A boy from one immigrant group and a girl from another are in love, much to the ire of their respective families. Two rival ethnic groups go to a dance at a local hall, and tensions are high. While these scenarios sound as if they belong to West Side Story, they are actually plot points from The Mulligan Guard Ball, a musical comedy from 1879. The similarity between the scenarios leads to the idea of palimpsests, where echoes of earlier works appear in later ones. According to the Chicago School of Media Theory at the University of Chicago, a palimpsest is

This notion helps us understand how various themes continue to appear and reappear in the American musical. The musical theatre is a gigantic palimpsest of multiple historical and stylistic layers, various folds where things get hidden, and typographical features such as venues, creators, and performers. Some subjects seem to permeate musicals for a time, then disappear, only to return decades later, while others seem to have a fairly solid presence. Among those that maintain a continual presence is the broad notion of social relevance. Following Bruce Kirle’s now commonplace thesis, musicals are products of the time and place of their creation.² Therefore a significant part of any musical’s identity rests within its contemporary social–cultural relevance. This chapter explores how a handful of socially relevant topics – immigrant experiences, race, knife violence, politics, and the allure of Latin America – were performed on Broadway musical stages before West Side Story’s appearance in 1957. Traces of these earlier shows in West Side Story reveal that the subject of this Companion resides in a continuum of musical theatre productions in which various palimpsests concerning social relevance can be discerned.

Immigrant Experiences

A vibrant musical theatre existed in and for various immigrant communities throughout the United States from the nineteenth century through World War II.³ Performances in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Yiddish were common occurrences on ethnic stages across the country. Many of the shows that appeared on these stages concerned the immigrant experience – after all, the target audience for these productions consisted of immigrants.

One of the most significant figures in New York’s German American theatrical scene was Adolf Philipp (1864–1936), an actor–singer–composer–playwright–impresario whose immigrant-themed works include Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A (1893), Der Pawnbroker von der Eastside (1894), and Der Butcher aus der Erste Avenue (1895). Philipp typically starred in his own productions. For example, in Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A, he played Hein Snut (translated as Henry (Big) Mouth), the title character who brings about the comeuppance of a former barber who lives beyond his means.⁴ While most characters in the tale are German, the cast did include one Irishman, ‘Herr’ McGinty, who speaks Irish-affected German.⁵ Philipp’s music is direct in appeal and sentiment, with diatonic harmonies, regular periodic phrase structure, syllabic text setting (making the words easy to understand), and an abundance of waltz refrains. Such musical style befits the background of his central European immigrant characters and audiences.

German and Irish immigrants also feature in Edward Harrigan’s The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879, revised 1883 and 1892, music by David Braham).⁶ Harrigan created the character of the Irish immigrant Dan Mulligan in 1873, and played him in a series of ‘Mulligan’ musical comedies through the 1890s. In The Mulligan Guard Ball, Dan’s son, Tommy, wants to marry Kitty,⁷ the daughter of the German butcher Gustavus Lochmuller. Dan is very much against the idea and thinks his son should marry an Irish girl. To complicate matters, Kitty’s mother, Bridget, is Irish and does not want her daughter to make the same mistake she did by marrying a German boy. Interethnic marriage is discouraged, as it is in West Side Story.

Central to the storyline of The Mulligan Guard Ball is the relationship between Irish immigrants and African Americans. From the 1850s, Irish immigrants and blacks were living in the same districts⁸ and, though the Irish supported abolition, tensions arose as Irish immigrants began taking over the jobs of free blacks by offering to work at a lower wage.⁹ The Irish, who had been what David R. Roediger terms one of the ‘in-between peoples,’¹⁰ since they were Northern Europeans but not Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were able to become white by aligning themselves with white groups, which they did. Drawing on the writings of James Baldwin, Roediger asserts, ‘Joining in acts of racism against people of color made immigrants white over time.’¹¹ The Polish immigrants in West Side Story, Tony’s community, would have also participated in this process of becoming white.

Since white immigrants took over jobs that paid wages, displaced blacks had to turn to self-employment and trades such as chimneysweeps and bootblacks.¹² These work-related tensions infuse The Mulligan Guard Ball. Dan Mulligan works at a gas factory, and Gustavus Lochmuller is a butcher. They both have stable incomes. By contrast, Simpson Primrose, one of the main black characters, is a self-employed barber. Significant in terms of performance, Primrose, along with the chaplain Palestine Puter, were played in blackface by ‘Negro impersonators’ Billy Gray and Johnny Wild.¹³ The blacks resent the Irish in The Mulligan Guard Ball. Their ‘Order of Full Moons,’ which Puter calls a ‘secret colored society to prevent de Irish from riding on horse cars,’¹⁴ points back at groups who kept blacks from using public transportation.

The Irish Mulligan Guard and the black Skidmore Guard plan balls for the same evening. When the hall where the Skidmore Guards planned their ball is closed, they end up being moved to the Harp and Shamrock Hall, which had already been booked for the Mulligan Guard Ball. The Harp and Shamrock is a place, says Puter, where a Full Moon cannot go ‘widout trouble.’¹⁵ When the Skidmore Guard arrive, after fearing an ambush, they leave their muskets in the hat rack, but carry razors to protect themselves from the Irish, who Puter describes in strongly racist terms. The Mulligans and the Skidmores come to an agreement: the Skidmores will go upstairs and the Mulligans will take the ground floor. During the balls, the ceiling gives way, causing mayhem when the Skidmores fall through and land on top of the Mulligans. Racial tensions on both sides live at the surface of The Mulligan Guard Ball, as they do in West Side Story.

In 1947, almost seventy years after the first incarnation of The Mulligan Guard Ball, two musicals concerning immigrant experiences and relationships between races opened on successive evenings: Street Scene on 9 January (book by Elmer Rice, music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Langston Hughes) and Finian’s Rainbow on 10 January (book by E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, music by Burton Lane, lyrics by Harburg). Street Scene includes immigrants from various European countries, while Finian’s Rainbow features only an Irish father, daughter, and leprechaun.

Among Street Scene’s New York tenement dwellers are immigrants from Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and Germany. Playing into racist stereotypes, there’s also a Jewish intellectual (Sam Kaplan, the romantic lead, a tenor) and a black janitor (Henry Davis, a baritone). The sundry cast of characters ‘finds an analogue for its ethnic diversity in its musical diversity,’ writes Stephen Hinton.¹⁶ When it comes to musical depictions of immigrant groups, the ‘Ice Cream Sextet’ evokes the spirit of Neapolitan song not only through its fast-paced sections in 6/8 but also by being led by a quintessential Italian tenor, Lippo Florentino. Henry’s ‘I Got a Marble and a Star,’ the second number in the show, likewise bears a strong blues influence, its style functioning as a racial signifier for African Americans.

Whiteness is performed through operatic-sounding music. The Maurrants – husband/father Frank, wife/mother Anna, and children Rose and Willie – are the generationally established white American family. Frank yearns for the ‘safe and sound’ world before the ‘lousy foreigners’ arrived. The Maurrants’ music, as well as that of Rose’s beloved, Sam, sets them – and their tragedies – apart from the other characters in the story. Musical style is not wholly segregated, for blues elements feature in the show’s opening number, ‘Ain’t it awful, the heat?’ and in Sam’s aria, ‘Lonely House.’

Finian’s Rainbow, which its authors called ‘a musical satire,’ concerns Finian McLonergan and his daughter Sharon, who arrive in Rainbow Valley in the mythical state of Missitucky (a fusion of Mississippi and Kentucky) from Ireland with a pot of gold stolen from the leprechaun Og. Whereas Street Scene operates under the tenets of realism, Finian’s Rainbow is a fable, rich in elements of fantasy. Unlike Senator Billboard Rawkins and his cronies, the sharecroppers who live in Rainbow Valley welcome Finian and Sharon. Rawkins remarks at one point, ‘My whole family’s been havin’ trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country [emphasis in original]!’¹⁷ Rawkins’s anti-immigrant, white supremacist attitude causes Sharon to wish, over the pot of gold, that he become black. Her wish comes true, and Rawkins experiences the racist slurs and treatment he so willfully lashed onto others. The Irish characters – Finian, Sharon, and Og – generally come across as the ones promoting antiracism, offering lessons to all the residents of Rainbow Valley. Likewise, it is their music, such as ‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?,’ ‘Look to the Rainbow,’ and ‘Old Devil Moon,’ that remain the most endearing songs from the show.

Race

Whiteness and racism run rampant throughout the history and legacy of the American musical. This is strongly evident in West Side Story, with Tony’s immigrant Polish community having become white, something that is not possible for the Puerto Ricans, many of whom would have sub-Saharan ancestry as a result of the Spanish slave trade.

Minstrelsy, which consisted of performances by whites in blackface of imagined black experiences with overt racist language and mannerisms, flourished on American stages in the nineteenth century. Blacks also appeared in minstrelsy, donning the requisite blackface. In the African American musicals that began to appear with greater frequency around the turn of the twentieth century, John Graziano asserts that ‘minstrelsy and racial pride coexist uncomfortably.’¹⁸ A corollary exists in West Side Story with its juxtaposition of performed racial stereotypes amidst a quest for betterment among the Puerto Rican immigrants.

The team of Bert Williams (1876–1922) and George Walker (1872–1911) starred in a series of musical comedies about black experiences that included In Dahomey (1903, book by Jesse A. Shipp, lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, music by Will Marion Cook) and Abyssinia (1906, book and lyrics by Shipp and Alexander Rogers; music by Cook and Bert Williams). In the former, a group of African Americans living in Florida journey to Dahomey as part of a colonization society, where they are imprisoned and sentenced to death before being rescued by the Williams and Walker characters.¹⁹ In Dahomey, with its depiction of rule and order in Dahomey as being ‘uncivilized,’ endorses Ibram X. Kendi’s remarks on the founding of the American Colonialization Society in 1817, ‘Africans in America had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans.’²⁰ The African Americans in In Dahomey certainly saw themselves as superior to the ‘savages’ of Dahomey. They performed on stage what W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed in 1900 at the First Pan-African Conference, ‘To be sure, the darker races are today the least advanced in culture according to European standards.’²¹ Du Bois, following assimilationist racist thought, advocated for gradual decolonization since in his estimation African nations were not yet advanced enough for independence. His words echoed those of his contemporaries who were saying the same thing about the colonies that the USA acquired after winning the Spanish-American War, places such as Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and, relevant to West Side Story, Puerto Rico.²²

The inappropriately heavy punishments for minor offenses from In Dahomey continued in Abyssinia. In the latter show, however, the Abyssinians are viewed as culturally superior to their African American visitors by speaking a stilted parody of ‘King’s English,’ while the speech of the African Americans evoked the demeaning sounds of minstrelsy.²³ The show opened in February 1906, three months before Franz Boaz gave his famous commencement address at Atlanta University. The noted anthropologist recalled the glories of precolonial West African kingdoms, telling the assembly: ‘To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the negro race, the past history of your race does not sustain [that] statement.’²⁴ Abyssinia played on a combination of these conflicting notions of racial pride and gradual decolonization, as would West Side Story.

Before Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) became ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein,’ they each created works that dealt with race. Hammerstein’s lyrics and libretti explored relationships between whites and various peoples of colour: indigenous nations in Rose-Marie (1924, music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart), Moroccans under French colonial rule in The Desert Song (1926, music by Sigmund Romberg), and African Americans in Show Boat (1927, music by Jerome Kern). In Show Boat Hammerstein and Kern offered a serious portrayal and interrogation of issues facing African Americans, especially during the miscegenation scene, when Julie’s mixed-race heritage is revealed.²⁵ In Rodgers’s case, the show was Babes in Arms (1937, book by Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, music by Rodgers, lyrics by Hart). To avoid being sent to a work farm as public charges after their parents go on the vaudeville circuit, Val and Marshall convince the sheriff that they can earn money by putting on a show. Among those who want to join the production are the African American siblings Irving and Ivory De Quincy. The wealthy white guy Lee Calhoun, who is underwriting the show and therefore is its producer, refuses to let the De Quincys perform on racist grounds. Val smacks him and sends the pair on stage for the show-within-a-show’s dance-heavy finale, ‘Johnny One-Note Ballet.’ (Lee ends up pulling his financing, which drives Val and his friends to the work farm, but everything works out at the end. It is a musical comedy, after all.)

When it comes to Rodgers and Hammerstein as a team, race is central to three of their musicals: South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and Flower Drum Song (1958), the latter appearing on the heels of West Side Story. While all three have been heavily criticized for their racist portrayals of Asian and Pacific cultures, they nonetheless perform ways in which different cultures interact, something that is central to West Side Story. White colonial attitudes dominate, even in South Pacific’s socially progressive dictate, ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.’

Opening the same year as South Pacific, Lost in the Stars (1949, book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Weill) took place in apartheid South Africa and concerned a young black man, Absalom Kumalo, accused of killing a white man during a botched robbery. Called a ‘musical tragedy,’ the work reflects the experiences of the black community, embodied by the chorus that occupies the work’s musical (and therefore dramatic) center, and Absalom’s father, the preacher Stephen Kumalo.²⁶ Among the musical’s most poignant moments is the choral anthem ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ (its title taken from the Alan Paton novel on which the musical is based), sung immediately after the white judge sentences Absalom to death. The antiphonal effects of black and white choruses in ‘Fear!’ is a harrowing manifestation of the anxieties caused by white-against-black violence. Weill’s idea of race-based choruses as characters is prescient of Bernstein’s treatment of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story.

Two musicals by white creators that offered images of African American cultures became important touchstones for such representations: the Broadway opera Porgy and Bess (1935, libretto by DuBose Heyward, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin) and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of George Bizet’s opera Carmen, Carmen Jones (1943, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett; film version 1954). Both feature entirely black casts (with the exception of small speaking parts for law enforcement characters in Porgy and Bess), and both have been interrogated for their staging of negative black stereotypes.²⁷ The rhapsodic score of the former and vibrant re-fashionings of Bizet’s music in the latter have kept both works in the public consciousness. Similar remarks could be made about West Side Story, its racist depictions of Puerto Ricans, and its captivating music.

Knife Violence

The intense rage associated with knife violence, the close proximity of bodies, and the physical force required make this type of killing intensely personal and terrifyingly visceral.²⁸ When Tony stabs Bernardo in West Side Story, the scene becomes part of a stage legacy dating back to antiquity. In terms of the operatic stage, some of the most famous on-stage knifings include Don José’s stabbing of the title character at the end of Bizet’s Carmen (1875), Canio’s double murder of Nedda and Silvio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), Tosca’s slaying of Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca (1899, first performed 1900), and the eponymous character’s slaughtering of Marie under a blood red moon in Berg’s Wozzeck (1914–1922, first performed 1925).²⁹

Knifings also occur in the plots of Broadway musicals in the first half of the twentieth century, though not with the frequency they do in the second half. Two of the most famous (or infamous) occur in Rose-Marie (1924) and Oklahoma! (1943, book and lyrics by Hammerstein, music by Richard Rodgers). In Rose-Marie, Wanda stabs her husband, the aggressive drunkard Blackeagle. According to the libretto, the scene is played behind a stage gauze, something that removes its intense directness while also offering the possibility to literally magnify the crime – and its horror – through lighting and shadows. As in Rose-Marie, a character marked with violent tendencies dies by the knife in Oklahoma! Here it is Jud Fry, who falls on his own blade during a fight with Curly.

Other types of violence appear in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. For example, there’s Billy’s horrific spousal abuse of Julie in Carousel (1945) and in The King and I, the king’s threatened beating of Tuptim and the brutal off-stage killing of her lover, Lun Tha. In the case of The King and I, the violence is linked to race in highly troubling ways, as it is in West Side Story.

Politics

A string of musicals from the 1930s employed satire as a way of addressing contemporary political and politicized issues. West Side Story’s ‘Gee, Officer Krupke,’ with its burlesque treatment of issues facing youth set to fast-paced razzmatazz music, has clear precedents in these shows.

The effervescence of musical comedy permeates a trio of works with songs by George and Ira Gershwin that played early in the decade: Strike Up the Band (1930, revised from 1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and its sequel, Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933). All three shows lampoon aspects of American political life at the time.

Morrie Ryskind’s book for Strike Up the Band offers a satirical look at the motivations for war. In George S. Kaufman’s scenario, the owner of a Connecticut-based cheese company underwrites a war between the USA and Switzerland in response to the Swiss protesting a US-imposed 50 percent tariff on imported cheese. As Howard Pollack asserts, the musical focused not on the absurdity of the war itself but rather on ‘the intolerance, paranoia, hypocrisy, self-serving moralizing, and exaggerated patriotism on the home front.’³⁰ These qualities are clearly evident in the show’s march-like title song.

