West of the West End

If the London theater has seemed sleepy of late, there may be a simple explanation: No fewer than eight major British directors have been gainfully employed this season on Broadway. And three of them -- Jonathan Kent, David Leveaux and Sam Mendes -- are reviving the kinds of time-honored Broadway musicals that were once the sole province of American creators.

The transatlantic shift in directorial talent hasn’t happened overnight. Although it’s instructive to note that English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber turned to an American, Harold Prince, to stage “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” two of Lloyd Webber’s biggest hits, the more recent trend has been to look the other way. From Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre “Carousel” in 1992 -- a four-time Tony winner on Broadway two years later -- to Trevor Nunn’s “Oklahoma!” and Matthew Warchus’ “Follies,” one Englishman after another has ventured where the British once rarely trod: beating the Americans at their own game.

Or have they?

Arthur Laurents, the octogenarian American book writer of “Gypsy,” rattles off the shotgun marriages between cultures that he says haven’t worked -- “Follies” and “Oklahoma!” among them, or so Laurents maintains. Where does that leave Mendes, the Oscar winner who has undertaken the third revival of “Gypsy” to reach Broadway?

“Sam,” Laurents told me over the winter, “will break the hex.”

That “hex” could well include the 2001 production of “Follies” from Warchus that was strong on forensic investigation of character -- in a London studio theater, it would have been a knockout -- but rarely sold the sizzle. The aim was for a book-driven and actor-oriented approach to a 1971 musical that, as reappraised by Warchus, carefully revealed the fissures of two marriages only to leave the “Follies” show-within-a-show in Act 2 falling distinctly flat (perhaps intentionally, one rather perversely suspects, given the anti-glamorous nature of the entire staging).

But with this year’s Tony nominations due to be announced Monday, a Broadway season defined to a considerable degree by a newfound confidence in the original American musical (think “Hairspray” and “Movin’ Out”) may also find itself acknowledging the work of a trio of English directors, each of whom has done his bit to prompt a rethinking of three very different Broadway musical classics.

The British acumen seems best applied when the musical reveals its strengths as a play: “Carousel,” for instance, adapted from a play (Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom”) and staged by Hytner on both sides of the Atlantic with an overwhelming eye for textual detail. Or the Trevor Nunn “Oklahoma!,” which in London at least -- less so on Broadway -- married genuine star power (Hugh Jackman’s naturally virile Curly) to an examination of a pioneering culture that was about much more than the exigencies of box socials. Even musicals without an actual dramatic source -- “Guys and Dolls,” for instance, culled from the stories of Damon Runyon, or the momma of them all, “Gypsy,” inspired by the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee -- hold up to textual scrutiny like the best of plays, except that they come buttressed with music and lyrics to lift the libretti into a newly remarkable whole.

In bygone days, the American directors of these shows did it all. Jerome Robbins staged the book scenes and the choreography of “Gypsy” in 1959, as he had done with “West Side Story” several seasons earlier and would go on to do five years later with “Fiddler on the Roof.” As recently as 1982, Tommy Tune shone on dual fronts as director and choreographer of the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit musical “Nine,” his vision of an admittedly tricky piece an all-embracing one, from the feather boa that helped win supporting player Liliane Montevecchi her Tony to the very conceit that the Fellini adaptation should consist of one man and a consciousness-invading cavalcade of women.

A new source for directors

Where is a producer to turn nowadays when it comes to tapping a director for his or her musical?

In the absence of such home-grown creative geniuses as Michael Bennett, the begetter of “A Chorus Line” and “Dreamgirls” who died in 1987 from AIDS complications, Broadway has turned increasingly toward British theater veterans. After all, says Jonathan Kent, whose revival of “Man of La Mancha” looks likely to snare Tony nominations for stars Brian Stokes Mitchell and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, if you can direct Shakespeare, you can have a go at a musical steeped in a no less classic source, Cervantes.

“Of course, there is a huge difference,” acknowledges Kent, who will be in Tokyo come the Tonys directing -- what else? -- “Hamlet,” in Japanese. But the sort of classic theater in which generations of Britons are steeped turns out to be good grounding when it comes to musicals.

