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

ease more naturally into dance through a series of incremental movements from natural to stylized movements, much in the same way spoken dialogue moves into a talky song verse before emerging as a great tune. Here, as at the Ascot races, a stage convention—the autonomy of dance as an expressive art form—is valued over conventional filmic naturalism. Shot on location in New York City using the fastest color film stocks and most advanced compact sound and camera equipment of the day, artistically executed mostly by New Yorkers, West Side Story was both grittier and artier than almost any contemporary Hollywood film made in beautiful sunny California.

In his eloquent memoir Original Story By, Laurents, writing about the stage version of West Side Story, concludes without false modesty, that this show was richer in content and quality than innovation:

As for those inflated claims, if West Side Story influenced the musical theatre, it was in content, not form. Serious subjects—bigotry, race, rape, murder, death—were dealt with for the first time in a musical and as seriously as they would be in a play. That was innovative; style and technique were not. They had all been used piecemeal in one way or another before…. The music for the dances is extraordinarily exciting; that music and the basic story are the lasting strengths of the show. The difference between the music of West Side Story and other shows, however, is in quality, not in purpose…. What we really did stylistically with West Side Story was take every musical theatre technique as far as it could be taken. Scene, song and dance were integrated seamlessly; we did it all better than anyone ever had before. We were not the innovators we were called but what we did achieve was more than enough to be proud of.24

While the musical and dramatic techniques of West Side Story may have been nothing new, the thought, complexity, and seriousness with which they were employed were exceptional. It was in the domain of overall quality that the show was innovative—it raised the bar (and the barre) for what a musical could be, beyond even the ambitious standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s collaborations of the 1940s and early ’50s. Their new post–West Side Story shows such as Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music began to look a little artificial in comparison to Wise’s film version of West Side Story in 1961 (but not the film version of The Sound of Music, which Wise also directed).

Although the movie may exert less appeal today in the context of the similarly accomplished and even grittier Chicago and Sweeney Todd adaptations, Wise’s (and Robbins’s) West Side Story—with its contemporary urban setting, ubiquitous and stunning dancing, and careful use of recurring sung and orchestral musical motives creatively augmented by location photography on the streets of New York—remains still something of a rarity in musical films where control over the soundtrack was typically facilitated by working on indoor stage sets. Anyone who has seen the opening of the film, with its unforgettable bird’s-eye view of Manhattan office towers and slums, brings that memory with them to even the best staged revival of the show. Wise brought taste and sophistication to his direction. Although he changed the show quite a bit, he brought it enduring fame and introduced the realistic, contemporary musical to a much broader audience, first across the United States, then around the globe. On September 3, 2006, the American Film Institute placed West Side Story behind only Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as the Greatest Film Musical of all time.25

EPILOGUE: THE AGE OF SONDHEIM AND LLOYD WEBBER

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SWEENEY TODD AND SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

Happily Ever After West Side Story with Sondheim

Sondheim and His Mentors

Within two years after creating the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) to music by Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, who wanted to be a Broadway composer-lyricist, reluctantly but again successfully wrote the lyrics only for a show to Jule Styne’s music for the canonic Gypsy (1959), also directed by Jerome Robbins. Sondheim’s second foray into Broadway lyric writing brought him into direct contact for the first time with a major star, Ethel Merman, and Sondheim contributed greatly to the creation of her character, Rose. Merman’s role in Gypsy capped a long career studded with star vehicles dating back to Girl Crazy (1930).1 Sondheim’s next show, the wacky but well-crafted farce, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), marked his long-awaited Broadway debut as a lyricist and composer at the age of thirty-two. Forum won the Tony Award for best musical, and at 964 performances enjoyed a longer run (200 performances longer) than any future Sondheim show. Even during these early associations with acclaim and popularity, Sondheim was generally relegated to the background, barely mentioned in the reviews of West Side Story and Gypsy and bypassed as a nominee for his work on Forum.

Perhaps the major achievement of his next musical, Anyone Can Whistle (1964), again with a libretto by West Side Story and Gypsy author Arthur Laurents, was that despite the show’s disappointing run of nine performances, Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records had the foresight to produce a commercial original cast recording. One year later Sondheim completed his trilogy of collaborations with composer legends begun with Bernstein and Styne when, against his better judgment, he wrote the lyrics for Richard Rodger’s Do I Hear a Waltz? (the fourth and probably final Laurents libretto that Sondheim set), an unpleasant and increasingly acrimonious experience for all concerned. The result was a quickly forgotten and subsequently neglected musical that despite its troubled genesis deserves to be heard and seen more often.2

Stephen Sondheim in 2007.

After two hits (as a lyricist), one hit as a composer-lyricist, a flop, a disappointing run, and five fallow years Sondheim, in tandem with Harold Prince, erupted on Broadway between 1970 and 1973 with a creative explosion: Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little