The Music & The Myth

AN INTERVIEW with BARTLETT SHER

While he was working on casting Camelot, the director, Bartlett Sher, spoke to our editors from his office at Lincoln Center Theater about his revival of the beloved musical. Sher has directed a breathtaking list of plays and musicals that Lincoln Center Theater’s audiences will remember, including To Kill a Mockingbird, South Pacific, and My Fair Lady.

JOHN GUARE: Our audiences will remember your revival of My Fair Lady, in which, without changing anything, you solved the problem of My Fair Lady in this jaw-dropping ending, in which she brings his slippers and then runs off. That gave My Fair Lady brand-new life. Why Camelot now?

BARTLETT SHER: Well, with My Fair Lady I think we were restoring the story to Shaw’s intentions. Eliza’s return with the slippers was introduced in the 1938 movie of Pygmalion, which Shaw wrote, because the studio wanted a happy ending. The people who made the musical bought the rights to the movie. We simply adhered to Shaw’s original vision. So, from a revival point of view, Camelot is a very different kettle of fish. It’s a musical that has incredible music—music that is absolutely beloved—but it didn’t really have a book that held up to the larger story. I think Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s initial intentions were to capture T. H. White’s very popular book, The Once and Future King—they have all this crazy magic in the book that wasn’t easy to accomplish onstage. There are stories of what a nightmare it was to produce. Moss Hart had a heart attack while they were on the road, and the journey to creating it was troubled.

JG: There’s the story of Moss Hart being wheeled into the hospital as Alan Lerner was being wheeled out of the hospital, and Lerner said, “This isn’t a musical, it’s a medical.” (Laughter)

BS: But, in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, four years after the show had opened and closed in New York, this somewhat nostalgic, romantic musical, largely built on a kind of longing for some weird, misty place in English history, got grafted over a longing for an American Presidential universe that had been taken away. And the musical, and the idea of Camelot itself, garnered a big place in the consciousness through the music and through these myths that grew up around it.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO: What sparked this revival of Camelot?

BS: André Bishop [Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director] suggested we do it for the Lincoln Center Theater gala, since we were doing another Lerner and Loewe musical at the time, My Fair Lady. I thought, Camelot? Richard Burton? But then I learned that Lin-Manuel Miranda loved the show, and that it was his mother’s favorite musical. I said, “Lin, you have to help me.” He really, really loved it. He loved everything about what it did as a musical, and that opened me up to something I hadn’t expected. He was a great spirit in exploring it. It was a wonderful experience in the theater, but at the end I came to the very same conclusion everyone else had: that it was not a very good book.

AG: Did you know right away that you wanted someone to write a new book?

BS: After the gala, I asked Lin who he thought could write a new book. Immediately, he said, Aaron Sorkin.

JG: If Camelot’s original book wasn’t great, what did the show deliver?

BS: I think it delivers a level of romance, and that you really feel the nostalgia for something missing or lost. You chart Arthur’s losing his bride and losing his kingdom, while knowing that he had been onto something great, which gives it a deeper, mythical kind of strength, which seems to push through no matter what. The thing that is moving is watching everyone accept one another in their failure, and watching everyone move ahead, even though mistakes were made. Arthur sees that he’s married to a woman who is obviously falling in love with somebody else. And his ability to accept these contradictions is very moving.

JG: I was surprised when I read a draft of the book and there was a reference to Voltaire and the Age of Enlightenment pops up. I thought, Wait a minute, we’re in the Middle Ages, aren’t we?

BS: Aaron didn’t want to look at time in such a linear way, so that all the influences of the thing we’re making are layered together.

AG: To create something out of time and place—mythological.

BS: Tadeusz Kantor, the Polish painter and director, influences all my work. He’s on the wall back there [gestures toward the poster hanging behind him]. He would say every work of art has its own autonomous logic. I’m building my own autonomous logic—where Voltaire can be referenced and in a time that feels like the Middle Ages . . . except that it isn’t. I feel like Camelot doesn’t need to happen in a specific year. We’re making our version. Aaron has made the marriage more political. He’s made the stress more real. He’s gotten rid of all the magic. He likes the political idea that maybe Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, but, as Guenevere reminds him, ten thousand people loosened it before him, which is a very big, democratic idea, as opposed to a magical one, and that’s very central to his point of view.