Of Thee I Sing, with a book by Kaufman and Ryskind, includes the impeachment trial of a sitting US president, something considered remarkable at the time, since the only one to have taken place to date was of Andrew Johnson in 1868, and he was not convicted. In Of Thee I Sing, President John P. Wintergreen, who was elected on a platform of love, chose to marry a campaign worker, Mary Turner, who bakes delicious corn muffins, rather than Diana Devereaux, who won the beauty contest tied to his campaign. Diana vows revenge, causing bad publicity. Wintergreen’s advisors suggest he resign to quell the public relations crisis, and when he refuses to do so, they impeach him. As the Senate is about to deliver its verdict, Mary enters and tells everyone that she is pregnant. The vice president, Alexander Throttlebottom, declares that there’s no precedent for impeaching an ‘expectant father,’ and the case evaporates. Larry Starr succinctly describes the basic message of the show: ‘American politics are haphazard, unburdened by principle, and readily swayed on the spur of the moment.’³¹ Gershwin’s music matches the dramatic need at any given point in the show, whether it’s the campaign march ‘Wintergreen for President,’ the jaunty title song, the slightly syncopated love song ‘Who Cares,’ or the extended musical-dramatic sequences such as the Act 1 finale. Just as Bernstein will do in his indictment of social issues in West Side Story, music here serves specific dramatic purposes.

Let ’Em Eat Cake, as a sequel to Of Thee I Sing, features Wintergreen, Mary, and Throttlebottom, all played by the same actors who created the roles. Wintergreen has lost his bid for reelection to John P. Tweedledee, and when the Supreme Court denies the incumbent’s request to overturn the landslide vote, he and his followers enter the garment industry and start a blue-shirt revolution, modeled on Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini’s black shirts. They stage a coup and Wintergreen becomes ‘dictator of the proletariat’ and turns the White House into the Blue House, after the colour of his revolution. When the League of Nations beats the US Supreme Court in a baseball game to settle war debts, Wintergreen and his cohort are sentenced to death by guillotine, only to be saved when Mary and the other wives enter wearing new fashions from Paris instead of the state-mandated blue blouses. Wintergreen ends up entering the dress-making business, Tweedledee becomes president of Cuba, and Throttlebottom becomes US president. The innate plot absurdities were perfect means to address the worsening economic depression, the ineptitude of government officials, and the rise of fascism in Europe. The show’s only hit song was the counterpoint song ‘Mine,’ in which Wintergreen declares his steadfast commitment to Mary.³² A much more famous counterpoint song, the ‘Tonight’ (Quintet), will feature prominently in West Side Story.

While the clothing industry was central to the satire in Let ’Em Eat Cake it was the lifeblood of Pins and Needles (1937), a revue featuring left-leaning sketches by Marc Blitzstein, among others, and music and lyrics by Harold Rome. Labor Stage, Inc. produced the show under the sponsorship of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), with members of the union appearing on stage. According to Trudi Wright, a large part of the show’s success came from its tempered political perspective.³³ Though still decidedly pro-worker and anti-fascist, it avoided overly radical sentiments, even with such progressively titled songs as ‘Sing Us a Song with Social Significance,’ ‘Doin’ the Reactionary,’ and ‘Four Little Angels of Peace Are We.’

The same night that the politically tempered Pins and Needles opened at the Labor Stage, 27 November, an overtly leftist work, this one entirely the creation of Marc Blitzstein, began playing at the Mercury Theatre. Audiences at The Cradle Will Rock experienced an ‘oratorio version’ of the work that featured Blitzstein at the piano and the principals, in street clothes, seated on a raised platform with the chorus on another platform behind them.³⁴ In Blitzstein’s story, Larry Foreman, a mill foreman in Steeltown USA, organizes his fellow workers and gains the support of the town’s underclass, including the prostitute Moll, against the capitalist Mister family (Mr. Mister, Mrs. Mister, Sister Mister, and Brother Mister) and Mr. Mister’s anti-union Liberty Committee. Blitzstein’s highly sophisticated score played at the banalities of much of the era’s popular music, as in ‘Honolulu,’ while the show’s leftist message came through in its polystylistic and austere-sounding numbers such as the title song, ‘The Freedom of the Press,’ ‘Art for Art’s Sake,’ and ‘The Nickel under Your Foot.’ The show addressed numerous social issues of the time beyond unions and the intimidation of union organizers, including imperialist fantasy, student militia groups, hypermasculinity, and even the preciousness of classical artistes.³⁵ Blitzstein himself remarked that the show concerned the plight of the middle class and its need to look to the future, not the past.³⁶

The tale of the work’s first public performance on 16 June 1937 has become at least as famous as its content. With its genesis in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theater Project, the show’s unapologetic political content in terms of the New Deal and labor unions brought about an injunction against the performance, causing the theatre where it was scheduled to play (the Maxine Elliott) to be padlocked. A theatre broker for producer John Houseman and director Orson Welles found the Venice Theatre empty, booked it, and the troupe performed the decidedly pro-union show with Blitzstein alone on stage at a piano and the cast singing and speaking their lines from the audience, since their union prohibited them from performing on stage.³⁷

Three weeks before Pins and Needles and The Cradle Will Rock began their Broadway runs, a show of a completely different ilk about New Deal policies opened. I’d Rather Be Right (1937, book by Kaufman and Moss Hart, music by Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart) concerns a young couple, Phil and Peggy, who want to marry. However, they do not think it prudent unless Phil gets a pay raise, something that won’t happen until Roosevelt balances the federal budget. In a dream sequence, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (played by George M. Cohan) tries all sorts of absurd ways to balance the budget, but, in the end, he is unable to do so and encourages the young couple to marry anyway, adding that he needs another term in office in order to balance the budget and restore the country’s happiness. Most reviews deemed it a kindhearted attempt at political satire, with Roosevelt portrayed as, according to Garrett Eisler, ‘a well-meaning grandfatherly figure surrounded by dubious advisors.’³⁸ The script sharply targeted various aspects of the New Deal – for example, the high taxes directed at the wealthy, Social Security, the Federal Theatre Project, and organized labor – to the point where numerous scholars, including Eisler, deem it essentially right wing.³⁹ The show includes Roosevelt’s press conference number ‘Off the Record,’ performed in a style reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan as the creators jabbed at ineffective or unqualified government officials.

The New Deal also figures in the plot of Knickerbocker Holiday (1938, book by Anderson, lyrics by Anderson and Weill, music by Weill), which relates the story of Pieter Stuyvesant, the tyrannical governor of Manhattan in the seventeenth century.⁴⁰ Based on Washington Irving’s satire, The History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), it takes a pre-existent text and infuses it with contemporary references, not completely unrelated to what Arthur Laurents did when transforming Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into West Side Story. Among the many politically charged songs in the show is ‘How Can You Tell an American?’, a duet for Washington Irving, who functions as the show’s narrator and brings about a happy denouement, and Brom Broeck, the show’s anti-Stuyvesant rabble rouser. Through sprightly music and clever list-song lyrics, the pair define an American as someone who cannot take orders (is defiant) and hates corruption (promotes justice). Other politically infused songs include the anthem-like ‘One Touch of Alchemy,’ in which Stuyvesant’s democratic reform appears to be indistinguishable from tyranny, and the buoyant ‘Ballad of the Robbers,’ the Act 2 opening in which Irving observes that the real criminals run free while the good guys (Brom) are locked behind bars.

Bernstein, Blitzstein, and Weill

The socially conscious musicals from the 1930s certainly resonated with Bernstein. On 27 May 1939, while a senior at Harvard, he led the greater Boston premiere of The Cradle Will Rock at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with the support of the Harvard Student Union and several faculty sponsors.⁴¹ Following Blitzstein’s model, Bernstein played the piano on-stage (and from memory), announced the scenes, and played some bit parts. The production sparked controversy from a local politician, while the critics praised it.

On 14 June 1952, while on the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Bernstein conducted a concert performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera as part of the university’s Festival of the Creative Arts (which Bernstein founded). Blitzstein prepared the translation of the team’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) and also served as the performance’s narrator, echoing his role in the early performances of The Cradle Will Rock. This concert was the impetus for a ‘Weill renaissance’ in the 1950s that included a production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village that ran 2,611 performances.⁴²

The Allure of Latin America

In his 1933 inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated himself and his administration to a ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ intended to improve relations between the USA and the nations of Central and South America. He emphasized cooperation and trade as the means to maintain this relationship, rather than military intervention. The plan kept Latin American nations aligned with the USA during World War II but began to unravel in the 1940s as the USA began to intervene in domestic affairs in Argentina, then elsewhere. Because of the Good Neighbor Policy, celebratory images of Latin America infused popular entertainment in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s, including Broadway musicals.

One instance was the football-themed campus musical comedy Too Many Girls (1939, book by George Marion, Jr., lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Rodgers). The story concerns a scandal-prone East Coast heiress, Consuelo Casey (despite her name, she’s white), whose father sends her to his alma mater, Pottawatomie College in Stop Gap, New Mexico, to keep her out of trouble. He hires four bodyguards to watch over her, all of whom are college-age football players. Of course, she falls in love with one of them. In his breakout role, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz (1917–1986) played Manuelito, an Argentine star of prep-school American football (not soccer). Manuelito’s love interest is Pepe, a student from Mexico. The Puerto Rican-born entertainer Diosa Costello (1913–2013) played Pepe, and in doing so, became known as the first Latina to appear on Broadway.⁴³ Manuelito and Pepe’s race-based romantic segregation, along with the show’s avoidance of interracial romance, leads to a racist idea of ‘exotic but equal’ when it comes to romantic couples in Too Many Girls. Individually and together, Pepe and Manuelito performed several cringeworthy-titled songs that reflected a collective Latin American identity which erases cultural distinctions. After all, a Cuban actor is playing an Argentine character who performs the idea of Mexican music.

Feting South America was central to the revue Sons o’ Fun (1943), which extolled the comic antics of the team Olsen and Johnson (vaudevillians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson). Extravagant production numbers such as ‘Thank You, South America’ and ‘Manuelo’ featured dynamic performances by the Spanish-born flamenco team of Rosario and Antonio (also known as Los Chevalillos) and the future Hollywood icon, Brazilian Carmen Miranda.

References to Latin America continued to appear in musicals during the early 1950s. In Guys and Dolls (1950, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows), Sky Masterson takes Sarah Brown to Havana, where after drinking a ‘Cuban milkshake,’ which unbeknownst to her includes rum, she kisses Sky and sings ‘If I Were a Bell.’ The first act of Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (1953, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov) ends with the high-energy ‘Conga,’ which begins with Ruth, a recent New York arrival, and a group of Brazilian naval cadets. Before the number ends, all of Christopher Street, where Ruth lives with her sister, have joined in the celebration.

* * *

West Side Story rests on a dynamic array of palimpsests, as this chapter demonstrates. The Broadway musical encompasses a rich heritage of shows concerning immigrant experiences, race, knife violence, politics, and the allure of Latin America. Building on performances of immigrant lives and race relations in The Mulligan Guard Ball through political satires in the 1930s to the nascent presence of Latinx actors and music in light of the Good Neighbor Policy, West Side Story forms an important part of the American musical theatre’s ongoing legacy of social relevance.

When the curtain rose in the Adelphi Theatre on 28 December 1944, and On the Town erupted onto the Broadway stage, it was the culmination of a journey for twenty-six-year-old Leonard Bernstein that had begun many years before, when a love of musical theatre had first been kindled in the young Lenny’s heart. From an early age, Bernstein had absorbed every musical experience placed before him, and there was certainly an eclectic range on offer. In his piano lessons, started at the age of ten, he studied the standard repertoire of classical pieces, whilst at home he would play by ear popular melodies, ragtime and jazz music that he heard on the radio.¹ When attending the Temple Mishkan Tefila, Bernstein was captivated by the organ and choral music that was performed as part of the worship; from the age of thirteen he was taken by his father to concerts at Boston Symphony Hall.² One of Bernstein’s first experiences of opera came when he played through four-hand piano arrangements with his younger sister, Shirley, and these explorations led to Lenny’s initiation into the musical theatre on a very practical level: at the age of only sixteen, Bernstein began the tradition of mounting a musical production whilst the family were at their summer residence in Sharon, initially persuading other enthusiastic local young people to join in a rather satirical performance of Bizet’s Carmen.³ Bernstein himself, unsurprisingly, took charge of various aspects of the show: ‘Leonard was in charge of staging and choreography as well as the music. That he could cope without help from an experienced guiding hand, such as a drama teacher or music teacher, illustrates an early ability to organise and lead a large group of performers. His innate sense of theatre was already beginning to assert itself.’⁴

Bernstein’s involvement with the theatre continued during his university days at Harvard, with two very significant events occurring barely a month apart in 1939: creating and conducting incidental music for the Classical Club’s performance of Aristophanes’ The Birds, and mounting a student production of Marc Blitzstein’s headline-grabbing show The Cradle Will Rock. The first of these events marked Bernstein’s conducting debut, while the second introduced him both to Blitzstein, who attended the premiere, and also to the concept that perhaps composing in general, and for the theatre more specifically, could be a worthy vocation. However, Bernstein’s head was turned as he began studying at the Curtis Institute in the autumn of 1939, and although he returned to Harvard to contribute more incidental music for The Peace in 1941, increasingly Bernstein’s time was taken up with conducting and highbrow composing. It was only following a move to New York in 1942, and his famous debut conducting the New York Philharmonic on 14 November 1943, standing in for an indisposed Bruno Walter, that the theatre literally came knocking on Bernstein’s door once again.

Fancy Free

Despite all the preceding events and experiences, it was to be through modern dance that Bernstein first reached the New York stage. The American choreographer Jerome Robbins was searching for a composer to collaborate with on his new American ballet, and the theatre designer Oliver Smith directed Robbins to Bernstein’s studio in Carnegie Hall. Robbins described the meeting: ‘We went up and saw him. I showed him my scenario, which was very well preceded [sic], it followed the story exactly as it is, and then he started composing.’⁵ The resulting ballet, Fancy Free, opened at the Metropolitan Opera on 18 April 1944 and was an instant success: ‘The music by Leonard Bernstein utilizes jazz in about the same proportion that Robbins’s choreography does … It is a fine score, humorous, inventive and musically interesting. Indeed the whole ballet, performance included, is just exactly ten degrees north of terrific.’⁶ Fancy Free follows three sailors on shore leave in New York City, hunting for female company for the twenty-four hours of freedom that they have. In Bernstein’s words: ‘From the moment the action begins, with the sound of a juke-box wailing behind the curtain, the ballet is strictly young wartime America, 1944.’⁷ The servicemen compete for the attention of two girls, and attempt to impress them with their dancing prowess, individually demonstrating their skills in a galop, a waltz and a danzón. Robbins himself danced the role of the third sailor, his choreography perfectly matching the rhythmic complexity and dynamic energy of Bernstein’s music, a moment that foreshadowed one of their later collaborations: ‘the “Danzón” movement … stands out stylistically, providing a view of Bernstein’s early tie to Latin musical traditions, a linkage that proved to have future implications for West Side Story’.⁸ In Fancy Free, Bernstein and Robbins, together with Oliver Smith, had produced an American masterpiece that spoke to the American people in a language that they understood and related to, a language of music and dance that they would witness again very soon in the trio’s next work together: On the Town.

On the Town

There was perhaps an element of inevitability about Bernstein writing music for Broadway, and following the success of their first collaboration, it was not long before it was suggested that Robbins, Smith and Bernstein expand the story of their three sailors on twenty-four-hour shore-leave into a full-scale musical. Not unexpectedly, ballet and dance would feature prominently in the narrative, as the trio of friends travel through New York searching for love and romance, but now with the addition of songs to help propel the fast-moving story forward. To create the libretto and lyrics, Bernstein recommended Adolph Green and Betty Comden; Bernstein had known Green since late adolescence when they met at summer camp in 1937, and had also played piano for the satirical nightclub group The Revuers, of which Comden and Green were members.⁹ The team was completed by the producer George Abbott, who provided the experience and knowledge that the young and fresh colleagues needed to bring the musical to the stage (see Figure 2.1). Just over seven months after Fancy Free had opened, On the Town premiered to critical acclaim:

Figure 2.1 Writing On the Town: from left, Leonard Bernstein, Adolph Green; centre foreground, Betty Comden; right, Jerome Robbins.

(Credit: Used with permission of Photofest, Inc.)

On the Town retains the trio of servicemen that had featured in Fancy Free, but every other aspect of the tale is original, and on their trip through the city the young men are waylaid by amorous women. The innocent country boy of the three, Chip, is seduced by a rather insistent taxi-driver called Hildy, and the clown of the group, Ozzie (played by Green), falls for the anthropologist Claire (Comden). Gabey, the dreamer among the boys, decides that he has to find Ivy Smith, who has been featured as ‘Miss Turnstiles for June’ on posters in the subway. He finds her in Carnegie Hall, loses her again and, with the help of his friends and their new-found sweethearts, is reunited with her just as the men have to return to their ship.

