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

of a Romeo and Juliet musical with lots of dance and its working out, Laurents wrote his most successful play, The Time of the Cuckoo (1952).

In 1944 Robbins collaborated with Bernstein on both the ballet Fancy Free (as featured dancer and choreographer) and its inspired Broadway offspring later that same year, On the Town. Beginning with High Button Shoes in 1947 (lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jule Styne), Robbins choreographed a quartet of musical comedies, mostly hits: Hugh Martin’s Look Ma, I’m Dancin’ (1948), Berlin’s Miss Liberty (1949) and Call Me Madam (1950), and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951), with its innovative narrated ballet-pantomime “Small House of Uncle Thomas.” As co-director with Abbott, Robbins helped to create Adler and Ross’s The Pajama Game (1954); as director-choreographer he brought to life two shows with lyrics by Comden and Green and music by Styne, Peter Pan (1954) and Bells Are Ringing (1956), the latter one year before West Side Story.

Bernstein, like Gershwin, came to the piano at a relatively late age, in Bernstein’s case, ten. He followed his undergraduate years as music major at Harvard (class of 1939) with studies in orchestration, piano, and conducting at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In 1941 he began his private studies with Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky. While an assistant to Artur Rodzinski (then conductor of the New York Philharmonic), Bernstein gained instant (and permanent) recognition when he filled in for ailing guest conductor Bruno Walter and conducted the orchestra on a national broadcast in November 1943.

Within the next three months Bernstein’s first “serious” classical works were performed in New York: the song cycle I Hate Music, the “Jeremiah” Symphony, the ballet Fancy Free, and, by the end of 1944, when the composer was twenty-six, his first Broadway hit, On the Town. Between On the Town and West Side Story the phenomenally eclectic composer, conductor, pianist, and educator composed three major theater works of enduring interest: Trouble in Tahiti (1952; with his own libretto and lyrics), Wonderful Town (1953; book by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov and lyrics by Comden and Green), and Candide (1956; book by Lillian Hellman, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Hellman, and Bernstein).

Several published personal remembrances help sort out the complicated genesis of West Side Story. The first recollection was recorded in 1949 in “Excerpts from a West Side Story Log,” the year Robbins introduced his concept to two of his future collaborators, Laurents and Bernstein. Bernstein’s log, which originally appeared in the West Side Story Playbill, identifies major events and ideological turning points between Robbins’s initial idea and the opening night tryout in August 1957.8 Nearly thirty years later the foursome (Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim) met in 1985 as a panel to discuss their creation before an audience of the Dramatists Guild.9 Valuable information on the genesis of West Side Story can also be found in excerpts from published interviews with those involved in the original production, a number of which appear in Craig Zadan’s Sondheim & Co.10 Other important sources on the compositional process are contained in Bernstein’s letters to his wife, Felicia, who was visiting her family in Santiago, Chile, during the rehearsals and Washington tryouts; Sondheim’s “Anecdote” published in the song book Bernstein on Broadway; and a Bernstein interview with theater critic Mel Gussow published shortly after the composer’s death in 1990.11

Despite some minor discrepancies in their 1985 recollection of West Side Story’s genesis, the four collaborators shed a great deal of light on the evolution of their masterpiece.12 Moreover, their memory of compositional changes is almost invariably vindicated by the eight libretto drafts and various lyric sheets housed among the Sondheim papers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The first of the libretto drafts is dated January 1956, two months after Sondheim joined the entourage, and the last was completed on July 19, 1957, approximately midway through the unprecedentedly long eight-week rehearsal schedule (twice the usual length).13 Earlier versions of Bernstein’s holograph piano-vocal scores are also available both in Wisconsin and in the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

From Bernstein’s log we learn that Robbins’s original “noble idea” in January 1949 was “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebration.”14 Over the next four months Laurents drafted four scenes, and the original trio of collaborators discussed the direction of what was then known as East Side Story. Bernstein recorded that their goal was to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musicalcomedy terms … never falling into the ‘operatic’ trap,” a show that would not “depend on stars” but must “live or die by the success of its collaborations.”

The next log entries appear six years later when Robbins-Laurents-Bernstein returned to their dormant idea. On June 7, 1955, Bernstein reported that the group remained excited and hypothesized that “maybe I can plan to give this year to Romeo—if Candide gets in on time.” By August 25 the trio had “abandoned the whole Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh,” replacing Jews and Catholics with rival gangs, the newly arrived Puerto Ricans (the future Sharks) and the “self-styled ‘Americans’” (the Jets). East Side Story had metamorphosed into West Side Story.

Since Robbins’s balletic conception entailed an unusually extensive musical score, Bernstein, who until then thought he could handle the lyrics himself, decided that he needed a lyricist after all. On November 14 he wrote that they had found “a young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim,” and described him as “ideal for this project.”15 In the 1985 symposium Sondheim added that when he was signed on as “co-lyricist” (in an unspecified month in 1955) Laurents “had a three-page outline.”16

In the sole entry of 1956 (March 17) Bernstein announced that Romeo would be “postponed for a year” to make way for Candide.17 Not unlike Candide’s Professor Pangloss, Bernstein tried to put the best possible face on this delay. He then described the “chief problem” of the new “problematical work”: “To