Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

star quality of Katharine Hepburn in Coco (1970) could help this show with music by André Previn to run more than a year. A potentially promising collaboration with the brilliant Leonard Bernstein in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) closed within a week. Other short-lived post-Camelot musicals included Lolita, My Love (1972), Carmelina (1979), and Dance a Little Closer (1983) with music composed by John Barry, Lane, and Charles Strouse, respectively. At the time of his death in 1986, the indefatigable librettist-lyricist had drafted much of a libretto and several lyrics for yet another musical, this time based on the classic 1936 film comedy, My Man Godfrey.63

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WEST SIDE STORY

The Very Model of a Major Musical

West Side Story, a collaboration of four extraordinary individuals—Jerome Robbins (choreographer and director), Arthur Laurents (librettist), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Stephen Sondheim (lyricist)—premiered on Broadway on September 26, 1957, and ran for 734 performances.1 After a national tour that lasted a year, it returned to Broadway for an additional 249 performances. A bona fide hit but not a megahit like Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady, West Side Story eventually logged in as the twelfth longest running show of the 1950s (see “Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920s–2000s” in the online website).2

In its initial run West Side Story received mostly favorable and respectful notices from our by-now familiar cast of critics. John McClain was the only critic who assessed the show as “the most exciting thing that has come to town since ‘My Fair Lady.’”3 Walter Kerr focused his attentions on the dancing, “the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been exposed to in a dozen seasons,” to the near exclusion of everything else, and concluded his review with a tribute to Robbins: “This is the show that could have danced all night, and nearly did. But the dancing is it. Don’t look for laughter or—for that matter—tears.”4 Brooks Atkinson praised the blend and unity of the work and production and the authors for “pooling imagination and virtuosity” to create “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”5 Robert Coleman and John McClain predicted that the show would be a hit, and, in what was perhaps the most laudatory critical response, John Chapman opened his review in the Daily News by exclaiming that “the American theatre took a venturesome forward step” to present “a bold new kind of musical theatre.”6 Nevertheless, it was not until 1961, with the release of the Academy Award–winning film starring the glamorous box-office draw Natalie Wood (her singing dubbed by the ubiquitous Marni Nixon), that West Side Story finally became a certified blockbuster, with a soundtrack that Stephen Banfield reports “remains the longest ever number 1 on Billboard’s album charts.”7

In the years since the film, West Side Story has appeared in revivals both at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater in 1968 (89 performances), on Broadway in 1980 (333 performances) and 2009, and in innumerable productions outside of New York. West Side Story has also acquired serious respect and attention from both theater and music historians and critics. While it shares with some of the other musicals in this survey a complex score rich in organicism and motivic and other musical techniques associated with the nineteenth-century European operatic ideal, as well as some songs that eventually became standards, it surpasses its European and Broadway predecessors in its reliance on dance and movement to depict dramatic action. The creators of West Side Story also managed to take a canonic and extremely well-loved Shakespeare play and adapt it for 1950s audiences while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. Most significantly, the adaptation both provides dramatically credible and audible musical equivalents of Shakespeare’s literary techniques and captures his central themes.

Musicals prior to West Side Story featured dance to advance the plot (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes); to convey deeper psychological truths in dreams, in fantasies, or through mime (Oklahoma!, and Carousel); or to establish an ambiance at the beginning of the show (Guys and Dolls). Thanks to the choreographic vision of Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), the ability of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) to conceive extended dance music, and the willingness of Arthur Laurents (b. 1918) to let dance and music speak for a thousand words (his libretto is widely considered to be the shortest of any full-length Broadway show), West Side Story went beyond these early landmarks in expressing essential dramatic action through the medium of dance. At least four major moments in act I are told exclusively or nearly exclusively in dance (Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, the “Cool” Fugue, and The Rumble); act II features a dream ballet based on “Somewhere” and a violent Taunting ballet. Dances even figure prominently in most of the songs, especially “America.”

West Side Story is also notable for increasing the tragic dimensions of a musical Jud Frye falls on his knife and dies in a fight with Curley in Oklahoma! Billy Bigelow takes his own life in act II in Carousel. Cable is killed on his military mission near the end of South Pacific, and the King dies at the end of The King and I. In West Side Story two principal characters, Riff and Bernardo, the respective leaders of the Jets and Sharks, are killed in a knife battle before the end of act I. Tony is shot and killed by Chino near the end of act II. In adapting what is arguably the most famous love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story presented a level of youthful violence, hatred, and death unprecedented in a Broadway musical.

The Making of a Masterpiece

Prior to its 1957 premiere, only Sondheim (b. 1930) among the principal creators of West Side Story had yet to distinguish himself on Broadway (Sondheim’s career will be surveyed in chapter 15). More than a decade earlier librettist Laurents had written the critically lauded Home of the Brave (1945). Between Robbins’s 1949 initial conception