“It sounds incredibly pompous,” Kent says, “but if you’ve worked on, say, Shakespeare, as a director you know about the marshaling of forces to tell a story. We do have a sort of training” for what musicals demand “before doing one.” His 1995 Royal National Theatre revival of “Mother Courage,” with Diana Rigg in the title role, had a cast of 27, whereas the “Man of La Mancha” company numbers 18 -- “so hey,” he says.

Indeed, those familiar with Kent’s work in London during the past 12 years as co-artistic director of the influential Almeida Theatre (he stepped down from the job last July) can see this director’s signature writ large in this $6-million “La Mancha.” (Like the Broadway original, “La Mancha” is performed without intermission. This is in keeping with many of Kent’s London productions, which were also staged straight through so as to heighten the intensity.) In accordance with material that only just skirts this side of kitsch, the staging stresses the outsized emotions long favored by Kent, who is easily the most operatic of London’s theater directors. And its floor-to-ceiling metallic set imports to New York the epic sensibility that Kent’s preferred designer of the moment, Paul Brown, has shown time and again in London. Some scenic motifs are imported too: The sunflowers that dotted the vast sweep of the Ken Brown production of Chekhov’s “Platonov” in London in 2001 reappear here at the Martin Beck Theatre.

One could argue that Kent brings excessive sobriety -- undue self-importance, really -- to a musical that has always been pretty soft at its core, complete with a ready-made anthem in “The Impossible Dream” that tends to leave audiences cheering and critics curling their toes.

But the result has pleased arguably “La Mancha’s” toughest critic, its 75-year-old composer, Mitch Leigh. “What it really comes down to is revisiting the thing in a way that I couldn’t,” Leigh says. “I couldn’t have done this.” Was Leigh nervous that Kent was a musical neophyte? Not at all, he says: “ ‘La Mancha’ is a play with songs.”

The same could be said of “Gypsy,” the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Laurents teaming that has, by this point, been so frequently compared with “King Lear” that one half-expects its driving and driven central character, Momma Rose, to storm up the aisle and start carving up a kingdom. Instead she shouts, “Sing out, Louise,” thereby setting in motion a family drama whose fractures are the stuff of classic theater.

Watching Mendes’ careful, sometimes over-deliberate but always psychologically clear-eyed new staging of the show, a veteran London playgoer can’t help but think back to Mendes’ seminal 1995 production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” at what was then his London home, the Donmar Warehouse. There too is an iconic American treatment of a fantasist mother and her perhaps irretrievably damaged daughter.

Seeing Tammy Blanchard’s shy, hesitant Louise in “Gypsy” shrink from the show-biz spotlight demanded by her mother, you find clear echoes of the psychic toll exacted from Williams’ Laura by the well-meaning yet willful Wingfield matriarch, Amanda. What’s more, just as Mendes’ “Menagerie” cast London actress Zoe Wanamaker as a younger, sexier Amanda than is the norm, so does his “Gypsy” turn any preconceived notion of the central role on its head. For there, her cascading ringlets shielded under a period-perfect wig, is that ageless Kewpie doll, Bernadette Peters, playing the Broadway musical’s most celebrated monster. The difference this time? Her Rose isn’t a monster, she’s a woman, and a complex, continually betrayed and abandoned one at that.

In that respect, “Gypsy” is a natural for a director who has spent most of the past 10 years in London excavating anew the work of Brian Friel, David Mamet and Alan Bennett, not to mention “Gypsy” lyricist Sondheim, whom Mendes has worked with three times before. (Their most recent partnering was on a New York workshop of the musical “Wise Guys,” which has since changed titles -- to “Bounce!” -- and directors -- to Hal Prince.)

Still, why hire a Briton to reinvigorate a Broadway classic? “I can only speak for Sam, who, I think, is a wonderful director of musicals,” says the New York revival’s English producer, Robert Fox. Pointing to a trend that shifted into high gear in 1994 with Hytner’s startling reclamation of “Carousel,” Fox says the English “are very good directors, and though maybe it’s not a dearth, there isn’t a plethora of great directors of musicals in New York. ‘Gypsy’s’ got a famously fabulous book and requires what a big book musical requires, which is a good director.”

And Mendes’ training in the not-for-profit sector in Britain, where directors are generally allowed to get on with it, proved invaluable as the Broadway piranhas hovered around “Gypsy” in the run-up to its opening. “Sam just kept his head down and did the work,” says an admiring Fox, well aware that the British system provides an in-built armor and confidence that may be less easily arrived at if you have only worked in the whirlwind that is Broadway.