The energy and enthusiasm of the collaborators is embodied in Bernstein’s music, and following the slow bluesy opening of ‘I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet’, the three sailors burst onto the stage accompanied by the sound of syncopated urban jazz, reflecting the unbridled vivacity of the men as they descend on ‘New York, New York’; their entrance is heralded with a fanfare to the city, a significant ascending motif that reappears at various points in the show, particularly in the dances. The driving rhythms with shifting accents and the dissonances of jazz harmonies encapsulate the constant hum of life in the city and the exhilaration and excitement of New York, especially as observed through the eyes of the visiting sailors. There is an edginess and restlessness that echoes the urban music of Copland and Gershwin. Further lively musical depictions can be heard at the end of the first half in ‘Times Square Ballet’, and in ‘The Real Coney Island’ towards the end of the show, in addition to featuring at other moments in the action; the Big Apple emerges almost as a protagonist in the story in its own right, displaying different characteristics at various points in the evening, but always portrayed in the language of American contemporary culture. As pointed out by Baber, ‘the prevalence of jazz, from the opening of “New York, New York” through chase music and subway sequences that recall Gershwin’s An American in Paris, leaves no doubt as to the verve and energy of the New York locale’.¹¹

The rhythmic vitality of On the Town is not only derived from the syncopations of jazz, but also from instances of Latin American dances. The first is a brief but significant example, when we hear a very recognisable rhythm in the ‘Conga Cabana’. This snippet of music had originally been composed by Bernstein for The Peace, and it would make another more significant appearance in Wonderful Town, as will be discussed below. The conga marks the change of scene into The Congacabana, a Latin nightclub where the sailors find themselves, together with Claire and Hildy. A nightclub singer wails ‘I Wish I Was Dead’, a number heard in a blues style in another establishment they had visited previously that night, but here transformed into a brisk beguine to suit the location. Having encountered Ivy earlier in the evening and arranged to meet her again, Gabey has been stood up, and with his mood rapidly descending, his shipmates and their new sweethearts attempt to cheer him up in the following ensemble number, ‘Ya Got Me’. The Latin influence continues in this song, which is underpinned by an insistent rumba rhythm, and demonstrated flamboyantly in an exhilarating dance break derived from the vocal music.

The energy and dynamism of New York also extends to its inhabitants and is particularly present in the comedy songs that characterise the female protagonists. Claire sings a mock-operatic comic duet with Ozzie as they bemoan the fact that they both get ‘Carried Away’, and Ivy leads a female ensemble number in ‘Carnegie Hall Pavane’, which begins as a scalar vocal warm up, gradually shifting in styles until it ‘provides a riotous flash point for the high–low fusions that define On the Town, invading the sacred space of “Carnegie Hall” with rousing swing rhythms and bluesy harmonies’.¹² Hildy has two songs that help to outline her very determined character: ‘Come Up to My Place’, where the objecting Chip is practically abducted in her cab, and ‘I Can Cook Too’, Hildy’s solo seduction song as she lists her extensive attributes. Oja points out that ‘the women usually had the last word in these songs, as they vigorously – sometimes raucously – breached the gender norms of their day’.¹³ When heard separately from the metropolitan ladies, the men sound a little tamer, even when they are setting out their intentions for adventure in ‘New York, New York’. In the song ‘Gabey’s Comin’’, Chip and Ozzie advise their friend on how to go about picking up a date, but there is still an element of innocence in the pick-up lines they suggest.¹⁴ Gabey’s romantic tendencies are embodied in the ballads that he sings, ‘Lonely Town’ and ‘Lucky to Be Me’, the sentimental and somewhat nostalgic sound contrasting strongly with the strident metropolitan music of the women’s numbers.

Bernstein, Comden, Green and Robbins had collaborated to create a fun and thrilling Broadway musical, but there was one specific dimension that lifted On the Town to a different level of theatre entertainment: the dances. The ballets that Robbins choreographed to Bernstein’s music helped to move the story forward in a way that had only been observed in a small number of shows prior to 1944, including Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes (1936), and Oklahoma! (1943) by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the second of which is frequently considered to be one of the first integrated musicals, with all the elements having equal importance in advancing the narrative.¹⁵ On the Town contains eight discrete dance movements, all of which present important elements of the story: ‘Presentation of Miss Turnstiles’, ‘High School Girls’, ‘Lonely Town Pas de Deux’, ‘Times Square Ballet’, ‘Subway Ride and Imaginary Coney Island’, ‘The Great Lover Displays Himself’, ‘Pas de Deux’ and ‘The Real Coney Island’.¹⁶ However, Bernstein’s background in highbrow composition led to a symphonic aspect in the dances,¹⁷ and a complexity not previously heard within the musical theatre. There were also interconnections between the movements created by employment of recurring motifs that had already been heard in the songs, and which, in the manner of leitmotifs, had garnered some significance. These motifs linked the dances either to Gabey or to the city, perhaps the two real protagonists of the story. Two years after the opening of the show, Bernstein extracted three of the dances and published them for concert use as On the Town: Three Dance Episodes. In the original programme note, he stated: ‘That these are, in their way, symphonic pieces rarely occurs to the audience actually attending the show, so well integrated are all the elements.’¹⁸ Bernstein’s music for On the Town blends classical and popular, highbrow and lowbrow, symphonic techniques and Broadway traditions, creating an eclectic mixture that is a feature of Bernstein’s writing. Of course, On the Town was not just the end of Bernstein’s journey to Broadway, but also the start of another, as he and his collaborators continued their adventures on the New York stage.

Nine years would pass before Bernstein would write the score for another show on Broadway, and in the interim, he composed for three other theatrical projects. The first of these, the ballet Facsimile (1946), was another collaboration with Jerome Robbins, while for the second, Bernstein contributed incidental music and songs to a 1950 production of Peter Pan. The last of these ventures was his opera of 1951/52, Trouble in Tahiti, for which Bernstein wrote both the libretto and the music. The seven scenes tell a tale of marital disharmony and distrust in the relationship between Sam and Dinah, possibly reflecting the troubled marriage of his own parents, but with a touch of jazz lightening the mood in the observations of a trio of singers, a Greek chorus commenting on the action. There is also another moment of Latin American influence, in Dinah’s aria ‘What a Movie!’, which is based on rumba and beguine rhythms.

Wonderful Town

1952 saw Bernstein reunited with Comden and Green, working together to a very tight deadline, as they had less than five weeks to create the songs for Wonderful Town, a musical expansion of Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields’ successful 1940 play My Sister Eileen. The writers had adapted their original work first for a movie version in 1942, starring Rosalind Russell in the central role of Ruth, and now they had crafted the libretto for a musical theatre production. The producers Robert Fryer and George Abbott had a contract for Miss Russell to reprise her role in the new version, but the contributions of their first-choice composer and lyricist had not been satisfactory, so the team from On the Town were brought in to complete the show, and furnish Wonderful Town with the musical numbers, before the contract expired. Although alterations were still being carried out through the try-outs in New Haven, the show opened to rave reviews at the Winter Garden on 26 February 1953: ‘“Wonderful Town,” which opened there last evening, is the most uproarious and original musical carnival we have had since “Guys and Dolls” appeared in this neighborhood.’¹⁹ One of the things that attracted Bernstein, Comden and Green to the project was the location, the action again set in New York, and more specifically in Greenwich Village, a district very close to the trio’s heart where they had lived and performed in the late 1930s. As the show was to be set in 1935, this meant the creative team could indulge in a nostalgic excursion into the musical styles of their past, using specific sounds and genres to establish the period and inhabitants of the city. In the first song, ‘Christopher Street’, a tour guide points out the streets and characters of the area, as the music opens with a vamp made famous by the flamboyant New York 1930s pianist and bandleader Eddie Duchin, setting the scene and defining the era of the show. Following our introduction to a rather bohemian and chaotic side of New York City, we meet two sisters, Ruth and Eileen, arriving from Columbus, Ohio and feeling a little overwhelmed in this new urban location. Just as the male protagonists of On the Town were from out-of-town, so the girls are new to the bustling metropolis, and the ensuing clash of cultures forms an important thread in the show. The girls’ first duet, ‘Ohio’, laments the hometown they have left behind, the lazy swung bass line reminiscent of a cowboy song, evoking a provincial ‘country’ sound that contrasts sharply with the preceding exhibition of city life that we have just witnessed.

Ruth and Eileen attempt to forge new lives for themselves in New York, as a journalist and an actress respectively, but neither are successful; Ruth’s journalistic endeavours are rejected, and Eileen receives more propositions than job offers. We are introduced to other interesting residents, including the girls’ landlord Mr Appopolous, an out of season professional footballer nicknamed The Wreck, a local drug-store manager called Frank Lippencott, and Bob Baker, an editor at the Manhatter who eventually wins Ruth’s heart. The character songs and ballads are standard fare for Broadway, although there is frequently an intellectual element that lends an extra depth to the lyrics and the music. Ruth’s first solo, ‘One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man’, is an inventive set of instructions on how to scare away male attention, apparently based on Russell’s instruction that the song should be ‘da-da-da-da-joke da-da-da-da-joke’.²⁰ The comedic nature of the lyrics, which include a grammar lesson directed at an imaginary unfortunate suitor, combines with Bernstein’s relaxed swing music, with occasional impertinent orchestral punctuation, to underline the sardonic facet of Ruth’s character. The ballads ‘A Little Bit in Love’ and ‘A Quiet Girl’, sung by Eileen and Bob respectively, are gentle and simple songs, oases of genuine emotion amongst all the posturing and pretence that appear to dominate the lives of the city dwellers.

One particularly inventive moment comes in ‘Conversation Piece’, when the sisters are visited by Frank, Bob and Chick Clark, who is attempting to inveigle himself into Eileen’s affections by providing Ruth with a job opportunity; the combination of callers results in a very awkward dinner party. The tension and unease of the situation is encapsulated perfectly in a heavy and melancholic vamp which is interrupted by various attempts to initiate polite conversation, all of which fizzle away leaving the orchestra to take over again. Eventually the tension is broken in a rather manic final section, as Eileen trills coloratura-like above the other singers, in a slightly hysterical manner.²¹ The dramatic function of the music in this number was important to Bernstein: ‘That’s the kind of thing I like to do in the theatre. The background is pure theatre music, operating exclusively in theatre terms, not with an eye on Tin Pan Alley, and not to create a memorable tune, but something which is an integral part of the story’;²² this integration, such a significant aspect in On the Town, is absent from the majority of Wonderful Town. In the place of the earlier show’s narrative ballets, we have a dance pantomime in ‘Conquering New York’, which depicts Ruth and Eileen’s struggles in their first weeks in the city, as their attempts to find employment are met with rejection and dismissal. The only other distinct dance item is ‘Ballet at the Village Vortex’, a diegetic number which appears at the opening of the final scene and functions to establish the atmosphere in the club rather than moving the story forward. Other significant sections of dance music can be found in ‘Swing!’, ‘Wrong Note Rag’, ‘Pass the Football’, ‘My Darlin’ Eileen’ and ‘Conga!’. The first two of these numbers demonstrate different aspects of jazz: the contemporary 1930s rhythmic phenomenon in ‘Swing’, and earlier ragtime and novelty piano styles in ‘Wrong Note Rag’. The final two songs in the list introduce pastiches of music from outside the city, indeed from outside the USA, that underline the diversity of New York, and its reputation as a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. In ‘My Darlin’ Eileen’ the younger sister is serenaded by a contingent of the NYPD in the style of an Irish jig, while ‘Conga!’ is the energetic final number in the first half. Ruth finally has a writing assignment, and is sent to interview the Brazilian navy cadets who are docked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The young sailors are more interested in dancing than talking, and despite Ruth’s best efforts to garner their opinions on a wide range of American issues and personalities, an uproarious conga begins (which at least one cadet believes is an American dance, although another does point out that it is Cuban). As mentioned previously, the underlying vamp for this number is recycled music, as it had already appeared in The Peace and On the Town, but here it is expanded and combined with a cross-rhythmic vocal line, the dramatic interest maintained by the encyclopedic references to the 1930s in the lyrics, while the excitement is escalated by ascending key changes, until it seems that the whole of Greenwich Village has joined in the dance.

Olin Downes had this to say about Bernstein’s contribution: ‘On the purely musical side a composer and a phenomenal musician … enriches his palette with many a pungent touch of dissonance and modern harmonic color, while yet keeping very clearly to the popular tone, the rhythmic vigor, the common human touch of our contemporaneous music of entertainment.’²³

Following Wonderful Town, it was not long until Bernstein turned again to theatrical music, but this time for a different medium, as he created his one and only film score for Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. There is an edginess and darkness to some of the music that Bernstein created for Kazan, reflecting the gritty nature of the story, as Terry (Brando) risks his life to take a stand against the crooked dockyard bosses in New York. There was more writing for the screen in 1955, although this time on a smaller scale, when Bernstein provided incidental music for a television production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, including a ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.²⁴ However, Bernstein had another encounter with Broadway between these two compositions, when he collaborated with Lillian Hellman on an adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play The Lark, based on the story of Joan of Arc. When the play opened in the Longacre Theatre on 17 November 1955, the audience were treated to the incidental choral music that Bernstein had crafted, utilising a seven-part a cappella ensemble, with some accompaniment from bells and hand drum; the songs were pre-recorded rather than performed live. The texts set were a mix of medieval French folk songs and the Roman Catholic liturgy, and Bernstein would later refashion the movements into his Missa Brevis.²⁵ This collaboration with Hellman occurred in the middle of another creative process involving the pair: the creation of Candide.

Candide

Bernstein’s return to Broadway on 1 December 1956 was not a return to the urban sophistication of On the Town and Wonderful Town, but to the world of operetta; jazz and Tin Pan Alley were replaced by the nostalgic sounds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. As the political atmosphere in the USA had become highly charged and vehemently anti-communist in the late 1940s, many of those who worked in the entertainment industry had found themselves under investigation, including Hellman herself. As a response to what became known as ‘McCarthyism’ – Senator Joseph McCarthy had been a prominent voice in the witch-hunt – Hellman settled upon Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide as a vehicle to protest the current situation. Although Bernstein was not called to testify before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), he had his own negative encounter with the political establishment when the US Justice Department refused to renew his passport in July 1953. The situation was only resolved when he gave an extended affidavit under oath confirming that he was not now nor had ever been a member of the Communist Party.²⁶ Bernstein joined the Candide project early in 1954, and he later qualified his reasons for agreeing to work on the production: ‘Voltaire’s satire is international. It throws light on all the dark places, whether European or American … Puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitorial attacks on the individual, brave-new-world optimism, essential superiority – aren’t these all charges leveled against American society by our best thinkers? And they are also the charges made by Voltaire against his own society.’²⁷ Although Bernstein and Hellman were committed to the project, finding a lyricist to complete the creative team proved a complicated task. By the time Candide opened, lyric contributions had been made by John La Touche, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur and Bernstein himself.²⁸ Despite the gravity of the original intentions, and what some considered to be a heavy-handed libretto created by Hellman, the score that Bernstein contributed contained some charming and light-hearted moments, as noted by the critic Brooks Atkinson, ‘None of his previous theatre music has had the joyous variety, humor and richness of this score. It begins wittily. It parodies operatic music amusingly. But it also has a wealth of melody that compensates for the intellectual austerity of Voltaire’s tale. While Candide is learning about life the hard way, Mr. Bernstein is obviously having a good time.’²⁹

The story follows Candide on his picaresque journey around the globe as he attempts to find happiness in a world where the odds appear to be stacked against him. From our hero’s optimistic beginnings in Westphalia with his teacher Pangloss, whose theories are embodied in ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’, he travels to Lisbon, Paris, Buenos Aires, Eldorado and Venice, before returning to a now ruined Westphalia, having survived war, an inquisition, earthquakes, duels, slavery and drowning. Joining Candide at various points in this odyssey are his sweetheart Cunegonde, her brother Maximilian, an Old Lady, and a pessimist called Martin, together with a large cast of lesser characters. The variety of locations offered Bernstein the opportunity to employ a wide range of musical styles in skilful pastiches and parodies, including a Bach-like chorale (‘Wedding Procession, Chorale and Battle Scene’), a rousing schottische in ‘Bon Voyage’, and a Straussian waltz in the ‘Paris Waltz Scene’; we hear echoes of Bellini, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and twelve-tone music. However, even in his homage to operetta Bernstein still manages to indulge his predilection for Latin American dance rhythms. In the first scene in Buenos Aires we are presented with ‘I Am Easily Assimilated’, a rather anachronistic tango as the eighteenth-century setting is at least one hundred years too early for such a dance to be heard, but the colour that the music adds to the Old Lady’s explanation of her apparent ability to thrive in any circumstances reflects perfectly her attitude to life: ‘faking her way through a number of situations and cultures, she has survived by her ability to assimilate into any milieu’.³⁰ This song also contains one of the few dance breaks in the show, as the surrounding crowd is infected by the Old Lady’s confident and tenacious spirit.

One of the most performed songs from Candide is Cunegonde’s aria, ‘Glitter and Be Gay’, sung by Candide’s betrothed as she is installed in a luxurious and bejewelled Paris boudoir, generously endowed by two gentlemen. She laments her current unvirtuous situation in a jewel song in the mould of Gounod, but with elements of a laughing song and just the hint of a brisk habanera. The florid coloratura writing which attracts so many sopranos to this show-piece aria demonstrates the influence of the operas that Bernstein had conducted,³¹ and, as previously noted, had been briefly foreshadowed by Eileen’s vocal histrionics in ‘Conversation Piece’.

