Jack O’Brien has wrangled some of Broadway’s biggest A-listers in projects as varied as “Hairspray,” “Henry IV,” and “The Coast of Utopia”—and picked up Tonys for all three. But the veteran director says his newest project, “The Front Page,” presents his biggest hurdle yet.
“This play is unlike anything I’ve ever worked on in my life,” O’Brien says of the revival of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur comedy, which opens on Broadway Oct. 20 starring Nathan Lane, John Goodman, Holland Taylor, John Slattery, and about 20 more actors. “I have to say it’s revealing itself as the densest work I’ve ever had to do.”
Is there a reason he keeps helming such ambitious theatrical endeavors at the highest level? “I’m either a glutton for punishment,” he quips, “or they’re trying to drum me out of the business.”
Thespians everywhere know better than to believe O’Brien could be drummed out of the business. Since his start in the ’60s, the director-writer-producer is responsible for some of the most daring yet polished work ever seen on stages around the country, at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre (where he served as artistic director), and on the Great White Way. Few other artists can claim to have won awards for such a wide variety of material; O’Brien is as comfortable working with Tom Stoppard, one of his longtime collaborators, as he is staging “The Full Monty.”
“Because I’ve grown up on musicals and Stoppard and Shakespeare, particularly, I’m used to big fields of actors,” he says. “I’m not intimidated by that, I find it exhilarating.”
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Still, “The Front Page,” which follows a horde of 1920s tabloid newspaper reporters in an intricate farce, features at least seven performers onstage at a time, often with overlapping or simultaneous dialogue. “Every second of it is packed with intention and invention and complication and more problems to solve than you can shake a stick at,” says O’Brien with a sigh. “It’s a masterpiece of puzzling interaction.”
Even more challenging is rehearsing with “the highest-profile company” he’s ever cast. “Almost all of these people are bona fide stars, and practically none of them have been in an ensemble of this nature before.” But O’Brien’s motto holds true, even with such a large, starry Broadway company: “We’re trying our best to put truth onstage so that the audience is arrested not by performance but by validity, by veracity, by truth.
“It’s not so much the review or the audience or the final product that interests me most. What really interests me most is ‘Did we have a great time working today?’ A safe could fall on our heads as we leave the building; but if you had a great rehearsal and you got somewhere and felt good about what you were doing, that’s how you achieve it, I think. Moment by moment and day by day.”
In the audition room, he adds, actors who are process-oriented climb to “the top of the wish list.” He looks for problem solvers, eager to contribute their creativity without being driven by ego. “I love people with a sense of humor and a sense of humility,” O’Brien says. “I have a kind of rule: The kinds of people I like to work with are very often the kinds of people I like to have dinner with.”
As for aspiring directors hoping for a fraction of the success he’s achieved? “I’d say, go into pharmacology. Not really!” he jokes. “I’ve always felt you want to become a lot of other things before wanting to become a director. The more I direct, the less I seem to know about it and the more I go with my gut and experience.”
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