Peter Stone: Musical Titan Writes The Book

Peter Stone, whose current Broadway show "Titanic"just won him his seventh Tony award nomination for Best Book, learned how to write musicals almost by chance.

In the early '60s, his agent asked him to create a musical based on "Kean," a Jean-Paul Sartre adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas Fils play about the great British actor Edmond Kean. He'd seen Pierre Brasseur play the title role in Paris.

Knowing nothing about the genre, he went to Frank Loesser (of "Guys and Dolls"), who told him "everything there was to know."

"Kean" was not a hit, but he was was hooked. During a recent interview at his house in Amagansett, he elaborated.

"I love the procedure, the rigmarole, the whole scheme of the complementary collaboration of the separate disciplines of composing and writing," he said. "Of course, like a marriage, it has its fraught moments."

Award-Winning Musicals

"You have to tell two hours' worth of play in an hour, and find a way to move seamlessly into and out of the music and lyrics. A musical is all concept and construction, which I like and know how to do. I'm the best in the field, I think."

An array of award-winning musical comedies and screenplays followed "Kean," among them "1776" in 1969, which won a Tony for Best Musical Book, a N.Y. Drama Critics Circle award, and a Drama Desk award.

A work reflecting Mr. Stone's passion for history, in this case the American Revolution, "1776" had a title and subject no one wanted to see, he said. Yet it ran for two-and-a-half years, and is currently being revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theater.

Subsequent musicals were "Woman of the Year," another Tony winner, "My One and Only," "Grand Hotel," and "The Will Rogers Follies," which won yet another Tony in 1991, as well as a N.Y. Drama Critics Circle award for Best New Musical and a Grammy award.

"Will was a cultural phenomenon whose rise coincided exactly with the evolution of the media," said Mr. Stone. "He was the number-one box office, radio, and stage star, a beloved humorist, and the intimate of six Presidents. When he died, the whole country went dark; 50,000 people attended his funeral."

"But - this nonstop success story was not very interesting."

Since Will had been a Ziegfeld Follies star, Mr. Stone decided to present his life as Ziegfeld might have conceived it. When things got boring, the great impresario (the voice of Gregory Peck, like the voice of God) would call down: "It's time for some girls," and the plot would be rigged to accommodate 16 showgirls the audience knew weren't really part of whatever scene was being dolled up.

Heads Dramatists Guild

Mr. Stone's oeuvre also includes a string of award-winning films such as "Charade" (1963), "Father Goose" (1964), which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" (1978), as well as a series of television dramas, among them an Emmy Award-winning episode of "The Defenders."

As president of the Dramatists Guild, he has spent years trying to dissuade critics from downgrading book writers and librettists to second place in the hierarchy of musical comedy credits.

"I've done 15 shows, and they're known as the Richard Rodgers show, the Cy Coleman show, or the Jule Styne show," he said. "I'm always trying to explain that it's not just Steve Sondheim's 'Company,' it's George Furth's, too, and that 'West Side Story' was written by Lenny Bernstein and Arthur Laurents."

"It's frustrating. You can have the biggest hit and still be ignored."

Wild Kingdom

Mr. Stone lives with Mary, his wife of 36 years, and a king-size Yorkie, Sam, in Manhattan and in a clearing in the woods off Stony Hill Road, Amagansett, that has the feel of being on safari in some wild kingdom.

Before seating a visitor at his big dining room table, he opened the back door and bowled a couple of dozen apples salvaged from a local market across a field to six young deer that clearly were expecting them.

Later he pointed out a Baltimore oriole on the bird feeder, eating an orange exactly its color that had been put there to attract the migrating species. A pair of cardinals seemed almost drab by comparison.

Finally, he jumped up and ran to a window: a supremely dapper red fox was trotting around the field, foraging for apple leftovers. "Our fruit distribution is paying off," Mr. Stone said excitedly.

As he awaits Sunday evening's Tony awards, Mr. Stone is, in his way, practicing what he preaches: affirming his place in the order of things, ing his place in the order of things, letting nature prevail.