The dance forms that Bernstein employed, the waltzes, gavotte and schottische, have rhythmic identities of their own, but as Candide is comic operetta rather than musical comedy,³² there is a paucity of dance in the show, excepting the section in ‘I Am Easily Assimilated’, and the separate dance item ‘Paris Waltz Scene’. With the strident patterns of jazz and swing notably absent from Bernstein’s score, the rhythmic vitality of Candide is rooted in the use of complex metres and shifting time signatures. These are first seen in the ‘Overture’ where the metre fluctuates between duple and triple time, a device also utilised in ‘Pilgrim’s Procession’, ‘Venice Gambling Scene’, and to a lesser degree in ‘Make Our Garden Grow’. Bernstein also employs quintuple and septuple time signatures, particularly in ‘Oh Happy We’ and ‘Ballad of Eldorado’, and frequently includes strong cross rhythms, seen in ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’, ‘Glitter and be Gay’, ‘Bon Voyage’, and ‘Paris Waltz Scene’. These techniques have the effect of distancing the music of Candide from Bernstein’s earlier musical theatre scores and aligning it with his highbrow compositions and operatic ambitions, although still retaining a sense of humour in the unexpected twists and turns.

At the end of Voltaire’s tale, and Hellman’s libretto, a great many events have occurred, but after all the melodrama, the struggles, fights, deaths, abandonments and lies, after all the parodies and pastiches and rhythmic trickery comes one of the only moments of genuine emotion in ‘Make Our Garden Grow’.³³ The foolish optimism of the beginning of the show has matured into a more realistic expectation of the future, as the characters accept that this world is not the paradise they once believed it to be, and that their lives are not destined for perfection. Richard Wilbur’s lyric takes its cue from Voltaire’s final line ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’,³⁴ and from a rising octave melodic motif heard scattered throughout the show that is associated with Cunegonde, Bernstein fashioned some of the most expressive choral music he ever wrote; as Crist articulates in her article considering the political atmosphere surrounding Candide: ‘The grand and affecting style of “Make Our Garden Grow” casts aside Voltaire’s studied skepticism to realise the composer’s own humanistic credo … [Bernstein’s] romantic faith in humanity and essential optimism resound throughout “Make Our Garden Grow”, which celebrates absolute unanimity.’³⁵

Despite all the sparkle and wit in Bernstein’s score, it could not be reconciled with Hellman’s bitingly satirical libretto, and the 1956 Candide was not a success, running for only seventy-three performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. However, Bernstein had already begun work on his next Broadway project and he had in fact been composing both scores in parallel. His new show would mark a return to collaborating with Jerome Robbins, and would open in New York less than eleven months later, changing musical theatre forever.

Jerome Robbins’s career prior to West Side Story was a balancing act between the vastly different worlds of concert ballet and Broadway musicals. Robbins’s often Janus-faced artistic identity was created not out of random opportunities but because his way of working stemmed from a narrative investigation of movement that was forged in a unique time when ballet was modernizing and musical theatre was discovering the dramatic potential of dance. This chapter describes how Robbins (1918–1998) came to be a ‘narrative artist’ and how he did not emphatically choose between concert dance and Broadway but navigated between the two through the whole of his career. Owing to his innovative choreographic strategies and creative interpretations of the world around him, Robbins brought modes of communication from one artistic world to the other, generating an overtly mimetic and dramatic style in concert ballet and an athletic and punchy ballet style in musical theatre. In fact, this doubleness in Robbins’s life extended throughout his career beyond West Side Story and helped to modernize (in his time) dance in both genres that has left a lasting impression. Notably, Robbins continually strove to exorcize his personal demons through concert dance and musical theatre, causing both joy and angst for the dancers and his collaborative partners. In the turbulent process, or perhaps in spite of it, he created some of the most lasting pieces of choreography in the repertoire of dance in the United States. This discussion traces Robbins’s formative training years, early career, and then focuses on several foundational shows that set in motion his choreographic career along with lesser known creations that helped shape his mode of expression building up to West Side Story. Robbins’s style, choreographic strategies, and ingenuities in West Side Story have a foundation in the material circumstances of his early career, helped along by key mentorships and collaborations with fellow artists both in ballet and musical theatre. I establish from the beginning how Robbins started out as many aspiring dancers do: cobbling together a variety of training schemes, odd jobs, and hustling for paid gigs. Along the way, I consider the tensions that continued to mount for Robbins between his personal life and his professional career and colour his way of working. Limitations of space prohibit a thorough investigation of Robbins’s many successes, projects, and artistic relationships in the decade building up to West Side Story; however, I draw out a collection of primary threads that weave together to create the dance-driven storytelling that comes to full fruition in West Side Story.

There are many reasons, ranging from proximity to Manhattan to early artistic contacts and mentorships, why Jerome Robbins was able to experience and be involved in the New York performance scene from an early age. Jerome Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on 11 October 1918 in New York City. He came from a lower-middle-class family that ran a corset company and lived in Weehawken, New Jersey. Growing up, Robbins had the advantage of piano lessons, a school with arts programs, and the opportunity to attend the cinema on weekends. In addition, his older sister Sonia pursued dance training and would invite him to watch her classes and be part of at-home rehearsals. Geographically, Robbins had the advantage of being a quick ferry ride away from a plethora of performance offerings in Manhattan, from Broadway musicals and plays, to a hotbed of avant-garde experimental artists practicing their craft, often outside for all to see. For amusement in his teen years, Robbins and his friends would seek out the strangest, most provocative work they could find in the city. Robbins constantly leaned on Sonia for support, encouragement, and help brainstorming future goals from a young age. Though Sonia wanted her own life and moved into the city to train as a dancer, Robbins, fiercely opportunistic from a young age, would constantly contact her for help and general advice.

While his family would have preferred Robbins enter the family business or pursue a more respectable and secure profession such as engineering or chemistry, his failing of several courses in his first year at New York University called for a reset of possible career trajectories. Robbins, who had a close relationship with his mother and a difficult relationship with his father, convinced his parents to let him try his hand at the various artistic endeavors he was interested in for one year. If his pursuits did not pan out, he agreed to return to the family business.² And so, after high school, at Sonia’s suggestion he auditioned for and was accepted into Senya Gluck Sandor’s experimental modern dance company, where she was a member. Robbins was soon training and performing side by side with upcoming modern dance luminaries such as José Limón. Sandor was a unique mentor for Robbins as he was an unusual ‘hybrid choreographer – ballet-trained, dedicated to modern dance, but also a veteran of Broadway, burlesque and vaudeville.’³ In order to excel at his theatrical approach, Sandor encouraged Robbins to study ballet and take acting lessons on the side. Sandor provided a substantial amount of modern dance training and a variety of performance and social opportunities. Perhaps the most substantial job in Robbins’s two-year engagement with the group was being part of the Yiddish Art Theatre’s production of The Brothers Ashkanazi. Importantly, this show, choreographed by Sandor, had nine performances a week and was Robbins’s first steady employment as a dancer. In this time Jerome Rabinowitz changed his name to one that was less Jewish sounding. The irony that this happened when he was learning more about his Jewish roots through working with a Yiddish company is not lost. In fact, the overt awareness of his Jewishness was something Robbins pulled away from in his early career.⁴

In this formative time two personal developments or basic character traits become clear – one practical, one artistic – that would go on to colour his early career. Firstly, Robbins was a resilient and relentless journeyman of the arts. He would seek out any creative employment opportunities he could find from puppetry to small tasks and backstage work that he would eagerly take on from anyone who was connected to the performing arts. He was extraordinarily determined and yet rarely got into projects the first time, second time, or at all. Recognizing that Robbins had to apply himself, press teachers for opportunities, and use considerable elbow grease to get even the chance to audition or try out ideas, brings a sense of ordinariness to someone who has often been exalted in dance and musical theatre history. His trials and tribulations also help explain the anxiety, self-doubt, and desperation he experienced early on; physicalized qualities that manifest at times in his movement style, such as seen in ‘Cool’ in West Side Story. Robbins’s early archival papers include many letters to artistic directors, company managers, and fellow artists asking for opportunities to audition or pitch ideas.⁵ Markedly, some of his early breaks in the dance world came from the need for male dancers in the profession.⁶ For example, after only four ballet classes he was thrust into a partnering role with an independent professional ballerina who desperately needed a partner.⁷

Secondly, early on in his work with Sandor’s company, and building on his experience in a variety of plays and operettas in high school, he began to be fascinated by the dramatic potential of the body. His interest in how to communicate through body language was consistently being deepened with every small project or nascent concept he was thinking and writing about. Deborah Jowitt, in Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theatre, His Dance, explains that Sandor ‘pushed dancers to think about their character’s backgrounds and perform truthfully in the Stanislavskian sense.’⁸ Sandor insisted the dancers understood ‘the importance of theatrical credibility,’ and Robbins absorbed this advice as he continued to pursue the development of narrative and character through his own movement.⁹ The concept of believable characters stood in contrast to the pantomimic tendencies and stereotypical characters often found in ballet productions. Robbins’s curiosity for realism would come to full actualization in West Side Story, where he consistently demanded truth and self-analysis from his performers.¹⁰ In considering the fundamentals of performance, what began as general observations, informal performance ideas, and general curiosities about the ability of the moving body to carry plot, turned into a very particular ‘intuitive knowledge.’ This unique creative impulse strengthened when Robbins had the opportunity to spend four summers outside of New York at Camp Tamiment in his early twenties.

Camp Tamiment

Camp Tamiment was a Catskills-like resort in Pennsylvania, nestled amongst the Poconos Mountains, where people would come to relax, play, and get away from the stresses of the city. On the grounds of the resort was the relatively large Tamiment Playhouse, which seated approximately 1,200 people – roughly the size of a Broadway theatre. Max Leibman had been established as the director since 1933 and was tasked with the massive job of putting on a new musical or revue every week for ten weeks. Performers and entertainers of all sorts would come out to work at Tamiment. While the pay was minimal, it was a professional performance job and provided room and board. Robbins was thrilled to be hired as a performer in 1936 and not return to work at the corset factory. In Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance, Wendy Lesser explains it was at Camp Tamiment where Robbins came to be a ‘narrative artist.’¹¹ Several factors combine to give Robbins the space to develop this mode of creative expression.

To start, the advantage of employment at the summer resort was that established professionals would join in or headline the revues for the summer season. In this capacity, Robbins, who spent his first few summer contracts in the ensemble, was able to watch, emulate, work alongside, and eventually collaborate with some key people in the field including Leibman, Danny Kaye, Carol Channing, and Imogen Coca among others. He would study their style and timing and learn from their acting choices in rehearsal and unique physicalizations in performance. In his free time, he would play around with various bits of choreography for small groups and experiment with his own ideas inspired by the musical comedies he performed in. Lesser explains the key importance of Robbins’s Tamiment experience: ‘beyond the dance and performance experience, he was learning something about the essence of theatricality, and it was the comedians who really taught him this.’¹² In the development of musical theatre of the time, the form was becoming increasingly solidified as to its various conventions. As the genre became more prolific in the United States, established methods of constructing successful musical shows were taking shape. Various conventions, such as the pairing of characters, structuring narrative arcs, and inserting comic foils along the way became part of the essential toolbox of writers, composers, and directors of musical theatre. The process and experience of being a cast member in a new show every week, while intense, exposed the nuts and bolts of the form, and offered up a road map to Robbins’s telling of a story in the musical theatre genre. He developed an innate sense of the performative gesture and how it worked to satisfy both the needs of plots and audience expectations. Considering the string of musical theatre offerings loaded with comedic bits and shenanigans that had circulated in Robbins’s formative years over the past decade, including Girl Crazy (1930), Anything Goes (1933), On Your Toes (1936), Me and My Girl (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), etc., there was a physical impulse and dramaturgical texture that became associated with Broadway musicals. Robbins was picking up on the many nuances of the form and how his own sense of movement could work in the genre.

In this musical theatre ‘boot camp,’ Robbins was included in the creation of a few short pieces that were sometimes included in the shows. He was always primed to learn a new skill, figure out lifts or partnering techniques, and help move rehearsals forward.¹³ In this capacity, he became someone choreographers and directors wanted to work with – a creative problem solver (a role he would take on many times down the road on floundering shows to help out colleagues, mostly uncredited).¹⁴ From his initial role as an ensemble member, towards the end of his four summers, he was often involved in the more formal choreography for the productions.¹⁵ For someone who was extremely self-conscious and critical of himself from an early age, Tamiment offered a safe space to explore and experiment artistically and socially. In performance, Robbins had a physical exuberance and charm that was clever and appealing to watch and brought him the needed confidence to return to the city and audition for Broadway musicals and dance companies.¹⁶

A Taste of Broadway

When Robbins returned to the city, he proceeded to network with Broadway dancers, performers, choreographers, and directors he may have worked with at Tamiment. He went to every Broadway musical audition call for ensemble members and surprisingly (to him) had little luck. He was never quite able to shake his feelings of inadequacy, focusing often on his shortcomings and the growing paranoia that he would never get another opportunity. Eventually, he got into the chorus of Great Lady (1938), a Broadway musical with music by Frederick Loewe. This was followed by being in the ensemble of Stars in Your Eyes (1939) and Keep off the Grass (1940). His journals cry out with the frustrations and the hard work of being in the chorus and tell of the general woe of being in the background.¹⁷ Despite his frustrations, the most key part of his chorus experiences is that George Balanchine, the rising star of the dance world, was the choreographer of Great Lady and Keep off the Grass. Robbins immediately identified the artistry in Balanchine, and closely followed his career trajectory and process and received some mentorship in return. Though Robbins’s style would never be as minimal and classically derived as Balanchine’s, the idea that he could dance and do choreography in both genres appealed to his creative impulse and obsessive desire to succeed on many levels. He turned his attention toward the ballet world in order to fulfill his desire to work and train amongst the best dancers.

Ballet Theatre

When Robbins heard Lucia Chase, a wealthy art lover, was set to invest in a new performance company called Ballet Theatre (which would go on to become the renowned American Ballet Theatre) Robbins was attuned to the opportunity this might present for him. True to form, he wrote letters seeking auditions with Ballet Theatre, tried to connect with some of the dancers in the company, and used his new status as an ensemble member in a Broadway show to give him a sense of legitimacy. During out of town try-outs for Keep off the Grass, when he heard the nascent Ballet Theatre were holding auditions he eagerly contacted the company managers. He wrote at the time, ‘I am greatly interested in joining the company – but unfortunately I will be out of town at the time for two weeks …. I would gladly leave the show to join and rehearse for the fall season.’¹⁸ This statement demonstrates his desire to be in the company given how quickly he would give up his Broadway gig. Eventually, after many attempts at contact and auditions, he got a job as a temporary summer intern in the company. Through a combination of fortunate breaks of being in the right place at the right time and doing the work required of him, Robbins was eventually offered a position in the company in the lower ranks. This was a very opportune moment for Robbins as he was able to take advantage of all the training and daily company classes traditionally offered in a ballet company and hone his skills. This increase in his technical aptitude was helped in large part by the opportunity he had to travel with the company to Mexico City for a four-month summer residency.

Still in his early twenties, Robbins felt for the first time in his anxiety-filled life that he had found a surrogate family in the company of ballet dancers in the new American company.¹⁹ Robbins was happy, curious, and generally elated to be in Mexico City. He was at his most creative in this environment, thinking up poetry, scripts for plays, and ideas for choreography. While he was very closed off emotionally in some ways, he had an effusive and vivid internal dialogue about what he wanted to achieve as an artist. (‘I will live to dance, eat to dance, sleep to dance.’)²⁰ In this formative time Robbins was beginning to get a greater understanding of the classical form (much like Tamiment had taught him about musical comedy). This appreciation built on his early impressions from seeing Les Ballets Russes. These new companies, though operating on shoestring budgets, were modernizing the form with each premiere. They turned the page on the classic ‘white ballets’ filled with women in long layers of tulle and crinolines and began to experiment with form and style. Anxious to make the Ballet Theatre as formidable artistically as Les Ballets Russes that had toured in the USA as early as 1916, the company toured across America to many cities of all sizes. Of note, in his time as a dancer, Robbins had first-hand experiences of all the dramas, unfair treatment, body exhaustion, and shenanigans of touring.²¹ Given this experience, one might suppose his treatment of his own dancers later on in his career would have been more understanding; however, it seemed the intensity fueled him to work harder and be even more self-critical, obscuring an established empathy for others. These ways of being in the world do in part go back to his childhood where his mother was brutally honest to him about every poem or story he would write.²² In this capacity, he developed a very blatant sense of honesty which, like his mother’s, was quite cruel. He writes in his diary, ‘Sometimes I dream I am so mean I have to go to bed.’²³

At Ballet Theatre, Robbins continued to hone his craft in the ensemble. He had already shown he had the grit to endure the brutally honest experience of casting within a large company. For example, when he failed to get cast as the understudy or even the second understudy for the title role in the ballet Petrouchka (which would become his favourite role) he writes, ‘I went to [Fokine] and asked him if please could I just study it – he didn’t have to spend any time with me, just let me come to rehearsals to watch and learn the role.’²⁴ In fact, this temerity paid off and he eventually stepped into the role, and would receive tremendous recognition for his interpretation of the part over the coming years. Refusing to take no for an answer was indeed his modus operandi. Thankfully amongst all this self-commanding and obsession, he continually took solace in exploring his surroundings on tour.

