By Scott Proudfit
Des McAnuff grew up in Toronto, Canada, during the cultural explosion following Expo '67. When he was 18, McAnuff auditioned for Hair and almost made it into the first Toronto company.
When he didn't get in, he decided to write a musical himself. He did, and it was good enough to get produced. In fact, when Hair was at the Royal Alex in Toronto, McAnuff's musical was at the Poor Alex, the Royal's smaller sister theatre. A review in The Toronto Star at the time said the score was "sometimes reminiscent of the Who's Tommy"--a prescient foreshadowing of things to come.
McAnuff went on to become the founding artistic director at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse from 1983 to 1994, spearheading a revitalization of regional theatre in the mid-'80s (and nabbing the regional Tony for La Jolla in '93). His work at La Jolla included directing three Tony-winning West Coast musicals which made their way from the Pacific to Broadway: Big River, The Who's Tommy, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
La Jolla became the model resident theatre, offering a combination of mainstream and avant-garde fare to a rapt and supportive local audience. A sample season looked like 1985's: Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, directed by James Lapine; Brecht's A Man's Man, directed by Robert Woodruff; Ghost on Fire by Michael Weller, directed by Timothy Near, and Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by McAnuff.
But despite the fact that McAnuff represented, for many, one of the last great hopes for intelligent, exciting, and accessible theatre in America, he left the Playhouse to pursue other projects, including his latest, the wicked comedy Cousin Bette based on the novel by Honorƒ de Balzac and starring Jessica Lange. Great news for the Great White Way? Unfortunately, no: Cousin Bette is a film.
Back Stage West/Drama-Logue recently sat down with the director to discuss his defecting to Hollywood, his tenure at La Jolla, and the future of theatre in America.
Back Stage West/Drama-Logue: Stage directors make the transition to film for any number of reasons. Some want more control over their projects. Some wish to reach a wider audience. What was behind your desire to direct film?
Des McAnuff: I think there's a natural tendency for artists, and specifically directors, to want to reach as many people as possible. That is probably part of it. But there are just certain stories than can be told best with film. I'm a director; that's what my job is called. But my job really comes from a need to tell stories. So I think of myself as a storyteller, in film or onstage.
And I guess control is also a factor. I don't mean that in some kind of anal-retentive sense--hopefully not, anyway. Onstage, you really have to celebrate the fact that you're not in control as a director. It's about creating possibilities. It's about creating catalysts and signposts and signals for actors. But really, when it comes right down to it, when the feast is served, you might not even be there. It is out of your control. To use a '90s phrase, it's "interactive." And unless you want to sit onstage and shout at the actors, "Pick it up!," that interaction does not involve you. You ultimately become an observer.
With filmmaking, you're controlling more by directing one more entity: the audience. The camera is the audience. You have the ability to weave your way through a story, controlling the audience's point of view at every second, every frame, and if you're interested in detail and intimacy in storytelling, film is the place to be. And I really have enjoyed it tremendously.
BSW/D-L: Has anyone from the theatre community expressed feelings of betrayal--a sense that they've lost you to the dark side?
McAnuff: There's been a little bit of that. But my response is, I've never been good at repeating myself. Maybe that's a negative way to put it. What I mean is that I envy people who find a style and an approach that is consistent--filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. I really admire that he has this aesthetic that is evolving in his films. Of course, he just did a play. But for the most part, he's been moving as a director in a particular direction.
But that's not me. Every project for me is a new universe. If I've just directed Shakespeare, I'm going to be inclined to do something contemporary or maybe a musical, something different. And I think film is going to enhance my work onstage. There is a definite relationship. It was something I really wanted to do. And I think I would have been unhappy if I had never gotten the chance to do it. I think when I do go back and do another play, I'm going to be really pumped. I'm going to be really passionate about it. There are people who have managed to do both. I don't know if I'll get a chance to do this. But I just noticed Nicholas Hytner is going back to the theatre, directing Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center. He's a gifted stage director, and yet he's made a couple of very good films.
BSW/D-L: Elisabeth Shue has some great musical numbers in Cousin Bette. Did you look forward to those shooting days, sort of a return to your home turf?
