Ravinia 2019, Issue 3, Week 6

JULY 1 – JULY 14, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 33 His Stage BY D E NN I S PO L KOW MER ICA’S MOST IMPORTANT MUS IC F IGURE was many things to many people: conductor, composer, pianist, educator, author, television personality, activist, international bon vivant. But if you asked Leonard Bernstein how he self-identified, he thought of himself as a composer. Over the past year and a half, the world has been honoring Bernstein’s centennial, which, by and large, has been a reevaluation of Bernstein the composer. That has meant abundant performances of his symphonies, choral works, chamber works, song cycles, bal- lets, and the like. Bernstein’s Broadway shows, howev- er, are in no need of reassessment, as works such as West Side Story and Candide have never fallen fully out of fashion. Those works did the reassessing, breaking the boundaries of the form, particularly in terms of how elaborate and through-com- posed much of the music was and the extraordinary demands they made on the artists performing them. Given that West Side Story is often considered the greatest musical ever written, it’s curious that its 1944 predecessor On the Town , the first show to unite choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein, is done so infrequently. Part of the reason is that the seamless line between music and drama achieved in West Side Story was still a work in progress within On the Town , the concept of which originated from the ballet Fancy Free . (That work was conceived by Robbins, who was so unhappy with its original composer that he simply showed up unannounced at Bernstein’s dressing room door in 1943 and managed to persuade him to compose the music.) That pedigree is never far from the surface of the show, as dance tends to intrude on the narrative, such as it is, and often for its own sake. The score is meticulously well-crafted, but Bernstein was still in search of his own stage style, the music often coming off as Gershwin-meets-Shostakovich. When MGM made the film ver- sion, most of Bernstein’s score was gutted as being too “operatic” and replaced with new material by the studio’s house tunesmiths. Given the popular success of that film with its Frank Sinatra–Gene Kelly pairing, people often expect to hear the non-Bernstein mov- ie tunes in stage productions.