Jerry Zaks is slumped on a banquette in a rear lounge of the Longacre Theatre, two weeks before the Dec. 1 opening curtain for the new musical "A Bronx Tale." It's the tail end of previews, and there are dozens of major decisions the director must make, hundreds of cues and bridges to be refined, thousands of seconds to be tamed.
"This is the most intense moment just before we freeze the show," sighs the 70-year-old Paterson native, his shock of white hair standing on end as he scrolls up and down through his production notes on an iPad. "Everyone realizes this is the last chance to implement changes. At the same time, we've got to be careful not to screw up what we've got."
Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks at a rehearsal for "A Bronx Tale: The Musical," which opened Dec. 1 at the Longacre Theatre.
Audiences who saw the show's world premiere at the Paper Mill Playhouse in February -- like this production, co-directed by Zaks and Robert DeNiro -- won't be able to put their finger on the revisions. It's a matter of microscopic edits to musical bridges and emotional beats, the choreography more tailored to each performer, the transitions more graceful, the humor more fine-tuned. "There's nothing worse," Zaks says, "than someone trying to be funny and not succeeding at being funny."
"He's just really good at bringing the heart out of the comedy," says star Nick Cordero, who originated the role of the gangster Sonny at the Paper Mill and who is reprising it on Broadway. "There are beats in the dialogue that lead to the laughs. It's almost scientific in a way, the tempo and the flow of the music to get the audience to do what you want them to do. He knows that language better than most."
Zaks is, in fact, one of the most sought-after stage directors in the country. He's a former Broadway actor -- he met Jill Rose, his wife and the mother of his two children, on the original national tour of "Grease" -- and won his first Tony for directing at age 39. Now he has three more on his shelves.
He has helmed some of the Great White Way's most successful plays, revivals and revues, from John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation" (1990) to Neil Simon's "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" (1993) to the Nathan Lane-starring revival of "Guys and Dolls" (1992) that many consider the best production of that musical ever. And as if directing one of the season's highest-profile new musicals isn't enough, Zaks is also helming the season's most anticipated revival: "Hello, Dolly!" starring Bette Midler and set to open in April.
"I love this work," Zaks enthuses. "I. Just. Love. It. I feel so grateful and so fortunate to still be doing it at 70."
The show that changed his life
Doctor, lawyer, engineer. Those were the options for a nice Jewish boy from Paterson, particularly for one born to Holocaust survivors in the ruins of post-war Germany. Doctor, lawyer, engineer. In that order.
"My parents brought me up to believe I should be ..." -- here Zaks snaps into a thick Yiddish accent -- "I need a pruy-freshun."
After escaping transport to a forced labor camp, his father Sy made it through the war by posing as a Christian Pole, while his mother Lily endured Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps and a death march into Germany in the winter of 1945. The couple reunited after the war and welcomed Zaks in Stuttgart, Germany in 1946. Two years later, the family moved to the United States, eventually settling in Paterson and opening a kosher butcher shop.
Zaks and his younger brother Allen attended Eastside High School, where Zaks -- chubby, short, bespectacled -- was named most popular. But that was just a front. "I was scared of everything and everyone," he says. "That's the way I was brought up. Something terrible could happen at every moment, and my coping mechanism was to ingratiate myself with as many people as possible."
After graduating from Eastside High School in 1963, he entered Dartmouth College as premed. Then he switched to prelaw. And then he stumbled into a Dartmouth Players' performance of the giddy 1953 musical "Wonderful Town."
"It was over," Zaks recalls. "I saw that musical on Winter Carnival Week in sophomore year, and everything changed."
Zaks finagled a part in a later staging of the show at Dartmouth, earned his MFA from Smith College, learned how to dance (he locked himself in the studio, drew the shades, and hoofed it to one Broadway soundtrack after another), dropped 40 pounds (his parents worried that his health was failing), and landed in New York in 1969, where he spent a decade as a working actor in a string of Broadway and Off-Broadway roles.
He was successful enough that even his skeptical parents came around to his career in show business -- though personal reassurances from the great Yiddish theater veteran Zero Mostel, with whom Zaks was co-starring in a touring company of "Fiddler on the Roof," helped seal the deal.
In the late 1970s, almost as a lark, he began directing, finding early success with Christopher Durang's "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You," which was developed at the Off-Off-Broadway Ensemble Studio Theatre and then ran for nearly three years Off-Broadway.