Taking in the moods and ambience of different towns across America was a great curiosity and delight for Robbins, and opened his mind to a broader feel for the United States. He would often tour around the various towns the company stopped in, whether it was Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, or New Orleans, among others. He was taking in what all these towns had to offer including jazz music and cultural offerings. Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham, and Katherine Dunham were among others who had ventured outside of New York or Hollywood, and were exploring what it meant to be American and how that could be interpreted on stage through movement.²⁵ Robbins describes the shift happening in the United States surrounding the status and acceptance of ballet, ‘a democratic people’s mark on the ballet is directly evidenced in its subject matter, its dancers, and the kind of audiences that attend it.’²⁶ The touring of Les Ballets Russes followed by Ballet Theatre, along with various other dance companies throughout America, had helped democratize the form, and with lower ticket prices allowed for greater accessibility. The cross-over of artists between the previously recognized ‘lowbrow’ musical theatres with the ‘highbrow’ classical ballet helped to level out hierarchies in performance and fostered more curiosity in the form from a wider range of people. The growing interest in ballet was reflected in musical theatre, and had been for a while, when you consider musicals such as On Your Toes (1936) or I Married an Angel (1938), both choreographed by George Balanchine. The inclusion of ballet in musicals was to become a substantial turn for the genre that would take firm hold for the next several decades. Robbins was to be part of this shift and, as developed on tour, already had his nascent ideas for a short ballet about three sailors visiting New York City.

Fancy Free and On the Town

Robbins was so eager to impress and officially start his career as a choreographer at Ballet Theatre with this potential new piece about sailors’ shore leave that he continued to write letters and make pleas for the opportunity to put the ballet together formally with support from the company, rather than in his spare time. Once he finally gets a chance to rehearse his ballet, he writes in a letter to the company manager, promising, ‘I’ll dig in like crazy and the poor kids who work for me will not have felt a lash like mine.’²⁷ This statement exposes a culture of the artistic figurehead as disciplinarian. That Robbins felt, in order to pitch his idea, that he would also promise to work the dancers extremely hard is troublesome and is demonstrative of his growing desperation to carve out an artistic identity for himself. His eagerness to please and prove himself comes at a cost to his connection to dancers on an equal level (as one himself). At this point, there is already the development of an intensity of labor that comes to colour his process for the rest of his career.

Returning to the composition itself, Robbins explains much of his inspiration came from Paul Cadmus’s 1934 painting The Fleet’s In!; though he found it too crude.²⁸ Indeed, the painting of the scene of sailors’ debauchery on shore leave caused quite a scandal when it came out. Robbins’s Fancy Free seemed to make much effort to keep a youthful exuberance and curiosity to the characters and stays away from the raunchier ideas set forth in Cadmus’s work. In fact, there is much more of a feeling of fellowship between the sailors. Lesser describes the camaraderie between the sailors as ‘palpable,’ and indeed it is this playfulness that is at the heart of the piece.²⁹ This quality is important to note for several reasons. Firstly, classical ballet at the time was experimenting with structure and form and these very forthright narrative or story telling qualities were not the norm in the new ballets. Secondly, the reservedness about the sexuality, he in fact embraces a year later in Facsimile.

The basic premise of Fancy Free is fairly simple: three sailors are on shore leave, they enjoy a fanciful night on the town pursuing women and good times. The men quickly come in contact with two women and the three men dance with them in a collection of duets. However, one man always is left out, or is found dancing alone. As a way of solving their dilemma the men hold a competition where each does a dance and the women choose the victor. Structurally, the unique strategy built into the piece is the odd number of performers. This unevenness is quite unusual in ballet, known for its many identical rows of swans, sylphs, etc., not to mention the conventional pas de deux, quatre, or six.³⁰ With the stage never seeming balanced, Robbins creates a jagged edginess to the moment that seems to be heading for a resolution, but never does. This effect creates a sense of anticipation or urgency and propels the piece forward, a strategy that carries through in West Side Story, in the opening prologue and elsewhere. Conversely, given Robbins’s unshakable sense of disconnect with his peers and his own strict self-judgment, there is a tinge of sadness cast upon the one always being left out. Adding to the complexity in Fancy Free, the ballet is filled with canons, meaning, one dancer performs a move, which is then repeated by the next dancer and so on creating a sort of waterfall effect of the step occurring numerous times. Robbins did not invent this effect; however, his use of canons in Fancy Free adds a unique dimension as each sailor has an individual character as shown by how the move is interpreted with slight differences by each dancer. Markedly, as the canon is performed with an uneven number of dancers, and in combination with Bernstein’s provocative score, the piece has a pulsing expectancy or promise that increases as the piece moves forward. Lesser explains the effect, ‘This refusal to fall into neatly aligned symmetries and predictable matchups make the dance everlastingly interesting.’³¹ Robbins’s style has many moments of classical vocabulary juxtaposed with off-kilter shoulder, hips thrusts, and Latin stylings. There is no attempt to disguise the ballet elements, they appear as punctuation throughout. For example, in one of the early duets, chassées and pas de bourrées lead into a lift in attitude position, when only moments earlier the dancers had been doing a sharp snake hips-like section.³² This obvious use of ballet moves alongside jazzy or invented steps becomes a signature of Robbins’s style. Ballet audiences were unaccustomed to combinations of lyrical or romantic movement juxtaposed with more upbeat popular styles. The insertion of sharp, hot moves onto the concert ballet stage, not to mention the wearing of character shoes (heels) by the women launches Fancy Free into a league of its own. This insertion of more racy moves, seen in hip rolls, shoulder shimmies, and a more grounded sense of movement helped to modernize and sensualize the ethereal and lifted body posture of classical ballet. Overall, Fancy Free’s gestural and narrative style builds from moments of sheer virtuosity, tender silences, thrilling bravado, and a general salute to the comraderies of the three sailors, each with a distinct personality.

Fancy Free stood out amongst the ballet company’s other offerings at the time and on 18 April 1944, the twenty-nine minute ballet was a near instant success. In its time Fancy Free offered a snapshot of New York City outside the doors of the theatre, or a postcard of the city for audiences on the company’s extensive tours, and audiences and critics alike were very receptive. Reconsidered today, however, Fancy Free has its limitations, specifically surrounding the male–female stereotypes as well as the harassing actions of the men disguised as playful shenanigans. Lea Marshall, writing for Dance Magazine in 2019, suggests it may be time to retire Fancy Free from the repertoire. She explains, ‘The ballet hasn’t aged well, especially in the wake of #metoo. It’s a study in rape culture.’³³ The pursuit of the women by the men, which involves hip thrusts aplenty, and a variety of grabs of body parts, though not championed in 1945, would likely be disapproved of in today’s social climate and the suggestion of the repetition of the cycle at the end of the piece, despite the women being fed up with the men’s antics, is also problematic.³⁴ The historical distance may offer an out for Robbins, and, considering he was choreographing for the zeitgeist of his time, the blame cannot rest entirely with him for the overt womanizing in the piece. Marshall, however, does not forgive this, noting, ‘Robbins knew women don’t relish this kind of behaviour from men. But he still made a comedy out of it.’³⁵

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Just over six months after the premiere of Fancy Free, essentially an intimate concert ballet piece, Robbins’s concept became the inspiration for a Broadway musical. In a moment of unique collaboration, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, and Robbins teamed up to create On the Town, which premiered at the close of 1944. Robbins was deeply immersed in the whirlwind of creating a piece that would come to have many achievements on Broadway at the time, one of the most integral being the desegregation of the cast and crew and incorporation of a more diverse team on and off stage. This is particularly poignant in the hiring of Japanese dancer Sono Osato.³⁶

The necessary changes in the transformation of the short ballet into a full-length musical, however, were illuminating to Robbins in regard to his aesthetics as a ‘narrative artist.’ When the piece was developed to an evening-length musical and directed by the renowned George Abbott, the most decisive element of the movement that was lost in the choreography was its ‘free-floating timeless charm.’³⁷ The whimsical off-centeredness was squared up and most substantially, due to the conventions in the genre of musical theatre at the time (and often continuing today), there was a decided resolution to the piece in the final grouping of happy couples. The distinct conclusion to the musical drew away the ambiguity in the piece for Robbins. Moreover, Robbins was confronted with the decisive workings of a director and experienced a loss of the control he had cultivated in bringing Fancy Free to its feet. Abbott, a formidable talent with over a dozen Broadway shows under his belt, had a ‘disciplined, forthright, pragmatic approach to directing’ which did not mesh with Robbins’s own singular way of working and brought much conflict in the run up to the opening.³⁸ Additionally, from a narrative point of view, and though he had been in several Broadway musicals himself, the introduction of singing seemed to shore up the grey areas of the characters’ personalities and make them more black and white. For Robbins, the increasingly stereotypical characters removed any room for more individualized interpretations. As Lesser describes, ‘the verbal obviousness crushes what was delicate and unspoken in dance.’³⁹

The discordant experience for Robbins of joining of song and dance may have been instrumental in developing how he was to make a lasting impact in musical theatre. Robbins would continue to seek out moments where he could recapture the voiceless ballet quality, as is seen in the ‘Prologue’ of West Side Story or the ‘Chavaleh Sequence’ in Fiddler on the Roof (1964). Though the sounds and sensibilities of Broadway, including jazz and vernacular dance, was so influential to him, one of the basic tenets of ballet – story-telling through mimetic narrative – remained one of his key tools.

A Decade of Work

Fundamentally, with the success of On the Town, Robbins was able to share his time and artistic development between Broadway and ballet. Jowitt sums up the arrangement: ‘the former subsidized the latter.’⁴⁰ Fancy Free received a prominent place in the Ballet Theatre repertoire, along with commissions for others, and his Broadway projects over the next ten years were in a constant flow. The diverse creative opportunities and challenges in both genres appealed to Robbins and having some financial security from his Broadway endeavors allowed him to do both. Robbins continued to develop his skills at bringing narratives to life through movement in a string of memorable musicals including: Billion Dollar Baby (1946), High Button Shoes (1947), Look, Ma, I’m Dancing! (1948), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), The King and I (1951), and Peter Pan (1954), where he assumed the role of director, after successfully co-directing Look, Ma with Abbott. As Robbins gained more experience on Broadway he began to work methodologically with the goal to have ‘dances that made logical sense, supported dramatic intent, and provided a stylistic continuum from the Libretto.’⁴¹ These goals sustained a string of mostly successful musicals and allowed for a productive and lucrative career for Robbins. Uniquely, it was his work in the ballet world, happening in tandem with his Broadway hits, that allowed him the freedom to experiment with deviations from the standard fare. In his ballet work he explored more ambiguous topics and aesthetic challenges of the form that would eventually fuse with the more popular styles he was using in musical theatre – a coming together that fully materializes in West Side Story.

The second ballet Robbins did for Ballet Theatre with Bernstein, before moving over to the newly formed New York City Ballet with Balanchine at the helm in 1949, was Facsimile. A brief glance at this three-person ballet gives some insight into Robbins and his process. While Robbins wanted a ‘human aspect to emerge’ in all his ballets he still was able to be much more abstract than in musicals.⁴² Robbins used three dancers in the piece, one of them being himself. Facsimile has been called ‘the first ballet about contemporary neuroses’ by New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff.⁴³ The ballet takes a much more urgent approach to a love triangle that is toyed with in moments in Fancy Free. Jowitt describes how Robbins was ‘primarily intent on bringing out the superficiality of these people’s lives and desires, the idleness that leads them into potentially harmful games.’⁴⁴ In an about face from his previous works, sexuality and eroticism are the modes of communication, laden with a sense of despondency and cruelty. Facsimile ends with the female dancer crying out ‘Stop!’ leaving an uneasy aura haunting the space (foreshadowing Maria’s final cry at the end of West Side Story). John Martin describes the unlikeable characters in his review of the premiere, ‘Without inner resources of any sort, they play around dangerously in the realm of psychological thrills. The argument of the piece is simply that Mr. Robbins doesn’t approve of them.’⁴⁵ The erratic emotional realm created by the dancers, listed in the program as ‘three insecure people,’ does not come out again in Robbins’s work until much later when he returns full time to the ballet world: in 1965 with American Ballet Theatre, and in 1969 the New York City Ballet. I mention Facsimile because after its premiere, Robbins moves away from the exploration of neuroses or dysfunction, and does Pas de Trois (1947) and Summer Day (1947) before moving over to New York City Ballet. Even so, I suggest this physicalized leeriness, or depleted cynicism, and overt eroticism pulses within the visceral choreography in West Side Story, a quality not generally found in his more popular works and which can perhaps be traced to this moment of exploring the more corrupt or selfish aspects of humanity, some of which he may have seen in himself.⁴⁶

Though Robbins retired from dancing in 1952, he continued creating work with the New York City Ballet. He made numerous very unusual ballets, including Age of Anxiety (1949) based on the poem by W. H. Auden and Bernstein’s 1948 symphony of the same name, where the dancers wear fencing masks, and which explores reflections of the self and ‘emotional emptiness,’ and The Guests (1959) about inner and outer circles of society; both ballets can be seen to inhabit some of his own anxieties. In 1950, he created The Cage, about man-eating female insects, which is hailed as an experimental breakthrough in its non-human narrative, though generally discomforting in its complexities around sexual rites and initiations.⁴⁷ His interpretation of Afternoon of a Faun in 1953 is well-received, and praised for its dream-like quality and musicality. He does not return to the raw and troublesome world of Facsimile in ballet until later in his career, but a unique manifestation of physicalized anxieties and passions permeates his work in West Side Story.⁴⁸

An Idea Long in the Making

West Side Story, originally titled East Side Story, had been an idea brewing between collaborators from as early as 1949. Robbins had pitched the idea of an updated Romeo and Juliet to his friends Arthur Laurents and Bernstein. Robbins was thinking through the different warring factions that could be pitted next to each other, perhaps Jewish and Catholic? Though the project was put aside, due to other commitments and the collaborators never coming to an agreement about the groups involved, the idea was never abandoned. As the story goes, newspaper headlines about juvenile delinquents sparring on US streets caught Robbins’s attention. Jowitt describes, ‘Robbins agreed … that ethnicity rather than religion should be the crux, and gangs, rather than families, the antagonists. The Jewish kids became Puerto Rican and the Italian gang a mix of European stock.’⁴⁹ When the group was able to get going on the project, work began on the musical.⁵⁰

Robbins worked the dancers extraordinarily hard. He demanded constant soul-searching and full commitment to the physical and psychological demands of the show. Dancers tell tales of the harsh conditions of rehearsals, some bragging, others complaining. Robbins pit one group of dancers against the other so tensions were felt both on and off stage. His ability to physicalize the agitation, stress, anxiety, and adrenaline of the Jets and the Sharks, alongside the tenderness and passion of Tony and Maria, was unprecedented. As Chapter 14 in this volume will explore, Robbins championed the ensemble as physical story-tellers and created actable, intuitive, and raw movement, boldly juxtaposing ballet, jazz, and popular dances of the moment – a confluence of genres, but also of the complicated experiences disciplining his mind and body – to achieve all he desperately wanted in life.

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Robbins’s way of working stemmed from a narrative investigation of movement forged in a unique time when ballet was modernizing and musical theatre was discovering the dramatic potential of dance. As the years went by, the choreographer said he was more interested in a world ‘where things are not named,’ and his exploration of ballet’s classical idioms became more abstract and profound.⁵¹ His sister Sonia, Senya Gluck Sandor, Max Leibman, George Balanchine, Mikel Fokine, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, George Abbott, Arthur Laurents and others were mentors and collaborators who were part of Robbins’s journey to what some say is his grandest accomplishment – West Side Story. Robbins engaged with people where he could; however, his anxiety and self-doubt pushed him to be more of an authoritarian over the work and he was decidedly not the easiest man to work with. What never changed, however, was his consistent awareness of the body in motion and the dramatic potential of dance. He astutely remarks at age twenty-seven:

Foretelling his work in West Side Story and eerily prophesying the creative intersections beyond his lifetime and into in the twenty-first century, Robbins’s legacy lives on in the collaborations and complexities across musical theatre, ballet, and theatre today.

During the twenty years between his graduation from Cornell University in 1937 and the opening of West Side Story twenty years later, Brooklyn-born Arthur Laurents had mixed success as a playwright.¹ Two of his plays (The Bird Cage and A Clearing in the Woods) didn’t last a month; one (Heartsong), closed in Philadelphia. Home of the Brave lasted sixty performances, but did get sold to a Hollywood studio. Only The Time of the Cuckoo had a respectable run. The films for which he wrote screenplays during this period were not commercial or critical successes. Laurents’s fame would come as book writer for the classic musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, and La Cage aux Folles (which he also directed), and as the writer of the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point in the 1970s.

Much of Laurents’s good fortune, from getting a break as a writer for radio to working with famous Hollywood directors and actors during World War II, to his part in the creation of West Side Story, came from personal connections, particularly his friendship with director–choreographer Jerome Robbins, the initiating force in the making of West Side Story. This is not to denigrate Laurents’s talent. He was a gifted writer who wisely took advantage of the opportunities that came his way.

Laurents was also a famously difficult person. Harold Clurman, who directed two of Laurents’s Broadway plays, observed that in Laurents ‘sensibility and a defensive aggressiveness are combined in precarious balance. The slightest rebuff, or what he suspects as one, makes him bitterly antagonistic; praise, encouragement, and affection melt him.’² Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Laurents on four musicals (West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?) recalls that ‘Aplomb was not one of Arthur’s chief virtues, and his tirades could be heard as far as Scranton.’³

Radio, Wartime Work, and Connections

Laurents moved back to New York after college and, while working at Bloomingdale’s department store, took an evening course in writing radio drama taught by Bill Robson, a producer at CBS. Robson arranged for his network to buy Now Playing, Tomorrow, a script Laurents wrote for his class. The star of that first show was Shirley Booth who would star in Laurents’s Heartsong and The Time of the Cuckoo. Listeners liked Now Playing Tomorrow, so until World War II Laurents had steady work writing for radio shows like Lux Radio Theatre.

