John Guare on The Boy Friend

This interview appeared on New York City Center's website in April 2016.

Playwright John Guare may be the poet laureate of yearning. So many of his characters are possessed by an absurdly specific nostalgia—whether it’s an old biddy longing for her dead lover’s toupee or a mobster lamenting how much better the Atlantic Ocean used to be. As far as nostalgia goes, Guare himself was an early bloomer. “I was 16 in 1954, and I missed the twenties so much,” he says. “All the time I thought, Oh, if only I had been born in the twenties, it would’ve been great.” But Guare’s favorite forgotten musical isn’t from the 1920s. Written in 1953, Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend takes place in a fairyland 1920s where girls are always carrying hat boxes, every messenger boy is a millionaire in disguise, and the cure for heartbreak is to “keep on dancing.” The musical also marked the American stage debut of a 19-year-old Julie Andrews.

MATT WEINSTOCK: Why The Boy Friend?
JOHN GUARE: After you called and asked if I would pick a musical, I starting thinking, Well, what will I pick? I was walking down the street, and I ran into Edward Hibbert, the actor. His father was the original Lord Brockhurst, and he was conceived and born during the run of The Boy Friend. We always talk about it. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and it just came out of my mouth—I didn’t even say hello. I sang:

I don’t claim that I am psychic
But one look at you, and I kick
Away every scruple
I learned as a pupil
In school, my dear.

Edward and I stood in the middle of 12th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenue, and sang the score of The Boy Friend. We didn’t say anything else. And I thought, Oh, I know what I’ll talk about. It amazed me how a show that I hadn’t heard in years was still so accessible to me, and so alive to me. The power of that show…I just remember it had a purity and a clarity that outdid every other musical I ever saw.

Do you remember the first time you saw it?
I can remember it vividly. I had to look up the date on my calendar, because it was one of the most profound days of my life. On October 12, 1954, A Star is Born with Judy Garland opened. The reviews were in the next day, the 13th. And Wednesday…I couldn’t wait to see it. I couldn’t wait for the weekend. It’s the only time I ever played hooky. I left for school, went right to where A Star is Born was playing, and saw the ten o’clock show. Then I came out, ran over to the Royale Theatre, and got a standing room for The Boy Friend. I’ll never forget that day. First of all, I love musicals. I’ve been going to see musicals since Annie Get Your Gun in 1946, which I saw for my eighth birthday, and which I can still remember vividly. Then I went to see things like Shangri-La with Jack Cassidy and Shirley Yamaguchi, and The Vamp with Carol Channing. I remember on my thirteenth birthday, I had a chance to see either The King and I or Wish You Were Here. And which did I pick? Wish You Were Here, because it had a swimming pool onstage. (laughs) I didn’t want to see Gertrude Lawrence. I thought, I can always see her. She died a little while after. But I loved Wish You Were Here. The greatest show I saw was Pal Joey—which was when I was 13 or 14. I sat in the balcony, and it was a revelation. But I didn’t understand the references. “Will Saroyan ever write a great play?” And emotionally, it was so advanced; I just didn’t understand it. But I knew that I was seeing what it would be like to be grown up. This was what being grown-up was. I wanted to write musicals, but the problem was, they were perfect—like Annie Get Your Gun or Where’s Charley? or Pal Joey—or else they were shows that even I could tell were broken in some terrific way—like The Vamp or Shangri-La. The Boy Friend was the first show I saw that was my size. It wasn’t that I liked The Boy Friend; I felt I could write The Boy Friend. It was something that I could address and devour and recreate. Where’s Charley? or Guys and Dolls or Pal Joey—those were shows that you went to in awe, thinking, How did Frank Loesser, how did Rodgers and Hart do that brilliant thing?  The Boy Friend made me think, Oh, I can do this. Given the time, I could write this. They were songs that seemed to have always been there. “I Could Be Happy”—the simplicity of it is beautiful. And “Won’t You Charleston With Me?”—god, that’s the kind of clever I can deal with. Even “Sur la Plage,” with that lyric:

You may run up against a rajah
Or maybe your man
Will be a poor man.