"Something happens to audiences when they see that long parade of people boarding the Titanic and realize that most of them are going to die," he said.

The passengers have such high hopes for this great maiden voyage, Mr. Stone explained. Segregated into first, second, and third class, they embody the dreams of the social strata of the English-speaking world in 1912, a population soon to be decimated by the Great War.

Except for the ailing Frick and Morgan, and the no-show Vanderbilt, whose luggage went down with his valet, all the great millionaires are sumptuously ensconced in first-class berths, and eagerly anticipate breaking the trans-Atlantic speed record aboard the largest moving object on earth.

Social Strata

Second class contains the bourgeoisie, anxious to better themselves in America but barred from first class on board. One cheeky woman seeks her fortune by crashing a dance and rubbing elbows with the unsuspecting tycoons.

In third class are Emma Lazarus's "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Assigned passage by lottery, they're thrilled by what seems to them like a luxury cruise to the New World, and couldn't care less what ship they're on. Three starry -eyed Irish girls, all named Kate, dream of becoming a seamstress, a lady's maid, and a nanny: positions far above their station back on the Ould Sod.

Historical Research

"People died in inordinate numbers, because the lifeboats were only accessible to first class," Mr. Stone said. "Similarly, the number of bulkheads that would have made the Titanic truly unsinkable had been cut back to avoid compromising the grandeur of the first-class cabins."

Savoring every detail of the fruits of his research, he described the overweening pride of the Titanic's owner and its builder, who push the accommodating captain to go faster, and the fears of the common seamen aware of the dangers of accelerating in poor visibility through iceberg-infested waters.

"The hubris of the ruling classes made disaster inevitable," said Mr. Stone. "Ultimately nature prevailed. And people like that - it reaffirms their place in the order of things. Nature's supremacy has been a recurrent theme in art and literature from Prometheus to 'Twister.' "

Nature Speaks Last

"A lot of Edwardiana and a now-quaint code of honor went down with the Titanic, too, signaling the real start of the 20th century," said Mr. Stone. "It was the first failure of technology since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; till then, bigger, stronger, faster had always been better."

"As after the explosions of the Hindenberg and the Challenger, people took a second look at so-called progress."

"Now that Deep Blue has beaten Kasparov, we will begin to believe - I know this - that computers are infallible. We'll put ourselves in a situation where our survival depends on them, and some comet or natural phenomenon will catch us without a backup. We need to be reminded again and again that nature always has the last word."

Brit Crit

While "Titanic" has received some excellent reviews, especially for its stunning technology, a British critic was angry that the actual sinking wasn't shown, the writer revealed a little testily.

"He wanted us to be the movie!" he said. "Like, I can't write about Hiroshima without having an atomic explosion on stage? Does he have to see the battle of Agincourt?"

"Fortunately, he's not with a major newspaper, and I don't mind saying that."

'That Immediate Thing'

Although Mr. Stone was born to a father in the film business in Hollywood, where there's no theater to speak of, he has been stage-struck since childhood. "I loved movies but wanted that immediate thing."

After graduating from Bard College he took an M.F.A. at Yale Drama School and lived in Paris for 13 years, working for CBS radio and television.

Back in New York, he started writing plays just as time was running out on naturalism.

"It had served a purpose analogous to the major social revolutions of the day, addressing causes like the water supply and syphilis, and destroying three of the six great Aristotelian dramatic conventions in the process."

Naturalism incorporated character, theme, and plot, while Aristotle talked also about music, dance, and spectacle.

Living with the Theater of the Absurd in France, Mr. Stone had applauded its restoration of the "unnatural" to theater: its use of soliloquy, asides, and poetry. And he eagerly embraced the music, dance, and spectacle of the American musical comedy.

"I always thought the reason 'Godot' was a hit everywhere except in New York was because we were the only place in the world that had musicals," he said. A note of pride was in his voice. His eye was on the oriole.