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

of which was to provide a respite from the surrounding tragedy, the motive behind “Something’s Coming” was to introduce a main character and to link this character to the ensuing drama.44 This is accomplished musically by allowing Tony to resolve a dissonant and dramatically symbolic interval (the interval of hate, a tritone) at the beginning and conclusion of his song.

From Verona to the Upper West Side

In order to understand the Romantic qualities inherent in West Side Story it may be helpful to recall that the nineteenth century, an age obsessed by the theme of idealized youthful passionate love that realizes its apotheosis only with premature death, was irresistibly drawn to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.45 Not only did this play—in various degrees of fidelity to Shakespeare—occupy the European stage throughout most of the nineteenth century, numerous musical settings also made their debut. Just as revisions of Shakespeare’s play from the late-seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries frequently included a happy ending, most of the musical adaptations strayed conspicuously from the original. Gounod’s still-popular Roméo et Juliette (1867), for example, introduces a major female role (Stephano) that has no Shakespearean counterpart.46

Although these operatic, orchestral, and balletic versions, unlike West Side Story, retain the names of the major characters and basic plot machinations, they more often than not distort Shakespeare’s tragic intention with the insertion of either a happy ending (like many play performances) or an ending that enables the principals to sing (or dance) an impassioned love duet before their demise. Consider Prokofiev’s ballet (1935–36), one of the most popular of the twentieth century and most likely an inspiration for Robbins. After its premiere, Soviet Shakespearean scholars influenced censors to prohibit Prokofiev and his collaborators from allowing Romeo an extra minute in order to take advantage of his pyrrhic opportunity to witness Juliet alive. Prokofiev defended his original scenario: “The reasons that led us to such a barbarism were purely choreographic. Living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”47

Modern-day nonmusical versions of Shakespeare’s play are similarly prone to alterations that can distort the meaning and tone of the Bard (or eliminate substantial portions of text), presumably for the sake of broader public palatability. The well-known 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet by director Franco Zeffirelli, probably the most popular film adaptation of Shakespeare ever made, serves as an instructive paradigm for the triumph of accessibility over authenticity introduced in chapter 1 (even though the eponymous principals die). One may acknowledge the need to make a Shakespeare movie cinematic and argue on behalf of the many artistic merits of Zeffirelli’s considerable textual excisions, but the conclusion is nonetheless inescapable that Zeffirelli has succeeded more brilliantly in bringing himself rather than Shakespeare to a mass audience.48

Although it contains extensive transformational liberties, the tragic dramatic vision of West Side Story arguably corresponds more closely to Shakespeare than Zeffirelli’s version or nineteenth-century musical adaptations that wear the garb of the Montagues and the Capulets. Robbins spoke of Laurents’s achievement in following the “story as outlined in the Shakespeare play without the audience or critics realizing it,” but most theatergoers familiar with the characters in Shakespeare’s tale of “fair Verona” can easily recognize their West Side reincarnations.49

While preserving the central theme of youthful passionate love’s Pyrrhic victory over passionate youthful hate and many of the central plot elements from the Shakespearean source, adapted to suit New York gang culture of the 1950s, the collaborators took four major transformational liberties:

1. Increased motivation for the conflict between the gangs

2. Decreased importance of adults

3. Substitution of free will for fate in the demise of Tony

4. Decision to keep Maria alive

Most obviously, the warring gangs, the Jets and Sharks, parallel the warring families, the Montagues and Capulets.50 Like Romeo at the outset of Shakespeare’s play, Tony, a Jet, has disassociated himself from the violent members of his clan. His friend, Riff, shares the fate and much of the mercurial character of Romeo’s friend, Mercutio. Maria appears as an older and therefore more credible Juliet for modern audiences. Bernardo’s death has a more direct emotional impact because he is Maria’s brother rather than a literal counterpart to Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. By 1957, New York City teenagers were less likely to share intimacies with an aging nurse. Consequently, Anita, a woman only a few years older than Maria, serves as a more credible counterpart to Shakespeare’s elderly crone, a confidante to Maria, and of course an agile dancing partner for her lover, Bernardo. Chino, Maria’s unexciting but eventually excitable fiancé and Bernardo’s choice for his sister, corresponds closely to Juliet’s parentally selected suitor, the County Paris.

All these changes reflect societal changes that transpired between the 1590s and the 1950s. For similar reasons, adult authority has been greatly reduced in the adaptation. Juliet’s parents, who play a prominent role throughout the Shakespeare play (and in Laurents’s early libretto drafts), are reduced to offstage voices in the musical; Tony’s parents are represented metaphorically as dummies in the bridal shop where Tony and Maria marry themselves without benefit of clergy. Doc, a druggist who parallels the well-meaning but ineffectual Friar Laurence, serves far less as a catalyst for the plot than as an adult representative who can at least partially sympathize with troubled youth; Officer Krupke, although more abrasive than his counterpart, Prince Escalus, possesses less authority and earns even less respect.51

Other departures from Shakespeare’s play were similarly motivated for the resulting accessibility. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, no Capulet or Montague can recall a specific cause for their senseless enmity.52West Side Story audiences learn that the Americans (the Jets) fear that the Puerto Ricans (the Sharks) are usurping jobs and territory. In contrast to the long-forgotten causes, the Jets and the Sharks know they are fighting for control over a few city blocks on the West side.

Perhaps the most dramatic departure from Shakespeare also developed because the collaborators of West Side Story realized they needed a “believable substitute for the philter.” Laurents speaks of his imaginative solution to this