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

a police station where the death of Bernardo and Riff, unknown to the Sharks and the Jets, would be announced. In the police station Tony and Maria would reenact their meeting at the dance and decide to elope, and Chino would utter the immortal words, “Life, liberty … and the pursuit of crappiness.” In the drugstore scene before the climax of the drama in the final 1956 version, Maria rather than Anita was taunted by the Jets. Not until the final months before rehearsals began did the creators of West Side Story succeed in finding a substitute for the philter.

31. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 44. The first two libretto drafts (January and Spring 1956) contained one song in an opening scene, the “Rumble Song.” Judging from an earlier musical draft of the actual Rumble, the “Rumble Song” of early 1956 and the song “Mix” were probably one and the same, but since no lyrics are given in the libretto, this conclusion cannot be established with certainty. In any event, by the third libretto draft (March 15), the concluding song of the scene is in fact labeled “Mix” (in the fourth libretto draft, however, “Mix” is not indicated). The early libretto drafts also suggest that two songs, “Up to the Moon” and “My Greatest Day,” based on the eventual Prologue and “Jet Song,” respectively, preceded “Mix.”

32. Bernstein would reuse a melody from “Mix,” also discarded from the Prologue, in the Blues portion of “Dance at the Gym.” A version of this idea (with some different lyrics) was retained in the published vocal score, 20–21, as part of the “Jet Song,” and accompanied by a note that this material was cut in the New York production.

33. Laurents’s fifth and sixth libretto drafts still indicate only one song in the Prologue, “Mix”; the seventh and eighth drafts (June 1 and July 19) contain a song for the Jets called “We’re the Greatest” and a reference in the dialogue to another ephemeral song, “This Turf Is Ours.” Shortly before rehearsals “Mix” was finally dropped. Although it is more difficult to date the “new” Rumble, the rehearsal period certainly marks a terminal date for the replacement of a Rumble (based on “Mix”) with the present version. Bernstein recalls in his interview with Gussow that “Mix” “wound up in ‘The Chichester Psalms’ in Hebrew.” See Gussow, “‘West Side Story’: The Beginning of Something Great” and Chichester Psalms II (Amberson/Boosey & Hawkes), 38–50.

34. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 45. Sondheim also confirms the reference to “This Turf Is Ours” in an interview reported in Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 24: “Then we wrote a new opening because everyone felt the opening wasn’t violent enough. The new opening was really violent and everyone thought it was too violent, so we went back to the ‘Jet Song.’” Like “Mix,” “This Turf Is Ours” resurfaced in another Bernstein work when it was incorporated in the Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy (January 19, 1961). Its opening motive is nearly identical to the “hate” motive (see Example 13.9a).

35. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 23–24. Sondheim also has more to say about the aptly titled “One”: “I remember that the tune of ‘One Hand, One Heart,’ which Bernstein originally wrote for Candide, had only a dotted half note to each bar. I realized I couldn’t set any two-syllable words to the song, it had to be all one-syllable words. I was stifled, and down in Washington, after my endless pleas, Lenny put in two little quarter notes so that I could put ‘make of our’ as in ‘Make of our hearts one heart.’ Not a great deal, but at least a little better.” Ibid., 23.

36. The piano-vocal manuscript of “One Hand, One Heart” also reveals that some of its orchestral material was sung, and more significantly, that the instrumental foreshadowing of “Somewhere” introducing the song was not a late addition.

37. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 24. “Kids Ain’t” is included among Bernstein’s vocal manuscripts.

38. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 49.

39. Ibid., 49–50.

40. In a letter dated “8 Aug already!” Bernstein writes to his wife, Felicia, that he had written “a new song for Tony” the day before. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 272.

41. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 21. Sondheim confirms that “Something’s Coming” was indeed completed in a day. See Sondheim, “An Anecdote,” xi–xii.

42. The locale of this scene changed several times. In the first two librettos “Tonio” appears in the opening scene with the Jets. In the two following libretto drafts, the scene takes place at the drugstore fountain; in the librettos of April 14 and May 1 the locale is the corner of a playground. The final draft moves from Tony’s bedroom (June 1) to an unspecified yard in (July 19).

43. The final libretto of July 19 concludes with a variation on the first words of the song, “Who knows? Could be. Why not?!” See also Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 43, and Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 21.

44. Bernstein describes his intentions further in his “8 Aug. already!” letter to Felicia: “It’s really going to save his character—a driving 2/4 in the great tradition (but of course fucked up by me with 3/4s and whatnot)—but it gives Tony balls—so that he doesn’t emerge as just a euphoric dreamer.” Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 272.

45. The antecedents of the Romeo and Juliet legend go back at least as far as the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, who, like their Shakespearean counterparts, are forbidden from marrying by their parents, and who, mistakenly thinking the other dead, needlessly take their own lives. Variations on a related theme frequented Renaissance Italy and were adapted by French and English writers for more than a hundred years before Shakespeare drafted his play. Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir have surveyed these and other sources of this tale of woe, and it is now unquestioned that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Arthur Brooke’s once popular poem, “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” (1562), itself based on the