McAnuff: Yes and no. First of all, the theatre in Cousin Bette is a location, but it's also a metaphor for deception, manipulation, illusion. In those scenes, I was really concentrating on storytelling. The theatre scenes are sort of these signal lights, a chance to comment on the themes of the film. I was really interested in revealing the mechanics of the 19th-century theatre from backstage, so that you would get this idea of deception. In the shots from the front, you see feathers floating down from heaven--then from backstage you realize it's a bunch of little urchins up there arguing, tossing feathers. So in a sense, it wasn't like directing a performance, where there is one audience perspective.
Also, Elisabeth had never done any singing and dancing publicly in her life. I wanted that bit of roughness in those scenes. As much as I love Bernadette Peters, it's not what I wanted. I'm fairly used to staging musical numbers, but in this particularly case, it's [the character's] sexual magnetism that people are coming to see. So, in a way, it was kind of fun, but on another level, I felt like, Oh God, I'm doing this movie I'm supposed to be leaving the theatre at least temporarily to be doing a film, and here I am back in the theatre.
BSW/D-L: What are some of the pitfalls of period films?
McAnuff: I think the worst danger of any period film is that you'll just end up making a comment on something that happened 200 years ago. Who cares? We're interested in our own times. The reason we do Shakespeare is that we find it pertinent. And that was the thing that struck me about Balzac. His elite society could exist today. It does exist. It could be Beverly Hills.
I think it's probably completely selfish, but I am more interested in my own times. I think, talking about period films, that there is a danger that you're going to create some remote vision of something that probably didn't exist in the first place. And I think musicals often lag behind, too. There's that danger in both musicals and period films, interestingly enough, to sentimentalize or romanticize.
I'm more interested in musicals like How to Succeed. Here were these two guys, Abe Burrows and Frank Loesser, who had written some of the greatest musicals of all time, but at the end of their careers, they were able to absolutely lampoon themselves. Here is a musical that, as somebody described it, is completely insincere from beginning to end. There's not a single sincere moment in the entire thing, which I absolutely loved. Strangely enough, the thing that reminds me most of that musical is something I'm supposedly doing next, the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie for Universal. At times, it reminds me of How to Succeed, in terms of tone. It never really takes itself seriously.
The real question I have to ask myself, is, If I'm concerned with the world today, why then do I go into these forms? I suppose the other side of that is simply that I do have an appreciation when somebody does do a great musical. Les Miz is a good example. It's not my favorite score, but it's a brilliant bit of musical theatre. When somebody does manage to get it right, that's an amazing thing. And that's true with a great period film, too. If somebody actually manages to put you in it and makes you think about your own life, it has a tremendous impact. When you feel like there is some connection between your time and events 200 years ago, there's an immense power to that.
BSW/D-L: What do you feel is the best training for a director?
McAnuff: Today, I think it's harder to just jump into the profession at the age that I did--18. There isn't the same kind of openness that there was at the time I was starting out. But the advantage today is that there are now some awfully good graduate training programs. They didn't really exist on any scale back then. The important thing, if you want to direct, or whatever you want to do in the theatre, is to remember that theatre is a collaborative art form. You need to find your people. You need to find peers. Going to a theatre school may be more about finding your peers than having magnificent teachers. I mean, hopefully you get both, but in order to direct, you need people to direct.
And you need to study acting, absolutely. That's first and foremost. If you're going to direct actors, you have to understand the way they work, you have to have struggled yourself. Even if you're a lousy actor, it doesn't make a difference. In fact, I sometimes think that bad actors make better directors, just like baseball managers: It's always the mediocre baseball players that make the great managers, because they really had to learn the game. They couldn't just get by on their talent.
BSW/D-L: Since the '60s, there has been a widening gap in the U.S. between mainstream and avant-garde theatre. Yet at La Jolla Playhouse, you were able to bring in directors like Robert Woodruff and Peter Sellars and present their shows to a fairly conservative audience. Are regional theatres still the best hope for closing the gap today?
McAnuff: When we started the La Jolla Playhouse--'83 was the first season--there was a great discussion at that time about the artistic deficit in the resident theatres. That was the phrase used: "artistic deficit." There was a feeling that Broadway was waiting around for new product from the resident theatres and the resident theatres weren't developing anything. They were waiting around for last year's Broadway show, which is the way a lot of them still function. Unfortunately, most theatres are back to this way of operating today. I think a lot of this is cyclical.