For most young men, World War II put careers on hold. Laurents was lucky. At basic training at Fort Monmouth near the New Jersey shore, he befriended Bob Hoskins, who happened to be the son of a senior aide to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thanks to Hoskins’s well-placed father, Laurents was transferred to the US Army Pictorial Service, located in an old film studio in Astoria, Queens, where he was assigned to be a screenwriter of official Army training films as well as a writer of radio scripts for the Armed Forces. The director of his first film script was none other than George Cukor, one of the greatest directors of the studio era. Throughout the war, Laurents was fortunate to work with major Hollywood and Broadway talent while socializing at night with people in the New York theatre and dance world who would soon be in positions of power.⁴

Fraught Friendship: Laurents and Jerome Robbins

During Laurents’s five years doing military work in Astoria, he had an affair with Ballet Theatre ballerina Nora Kaye⁵ while also enjoying sex with a number of men. Through Kaye, he became friends with dancer–choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose 1944 ballet Fancy Free would later the same year be adapted into the musical On the Town, also with a score by Leonard Bernstein. Although Laurents at the time had no experience writing for the stage, Robbins had tried without success to convince Bernstein that his new friend should write the book for On the Town.⁶ Through the next decade and a half, Laurents and Robbins would have a turbulent professional and social relationship that would eventually lead to Laurents’s collaboration on West Side Story and Gypsy. Robbins found Laurents an agent and a producer for his first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, and, after the war, asked Laurents to write the book for a musical about a ballet dancer. Laurents turned in a draft whose central character was a ruthless, egotistical dancer modeled on Robbins himself. Robbins’s biographer, Amanda Vaill, mused, ‘What this says about Laurents’s opinion of his friend Robbins is an interesting question.’⁷ Eventually the writer pulled out of the project, which became the short-lived 1948 musical, Look Ma, I’m Dancing. Laurents’s friendship with Robbins became somewhat strained when the director–choreographer betrayed friends in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953,⁸ Laurents recalls that Robbins said:

Throughout Laurents’s memoirs, he attacks informers who betrayed their friends during the years of the Red Scare and blacklist. His 1995 play, Jolson Sings Again, is loosely based on the betrayal of another director–informer, Elia Kazan.

Despite Robbins’s testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Laurents remained friendly with Robbins, but their relationship unraveled because of Robbins’s behavior during rehearsals for West Side Story and his insistence on more prominent billing than his colleagues received. Laurents later wrote of Bernstein’s, Sondheim’s and his anger at Robbins, ‘The four of us had started the show together, created it together, had a wonderful time being together, but three of us weren’t talking to Jerry. There was no pleasure in that; if anything, there was an additional load of resentment because he had caused the estrangement, he was why “together” had lost its meaning.’¹⁰ Laurents would work with Robbins two years later on Gypsy, but their relationship was never the same. The surviving collaborators on West Side Story, Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, chose not to take part in Robbins’s memorial service almost forty years later.

Broadway Debut: Home of the Brave

One crucial theme of West Side Story is prejudice. In the musical’s original conception, East Side Story, the source of the intra-gang conflict was anti-Semitism, rather than bigotry against Puerto Ricans. Anti-Semitism is a theme that appears in Home of the Brave and in some of Laurents’s later plays.

While Laurents was working in Astoria, he began the script that would become his first Broadway play, Home of the Brave (1945). The script was inspired by an experience Laurents had in basic training. At one barracks inspection, Laurents’s friend Bob Hoskins punched a sergeant who complained about how badly ‘the kikes’ cleaned up the barracks. Hoskins wasn’t Jewish but felt badly for his Jewish friend. A second impetus for the play was Laurents’s new interest in psychoanalysis. During the five years Laurents was in the army, he became increasingly confused about his sexual orientation and behavior. His first psychiatrist believed that all his problems came from his homosexuality, which could and must be cured. Only years later with a more enlightened Hollywood psychiatrist did he become comfortable with his sexual orientation. However, the most powerful inspiration for Home of the Brave came from a photograph that landed on Laurents’s desk of some GIs looking at the mutilated body of a comrade: ‘That photograph haunted me. I pilfered it from the army files and kept it in my drawer. I didn’t know why I knew it was a play but I did.’¹¹

These three elements – the friend’s reaction to an anti-Semitic slur, Laurents’s inability to accept his sexual orientation, and the photograph – combined into the creation of Home of the Brave. The experience of writing for radio and film, which allow free movement in space and time, influenced the structure of Home of the Brave which, instead of being confined to one interior set, alternates between the present in an army hospital and the past on a Pacific Island. The central character is Peter Coen, a young recruit who is extremely self-conscious about his ‘difference,’ his Judaism. He tells the army psychiatrist, ‘None of them are like me.’¹² His journey in the play is one of self-acceptance. When we first see Coen in the hospital, he is unable to walk, a result of a psychological trauma caused by the death of his closest friend, Finch, a young private from Arkansas. Through their wartime experience, they became so close that they planned to open a bar together after the war. Finch even joked about Coen marrying his sister. During a feud in a tense moment on an intelligence-gathering mission on a remote island overrun with Japanese, Finch barely stops himself from shouting an anti-Semitic slur. Coen, hyper-sensitive to such slights, feels betrayed by the only person he felt totally accepted him. Shortly after that, Finch is shot by a Japanese sniper. Coen and his fellow soldiers have to leave their wounded comrade to the incoming Japanese so that they can complete their crucial intelligence mission. Coen’s subsequent paralysis is caused by a combination of anger over what he sees as Finch’s betrayal and guilt over having to leave a wounded Finch to be tortured and killed by the Japanese.

From the outset, the psychiatrist knows that Coen’s problem is at heart a societal problem, an inability to accept difference: ‘That kid’s crack-up goes back to a thousand million goddamn people being wrong … They don’t take a man for himself … for what he is.’¹³ The psychiatrist can only cure Coen’s paralysis by the extreme tactic of shouting an anti-Semitic slur at him: ‘You lousy yellow Jew bastard, get up and walk!’¹⁴ Through therapy, Coen comes to realize that his sensitivity about anti-Semitism is based in great part on his own inability to accept his Jewishness – his difference. That sensitivity to anti-Semitism would lead to Laurents’s interest in the first iteration of West Side Story, East Side Story.

It took decades for Laurents to accept that in Home of the Brave, he had not only dramatized his sensitivity about his Jewishness; he had also unintentionally projected his anxieties about his homosexuality onto Peter Coen. Laurents, born Levine, was sensitive enough about the prevailing anti-Semitism in America to change his last name in order to have a better chance of getting a job; however, his memoirs make clear that he was much more sensitive and confused about his sexual orientation. He was unable at the time to accept his homosexuality or to see that the primary relationship in Home of the Brave has a homoerotic element: ‘Had I realized that it could be construed that way, I would have worked overtime to clean it out.’¹⁵

Home of the Brave demonstrated Laurents’s ability to capture the language of young servicemen in tense situations. His ear for convincing colloquial dialogue would later serve him well in the creation of the teenage gang members in West Side Story. A 1949 film adaptation of the play (screenplay, Carl Foreman; director, Mark Robson), changed the central character from Jewish to African-American, thus making the key issue racism, not anti-Semitism, even though troops were racially segregated until 1948.

After many changes in directors and leading actors and multiple script revisions, Laurents’s second stage play, Heartsong (1947), about a young couple dealing with abortion, closed in Philadelphia.¹⁶ For the next few years, his base of operations would be Hollywood.

Hollywood and Rope

Laurents’s first contract as a screenwriter for MGM earned him the generous sum of $2,500 a week. Working on his first assignment, the psychological melodrama The Snake Pit was a lesson in the pitfalls of screenwriting, including being forced to tack on an unbelievable happy ending and not receiving appropriate credit for his work. After collaborating on The Snake Pit, Laurents had two major screenwriting assignments during the late 1940s. The first was to adapt Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 British stage play, Rope, for Alfred Hitchcock. The celebrated British director had hired his friend, actor Hume Cronyn, to write a treatment based on the play, then hired Laurents to Americanize the British dialogue. Laurents later insisted that even though Cronyn got screen credit for the adaptation, the final screenplay was his alone.¹⁷

Loosely based on the famous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, the play and film depict two wealthy young men who murder a college friend, hide his body in a chest in the living room, then hold a dinner party in the same room. The crime is solved by a former teacher and friend who had taught the young men the Nietzschean concepts that led them to think that they were above conventional morality. Everyone who remembered the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks knew that there was a sexual element in the killers’ relationship. Patrick Hamilton’s play is filled with innuendo that the two young men are sexually involved. Given the censorship in Britain at the time, such information could only be hinted at, never overtly presented verbally or physically. The same rule applied in Hollywood where any mention of ‘sex perversion’ was banned. Still, Laurents remembered how Hitchcock delighted in filling his film with homosexual intimations: ‘At Warner Brothers studio in Burbank where Rope was shot, homosexuality was the unmentionable, known only as “it.” “It” wasn’t in the picture. No one was “one.” Fascinating was how Hitchcock nevertheless made clear to me that he wanted “it” in the picture.’¹⁸ The director knew that Laurents and the actors playing the murderous couple, Farley Granger (Laurents’s housemate and lover at the time), and John Dall, were homosexual. Hitchcock’s direction emphasizes the closeness of the murderers by keeping them together in the same frame through most of the film. Unfortunately, James Stewart is woefully miscast as the older friend who solves the case.

In Laurents’s screenplay Brandon and Philip started a relationship in prep school and have stayed in contact even though Brandon went off to Harvard and Philip trained to be a concert pianist. Now they share an apartment in New York. The murder of their friend David seems to be a way to maintain a strained relationship. Brandon is the more dominant personality. Philip says at one point, ‘You scare me. You always have – from the very first day in prep school. Part of your charm, I suppose.’¹⁹ For Brandon the most exciting part of their crime is the dinner party they hold in the same room as the corpse. Their perverse guest list includes Janet, the victim’s fiancée; Ken, her ex-boyfriend; and Janet’s father. This gathering is for Brandon a delicious bit of theatre but Philip gets progressively drunk, frightened, and hostile. Laurents, living within Hollywood’s policing of the closet and still deeply conflicted about his sexual orientation and his relationship with Granger, was the perfect writer to create an American version of Hamilton’s dysfunctional gay couple.

Rope was not a box office success although film scholars and critics have over the years found much to praise in Hitchcock’s direction and Laurents’s screenplay. After Rope, Hitchcock repeatedly asked Laurents to adapt various properties for him but Laurents never found any of them congenial.

Back to Broadway: The Bird Cage

Between work on films, Laurents was writing his next Broadway play, The Bird Cage, which ran for only twenty-one performances in 1950. Like Caught, the play is a critique of capitalism and men who abuse power. The central character has no redeeming virtues to win an audience’s sympathy or keep its interest. Wally Williams, emcee and half owner of a sleazy New York nightclub, only knows money, power and control. He has a long list of people he despises: his wife because the money that was supposed to come with the marriage never materialized; any girl who will not have sex with him; and his teenaged son because he isn’t manly enough to have sex with the girl Wally provided for him. When his only supporter, the club pianist, talks back to him, Wally slams the lid of the piano keyboard on his hands. At the end, when Wally has lost control of the club and everyone has walked away, he sets fire to his tawdry little kingdom. Laurents has deftly captured the working-class patois of his characters but the play was too melodramatic to be successful.

West Side Story Begins

While Laurents was in Hollywood working on Summertime, Leonard Bernstein was preparing for concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and Jerome Robbins was working on the film version of The King and I (he had choreographed the Broadway musical). Laurents and Bernstein had a poolside discussion about the Latino gang problem in Los Angeles, which quickly led them to think about turning East Side Story into West Side Story about gang warfare between whites and Puerto Ricans. Robbins was equally excited about the idea. However, all three had other projects. Laurents had some other screen assignments (Anastasia, based on the play by Marcel Maurette and an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel, Bonjour Tristesse), and was working on his next Broadway play, A Clearing in the Woods. Bernstein was working on Candide and Robbins was involved with the musical Bells Are Ringing, which he was slated to direct and choreograph (with Bob Fosse). Bernstein quickly realized that he couldn’t write both music and lyrics, so Laurents arranged for his young friend Stephen Sondheim to meet with Bernstein. The rest is history.

Psychoanalysis and A Clearing in the Woods

In the process of his therapy with psychiatrist Judd Marmor, Laurents came to understand why he had been frightened of Farley Granger moving in with him: ‘I was afraid that if he lived with me, he would know me.’³² This expression of self-loathing echoes throughout A Clearing in the Woods, which opened in January 1957. Overcoming his own self-hatred, particularly because of his homosexuality, allowed Laurents to enjoy a relationship with Tom Hatcher begun in 1954, which lasted until Hatcher’s death in 2006.³³

In A Clearing in the Woods, Laurents attempted to ‘soar above the confines of naturalistic theatre.’³⁴ The clearing that is the setting for the play is not a realistic location. Rather it is a psychological landscape where Virginia, the central character, comes to terms with her past and with herself. Virginia is a woman in her thirties who is in the throes of depression. Like Leona Samish, she is an executive secretary, about as far as a woman could then go in the corporate world. Virginia has been a failure in her relationships with men because she demands that they have the professional success she is not allowed. She has never fully expressed herself to the men in her life because if people truly knew her, they would not like her. In the clearing, Virginia has to confront those men. More important, she has to interact with versions of herself at different stages in her life: as a child, as a teenager, and as a young woman. Like Peter Coen in Home of the Brave, Virginia has to accept that she is not as different or special as she wanted to be. At the end, she tells her younger selves, ‘Accepting you as you are means I can never be what I dreamed.’ Their response is, ‘An end to dreams isn’t an end to hope.’³⁵

A Clearing in the Woods was not successful because Laurents was too prosaic a writer to successfully create a poetic drama. He explains too much, repeats explanations too often. Laurents felt that Kim Stanley, an actress, he believed, ‘whose brilliant acting talent was almost matched by her talent for self-extinction,’³⁶ never was able to communicate any of the humor necessary to make the audience sympathize with the character.³⁷ It isn’t clear that another actress would have made much difference. As New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson accurately observed, ‘Virginia is not an interesting woman.’³⁸ The play ran for only thirty-six performances.

Finally West Side Story

West Side Story went into production eight years after Laurents, Bernstein, and Robbins discussed the idea for East Side Story. Laurents and Bernstein were both smarting from the failures of A Clearing in the Woods and Candide and eager to create a new kind of Broadway musical.³⁹ Their first producer, Cheryl Crawford, backed out after failing to find backers interested in a dark musical with a cast of unknowns: She told the creators, ‘We have had this whole school of ash can realism.’⁴⁰ After Stephen Sondheim told his good friend, producer Harold Prince, about their problems getting West Side Story produced, Prince and his producing partner Robert Griffith took on the show, quickly found the funding, and set a September date for its opening at the Winter Garden Theatre.

According to Leonard Bernstein’s biographer Meryle Secrest, the collaborators would discuss the musical’s concept and overall shape:

Laurents understood that, ‘My task … was to drive as eloquently and economically as possible to the musical moment, be it song, or dance, or both.’⁴² This may be why West Side Story has less spoken dialogue than most musicals. Sondheim has stated, ‘Of all the things I gleaned from working with Arthur, the most pointed was an awed respect for the book writer. … The book writer is the source from which the songwriter … takes character, diction, tone and style, and sometimes dialogue.’⁴³ Actually, there is more dialogue than Laurents or his colleagues originally intended. Laurents wrote a speech for Maria after Tony has been killed that Bernstein and Sondheim were supposed to turn into a song. Bernstein admitted that he never could find an effective way to set Maria’s final lines: ‘Everything sounded wrong. I made a difficult, painful, surgical decision not to set it at all.’⁴⁴ The musical ends with Laurents’s words, not Bernstein’s music.

West Side Story as Finale

While Laurents was justly proud of his work on West Side Story, he was not satisfied with the original production. He worked with Robbins directing the dialogue scenes but could not get the result he wanted with a cast of dancers who were not trained as actors. He thought, ‘The music was magnificent but it was poorly sung and the acting if anything was non-existent.’⁴⁵ In 2009, at ninety-two years of age, Laurents took on the task of directing a revival of West Side Story. He was determined that ‘the acting was going to be on a par with the ability to dance and sing.’⁴⁶ That production had a slightly longer run than the original production. At the end of his long career Laurents put his stamp on West Side Story as director as well as book writer. Nonetheless, although Jerome Robbins had been dead for eleven years, the posters and Playbill still contained the same box containing the statement ‘Entire Production Directed and Choreographed by Jerome Robbins’ that infuriated Laurents back in 1957.

