Lyric Opera 2018-2019 Issue 14 West Side Story

M U S I C A L N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O May 3 - June 2, 2019 | 29 Hot and Cool: e Creation of West Side Story By Roger Pines e rst Maria, Carol Lawrence, and the rst Tony, Larry Kert, on location in New York City (West 56 th Street between 9 th and 10 th Avenue) for a West Side Story publicity shoot. e 1958 Tony Awards included ve Best Musical nominees. ree of those shows – seldom, if ever, performed today – were memorable chie y as vehicles for major stars: Tony Randall (Oh, Captain!) , Lena Horne (Jamaica) , and Gwen Verdon (New Girl in Town) . e fourth show, e Music Man , which ultimately won the award, was an a ectionate depiction of turn-of-the- century Iowa that turned journeyman actor Robert Preston into a Broadway headliner. e fth nominee was the “odd show out.” To begin with, the principals were unknowns, not stars. It was a gritty show, colored by both the cruelty and the ecstasy of young people living and loving in a vibrant but dangerous urban setting. It also had a tragic ending, unprecedented for a Broadway musical. But it abounded with awe-inspiring talent, and everything about it communicated the excitement of the new. is was West Side Story . e show’s many miracles began with its creators, as formidable a team as any musical-theater production has ever seen. Leonard Bernstein (music), Arthur Laurents (book), and Jerome Robbins (director/ choreographer) had all triumphed on Broadway before. Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), then only 25 years old, was working on his rst Broadway show, although he was certainly as acutely intelligent and stupendously gifted as his three colleagues. But however savvy each man may have been, in this case they were all very much feeling their way into a show unlike anything seen previously on Broadway. On January 6, 1949, Bernstein wrote that Robbins had called him with “a noble idea” 1 : a contemporary Romeo and Juliet , refashioned as a con ict between Jews and Irish Catholics, “set in slums at the coinci- dence of Easter-Passover celebrations” on New York’s Lower East Side (the title, in fact, was originally East Side Story ). Robbins proposed Laurents as the right person to create the adaptation. But those three were among the busiest people on the American performing-arts scene, and the project was eventually shelved. In 1955, however, when Bernstein encountered Laurents in California, it came up again. e idea of a Jewish/Catholic Romeo and Juliet was now abandoned, in favor of an “American” gang (the Jets) vs. a Puerto Rican one (the Sharks). And so to work, with Sondheim now on board as the fourth collaborator. Known as a playwright, director, and screenwriter, Laurents later described his West Side Story dialogue as “my translation of adolescent street talk into theater: it may sound real, but it isn’t.” 2 In his brilliantly constructed libretto, several situations parallel Shakespeare’s play: • the Capulet/Montague ball becomes the “Dance at the Gym,” where Tony and Maria meet; 1 Quoted in Nigel Simeone, Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story, Routledge, 2017, p. 17. 2 From interview for Musikspill, Norwegian television series hosted by Harold Tusberg, 1980. FRIEDMAN ABELES, BILLY ROSETHEATRE DIVISION, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY