Arthur Laurents Comes Back To Stage

Theater people are always saying awful things about Arthur Laurents. One popular story has him expressing his displeasure over a rehearsal of the original West Side Story, for which he wrote the book, by pissing on the set. Another has him making a belated entrance at a panel discussion, draped in mink and announcing, “Behold, a living legend!”—to which Stephen Sondheim, also on the panel, supposedly retorted, “Wrong on both counts.” That these stories are almost certainly untrue (the former sounds more like Jerome Robbins; the latter like Leonard Bernstein) only emphasizes the degree to which Laurents’s actual antics attract them. In any case, he laughs them off—“What kind of asshole would say things like that?”—but doesn’t seem to mind the notoriety; as the name Dorothy Parker once validated a witticism, his name now authenticates an outrage. (Read more here)