Nicholas Hytner cut his teeth on opera and the classics and then
directed Miss Saigon, which gave him a rare opportunity to work with
writers who aren’t dead. At the time, he described to me arriving
for work one morning and explaining that overnight he’d had some
wonderful directorial notion that would involve the authors amending
only one small section. The composer, Claude-Michel Schonberg, “gave
me a polite look which I broadly interpreted as ‘Fuck off and do
what we wrote.’ ” He did.

Happy the author who can say, “Fuck off and do what we wrote.” The
very same season—1989—Robert Wright, Chet Forrest, and Luther Davis,
writers of Kismet, were working on Grand Hotel. They’d already
been forced to sign substandard contracts, paying them well below
the Dramatists’ Guild minimum and for which they could have been
kicked out of the Guild. This is becoming standard practice here,
and its impact is disastrous: indeed, one reason that we get so many
crummy revivals like How to Succeed in Business Without Really
Trying is because the estates of deceased authors are usually more
compliant when it comes to accepting reduced royalty rates. And the
more producers get used to accepting those substandard rates as the
norm and the smaller the proportion of the overall budget you have to
allocate to the writing, the further the author’s status declines in
relation to the director.

As things turned out, for Wright, Forrest,
and Davis it was