When Jerome Robbins, the director and choreographer of West Side Story
and, as such, the man who transformed modern musical theatre, called his
friend Leonard Bernstein, the composer, on January 6, 1949, with the concept
of an updated version of Romeo and Juliet, he did not mention Sharks and
Jets, or even young Americans and Puerto Ricans. The divided clans that
Robbins proposed were Jews and Catholics.
The setting was still the New York slums, and the theme of love versus hate
would not alter in the long years between that first conversation and
opening night, but the backdrop to the racial, religious tension was going
to be the Easter and Passover celebrations, Juliet was to be a Jew and her
Romeo a Roman Catholic. It took more than eight years for the project to
reach the stage, by which time it, and the city in which it was based, had
changed greatly, with the arrival of almost 600,000 immigrants from a single
north Caribbean island. “We have abandoned the whole Jewish-Catholic premise
as not very fresh,” wrote Bernstein on August 25, 1955, “and have come up
with what I think is going to be it: two teenage gangs, one the warring
Puerto Ricans, the other self-styled ‘Americans'. Suddenly it all springs to
life. I hear rhythms and pulses and, most of all, I can feel the form.”
Certainly, it is impossible to imagine West Side Story without its
sultry and exotic flavours, its mambos and hemiolas, but while these
elements and Stephen Sondheim's brilliant words tie the work and its
characters to a specific time and place, its message is timeless. More than
five decades on from its first performance in Washington, West Side Story remains
as relevant as ever; some may argue more so. Its revival at Sadler's Wells,
on the 50th anniversary of its debut in the West End, which opened last week
to excellent reviews, confirms it as one of the great artistic achievements
of the 20th century, with an enduring significance.
In London, a city that has had 70 murders this year, many teenagers of first
or second-generation immigrant parentage, a tale of angry, edgy young men,
their misdirected sense of self-worth tragically reliant on violent and
dangerous gang culture says more about our world than many newer productions
or commentaries; and they don't have Bernstein's tunes or Sondheim's
delicious wordplay, either. West Side Story was written at a time
when restaurants displayed signs barring dogs and Puerto Ricans (Porto
Ricans, to the gang of whites known as the Jets), a distrust that will be
familiar to some members of modern immigrant communities. These new citizens
feel victimised and shunned and see insularity as the sole means of
protection from the spite of the natives, displaying the same cynicism and
contempt that Maria's brother Bernardo had for the American dream. This West
Side could be any city in Britain on any day of the week and this Story does
not need extensive modernising when one considers how little society has
progressed in half a century.
The librettist Arthur Laurents and Sondheim as lyricist were limited only by
the conventions of their time. Their gang members could not swear, nor could
director Robbins douse the stage in spilt blood. Zip guns were mentioned
because real guns were harder for juveniles to come by. Times change, sadly.
Laurents intends to correct this with a revival scheduled to start at the
National Theatre, Washington, in December, transferring to Broadway in
February, which will be improved by rewritten exchanges in Spanish. “This
show will be radically different from any production of West Side Story ever
done,” he promises. “The musical theatre and cultural conventions of 1957
made it next to impossible for the characters to have authenticity. Every
member of both gangs was always a potential killer even then. Now they
actually will be. Only Tony and Maria try to live in a different world.”
Laurents's desire to refashion his work is noble, but to some extent
unnecessary. We got the point anyway. The production at Sadler's Wells would
be termed conventional by comparison but, despite this, Laurents's original
statement that the currency of hatred, and of gang life, is murder is clear.
The deaths of Bernardo, Riff and Tony do not have to be made visceral to
reach a modern audience. The action and the language, while very much of its
time, speak a universal truth.
Although the narrative of West Side Story was not new to Laurents, the
same could be said of Romeo and Juliet to Shakespeare. Matteo
Bandello, an Italian poet and novelist, is credited with the first version
of the tale, translated by Arthur Brooke as The Tragical History of
Romeus and Juliet in 1562 and reprinted in 1587, ten years before
Shakespeare's play was performed. There was also a prose version, published
as one of 60 stories contained in a book, The Palace of Pleasure,
written by William Painter in 1582. Yet the mission of West Side Story
was not to overhaul Elizabethan poetry, but to challenge the conventions of
musical theatre without, as Bernstein put it, falling into the operatic
trap. “A musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms, using
only musical-comedy techniques,” he wrote. “If it can work, it's the first.”
