On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (9 page)

Further affirming the show’s unique appeal was its resetting and updating of
Romeo and Juliet
, with just enough correspondence to give the audience the sense of a new reading of an old story, rather as with the theatre festivals of Ancient Greece. Better,
West Side Story
was
Romeo and Juliet
put into music, as Romeo wonders what marvelous adventure is on its way (in “Something’s Coming”), as the lovers take vows in secret (in “One Hand, One Heart”), as Juliet brings up the second-act curtain on a never-fail theatrical irony: the carefree moment before the bad news, in this case of the two deaths in the rumble (in “I Feel Pretty”).

Finally,
West Side Story
was the first
Gesamtkunstwerk
among musicals. The term is Richard Wagner’s, meaning, roughly, “all the arts combined in a single organism.” The fusion of script and score dated back to
The Beggar’s Opera
(1728), in the English genre called “ballad opera.” Dance was integrated in various ways in
The Band Wagon
(1931),
Oklahoma!
(1943),
On the Town
(1944), and
The Golden Apple
(1954). But
West Side Story
pioneered a seamless visual flow using a full-scale scenic design (as opposed to
Allegro
’s “bare stage with bits and pieces” approach).

Even the cast’s résumés were integrated. The usual musical hired performers strong in acting, or in singing, or in dancing, then tried to blend them, more or less, into a unit. For
West Side Story
, however, Jerome Robbins wanted people who could do everything. So heroine Maria (Carol Lawrence) and her confidante, Anita (Chita Rivera), could act, sing, and dance. The leader of the Jets, Riff (Mickey Calin), urged transcendence upon his hyper cohort in “Cool”—but he did not then leave the stage to the ensemble for the dance, as he would have in many another musical: he dominated the choreography as he dominated the gang.

Again,
West Side Story
was a naturalized fantasy. True, the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (Ken LeRoy), had been dancing since
Oklahoma!
, which made him far too old for the part. And the hero, Tony (Larry Kert), was a wonderful singer who could neither act nor dance. Still, Kert embodied the ardor that is the salient quality of Shakespeare’s text, that youthful wonder that makes the tragedy all the more harrowing. A song cut during the tryout, “Like Everybody Else,” sung by three of the Jets, emphasizes how the score takes its point of view from not society but its children. “I been to Night Court and I been rolled,” Baby John complains. “Why can’t I be old?” Here we see how much Shakespeare inheres in
West Side Story
, for
Romeo and Juliet
is all but overrun with the extravagant self-dramatizations of the young.

The parallels between play and musical are well observed, for Romeo meets Juliet at a ball, gets his close friend Mercutio killed through interference in a duel, and avenges him by killing Tybalt—and this is all in the musical. It does end differently: Maria survives. The authors were considering killing her as well, but Richard Rodgers advised them not to. “She’s dead already,” he told them.

Here are the musical’s characters next to their source counterparts:

It’s worth noting that Arthur Laurents’ libretto doesn’t simply echo Shakespeare. Laurents
adapts
him, retaining compelling character information to give the musical color. Consider: Shakespeare’s Mercutio is a professional cynosure, witty and ribald, using words in endless stream-of-consciousness riddles:

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open et cetera, thou a pop’rin pear!

So Laurents’ Riff is the equivalent in high middle bop: “Unwind” and “Easy, freezy” and “I say I want the Jets to be Number One, to sail, to hold the sky!”

Further, Laurents’ use of the Nurse in his invention of Anita is fascinating, for both characters have, at once, a lot of power and no power at all. The Nurse is in charge of Juliet yet remains a nobody in the Capulet hierarchy; Anita dominates Maria yet is nobody in the “man’s world” of Latin culture. A sharp actress can steal the show in either role. Chita Rivera’s Anita was thought imposing enough for her to replay the part in the first London production, in 1958, and, to look at it from another angle, Edna May Oliver turned down her chance to preserve her Broadway Parthy Ann in the 1936
Show Boat
film in order to have a go at the Nurse for MGM’s
Romeo
, with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer.

This coming together of Shakespeare and the musical—however artistically ambitious a musical it was—is something of a creative oxymoron, as the performers needed for Elizabethan drama are vastly different from those who populated fifties musicals. Of course,
West Side Story
is not Elizabethan—but it would not have worked if the cast had not been able to find some modern equivalent of the original’s passion and poetry. The challenge lies in the score as well as the script—in the ecstasy of “Maria,” the helpless tenderness of “Tonight.”

Thus, Jerome Robbins demanded twice the usual rehearsal time—an unprecedented eight weeks—in order to match the performances to his vision. He broke the actors apart—Jets here, Sharks there, grownups elsewhere altogether—and forbade intermingling. You
hate
each other. Don’t present it.
Live
it! Tony Mordente, the original A-Rab, one of the Jets, told Robbins’ biographer Amanda Vail that the notoriously sadistic Robbins was especially abusive with the good-natured Mickey Calin: “It was hard to think of [Calin] as our chief, our button guy, who if he would say, ‘Go kill somebody,’ we’d do it.” So Robbins “pounded [Calin] into dust and molded him back into clay. … And you could see the change happening. More and more, Mickey became the leader of the Jets.” Chita Rivera told Vail that Robbins’ somewhat improvisational staging of the scene in which the Jets attack Anita—again, a development of a much less violent episode in
Romeo and Juliet
—set loose something rough and primitive in what till then had been guy-next-door chorus boys. Vail thought Rivera was “still shaken” talking about it many years later. Said Rivera, “We were getting in touch with feelings we never knew we had.”

