Acknowledgements

The completion of a volume like this is not possible without the participation and assistance of many people. First we must thank our contributors, who willingly shared their expertise and time, first writing these wonderful chapters and then working with us while we edited them. Our writers included scholars with whom one or both of us have collaborated and others with whom we have not worked before, and to all of them we express our deep gratitude for their enthusiasm for the project and their patience while we completed it. Obviously, we have all fought through the complications brought on by the pandemic while working on this project, especially the challenges it caused in our teaching lives, which lengthened the editing process and slightly delayed the volume’s submission. Discussions recently and over the years with a number of our writers, and others in our field, have assisted our knowledge and perspectives on West Side Story, Bernstein and his collaborators, and their place in the history of the musical theatre and its repertory. We thank these many people for their contributions to our work and understanding.

We express our deep appreciation to our editor Kate Brett of Cambridge University Press and her assistant Abi Sears, who patiently answered numerous questions and were both instrumental in bringing this collection to print. We feel honoured to be part of The Cambridge Companion series, which has become such an important part of publishing for general and scholarly readers in both music and theatre. We both thank our institution and their libraries and staffs for their assistance in making our research for this volume possible. Thanks to Marie Carter (now retired) and Hannah Webster of the Bernstein Office for their assistance in securing necessary permissions for the book and to Georgia Stratton of Concord Music Publishing for her help. We also appreciate Steve Swayne’s help in securing permissions from Stephen Sondheim’s office to publish the lyrics that appear in his chapter on the young Sondheim. We thank the New York Public Library, SOM Produce, and Photofest for their assistance in securing photographs for the book. Sara McClure, a PhD student in musicology at the University of Kansas, prepared the volume’s index. We thank Sara for her meticulous and timely efforts. We also appreciate Adrian Hartsough for producing a musical example.

Paul Laird dedicates this volume to his wife Joy Laird, who has patiently listened to him enthuse about Bernstein and especially West Side Story for more than forty years. Elizabeth A. Wells dedicates this volume to Branden Olsen, her partner in crime and musicology, without whom she could not have completed this volume.