“This is where it all happens,” says Susan Stroman, giving a brief virtual tour to Broadway Direct of her nearly all-white office that she bought right after 9/11. There are mirrors, a piano, and a wooden dance floor, currently covered with a rug. It’s hard not to think of the choreography that was conceived on that floor, from Oklahoma! to Bullets Over Broadway, The Scottsboro Boys, and, more recently, New York, New York. Her apartment is upstairs. “It’s a bit of a mess because it’s getting ready for opening night,” she notes.
At the time of this interview, opening night was a week away. It’s the new Broadway play, Left on Tenth, starring Julianna Margulies (The Good Wife) and Peter Gallagher (The O.C.), playing at the James Earl Jones Theatre. Stroman, or Stro, as most of the theater community calls her, is directing. It’s a unique opportunity for the five-time Tony Award winner, traditionally known for being at the helm of grand-scale musical-comedy juggernauts, like Crazy for You, Young Frankenstein, and the record-breaking The Producers.
“We call it a ‘rom-traum,’” Stroman calls Left on Tenth’s genre. “It’s a romance, but it has trauma.”
The play, with a cast of four, is based on screenwriter Delia Ephron’s memoir about finding love again after losing her husband and beating leukemia after doctors give her about four months to live. Ephron, known for writing romantic comedies, like the classic You’ve Got Mail, was living in anything but a romantic comedy. Margulies plays Delia and Gallagher plays her new love interest and future second husband, Peter.
Stroman was offered the directing job after a meeting with producer Daryl Roth and Ephron, who had already started reworking her pages into a script. Stroman and Ephron hit it off, finding similarities in their lives. Ephron’s sister, famed screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, died of leukemia, the same disease Stroman’s husband of three years, director Mike Ockrent, died from in 1999. “There are a lot of confluences with us. We even had the same gynecologist, if you can believe it!” she says with a chuckle.
One gut-wrenching scene in the one-act play shows time passing as Margulies’s Delia spends more than 100 days in the hospital for cancer treatment. Stroman admits it was a difficult scene to demonstrate how brutal the treatment was. “Even now, though I’ve watched the play a million times, just when you hear that word leukemia, it takes me right back,” she admits. She says she knew so much about it, she was able to apply it to her direction.
Casting suggested Margulies and Gallagher (who Stroman briefly worked with on the dance film Center Stage in 2000) to star, and Stroman acknowledges they’re a dream to work with. “They’re respectful of everyone in the room and they’re not afraid to try things,” she says. “Those are the people I want to work with. I want to work with people who are fearless, and the two of them are fearless.”
So fearless that Margulies learned to tap dance for the role. Stroman is a brilliant tap choreographer and threw in some soft shoe amid the dialogue. The real-life Delia and her late husband, Jerry, took tap lessons as a couple, so naturally that was weaved into the play. A photograph used on set is of the real Delia and Jerry dancing. “She was very devoted to getting it right,” Stroman says of Margulies’s dance rehearsals, which took about a week to get down.
Next spring, Stroman directs the highly anticipated Smash musical, based on the 2012 NBC TV series. The musical will star many Broadway favorites including Robyn Hurder and Brooks Ashmanskas, with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Rick Elice and Bob Martin are writing the book. For the first time in her storied career, dating back to Musical Chairs in 1980, Stroman is not choreographing the musical.
“I got a call from my agent and the first thing he said was, ‘Would you ever consider directing a musical and not choreographing?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ And then there was this silence. And then I said, ‘Well, why are you asking me this question?’ And he said, ‘Well, the producers want to do Smash, but they would love to ask Josh Bergasse to choreograph because he did the TV show,’” she recalls of the initial ask.
Stroman and Bergasse went to lunch and, like with Ephron, hit it off. They had never met even though Stroman admired his work on the series. “It just seemed like it was meant to be, that we would be together, and, of course, he would have had to choreograph it, since he did that TV show.”
She teases that the musical adaptation is like the TV show in that it is about a group of creatives putting on a musical about Marilyn Monroe, but it strays from the TV show in other ways. “This one is funny. Robyn Hurder is spectacular. Brooks Ashmanskas is just amazing. They were born to play these parts.”
And she has her “fingers crossed” for when a revival of her first big choreographing hit, Crazy for You, will transfer from London to Broadway. “They just have to find the right theatre and the right time, so hopefully it will come back.”
A second chance, perhaps, for the Gershwin musical to take another bow on Broadway. But as the theme of Left on Tenth suggests, there’s always hope for a second chance at love too.
“The thing is, I have my work, which I am devoted to and also obsessed with and absolutely love. I’m very fortunate to love what I do, so I find great joy in that. So I haven’t had that second chance,” she says. She then pauses when asked if perhaps she might rethink it.
“Sure, sure. Now that I’ve done this play.”