Some may wonder where the “directing” is, insofar as Mendes’ “Gypsy” doesn’t call attention to itself the way his decadent, in-your-face “Cabaret,” now in its sixth season on Broadway, so clearly does. But to rejigger “Gypsy,” Mendes said late last year, “would be as inappropriate as rewriting ‘Guys and Dolls’; it’s something that kind of found its perfect form, which is rare for me.”

This director’s imprint, in any case, is there to behold, from the stripped-back nature of Anthony Ward’s set -- very Donmar in its aesthetic -- to the telling use of the frame in which the incipiently beautiful Louise, belatedly taking in her reflection, starts to bloom: a picture frame featured prominently in Mendes’ “Twelfth Night,” the Shakespeare comedy that was the final play of his Donmar regime. But any signature from its director, Mendes implies, is best left subtly: “It’s a misunderstanding that one does these things anyway to draw attention to the production. If you’re doing a revival, I’ve always felt that one of the great strokes of luck is to be working on pieces that were brilliantly structured by directors and book writers.”

Mendes’ greatest challenge was to extract from Peters a performance to remind us that a perennial Broadway cutie remains the same talent who cut to the quick on film in “Pennies From Heaven” and, most memorably on Broadway in Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” Appropriately for a production that begins with the word “silence” held in the spotlight, this husky-voiced actress-singer is at her best in moments of repose: reading the letter announcing her daughter June’s elopement or, later, inwardly making peace with the striptease sensation that the reluctant Louise can -- no, must -- become. From there, it’s not much of a stretch to regard Peters’ climactic “Rose’s Turn” as this character’s equivalent of the bone-chilling “Cabaret” with which Mendes’ revival of that show concludes. Both musicals are about haunted, stunted heroines, leaving this “Gypsy” to lay bare not a bad woman -- as has been the norm -- but a monstrously self-deluded one.

If Mendes’ “Gypsy” sticks to an established template in a deceptively foursquare manner whose depths emerge when least expected, the Leveaux “Nine” throws out Tune’s no less remarkable original in the most revelatory way. “I couldn’t be Tommy Tune and wouldn’t pretend to,” Leveaux has said, which suits “Nine’s” producer, Todd Haimes, and its Tony-winning composer, Maury Yeston, just fine. The $5.5-million revival, says Haimes, whose Roundabout Theatre produced the far less successful Warchus “Follies” several seasons ago, marked an opportunity to give the musical “a different spin, for which I gave David carte blanche.”

As an enthusiastic Yeston explains it, “David went for the heart of [the show]; he really directed a play about a marriage,” as opposed to the exercise in style and chic that the Tune production so impressively was.

Returning to “Nine” for the third time following versions at Mendes’ Donmar home and in Buenos Aires, Leveaux (who has been hired to direct the next American stage revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”) finds the warmth and even pain in a musical about infantilization: a frustrated film director -- Antonio Banderas, inheriting the role Marcello Mastroianni played in the film, “8 1/2” -- nearing 40, yet gnawed at by his 9-year-old inner child. The production delivers the Broadway goods when it needs to (rather shamelessly so, in the audience-pandering of cast member Chita Rivera, the company’s resident legend) alongside an airiness and grace that I don’t remember seeing 20 years ago.

“I’m looking for directors who have vast experience with text,” says Haimes, “and I will sacrifice experience in musical theater for that.” But all one needs to have had is some experience of life to be moved by the closing passages in “Nine,” in which the young Guido (William Ullrich) confronts each of the 16 women in his orbit, only to receive the appropriate kiss or handshake from each. Whereas Tune’s production objectified women, Leveaux takes an eager audience into the hallucinatory landscape of love and lust, machismo and maturity.

As a result, a show that once gleamed outwardly has now acquired an additional inner glow. Where Tune’s vision of the material was (literally) black and white, Leveaux sees Guido’s carnival of carnality whole, Scott Pask’s set shimmering with the colors of the renaissance as if to acknowledge yet another British director’s capacity for Broadway renewal.

Matt Wolf is London theater critic for Variety and author of “Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping Into Freedom.”