"He's always had a great sense of humor and a great love of life," says William Carden, the artistic director of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, "and that came through as an actor, and it's also in his work as a director."
As it happens, Zaks' methodical approach to his chosen pruy-feshun is not unlike engineering. The director is is known for his masterfully precise, specific and finely calibrated approach to the material. "When he works with a playwright," Carden says, "he works through the play, line by line because he wants to make it the best it can be."
"The notes he gave me in the script were just unbelievably good and detailed," recalls Neil Cuthbert, who wrote "The Soft Touch," the first play Zaks directed. "Jerry is a theater person. He just knows what it means to put actors up on stage and to create a story and keep it going for two hours, knowing when you need a crescendo, when you need this kind of scene, that kind of scene."
A tricky 'Tale'
This is the second time Zaks has tangled with "A Bronx Tale," the coming-of-age story about a young man caught between the conflicting moral codes of his bus driver father and his gangster mentor. It started life as a one-man show by Chazz Palminteri, who based it on his own experiences growing up in a parochial Italian-American enclave in the 1960s, and Zaks directed the Broadway version in 2007. It also became a beloved movie starring Palminteri as the fearsome mafioso Sonny and DeNiro (who also directed) as Lorenzo, the humble, by-the-books father to the young Calogero.
Palminteri and DeNiro made a few attempts at developing the material into a musical, but the project stalled until the songwriting collaborators Alan Menken and Glenn Slater (Broadway's "Sister Act," which Zaks directed) came on board. Tonally, "A Bronx Tale" is a tricky proposition, the enveloping doo-wop melodies and light-hearted take on mafia stereotypes transitioning in the second act into more visceral themes of loyalty, racism and the tragedy of wasted talent.
"Look, I believe that the sound of laughter is the sound of an audience falling in love with the characters," Zaks says. "They need to fall in love with them, so that when serious things happen, the audience cares ... I want them to laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, and just then they think they're going to laugh again they cry. Because they can."
Also tricky: Co-directing with DeNiro, who was initially piqued that he hadn't been asked to direct the musical but who has since credited Zaks with doing much of the heavy lifting on the show.
When asked if he had ever co-directed before, Zaks quickly says, "Never."
Would he do it again?
"No," he says, even more quickly.
That's not shade on DeNiro -- "Bob understands, like all collaborations, that the best idea wins" -- but speaks more to Zaks' admitted tendencies to control.
The musical made its world premiere in February at the Paper Mill, and while the nonprofit theater does not release financials about individual shows, a spokesman says it performed better than any production debuting in the traditionally slow late winter time frame than any other in the last 20 years. Tickets sales for the Broadway production have been strong, with near-sold out shows in previews, and $717,860 grosses for the week ending Nov. 27, 87 percent of its gross potential, according to the Broadway League.
Zaks' next project has even higher stakes: the "Hello, Dolly!" revival starring Midler in her first non-concert Broadway musical production since 1967, when she was part of the original "Fiddler on the Roof." The spring revival is the hottest ticket in town -- it brought in more than $9 million on its first day of ticket sales, setting a new Broadway record.
It's a show Zaks saw three times standing in the back of the St. James Theater during its original run in the 1960s, and whose cast album he wore out in that dance studio decades ago.
"I fell in love with directing because I loved the opportunity to orchestrate the life between two actors in a scene," Zaks says. "After having to prove I was an actor for 10 years, over and over again, I was suddenly directing. It happened at the Ensemble Studio Theater when I discovered I was experiencing as much joy watching what I had done than actually doing it myself."
As much joy, or more?
He sighs again. "That's hard to say. I love being an actor. There's no way to describe how satisfying it is to have a light come up on you at the beginning of a Broadway show, singing 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' in a Jewish accent in 'Tintypes,' or to be a member of the original cast of 'Grease!' and being part of something that was bringing audiences to their feet.
"But I didn't have any control over the bigger picture, and being a director is really good for a control freak who likes to tell people what to do." He laughs. "That's honest."
Vicki Hyman may be reached at vhyman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickihy or like her on Facebook. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook, and check out Remote Possibilities, the TV podcast from Vicki Hyman and co-host Erin Medley on iTunes, Stitcher or Spreaker, or listen below or here.