Ask Joel Grey what makes flowers so sexy and the Broadway legend raves: “They are voluptuous, juicy — and hot.”
“I went through three renditions until I found out what I wanted to say which had to do with color and sex,” says Grey who took all the photos with his iPhone. (It’s Grey’s fifth photo book.)
“I always knew it was about sexy flowers but I didn’t know how to get here. It was Georgia O’Keefe, who really wrote the book about that, and then Robert Mapplethorpe took it another step further. Whenever I bring home flowers, I’m obsessed and I can’t wait to get my camera on their face. My daughter said I’m the flower whisperer so that’s how the book got its name.”
Grey, who came out publicly as a gay man in a 2015 PEOPLE interview, says life at 87 is full of delightful surprises, notably his acclaimed production ofFiddler on the Roof,now playing at Stage 42 Theater. “It’s nothing I ever expected,” he says of life in his ninth decade. “Nobody ever expectedFiddler on the Roofin Yiddish, let alone me directing it.”
When Grey was first asked to directFiddler on the Roof, he thought it would be a three month run. But over a year later, the play, which has English subtitles, is still getting rave reviews, having just won the 2019 Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical Revival. As well as such fans asBette Midler, Bernadette Peters andJake Gyllenehaal.(“His mother is Jewish and insisted that he go,” says Grey of the young actor. “I love him so much, he’s a wonderful man.”)
Grey found new meaning in the beloved 1964 musical. “I went back to the original stories of why they were written,” he says. “About the milkman Teyve with five daughters who had a hard life, who had a sense of humor and a sense of God. And I thought about what’s going on in the word, with anti-Semitism and how it’s blossomed. It’s so scary everywhere just as it was in Anatevka [the fictional Russian village where the story takes place.] And I’ve found that people of all religions and backgrounds are connecting with it.”
“It’s the notion of refugees and our ancestors — being criticized for who you are,” he says. “Scapegoated. Refugees in Mexico, immigrants. The Trump focus on putting people in cages. It’s unbelievable.”
Grey stripped the play down to its essence, emphasizing the human story of a man who loves his family and his home and is chased out of his Russian village for being who he is, a Jew.
“We’re telling a story and it’s personal,” he says. “It’s about people, family, life.”
Over fives decades since he created a sensation in the musicalCabaret(for which he won a Tony and an Oscar) Grey finds hope in his art. “It’s about the work you do to make things better and to believe it can get better.”
(Grey’s photos can also be seen in a new companion exhibit at theStaley Wise Galleryin Manhattan.
source: people.com
