Director / Choreographer

I directed and choreographed Something's Afoot on Broadway in 1976 — a comic murder mystery musical that gave me the chance to blend movement and storytelling in ways that would define my directorial voice.

Two years later I returned to Broadway as director of Gorey Stories, a work by the writer and artist Edward Gorey. The piece had received a strong review in The Times when it opened Off Broadway under my direction. Mel Gussow called it "a merrily sinister musical collage of Goreyana." That review led the producers to move the show to the Booth Theater on Broadway.

"I was kicking and screaming all the way," I told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, when I restaged the work in Hollywood. "The Booth is too big a theater. People paying $27.50, or whatever the price was then, don't want to be told to use their imagination. They want to see it."

Not helping matters was that there was no New York Times rave — by October 1978, when the Broadway version opened, the paper was on strike. Other reviews were generally mixed.

"The day after we opened," I recalled, "we got telephone calls from the theater to come pick up our makeup because we weren't going to be playing that night. It's one of those delightful experiences that really does make you want to go into selling cosmetics door to door."

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The high point of my directing career was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on Broadway in 1982. The show had started out in the 1960s as a school project by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) and had been performed in Britain and the United States over the years. But my Broadway version elevated its profile considerably.

The show started Off Broadway at the Entermedia Theater in the East Village before transferring to Broadway, where it ran for more than a year and a half and earned me two Tony Award nominations — for best direction of a musical and best choreography.

Its most lasting effect — vital to high school and college theater departments everywhere — was the casting of a woman in the part of the Narrator, a role as important as that of Joseph himself; it's now standard practice. Most previous productions had made the Narrator male. That was originally my concept as well.

"Someone did it in Brooklyn with a Black man playing the Narrator, so that's what we looked for," I wrote. "Believe it or not, could not find the right one in New York City. 'Bring in the girls,' I said."

The role went to Laurie Beechman, who would in 1984, as a replacement player, step into another Lloyd Webber musical, Cats, in the role of Grizabella — the character who sings the famous "Memory." Her work in Joseph earned her a Tony nomination for best featured actress in a musical.

"We found Laurie Beechman with the soaring, searing voice and we had it made."