Conclusion

Throughout his early career, Laurents the playwright was experimenting with new ways of structuring stage drama that reflected the free movement in time and space possible in radio drama and screenplays. This is evident in Home of the Brave, which moved back and forth from the present in a military hospital to the traumatic past on a Pacific island, to the symbolic setting and dreamlike quality of A Clearing in the Woods. One can see how Laurents could be drawn to musical theatre narratives, which move more freely in space and time than the typical one-set dramas of the period. Being a playwright drawn to formal experimentation, he was the perfect choice to create the book for what was certainly an experimental musical. Moreover, his years adapting novels and plays into film scripts gave him the experience necessary to translate Romeo and Juliet into a new medium. Laurents never had another play produced on Broadway. From West Side Story on, he would be primarily associated with musicals and screenplays.

The Man and the Pen

Late on Tuesday evening, 4 October 1955, the opening night party for Island of Goats was underway. The play – an English adaptation of Ugo Betti’s Delitto all’isola delle capre (‘Crime on Goat-Island’) – would close after all of seven performances. However the cast and crew felt that night, Stephen Sondheim, who did not attend the play’s opening, had his own reasons for feeling downcast. His hoped-for professional debut as a composer–lyricist – Saturday Night (book by Julius Epstein based on a play by Julius and his twin brother, Philip) – had lost its main producer, Lemuel Ayers, who had died of leukemia two months earlier.

At the party, Sondheim felt somewhat out of place until he spied Arthur Laurents across the room. They had met some months earlier, when Laurents had attended an audition for a musical version of James M. Cain’s 1937 book, Serenade. In his memoir, Laurents recounted Sondheim’s rendition of songs from Saturday Night.¹ Sondheim had his own takeaway:

Someone in the fall of 1955 might be forgiven for not knowing where Sondheim would land as a man of the theatre. In college he had written a radio play, music and lyrics for three different musicals, the book for two of those musicals, short stories and satire, music criticism, a piano sonata, and the beginning of a novel. He had also earned acclaim for his abilities as an actor. The year after his graduation from Williams College found him completing a concertino for two pianos and a sonata for violin solo. He wrote a TV script for Jack Lemmon, then a budding young actor; between October 1953 and February 1954 he collaborated on eleven television scripts for the comedy series Topper. He had an apprenticeship of sorts with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II: two of the Williams musicals fulfilled half of the apprenticeship; a third, a musical based on P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, failed to find its final form; neither did the fourth, Climb High. By early 1954 Sondheim had much to show from his efforts to write the book for a musical, but none of those efforts was polished enough to take the stage.

These scripts, sketches, and scores – nearly everything from 1946 to 1965 – are currently housed in the library and archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.³ These early materials have provided scholars and writers grist for popular and scholarly work, most notably Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals with its twenty-one pages on Sondheim’s pre-West Side Story activities;⁴ Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life, which has a rich portrait of Sondheim’s development;⁵ and my own articles and book that trace the foundations of Sondheim’s musicodramatic style.⁶ To my knowledge, neither Banfield nor Secrest nor I have fully disentangled the composer from the lyricist nor fully explained reactions such as Laurents’s.

Despite the plethora of scripts at Wisconsin, it is clear that Sondheim did not wish to be characterized as a writer of words. The 1965 biography that accompanies the Wisconsin finding guide talks about how

In the first volume of his collected lyrics and the ‘attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes’ that go along with them, published forty-five years later, Sondheim returned to make the same point: that he was a composer first and foremost, and that meeting the composer for West Side Story only exacerbated his own desire to write for the musical stage. He said of the not-so-glamorous meeting with Bernstein that, notwithstanding his experience with Julius Epstein, working with Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins was entirely different:

After recounting his audition for Bernstein, which reads as though the headstrong young man was in the presence of an inscrutable oracle, the eighty-year-old Sondheim tells the reader how the twenty-five-year-old Sondheim felt:

The materials in Wisconsin provide the hard evidence of what Sondheim was doing from 1946 to the premiere of West Side Story in 1957. Two other more recent sources shine a light on the more affective aspects of this period in Sondheim’s life. The two volumes of his lyrics buttress the opinion of Laurents and others who saw in these words a master at work. And two commercially available recordings, both titled Sondheim Sings and both released in 2005, serve as sonic witnesses, placing the astute listener alongside Laurents and others who heard Sondheim sing and play his songs. Together, these two sources make Laurents’s assessment easier to comprehend: the lyrics rival those from the best in the business, while the music is not unlike Sondheim’s description of Bernstein’s music: ‘a fresh individual and complex sound, a new kind of music.’ And given that he did not have the profile that Bernstein the composer had, Sondheim the composer was more easily dismissed. One can imagine Bernstein parroting Laurents: ‘I don’t like your music, but I do like your lyrics a lot.’

‘I liked your lyrics very much’

The audition that Laurents heard occurred around the time that Sondheim attended a gathering at lyricist E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg’s apartment. Also there that afternoon were composers Burton Lane (Finian’s Rainbow, 1947) and Harold Arlen (House of Flowers, 1954; ‘The Man That Got Away’ from the film A Star Is Born was released that year, although Judy Garland had recorded it the year before). Both Lane and Arlen ‘played some stuff.’ Then it was Sondheim’s turn. He recalled that he played three numbers: ‘a fast, a slow, and a fast.’

A look at the lyrics for these three songs and others from Saturday Night – his first professional musical – show that, as a wordsmith, Sondheim was indeed writing blockbusters.

Sondheim patted himself on the back for his ability ‘to imitate the Jewish Brooklynese of the Epstein brothers as if I’d been born in Greenpoint.’¹¹ The title song situates us in Jewish Brooklyn in its very first lines. Four guys are gathered at a home in Brooklyn. Ted is on the phone, trying to get a date with some woman; Ray bets that Ted will fail; Ray relates his opinion about Ted to Artie and offers up an alternate plan for the evening.

After apparently nixing the notion of seeing ‘the combination [possibly a double feature] of Johnny Mack Brown and Bessie Love’ at a nearby movie palace, Ray offers up another option that he found in the Sunday New York Times. Artie voices his disapproval in rather colourful terms:

Dino, the fourth fellow at the house, plays a honky-tonk number on the piano, Artie strums a ukulele, and the ennui and desperation of the guys comes through in the sharpness of their dialogue in the form of Sondheim’s lyrics.

As for Sondheim’s characterization of ‘Isn’t It?’ as a slow song, it might be more accurately described as a waltz, a dance that appears repeatedly in Sondheim’s oeuvre. In fact, the materials in Wisconsin include two undated piano compositions, each named ‘Waltz.’ Both have the mien of French cabaret music with a whiff of Ravel thrown in. Given the character’s (Helen) affectation of being from the South (she, too, is from Brooklyn), a waltz seems appropriate for her attempt to portray herself as a Southern belle. The lyric itself is fairly straightforward, containing just a few internal rhymes but organized around the last word in each stanza – ‘band–demand–hand–grand’ – while at the same time reminding us that this era features a red-hot stock market.

The ‘screaming 2/4’ – ‘One Wonderful Day’ – already exhibits wit and skill with its identity in the first two syllables. And in a song that revolves around the possibility of marriage, Sondheim sent up one of the best-known wedding melodies – the ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Wagner’s Lohengrin – setting it to words that would be right at home in Company:

A more positive take on marriage – one that, like ‘Isn’t It?’ uses the stock market as a trope – comes in ‘Love’s A Bond.’ As with other lyrics in Saturday Night, ‘Love’s A Bond’ abounds in interior rhyme:

Another song, ‘Exhibit A,’ conjures up the lawyerly disquisition that Fredrik lays out in A Little Night Music (‘Now’). After detailing eight alphabetically organized ‘exhibits,’ A through H, that any enterprising young man will need to have at hand in order to have his way with his date by the end of the evening, including the scent of ‘new pine’ that will assist a fellow in getting his girl to become ‘supine,’ Bobby reviews the ‘evidence’:

Other lyrics from this same time period show a similar virtuosity and joie de vivre. The second volume of Sondheim’s lyrics contains a sampling of birthday tributes, including two for Bernstein (1958 and 1988), one for Laurents (1998), and two for Harold Prince (1978 and 1993). The first Bernstein birthday lyric is a reworking of ‘You’re Only as Old as You Look,’ a 1955 song that Sondheim wrote for Jerry Beaty, Mary Rodgers’s first husband. The Bernstein version finds Sondheim twitting the birthday boy for his propensity to borrow other people’s music; it also has a sequence where the rhymes are so closely assonant that one might be excused from hearing them initially as near or false rhymes, which Sondheim decried as ‘the refuge of the destitute.’¹⁷

The original version of the song to Beaty opens Sondheim Sings, Volume II. Also on the CD is a birthday tribute he composed a year before titled ‘A Star Is Born.’ A clear nod to the Garland film of the same year, Sondheim fêted the birth of a classmate’s daughter by regaling the infant’s father – a Williams classmate and an avid movie and theatre buff – with an avalanche of references so dense that, in his volume, Sondheim felt the need to provide a glossary for some of the more than seventy actors, movies, and studios he invoked:

This concatenation of names provides an early example of the list song in Sondheim’s hands; later list songs include ‘I’m Still Here’ (Follies), ‘Please Hello’ (Pacific Overtures), and ‘Putting It Together’ (Sunday in the Park with George). And while it was written for a private audience – Charles Hollerith, Jr.; his wife, Catherine; and their newborn daughter, Catherine Louise – undoubtedly others in Sondheim’s orbit at this time would have had opportunities to hear these songs.²⁰

The scintillating wordplay found in Saturday Night and other contemporaneous songs and his emerging ability to define and describe character through his lyrics set Sondheim apart from other practitioners in his day. It is not by accident that Sondheim looked to Frank Loesser and Guys and Dolls, rather than Hammerstein or Alan Jay Lerner – Brigadoon (1947), Love Life (1948), and Paint Your Wagon (1951); My Fair Lady would come later (1956) – as a model for witty, acerbic, conversational lyrics at this moment in his career. The other men were poetic and romantic; Loesser was a wisecracking New Yorker.²¹ And, like Sondheim, Loesser wrote his own music to his own lyrics. Except, unlike Loesser, nobody seemed drawn to Sondheim’s music. The recordings give a hint as to why that might have been so. They open a window into Sondheim’s piano technique. In a word: it was formidable.²²

‘I didn’t like your music’

Although it was composed after West Side Story, ‘Pretty Little Picture’ (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1962; Sondheim Sings, Volume I: 1962–72) can illustrate what Sondheim might have sounded like when Laurents, Lane, Arlen, Bernstein, and others heard him sing his songs in the mid 1950s. For starters, the tempo of Sondheim’s rendition (quarter note [q] = 120 to 126 bpm) is much faster than what has become the standard tempo, from Zero Mostel’s performance to the present day (q = 106 bpm). Then Sondheim tossed off the Prokofievian ‘wrong notes’ as though there was no physical challenge whatsoever.²³ While there is an actual wrong note or two in his performance – for example, a G in the bass instead of an F at 1′ 43″ – the enthusiastic singing and playing, coupled with the fast tempo, result in a blockbuster performance.

One hears the same drive in his rendition of an early version of ‘The Glamorous Life’ (A Little Night Music, 1973). The piano playing sounds as though there is a second person sitting with him, but Sondheim executed both the piano playing and singing alone; the motoric accompaniment, the leaps into chords in the middle of the keyboard, and the shifts in meter are handled with vigor and aplomb. One hears an accomplished performer at work here, one for whom virtuosity seems to come with little effort.

I do not wish to oversell the pianistic facility found in the recordings. They represent only a selection of the recordings that Sondheim made, and one would presume that they were chosen for their fidelity to the songs and persuasiveness as performances. It is easy to imagine multiple takes of one song as he allowed the tape to roll, and those performances, filled with stops and starts and the inevitable clinkers, may one day yield their own thorough study. But these recordings give us a sense of what it must have been like to have been in the room where Sondheim, having spent the day preparing and practicing alone, auditioned his songs in order to interest potential producers and investors in his work.

In addition to the standalone songs ‘You’re Only as Old as You Look’ and ‘A Star Is Born,’ Sondheim Sings, Volume II: 1946–60 has two songs from Saturday Night. The first, ‘I Remember That,’ is in 32-bar song form (here AA′BA″) with an 8-bar extension of the final A section. It also features a 28-bar verse in which Hank recollects meeting Celeste for the first time, getting all of the details wrong, and a 10-bar reprise of the verse by Celeste, who corrects Hank. Sondheim’s playing closely resembles the published version, which is in the same key (C major) and, most importantly, contains the contrapuntal tenor voice in the piano part. In the introduction to the refrain, that voice sets up an oscillating figure that runs throughout the song; in the bridge, it traces a descending line that returns in the tag at the end; and this voice drives the modulation to the bridge, as the song moves to E major. In that transition to the bridge, the accompaniment also indicates that the left hand needs to cross over the right, which is playing the interior line at that point. This interior voice, preserved by the crossing of hands, resembles the piano writing in Rachmaninov, including in the second piano concerto – the first movement of which Sondheim performed²⁴ – and Sondheim has always been fond of counterpoint, which is evident in other moments in Saturday Night.

The melody for ‘I Remember That’ is more instrumental than vocal, with its repeated triadic arpeggiations climbing up the scale in the A sections: first C–E–G, then E–G–B, lastly G–B–D, all harmonized with a C major triad. And the tag features its own upward idea, as the melody, after hitting a high E, comes back down to a G as the stressed note, followed by an A and then a B, not unlike what one hears in the final A section of ‘The Trolley Song,’ sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis ten years earlier (1944; music and lyrics by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane). All in all, it is an accomplished traditional song that has elements that make it challenging to sing, slightly more difficult to play than a standard lead sheet (the published score does not provide chord figures), and less immediately memorable than the songs of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, which this song, with its modulation in the bridge, seem to hold as its models.

Berlin was especially fond of double songs, beginning with ‘Play a Simple Melody/Musical Demon’ from his 1914 musical Watch Your Step and continuing through to his last completed musical (‘Empty Pockets Filled with Love,’ Mr. President, 1962) and to the last major revival he oversaw (‘Old Fashioned Wedding,’ Annie Get Your Gun, 1966). Closer to Sondheim’s young adulthood – and its own bona fide phenomenon – was ‘I Wonder Why/You’re Just in Love’ from Berlin’s 1950 Call Me Madam. The lovely, almost syrupy ballad sung by the male lead is touching, but once the real star of the show, Ethel Merman, cuts in with her jazzy counterpoint, the song enters a different stratosphere that is intensified when the two songs are sung in tandem. The song never failed to rouse the audience, and Merman and her male lead – one hesitates to call him a ‘co-star’ – often had to reprise the song as an instant encore.

‘In No Time at All/A Moment with You’ attempts to pay homage to this Berlin tradition, but it is a pale copy of what Berlin executed in 1950. Unlike the Merman showstopper, Sondheim’s song has a single pace: ‘Tempo di Fox Trot.’ And the recording of Sondheim singing this song in 1954 doesn’t fully realize the second song, making it difficult at this distance to determine how well the two lines work together. By the time the show was produced off-Broadway, the second ‘song’ became more of an echo of the first, taking over some of the wrong-note counterpoint in the piano part of the 1954 recording and setting that counterpoint to words.²⁵ And like ‘I Remember That,’ this song’s bridge is a modulator’s paradise, enharmonically going from D-flat major through F-sharp minor to E major and then to A major. The score retains the five-flat key signature as the music here is festooned with accidentals. Then a classic jazz tritone pivot sends the music from an A¹³ chord to an E-flat¹³ chord, then through the dominant of the original key back home to D flat major. One can think of ‘So in Love’ (Kiss Me, Kate, 1948, Porter) or ‘All the Things You Are’ (Very Warm for May, 1939, Kern; book and lyrics by Hammerstein) for other examples of modulatory excess on Broadway that Sondheim would have known and admired.

The title song for Saturday Night takes modulation, counterpoint, and climbing melodies to a dizzying height.²⁶ After Dino’s ragtime piano introduction in the key of B flat major, Artie strums three chords on his ukulele that place us on the doorstep of D-flat major. The first eight bars of the verse are in D-flat, but the second eight are jacked up to E-flat. They are followed by a harmonically unstable sixteen measures that, somewhat surprisingly, end with a return to E-flat major and the melody sitting on the sixth degree. Four measures in E-flat repeat the melodic figure that opened the verse, only to be cut short by Dino’s honky-tonk piano, now thrown into D-flat instead of B-flat. It sets up Artie’s three ukulele chords just fine … and then the music continues without preparation in F major for the song’s refrain (or ‘burthen,’ as Sondheim liked to call this section of a song, in homage to Kern).

The accompaniment thus far has had moments of contrast with the melody, but the refrain (a straight-up 32-bar song, in ABAC form) contains the same kind of interior tenor line that was so prominent in ‘I Remember That.’ Its true contrapuntal potential, however, is revealed in its second appearance. After a return to the beginning of the song, the D-flat/E-flat/unstable harmonies/return to E-flat structure jumps to what is marked as the coda but is more a written-out version of the refrain repeat. This time, the snippet of the opening line of the verse is given its full eight bars (instead of four the first time), with the melody oscillating between $\hat{3}$ and $\hat{2}$ in E-flat, but midway the key changes to F, making the oscillation between $\hat{2}$ and $\hat{1}$ . This static melody with a key change underneath is something Sondheim adopted from Ravel’s Trio and String Quartet, deployed in the first movement of his piano sonata, and seen in the key change at the end of the bridge in ‘Losing My Mind’ (Follies). Here in ‘Saturday Night,’ with the music now in the key of the refrain, Sondheim pulls another compositional rabbit out of the hat: the melody of the A sections – which has the same stairstep quality found in ‘I Remember That’ – can be sung in canon at the unison with one bar separating each entrance, and the written-out repeat has four vocal lines as Ted, Ray, Artie, and Dino echo one another in lamenting their lonely plight on this particular Saturday night.

