide array of stars he has met over the years and revealing the hardship and joy that comes with a life in show biz. 25,000 first printing.

Original Story by

"Nick and Nora are a married couple, who, in the midst of trying to solve a murder, find not only problems with the case and suspects, but also in each other. They cooperate to get all the suspects to come to the Big Tamboo, where another murder takes place and the murderer is discovered"--Broadwaymusicalhome.com.

Nick and Nora

A New Comedy

Invitation to a March

"Home of the Brave is an honest play by an honest playwright on an honest theme. Arthur Laurents, American, and now a G.I. out of uniform, walks right up and faces the predicament of a lad who is a soldier and a Jew, but above all is a human being, sensitive to the shock of prejudice. I am convinced that Coney's position in or out of Home of the Brave is none too comfortable, that the Coneys of the whole world respond as Arthur Laurents has made his Coney respond to the prejudices around him. His is more than a soldier's problem; it is the problem of people everywhere."--The author.

Play in Three Acts

Home of the Brave

Jerome Robbins

Leonard Bernstein

A Musical

West Side Story

(Applause Books). 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 Laurent's good friend and the editor of this book, David Saint.

A Life Completed

The Rest of the Story

Leona Samish, a single American woman of a "certain age" takes a long-planned European vacation from her job as a secretary and finds herself in a pensione in Venice, Italy. At a street market, she meets the handsome proprietor Renato DiRossi, entering into a casual flirtation which turns into an affair. Her complacency is jolted when she discovers he is married, has several children and is quite happy with the arrangement as is. Long-dormant frustrations and anger come to the surface as Leona faces the harsh reality of this new found infatuation and her own romantic notions of love. Shirley Booth and later Katharine Hepburn ("Summertime") played the leading role.

A Comedy in Two Acts

The Time of the Cuckoo

The Way We Were

This series of contemporary plays includes structured GCSE assignments for use by individuals or groups. These include questions which involve close reading, writing and discussion. This play places the "Romeo and Juliet" story in a New York gang-warfare context.

Gypsy Rose Lee

Jule Styne

Based on the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy was a Broadway smash for Sondheim and his West Side Story collaborator Arthur Laurents. This is the tale of vaudeville's sad decline, and of one domineering stage mother and her inadvertent creation of a notorious burlesque stripper. Featuring such standards as "Let Me Entertain You" and "Everything's Coming Up Roses".

A Musical : Suggested by the Memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee

Gypsy

Nothing square about this place. Dreams and fears come in every size and shape as they take their places in John-Michael Williams' arresting new play. No scenery no elaborate props; Senior Square is set in the human heart and bursts with humor wit and a warm understanding of a generation coming of age. Thirteen high school students stand at the crossroads of senior year. Where have they come from and where are they going? Easy to produce and delightful to direct Senior Square offers challenge and scope to young performers (7 male 6 female; integrated cast.)

Arthur Laurents

Books

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