And it was. The year that West Side Story opened was part of a golden age
for musicals. Bernstein and Sondheim's piece did not even win the 1958 Tony,
which went to The Music Man by Meredith Willson, another stunning
show, innovative, evocative and rich in language and melody (and currently
revived in Chichester, coincidentally). In The Music Man, however,
love triumphs, the conman Harold Hill deciding to stay with his sweetheart
and face the wrath of the small Iowa community that he has swindled, rather
than skipping town with his ill-gotten loot. By contrast, West Side Story
ends confident enough in his achievement to refuse to compromise when studio
boss Jack L. Warner wanted to replace leading man and Tony winner Robert
Preston with Frank Sinatra or Cary Grant when casting the film role. The
Music Man is a wonderful musical; go and see it, or rent the movie. But
it isn't West Side Story; because nothing is.
West Side Story's choreography alone sets it apart (Robbins did win a
Tony for that at least), because so much of its emotion is expressed through
dance. Creating these scenes was a monumental task because Bernstein thought
like a composer, not a hoofer. Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the film,
explained that dancers work in counts of four, six and eight. “Then along
comes Leonard Bernstein with his 5/4 time, his 6/8 time, his 25/6 time: it
was crazy,” she recalled. “It was very difficult to dance to that kind of
music, because it doesn't make dancer sense.” (There have been few British
hit singles written in 5/4 time, one being Take Five by Dave Brubeck,
the other Living in the Past by Jethro Tull, for the simple reason
that you can't dance to it without looking like a drunk at a wedding with an
inner-ear complication.)
The DVD of the film contains an extra segment that makes apparent the
achievement of Robbins's choreography. He rehearsed for three months,
revised everything on location, and his instructions were so demanding that
no scene was filmed all the way through. Some dancers suffered injury, some
collapsed through exhaustion, he would have gang members scaling high
fences, bare-handed, and jumping down to a playground, all in time. This was
new, and it still is.
Watch a conventional chorus line in action to understand the radical nature of
the movement in West Side Story. “What are they dancing about?” asked
Robbins of his juvenile delinquents, and then answered his question with an
opening sequence that perfectly sets up the bravado, the roll, the sneer,
the pure physical power and arrogant grace of being in a gang. And he says
it all, at first, with something as simple as finger snaps and a walk.
Robbins's choreography is so good that it is sometimes possible to overlook
Bernstein's immense score, which has such density that when it was first
performed at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, the orchestra could not
fit into the pit, and the woodwind section had to play multiple instruments.
Much has been made of the fact that in the film version, the singing of the
two lead roles were dubbed, but what is rarely offered as mitigation is how
few musicals call for the principal actor to hit the extended high B-flat
that concludes Maria, a song as close to an aria as anything heard in
popular music.
Indeed, so aspirational was Bernstein's score that Marni Nixon, who provided
the voice of Maria for Natalie Wood, also had to assist Moreno as Anita, and
in some parts of the song Tonight ends up in a duet with herself. (Nixon was
also Deborah Kerr's voice in certain songs in The King And I, sung
all of Audrey Hepburn's parts in My Fair Lady and did the top notes
of Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend for Marilyn Monroe. At the age of 78,
she is appearing in the US revival of My Fair Lady as Mrs Higgins. A
bit of a trouper, you might say.)
Even in the original stage production, Bernstein eschewed experienced singers,
wanting the raw kid quality that an untrained voice would bring. He then
took those kids and introduced them to something called five-part
counterpoint. This is why West Side Story continues to matter.
Artistically, it was heroically ambitious for its time, and in a world in
which a musical is now a repackaged compilation of Boney M's hits, a safe,
dumbed-down, populist money-grab, offering nothing new and taking no
chances, it remains the standard of what it is possible to achieve.
Equally, its message is tragically untroubled by time. The best live action
short film at the 2007 Oscars was West Bank Story, a 21-minute parody
of the work, set among warring Israeli and Palestinian falafel stands,
directed by Ari Sandel. There is not a city in the world in which West
Side Story does not have resonance and, in London, its moral is more
urgent than ever.
Bernstein said it best. “Alas, the materials of the work have not become
dated,” he mused. “Would that they had, for the sake of our world.”
This is a beautifully written and intelligent piece. West Side Story is entirely deserving of such reverence. Well done Martin.
David, London,
for the wss board?
Gwen, NYC, USA