The posters for the first performances, out of town, billed Sondheim and Bernstein as co-lyricists. But Bernstein, master of so many trades, was adept at only comic verses. He had written some of the words to
On the Town
’s “I Can Cook, Too,” a list song made of erotic double meanings (“My gravies just ooze”). And, on
Candide
, he gave verse to “I Am Easily Assimilated,” a sardonic spoof of the “When in Rome” immigrant. At romantic numbers, however, Bernstein could not tell attar from deodorant, and Sondheim ended up writing so much of
West Side Story
’s lyrics that Bernstein let his partner take full billing credit for them. As Steve loves to tell us, Bernstein even offered to give up his royalty percentage, but a grateful Sondheim thought that might be too much to want. One thing Sondheim has never been intent on is money; rather, he navigates around loyalty and talent. So Sondheim took the credit without the bank, and thus gave up ninety-five years’ (under the pre-1978 copyright law and the so-called “Sonny Bono amendment”) worth of extra revenue.

Strange to say, Sondheim looks back on this first set of Sondheim lyrics to be heard on Broadway with rue. He likes “Something’s Coming” because its images reflect the interests of a teenager. He likes the “Jet Song” and “Gee, Officer Krupke,” the latter of which Robbins set on its feet in three hours—“one of the most brilliantly inventive [stagings] in one number I’ve ever seen.”

Sondheim said this at a Dramatists Guild panel some thirty years later, when he noted that the “more contemplative lyrics” now struck him as self-conscious and even pretentious, as though he were dictating to characters rather than letting them express themselves. “Very ‘written’ ” is how he put it. He felt this in particular about “I Feel Pretty,” because the emphasis on rhyme must suggest sophistication, and Maria, who sings it, is a very sheltered young woman. I think something’s wrong here. Everyone responds to rhyme, if only the “Roses are red, violets are blue” sort, and much of “I Feel Pretty” deals in obvious matches, like “pretty” and “witty.” Other lines perfectly capture a young girl jumping for joy—“Such a pretty me,” for instance.

Then, too, that number always goes over wonderfully. If there were a discord between who Maria is and what Sondheim gave her to sing, the audience would be confused and resistant. Sondheim even said that, after run-throughs before the tryout, he changed the lyrics, the better to respect character. But his collaborators preferred the first version, and it stayed in.

Jerome Robbins hated the number. He left it to the assistant choreographer, Peter Gennaro, to stage.
^*
According to Carol Lawrence, Gennaro allowed her to make up her own idea of an “I Feel Pretty” dance, sporting a mantilla, faking a bullfight, then flopping on the bed for the blackout. Oscar Hammerstein particularly loved the number—did
he
ever tell Sondheim that the lyrics weren’t apt?—and later congratulated Robbins on its spontaneity, never dreaming that Robbins had nothing to do with it. Robbins took credit for it all the same.

As so often with breakaway projects,
West Side Story
had trouble getting its capitalization. As Bernstein put it at that Guild panel, “There was tremendous animosity to the whole idea.” The production was about to go into rehearsal when its co-producer (and primary money-raiser) Cheryl Crawford abruptly pulled out on spurious grounds. “Cheryl,” said Laurents, “you are an immoral woman.” But this does show how strange
West Side Story
appeared to the “angels” (as they used to be called: those who backed Broadway productions), because Crawford in fact liked taking chances on unusual material. Amazingly, Columbia Records, Bernstein’s own label, is supposed, at first, to have passed on making the cast album.

What?
This after the firm’s President and artistic guru, Goddard Lieberson, had just masterminded Columbia’s financing of
My Fair Lady
, the most profitable musical (and biggest-selling LP) of its era? One year later, Lieberson, with all his power, wouldn’t record Bernstein’s Broadway show? With that score—which Lieberson must have heard? This is unbelievable; indeed, Columbia did in fact tape the
West Side Story
score in the end.

The show opened on September 26, 1957, at the Winter Garden Theatre after very successful tryouts in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. It was an electric event, the first big show of the season. Angry Young Man John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
; Lena Horne; Helen Hayes and Richard Burton in Jean Anouilh; Noël Coward; Julie Harris; William Inge; and
The Music Man
were all to come, but only later in the year, and
West Side Story
won mostly raves. The
Times
’ Brooks Atkinson caught the aspect of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
, noting, “Everything in
West Side Story
blends—the scenery … the costumes … the lighting. For this is one of those occasions when theatre people, engrossed in an original project, are all in top form.” Only Walter Kerr, who specialized in hating any music more complex than “Three Blind Mice,” gave it a mixed review: “Apart from the spinetingling velocity of the dances, [it is] almost never emotionally affecting.”

At least Kerr mentioned Sondheim. He felt wonderful finally to have a show on Broadway, though that heady mix of big-wheel Names overwhelmed his credit. However,
West Side Story
’s true lost author was Peter Gennaro, who choreographed “America” and all of the Sharks’ steps in the “Dance at the Gym.” Jerome Robbins, apparently foreseeing how long the show’s art would prove, made Gennaro sign a contract including the line “You hereby assign to me any and all rights in, and to any and all choreographic material created or suggested by you in connection with, the play.” And when
West Side Story
won the Tony Award for Best Choreography, Jerome Robbins was the only recipient—and he didn’t even thank Gennaro in his acceptance speech. (Compare that with Bernstein’s giving Sondheim sole credit for the show’s lyrics.)