As a playwright, screenwriter, and director, Arthur Laurents has a unique place in the history of theater. In this moving, exhilarating, and provocative account, he presents readers with a front-row look at the making of two of the greatest musicals of the American stage, West Side Story and Gypsy . He writes in rich detail about his new bilingual production of West Side Story , along with his most recent production of Gypsy , how it began as an act of love, and how that love spread through the entire company and resulted in a Gypsy unlike any other. Laurents offers behind-the-scenes details about the musicals he directed, including I Can Get It for You Wholesale , its producer David Merrick (the “Abominable Showman”), and its (very young) stars, Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould. He dishes on Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle , which starred Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick, marking the debut for each in musical theater. And he recounts the challenges and surprises that came with the making of La Cage aux Folles , the first big Broadway musical that was gay and glad to be. Throughout, the book is enriched by Laurents's two loves – his love for the theater and his love for his partner of fifty-two years, Tom Hatcher, who shared and inspired every aspect of his life and his work. Mainly on Directing presents an unforgettable portrait of an artist working with other artists, a unique close-up look at today's American musical theater by a man who's been at its red-hot center for more than five decades.

Leona Samish, a single American woman of a "certain age" takes a long-planned European vacation from her job as a secretary and finds herself in a pensione in Venice, Italy. At a street market, she meets the handsome proprietor Renato DiRossi, entering into a casual flirtation which turns into an affair. Her complacency is jolted when she discovers he is married, has several children and is quite happy with the arrangement as is. Long-dormant frustrations and anger come to the surface as Leona faces the harsh reality of this new found infatuation and her own romantic notions of love. Shirley Booth and later Katharine Hepburn ("Summertime") played the leading role.

George Oppenheimer's brief summation: "It skirts about the fairy story of , but never settles for long in one mold. There is social comment on conformity and other failings of our modern civilization; there is satire of the mores of the rich and the not so rich; there is also pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned romance, a commodity too rarely hawked from our contemporary stage. The story deals largely with the conflict between summer visitors to the South Shore of Long Island and two of the permanent residents who become entangled in their lives. The visitors, rich, sophisticated, conventional (although they would bridle at the word), have come for the wedding of a lovely young girl and a highly eligible young man. There is, however, one deterrent to this eminently suitable alliance. The bride-to-be keeps falling asleep, especially on those occasions when her intended discusses their secure and predictable future. During one of these naps another young man, poor, unambitious and unshackled, kisses the girl and wakes her up with a vengeance. From then on, there is a battle between the kissing boy's mother, as free a soul as her son, and the two mothers of the prospective bride and groom. And in the middle is caught an attractive man, who is inextricably involved with both camps."

Drama / 2m 3f / Simple SetCome Back Come Back Wherever You Are a play by the widely-acclaimed Tony Award-winning theatre legend Arthur Laurents is an intimate emotional drama about a cabaret singer coping with the devastating death of her husband while trying to navigate her overbearing controlling mother-in-law and the aggressive advances of a sexually persistent handsome new suitor.Recently widowed Sara must comes to terms with her husband's death but is haunted by visions of him. Her fixation on his posthumous messages dampens her historically lukewarm relationship with Marion her therapist mother-in-law who is disturbingly pragmatic about the passing of her son. Sara's grief is also altered by Michelle her under-appreciated sister-in-law who is struggling both with her sexual identity and her relationship to her deceased brother. All is complicated by Dougal a picture framer who is struck by the earnest Sara.Come Back Come Back Wherever You Are is a gripping drama about grief and the ability of a family to cope with loss. But at its heart it is a play about love. It was part of the 2009 season at the George Street Playhouse."The prolific Laurents has given his play a crisp staging cramming the 90-minute wake with enough heartbreak and ardor to fill a grand opera." - Variety