The Biggest Time

About the author:
Two-time Tony Award-winning director Des McAnuff is no stranger to helming some of the biggest shows on Broadway with shows like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Big River, The Who's Tommy and the recent Dracula, The Musical not to mention his film work: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Cousin Bette. But perhaps none of his projects has intrigued audiences like his latest collaboration with Hollywood funnyman Billy Crystal on one of this season's biggest hits, 700 Sundays . The solo play was workshopped at the La Jolla Playhouse, where McAnuff served as artistic director from 1983 to 1994 and then returned to the position in 2001, and splashed onto the Great White Way in December with positive reviews and long lines at the box office. Here, McAnuff tells how this special project came about and the advantages of working in theater with non-theater people.

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I've spent a considerable amount of time working in the theater with people who have spent most of their time outside of it. Not that I don't love stage actors and playwrights and so on, for they are surely my closest kin. But selfishly, I have always been drawn to artists who bring a new blast of energy to the stage with them, who perhaps have their own kind of reverence for it and who can take us places we may never have been. And it's an eclectic assortment. I've had the privilege of creating projects with rock and rollers Pete Townshend of The Who, Ray Davies of The Kinks, the country songwriter Roger Miller, jazz greats The Adderly Brothers, poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje; once even based a play on a book by West German radical Michael "Bommi" Bauman in the hallowed halls of the Juilliard school. Recently, I've been working on a musical about the rough and tumble true-life story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and getting in some time with legendary pop songwriters Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe. All of these experiences, I readily confess, have brought me immense satisfaction, but 700 Sundays holds its own unique place in my heart.

It's important to point out that Billy Crystal trained as a stage actor and, while before 700 Sundays he had been away from the histrionic boards for many years, the theater is definitely in his blood. A rarefied detail of his biography has Billy appearing in a production at La Mama of the seldom performed 16th century revenge tragedy Arden of Faversham when he was fresh out of drama school. But from the first time we met, there was a passion emanating from Billy for developing this solo piece that I associate more with a jazz musician than with a traditional theater artist. And jazz it's turned out to be. For 700 Sundays is not only about Billy's family's Commodore jazz label, it's a jam session on a central theme, a piece of hot jazz in itself. It's paradoxical. It has form, but it's constantly shifting and developing--it's improvisational, yet it has structure. It is dangerous because it abandons itself to the moment, but it has the dependability of a gripping story. 700 Sundays is never the same. I've seen it literally dozens of times during its development period in front of an audience at La Jolla Playhouse and on Broadway, hundreds of times in private, and it never takes the exact same path twice.

700 Sundays was born out of a series of conversations. At first, Billy and I were alone. Later, we were joined by our collaborator Alan Zweibel. Most of these sessions were spent with Billy simply telling stories. Gradually the stories started taking the shape of one long personal story, with episodes and scenes and characters from Billy's past. Finally, it became a play; not a play with a frozen text but a breathing, ever-changing piece. It was like directing mercury. I like to think that the same qualities that captivated us in the quiet of the rehearsal room as we pieced Billy's play together are still alive at the Broadhurst for every audience member for each performance. The audience feels like they're in the living room, or around the campfire, with a great storyteller who's telling a tale that he absolutely has to get across. At its most powerful, it's a kind of timeless experience, and in many ways, it transcends acting.

In Bob Dylan's Chronicles, he reveres the theatre as a place where "the action takes place in the eternal now." I once heard Dylan describe Broadway to Roger Miller during a Big River rehearsal, which he was visiting as "the biggest time." I thought he was kidding.

Anyway, the 700 Sundays story goes on, remains alive. I've watched it go on through the Iraqi war, marriages for gays, the World Series, the presidential election, and it's been very stimulating to feel the immediacy of people's reactions when Billy references a moment that everyone shared in on the evening news--Colin Powell's resignation, steroids, The Passion of the Christ. There are apparently, happily, still a lot of people who go to the theater and expect to think. Some claim they only want to be amused. But I think most of us show up hoping to feel something, something genuine that chills us, heats us up, or opens a vein. The most satisfying thing for me with 700 Sundays is to see men in the middle of their lives, guys who haven't cried since grade school, wiping away the tears. They're not just thinking of their own times, they're thinking of their own lives and their own families and they are truly living in the eternal now. It's the only place to be.