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

problem with justifiable pride: “The thing I’m proudest of in telling the story is why she [Anita] can’t get the message through: because of prejudice. I think it’s better than the original story.”53

Thus, whenever dramatically possible, the youthful characters in West Side Story make their own mistakes and generate their own fate. Tony’s form of suicide, his vociferous public invitation for Chino to shoot him, contrasts with Romeo’s quiet decision to take the poison he has purchased for this purpose. In Shakespeare, a tragic coincidence (an outbreak of plague) prevented the news of Juliet’s magic sleep from reaching Romeo; the sleep itself was induced by Friar Laurence’s herbal potions, a well-meaning, albeit imprudent, adult action. A much-provoked Anita sets the stage for Tony’s death with her deliberate lie to the Jets that Maria is dead. By letting Maria live, the creators of West Side Story allow her to assume the authority previously delegated to the patriarchal figures of the Capulet and Montague families and to inspire reconciliation between the Sharks and Jets, who then carry Tony’s body off the stage at the final curtain. Significantly, Maria leads the play’s dramatic catharsis in front of adults as well as her peers.

Only the first two of Laurents’s libretto drafts (January and Spring 1956) follow Shakespeare on this crucial dramaturgical point. Maria, thinking Tony dead, returns to the bridal shop and “sings passionately of her not wanting to live in a world without Tonio [at this point Tony was Italian-American], a world that has taken him from her.” The scene description continues: “At the peak of this, she grabs up a pair of dressmaking shears and—with her back to us—plunges them into her stomach.” Moments later Tony (Tonio) arrives and “cradling her in his arms, he starts to sing with her a reprise of their song from the marriage scene.” The orchestra completes their song and after kissing her, Tony opens the door of the shop and cries out, “Come and take me! Come and take me too!”54

By the third draft (March 15, 1956), which also concludes at the bridal shop, Maria “tries to tear the wedding veil with her hands, cannot, picks up sewing shears and is about to cut the veil when a new thought [presumably suicide] enters her mind.”55 In this draft, as in the five others over the next sixteen months, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

Robbins credits Rodgers for realizing how to “solve a problem like Maria” (two years before The Sound of Music’s Maria Von Trapp) and for keeping Maria alive: “I remember Richard Rodgers’s contribution. We had a death scene for Maria—she was going to commit suicide or something, as in Shakespeare. He said, ‘She’s dead already, after this all happens to her.’”56 All sources agree that Bernstein’s collaborators wanted to convert Laurents’s prose speech into music for Maria, just as Bernstein and Sondheim had raided the libretto for “Something’s Coming” and “A Boy Like That.” In the 1985 panel discussion Bernstein recalled that he discarded four or five attempts to create an aria for Maria from Laurents’s dummy lyric that would become Maria’s speech: “It’s not that I didn’t try.” In an interview with Humphrey Burton, Bernstein offered a more detailed account:

“It cries out for music,” Bernstein said himself. “I tried to set it very bitterly, understated, swift. I tried giving all the material to the orchestra and having her sing an obbligato throughout. I tried a version that sounds just like a Puccini aria, which we really did not need. I never got past six bars with it. I never had an experience like that. Everything sounded wrong.” So Maria’s words, which Laurents had written merely as a guide to lyricist and composer, became the dramatic text. “I made,” Bernstein confessed, “a difficult, painful but surgically clean decision not to set it at all.”57

Despite these liberties, for the most part the collaborators of West Side Story preserve the spirit of the original as well as what is perhaps Shakespeare’s central theme: the triumph of youthful passionate love over youthful passionate hate, even in death. They also incorporate Shakespeare’s literary device of foreshadowing, for similar dramatic and musical purposes, to inform audiences of the inevitable, albeit mostly self-made, destiny facing the young lovers. Tony’s somewhat more optimistic premonition in “Something’s Coming” early in the musical can be seen, for example, as a parallel to Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech: “My mind misgives / Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels and expire the term / Of a despised life, closed in my breast, / By some vile forfeit of untimely death” (act 1, scene 4, lines 112–17).

Romeo’s bittersweet, sorrowful premonitions in the first eleven lines of act V (“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead”) clearly correspond to the Romantic message most clearly expressed in “Somewhere,” introduced by an anonymous offstage “Girl” (opera stars Reri Grist on Broadway and Marilyn Horne on Bernstein’s 1985 recording, handpicked by the composer) during the dream ballet sequence in act II.58 By the end of Bernstein’s musical counterpart to Shakespeare in the dream sequence, audiences know that the place and time for Tony and Maria will not be a flat on the Upper West Side. Rather, as in the tale of Tristan and Isolde, their passionate love will be fulfilled only after death. With great ingenuity Bernstein manages to discover a convincing musical equivalent to Shakespeare’s foreshadowing of death, a musical transformation from youthful hate to youthful love.

A “Tragic Story in Musical-Comedy Terms”

As early as 1949, Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins were consciously striving to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms” and to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap.’” At the same time they—mainly Bernstein as the composer—borrowed freely from the European operatic and symphonic traditions.59 The degree to which Broadway musicals could and should aspire to the