JG: Tell us a little more about Kantor.

BS: It’s his principle that you have to have what he called the sustained radicalism of the painter, where each time you move on to a new board you’re rejecting what you did before to make something new. With each new piece he wrote, he wrote a new manifesto, rejecting everything he’d done before and starting over again, in a pure spirit of the avant garde. He also made a distinction between the interpretive artist and the creative artist. I, the director, am the interpretive artist; you, the writer, are the creative artist, and they are very different impulses. That’s where Kantor has always fueled and supported me to try different things within the sort of safer environment of interpretive arts.

JG: What was the first musical you saw?

BS: I grew up in San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and when I was eleven my family took me to see Hair. I sat next to my mom and the actors all took their clothes off, and I thought, What the heck is going on? And I thought it was really amazing. I remember them crawling onto the stage, and I remember afterward leaving and seeing a couple of the actors coming out of the stage door and heading off into the night, and I thought, Oh, that must be a really cool life. Also, around that same time, I saw my first Grateful Dead concert, which was just as insane, but I thought it was really fun and very communal.

AG: The way you talk about San Francisco, it struck me as its own kind of Camelot.

BS: I do feel very lucky for growing up there. It was a very special time; it was so out of control, and it was going through such transformation. And it prepared me for everything else. When I went to Massachusetts, to Holy Cross College, I thought, This is so ordinary compared to where I grew up. It was as if I’d stepped out of a spaceship. But I think that’s an interesting link, because my growing up in San Francisco was very special and very tumultuous. My parents divorced, so I was going through a lot, but the city itself was filled with these extremely creative endeavors.

JG: How much of the rehearsal process is an act of discovery for you?

BS: About ninety percent. I have a lot of points of view, and a lot of work to do before we get there to ask the questions at the highest possible level, but you always have to be ready to go in some new direction if you discover something you didn’t expect halfway through.

JG: So you’re open to accidents happening?

BS: Oh! Accidents are critical. I think one of the illusions about directors is that somehow they have this received vision that they then prove to everyone as they move through the process, as opposed to an approach that they then use as an active exploration of a text. My job is assembling all that information and selecting and pulling it together into a whole that’s going to be shared by all of us as we get there.

AG: I realize it’s early, but what can you tell us about the world that you’re creating?

BS: We’re going to build our own version of Camelot, our own version of this world, with our own sense of movement, with our own kind of structure to it, and explore it to kind of mirror who we’re becoming now, and who we are. I’m really interested in how Ariane Mnouchkine builds her company at Le Théâtre du Soleil— through mask work and movement work. Working with all of our actors and singers, we will try to build a physical world. I’m interested in approaching a musical in the American canon in a different way, through movement, because Camelot doesn’t operate the way most musicals do—it has no dances, no traditional numbers. I’m going to try and build a company, and build a world to deliver what I think is a very powerful story, to get underneath the fingernails of both our own mythology about Camelot, our own mythology about democracy and lost democracy, and ideas that are good, and see if we don’t find ourselves with Arthur in this very ambivalent place—as a country, as a human being, as we look into the future. The show’s ending is very touching and very complicated—it is filled with hope, but also with lots of dread and doubt. I always say these revivals always come around when you need them to, and this Camelot seems to be coming around with some comfort for a dreaded future.

AG: I’m interested in your comment that revivals come back when we need them most as a society. When did you start having these discussions about the political optimism and hope in the show?

Clockwise from bottom left: Ivy © imageBROKER/ Alamy; Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner © RBM Vintage Images/Alamy; Crown © Cheri Doucette/Alamy; Sword and The Stone book jacket. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1938, T. H. White; Bartlett Sher © John Lamparski/WireImage/Getty Images; Knight's helmet © mccool/Alamy; Feather courtesy of the Graphics Fairy; Aaron Sorkin © Gary Hershorn/Reuters/Alamy; Sword © Denis Rozhnovsky/ Alamy; Foil over sword © Aitthiphong Khongthong / Dreamstime.com; Castle © Malcolm Fairman/Alamy; Gauntlet © Sergey Klopotov/Dreamstime.com.