They’re all rhymes and thoughts that a 16-year-old could wrap his brain around. And thanks to that, for the next couple of years, I started writing a musical of The Great Gatsby. The Boy Friend fed my love of the 1920s, and it showed me what songs could be in a musical. Ironically, some of the songs I wrote for The Great Gatsby ended up in The House of Blue Leaves [Guare’s 1971 play about a small-time songwriter].

That’s fascinating. Those songs have the same quality of the songs in Boy Friend—an innocence totally untouched by camp.
Well, that’s what I loved. I took the innocence of The Boy Friend with no irony at all. So when you sent me that incredible thing that I’d never read—Philip Larkin’s description of seeing a production of The Boy Friend in Hull—I mean, that’s the way it is.

Larkin called The Boy Friend “the greatest theatrical work of our day” and wrote that “when Polly is alone in Act 1, & tears up her letter, just before Tony looks hesitantly in through the french windows, I felt as if I were watching a great moment in drama.” Wasn’t he laying it on a little thick? I mean, The Boy Friend has no illusions about being high art—it’s just a wonderful low-art musical.
But it’s not a low or high art. When a play connects with the audience, that’s the highest aspect of theater.

Why do you think The Boy Friend isn’t revived more often?
It would be impossible for our eyes to see that show with the amount of purity and discovery that we had 60 years ago. We’ve become too smart. And Julie Andrews was so singular. When they did a revival with Sandy Duncan, I didn’t even bother to see it. The Boy Friend might be something that was born at exactly the right time: 28 years after the period, when it was in the recent past. Though wouldn’t it be lovely if they revived it, and somebody had the same reaction I did?

You’ve adapted a few classic musicals—Brigadoon, Babes in Arms, Kiss Me, Kate. Is there anything you’d change about The Boy Friend?
Nothing. It’s perfect. Why would you change it? It’s funny—the only criticism I’ve ever read of The Boy Friend was that it wasn’t an authentic musical, because the authentic musicals of the twenties had a great clown involved in them. And that clown is nowhere to be found in The Boy Friend.

Did you ever meet Sandy Wilson?
No. I never even dreamed of it. And he just sort of vanished. I mean, I know of Divorce Me, Darling!—which I’ve never heard; I’ve never wanted to listen to that. And I didn’t go to see Valmouth when that opened, with Gail Jones. I loved The Boy Friend. I didn’t want him to do anything else.

But Divorce Me, Darling! seems so formally daring—a sequel to The Boy Friend set in the thirties, when their marriages are all on the rocks. That wasn’t intriguing to you?
Not at all. Anyway, it never came over here, because it was not a success in London. Back then, if shows didn’t get imported to Broadway, you didn’t hear about them.

Since we’ve talked so much about the twenties, I want to ask about the movie you wrote about George Gershwin. To me, it’s one of the great dreams deferred, right up there with the MGM movie of Follies. Can you talk about the Gershwin project?
No, it’s too painful. Too painful. Have you ever read it?

I haven’t. But the idea of your sensibility married to those songs is just intoxicating.
It was a heartbreaker. I worked on it for a couple of years. Lee Gershwin had said to me, “Whatever you find out, just tell the truth.” And I did.

Adele Astaire thought George Gershwin was a “neuter”—that was her crackpot diagnosis. How did you see him?
I tell you, the thing that fascinated me about George Gershwin—wading through timelines of all the people in his life—was that everybody wanted a piece of him. Everybody wanted George—Ira, everybody. You were drawn to him because of his music, and then you didn’t know what was there when you got there. You could read anything you wanted into him, cause he was all passion and all life, with a complete focus on his music.

I read that in your first theater job, you were in charge of “bringing up all the stage lights surreptitiously when [Gloria Swanson] came onstage so the audience would subliminally think, Gee, isn’t everything brighter when she’s around?” You called it a “star bump.” Did the star bump die off with Swanson?
No, but the bump has gone out of it. Before, they were done on the light board by a guy who went from one cue to another. Now it’s automated—so it’s just an imperceptible, increasing glow.

I’ve never noticed one. Maybe my eye’s not sharp enough.
Well, you’re not supposed to notice the star bump; you’re supposed to notice the actor. It’s as if they’re emanating, the light is pouring out of them. If you notice a star bump, it’s a failure.