Not to blame everything on economics, because God knows we had financial challenges at the Playhouse, but I do think there is a tendency for theatres to get more and more cautious, obviously when their existence is threatened. So support allows people to take risks. And I did manage, sometimes by the skin of my teeth, to hang on to the support of the board and a good portion of the community, enough to take some risks. I think theatre will continue to flourish, but there are inevitably going to be these cycles where people get more cautious. I heard somebody make the argument, "Oh well, let these theatres fold if they're not exciting." And that just makes me crazy. I said, "Absolutely not. Take them over. Let young people in there and take them over. Make them vital and don't put up with mediocrity." We shouldn't put up with it.
BSW/D-L: A lot of regional theatres have divided themselves neatly between traditional mainstage shows and avant-garde or new works on the second stage. Is this valid?
McAnuff: It's inevitable that people are going to take chances on the smaller stages. It's happened for decades. The Royal Shakespeare Company does the same thing, and has from the beginning. There's nothing wrong with experimenting on smaller stages; that's got to be encouraged. I think the danger though of doing what you've described is that you start addicting people to tepid work. If you want to develop an audience that wants to be challenged, you have to do challenging work, and you may even have to go through a period when you feel rejected, a period that's difficult. But if you stick to your guns and you're talented, which is a requirement obviously, you will cultivate an audience.
I believe in art-driven institutions. And the best way to develop an audience that wants to be surprised is to surprise them and lead them. I want to be led as an audience member, too. I don't necessarily want to see what I saw yesterday. But all this is easier said than done. And I have sympathy with institutions that are struggling.
One thing I would say about all this, though, for what it's worth, is that I left the Playhouse after 12 seasons because I really felt it was time. I felt it was time for me to move on, and I thought it was time for the Playhouse to have a new artistic leader. And it was not easy. I think some theatres don't have enough changes. I don't think that bringing in more vital, and maybe younger, leaders into theatres is a bad thing. One of the problems that theatre faces today is that it's harder for directors in their 20s and early 30s to get opportunities. In the commercial theatres, there's so much capital involved these days that they're for the most part closed off. So for resident theatres, I think that new blood is crucial in terms of addressing this whole question.
BSW/D-L: What about the growing schism between academics and practitioners in the theatre community?
McAnuff: When I direct, particularly a classic, Cousin Bette for example, I always work with an academic. I taught dramaturgs at the Playhouse as part of the UCSD program. I'm used to working with people who have strong academic backgrounds, stronger than my own flimsy, poor excuse for an education. And I work closely with them in terms of research. So I do have great respect for theoreticians, but I'll tell you what I've come to discover. Generally--let's just focus on one area, say, Shakespeare. There's been a lot of very smart stuff written about Shakespeare by critics and academics. But often I find that they've got a critical ax to grind. Someone discovers that you can look at the Macbeths as a middle-class couple, which is true, and you can gain tremendous insight. So they spend all of this time proving this theory and they overlook God knows what else in the meantime. It is a domestic tragedy on some level, but it's also sandwiched between these two great battle sequences--you know, what's that about?
You can look at Macbeth many different ways. The advantage of being a director is that you can really explore some of these theories, but in the end you actually get to do the play. And when you do the play, you make discoveries that you could never make by simply studying the text.
Dramatic literature is something we get involved with in theatre, but it isn't the same as theatre. Theatre exists on the shifting sands of time, and vanishes forever the second the performance is over. The next performance will never be the same. I think there are certain insights that you can only gain by doing plays. I know that's our advantage. I'm not sure what the advantage of the academic is. Whether it's that they have more time to just sit there and read, I'm not sure. But I do have a respect for serious dramatic criticism and I wish there was more of it.
BSW/D-L: Does the future of American musical theatre lie in rock 'n' roll?
McAnuff: I was really heartened by the reaction to Rent. I hope that kind of work continues. I think that it was a great shame that Capeman wasn't more of an artistic success, because it's fabulous to have people like Paul Simon involved in the theatre. One of the things that gave theatre its vitality in the late '40s, the sort of Golden Age of the musical, is that you had the people who were writing the pop songs also writing the musicals. But in the '50s, Broadway got nervous, for whatever reason. I'm not just talking about the producers, I'm talking about the audience, as well.
It really took until the late '60s for rock music to even begin to find a home on Broadway. And those shows have always kind of been orphans. There have been successes--Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell--but Broadway has always seemed more comfortable with its own traditions, dating back to that Golden Age. I think to really blossom, for the American musical to really evolve, it needs both. It needs Sondheims and it needs Pete Townshends. And it remains to be seen whether it will accept both. Right now it's still about audiences over 50. BS