The stabbing wrong notes, the triadic and instrumental melodies, the insinuating contrapuntal lines, the modulatory harmonies, the energetic accompaniments: taken all together, Sondheim’s songs exhibit an almost irrational exuberance, especially in comparison with what Loewe and Loesser and Berlin and Porter and Rodgers were offering on Broadway at the time. Only Arlen – Sondheim’s favourite song composer – could come close to such musical audacity, and even he found it necessary to suggest to Sondheim that the young composer–lyricist tone down his exuberance.²⁷ Is it any surprise, then, that Laurents and others found Sondheim’s music hard to digest? And Sondheim did little to help his cause by being such a polymath at the time. With Ayers’s death and the subsequent shelving of Saturday Night, Sondheim would be known as a lyricist throughout the 1950s and for years thereafter.

Getting One’s Goat

Sondheim knew in 1957 that, sooner or later, his music would arrive on Broadway, just as his lyrics had. And on Tuesday evening, 8 May 1962, when A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum opened, that day had arrived. It meant that Sondheim would receive his first professional reviews for his work as a composer as well as a lyricist. This is what he heard as someone read Howard Taubman’s New York Times review aloud at the opening night party:

Many talented hands fueled Forum’s run of 964 performances, and yet Sondheim’s contribution to the show was virtually overlooked: Forum won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Musical; Oliver! won the Tony that year for Best Original Score; Sondheim was passed over in that category.

Arthur Laurents would give Sondheim a second chance as composer–lyricist with Anyone Can Whistle (1964); it closed after all of nine performances. Sondheim’s heyday would have to wait until the 1970s, when he started becoming the doyen of American musical theatre with Company, yet for another decade his lyrics bested his music in the eyes of many critics. By 1980, there was no question about who Sondheim was: the premier composer–lyricist of the American musical. Time will tell, when Broadway’s musical theatre history is recounted seventy years hence, whether Sondheim is seen as the GOAT (‘greatest of all time’). Whatever that critical judgment is, his greatness, fleetingly acknowledged in the 1950s and early 1960s, is no longer in doubt. In the musical theatre pantheon, there will always be a place for him.

In 1949 Jerome Robbins ‘started looking for a producer and collaborators who’d be interested’ in his idea for a contemporary Romeo and Juliet.¹ ‘This was not easy. Producers were not at all interested in doing it,’ he recalled decades later.² Even when producers were on board, they struggled to secure backers with additional funding. West Side Story was preceded on Broadway by the 1956 premieres of My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella, and Bells Are Ringing and was followed three months after its opening by The Music Man – hit musical comedies that conclude with a couple anticipating a future together, in contrast to West Side Story’s women grieving the deaths of their lovers due to gang violence. With no similarly unhappy ending earning well on Broadway at the time, it is unsurprising producers and backers were reluctant to support West Side Story.

This chapter examines the four producers who were attached to West Side Story on its way to Broadway – Cheryl Crawford, Roger L. Stevens, Robert E. Griffith, and Harold S. Prince – unpacking their relationships with each other and with the musical’s creative team. While West Side Story’s creative team is well known for the innovation its members hoped to achieve with their lyric theatre collaboration, they were simultaneously keen to earn a profit. Two weeks after the musical opened, Arthur Laurents wrote to producer Roger L. Stevens, a real estate magnate, for advice on investing in real estate syndicates, and Stephen Sondheim kept Leonard Bernstein updated on the musical’s profits while the composer was on a conducting tour.³ The chapter will therefore also explore the ways this musical generated a profit, in particular its further circulation via national and international tours.

Though conversations and work on the musical developed over many years, producers and investors for West Side Story were recruited primarily in 1956 and 1957. The talent agent and producer Leland Hayward, and producer–authors Rodgers and Hammerstein, were among those who turned down the new musical. An audition for legendary Broadway producer George Abbott was particularly terrible. A nervous Bernstein played poorly and loudly, and, with Sondheim, ‘sang like desperate frogs!’ Laurents related to Robbins in a letter.⁴ Abbott provided mixed feedback including his preference to lighten up the sombre musical. Though much of West Side Story’s development illustrates its creative team’s desire to innovate musical theatre, that innovation was communicated to potential producers and investors through the traditional Broadway backers’ audition. A producer’s office or wealthy theatre afficionado’s apartment were not the ideal venues for showcasing a musical drawing heavily on dance and dramatic music for its storytelling. West Side Story’s struggle to secure a producer and financing signaled the potential for new models of musical theatre development and pitches.

The Gambler and the Facilitator: Cheryl Crawford and Roger L. Stevens

The elder sister to three younger brothers, Cheryl Crawford (1902–1986) accumulated years of experience in sparring with boys. She was introduced to theatre as a child in Akron, Ohio where she lived with her upper-middle-class family. An avid reader who entertained audiences of her own, Crawford invented stories on her front porch based on prompts from the neighborhood children who delighted in her ability to construct a narrative.⁵ She left the Midwest to major in drama at Smith College and spent a summer working for the Provincetown Players, during Susan Glaspell’s tenure. Acting training with the Theatre Guild in New York City followed her college education so she could learn about professional theatre and pursue her goal of becoming a producer. ‘Since [Theatre Guild executive director] Theresa Helburn was one of very few women, and certainly the most important one, in an executive position in the theatre, I hoped she would look on my ambition favorably, woman to woman,’ Crawford recalls in her autobiography.⁶ In 1926, after a year of training with Guild actors, Crawford began to establish herself professionally, as an actor, stage manager, director, and eventually producer.

‘Sometimes I think a producer is a person who is absolutely unable to do anything else, who has a strong interest in all the arts but the talent for none of them and enough business sense to know that sometimes you must dare to go to the edge of disaster to achieve what you desire,’ Crawford mused.⁷ Musicals became her passion and she brought her business sense to the collaborations she facilitated. Crawford introduced German composer Kurt Weill, who wanted to work on an American subject, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green. Together they created the antiwar musical Johnny Johnson (1936), about an idealistic soldier who enlists to fight in the First World War. Disagreement between members of the creative team and a too-large theatre contributed to the musical’s short run on Broadway.

Producing independently by the early 1940s and struggling after a string of failures, Crawford was recruited to co-produce at a summer stock theatre in New Jersey. She obtained permission from the Theatre Guild to produce a revival of Porgy and Bess, in New Jersey, and hired performers from the 1935 premiere as well as its conductor, Alexander Smallens. He and Crawford collaborated to streamline the work’s recitative, to create greater flow and coherence. The production was such a hit that it transferred to Broadway early in 1942, went on tour, and returned to Broadway in 1943 and 1944. Porgy and Bess generated much needed income for Crawford and convinced her to focus on musicals. One Touch of Venus (1943), another Broadway collaboration with Weill, was followed by the musicals Brigadoon (1947), Love Life (1948) and Paint Your Wagon (1951).

Crawford’s musicals were not always commercial hits, such as the short-lived Flahooley (1951), a satirical puppet musical. Her shows frequently revolve around opposing views – whether on war, capitalism, urban, suburban or pastoral life, or with West Side Story, on migration and assimilation. Crawford wanted One Touch of Venus to ‘have social bearing and also be amusing,’⁸ and similar potential would be a key element persuading her to develop West Side Story. Lehman Engel and Howard Kissel note how, ‘Given the iconic status of the show, it is hard for us to understand the enormous gamble [West Side Story] posed.’⁹ Barranger titled her biography A Gambler’s Instinct, calling Crawford a ‘woman of poker-playing instincts and gaming skills, the individual of courage and fortitude, the legendary risk-taker and penny-pincher who mastered the art (and gamesmanship) of producing on Broadway at mid-century.’¹⁰ Bernstein offered West Side Story to Crawford in 1956 but she was unable to fund the entire $300,000 advance the production needed her to wager so she recruited Roger L. Stevens (1910–1998), with whom she had served on the board of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), as co-producer.

Once on board, Crawford and Stevens explored the possibility of a Los Angeles out-of-town tryout for West Side Story. They corresponded with Edwin Lester, General Manager of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera at the Philharmonic Auditorium. Copying Stevens on her letter to Robbins, Laurents, and Bernstein on 15 June 1956, Crawford’s desire for an entertaining musical was clarified. ‘We both feel that exciting as the show can be, it is no cinch and I think all of you realize that too, it has very few of the customary Broadway values of comedy and splash with three killings and music leaning to opera.’¹¹ She continued to share various concerns with Stevens over the summer, regarding the contract, profit sharing, advertising, and a play in development with a similar story. She also commissioned Sondheim to write a song and incidental music for N. Richard Nash’s play Girls of Summer, opening later that year.

Lester followed up with Stevens at the end of 1956, praising the creative team’s work but raising concerns over such a musical premiering at a Los Angeles venue owned by Temple Baptist Church:

Less than a year after West Side Story opened on Broadway, its rival The Music Man launched its national tour with a six-week run at the Philharmonic as part of Lester’s Civic Light Opera subscription series. West Side Story arrived in Los Angeles eighteen months after opening on Broadway, giving it plenty of time to generate positive media attention and word of mouth that would counter any church concerns.

Crawford relayed Lester’s concerns to Robbins in the new year and floated Hartford as an alternative tryout. Crawford’s devotion to the musical was unabated, despite the criticism she offered on form and structure: ‘I re-read it very carefully and it’s too good not to be great … Please know that I have lost none of my enthusiasm. I just want this to be the greatest it can and we shouldn’t rush in only partially prepared.’¹³ She explained that she had shared the script, giving it to

Did Crawford’s letter inspire Robbins? Within two months he was writing to his friend Tanaquil Le Clercq about a high school dance he had visited in Puerto Rican Harlem.¹⁵ Laurents does not give Crawford any credit for advice on comedy, but in his memoir recalls, ‘There was a need, I thought, for comedy relief which, by lessening tension, would increase the impact of the tragedy that followed. After getting nowhere with dramaturgical arguments, I invoked Shakespeare’s use of clown.’¹⁶ It may be a coincidence that Laurents and Crawford independently saw the potential for clowning in this musical, but given Laurents developed this comedy after Crawford’s departure, it is difficult to read Crawford’s letter to Robbins and not recall the number ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ in which the Jet boys clown around, entertaining each other with their turns, as Crawford’s friend suggested.¹⁷

Crawford wrote to Stevens in March 1957 before he traveled to England, discussing the production budget as well as the possible choice of the ANTA Playhouse (now August Wilson Theatre). She also emphasized, ‘I will work hard to keep them at it.’¹⁸ Despite her ongoing concerns and being busy with several plays, Crawford nevertheless enjoyed the creative team’s milestones. ‘Bit by bit I heard the score, wishing they would develop one great soaring ballad for it. Then one day Lenny phoned in great excitement: They had finished a wonderful new number. Sure enough, when I heard it at his apartment, I was delighted. The song was “Maria.”’¹⁹

Barranger writes that, ‘She remained enthusiastic until a backers’ audition in April … during which none of the well-dressed potential investors opened his checkbook.’²⁰ Arts patron and co-producer of Crawford’s Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon, Bea Lawrence, hosted the discouraging audition at her apartment. Crawford recalled the evening two decades later:

It had been nearly six years since her success with Paint Your Wagon and Crawford had weathered a string of flop plays; this latest musical needed to make money for her.

The creative team hoped to open the show in the spring of 1957 but were delayed due to Bernstein’s conducting engagements, his work on Candide (1956), and the inability to cast a male lead. Months later, just before the Broadway opening, the New York Times reported on the casting challenges Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Crawford had flagged, in an article titled ‘Talent Dragnet.’ According to reporter Murray Schumach, an eight-month search sent the West Side Story team to high schools, choirs, settlement schools, ballet companies, and nightclubs. Schumach explained how the new musical was combining the singing and dancing choruses that were separate in most musicals and noted the relative youth of the majority of the characters – ‘almost the entire cast had to be young – and yet have the professionalism derived from experience.’²²

The casting challenges highlight why backers’ auditions, despite being an established industry practice, were unlikely to convince anyone to finance West Side Story. Robbins’s biographer Deborah Jowitt is one of many who has emphasized the brevity of Arthur Laurents’s script for the musical, ‘Its passions rage primarily through song and dance,’ she explains.²³ Beyond the beauty of Bernstein’s sung melodies, much of the power of this show’s music comes from the orchestration of its score, created in collaboration by Bernstein, Sid Ramin, and Irwin Kostal. Bernstein scholar Nigel Simeone explains, ‘Bernstein began greatly expanding the orchestral contribution to a Broadway show in On the Town (1944), but in West Side Story the orchestra takes a pivotal role, becoming an integral part of the drama.’²⁴ Despite this expanded labor for orchestral music, work on orchestrations could only begin late in the production process, given a score must be completed prior to its orchestration. Similarly, while Robbins demanded eight weeks of rehearsal and assistants for both him and co-choreographer Peter Gennaro, the dances had yet to be created and could certainly not be easily showcased in Lawrence’s living room even had they been ready in April of 1957. The format of a backers’ audition could never contain, much less showcase, the innovations in Laurents’s spare libretto with its explicit stage directions; Bernstein’s songs alongside sophisticated, dramatic orchestrations; and Robbins’s and Gennaro’s fusion of ballet and Latin rhythms. The failure of the fundraising attempts predicted the evolution that would occur decades later in how investors are introduced to musical theatre material whose development they might fund.

It is no wonder that the discouraging audition spurred Crawford’s recusal from the production; it was impossible for the material to express its potential through this kind of demonstration. Additionally, she wanted more than to excite audiences with songs and dances telling a contemporary story. Envisioning a sociological document explaining why kids were the way they were, she regularly sent memos to the creative team demanding rewrites and, ‘Faulting the book for not tracing the socieoeconomic history of the neighborhood where the play took place.’ Her proposed solution was to delineate ‘how middle-class Wasp had given way to immigrant Jews to poor Negroes to motley mix.’²⁵

Contemplating both the costs – $300,000 was not a small fee for this producer – and the casting requirements, she decided to pull out. Her exit strategy baffled some on the creative team. She wrote long, inflammatory memos to Laurents and Robbins, criticizing one man to the other. To Laurents she suggested the characters were under-developed, and that he make more of how upward mobility causes change to neighborhood demographics – something playwright Lorraine Hansberry would explore almost two years after West Side Story premiered, in A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Crawford believed that ‘[w]hat is happening to kids seems to be one of our most urgent problems today and although we’ve picked these special kids their desires and conflicts should be representative of more.’²⁶ She pressed Laurents for greater detail and further development, declaring, for example, ‘I don’t think any of the characters should be supernumerary or “group.” Each should be part of a gallery of vivid and interesting kids with real stories.’²⁷

Laurents responded that night, noting the depressing and discouraging atmosphere to which Crawford was contributing and that he was ‘not interested in adding extreme detail – They never characterized anybody and I am bored to death with them.’²⁸ One of Laurents’s stage directions nevertheless reinforced Crawford’s belief, describing the Jets in the first scene as, ‘an anthology of what is called American’²⁹ and recognizing they were representative of more than the events in the musical. Laurents ultimately provided specific details about each character. ‘There were to be no anonymous chorus boys and girls; they all had names,’ Jowitt describes. ‘All were advised to figure out who they were, their family background, their day-to-day lives.’³⁰ Robbins famously asked the Jet and Shark actors not to socialize with each other, and the creative team eventually accomplished much of what Crawford suggested.

Crawford had gone to the edge of disaster with West Side Story, as she believed producers ought to, but ultimately reneged on her West Side Story wager because her own circumstances prevented her from achieving her goals. She announced her withdrawal to the creative team at a meeting in her office. ‘Conflicting testimonies muddy the waters of what happened next. Harsh words were exchanged,’ Barranger explains.³¹ Laurents wanted to hurt Crawford so called her ‘an immoral woman’ and left with his collaborators.³² Sondheim does not remember Crawford’s involvement with any fondness, observing, ‘West Side Story also exposed me to another, less reliable, kind of collaborator: the producer.’ Overlooking her track record with musicals, he calls her ‘a lady with a distinguished record of producing plays by Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams’ but laments that she announced her departure from the project just two months before rehearsals were scheduled to begin.³³

In his memoir Laurents tries to understand why Crawford sent separate memos to him and Robbins, thinking she should have known the collaborators would keep one another informed. ‘Could it be that this good, this moral Christian New Englander was not above being devious?’ he wondered, demonstrating his limited knowledge of Crawford, a Midwesterner though she attended Smith College in Massachusetts. Decades later, when his colleagues were still grumbling about Crawford’s departure, Robbins hung on to the facts: ‘My version of Cheryl’s withdrawal is very simple: she couldn’t raise the money.’³⁴ Crawford had written to Robbins months before her withdrawal confirming, ‘I want a hit possibly more than any of you so I don’t want to muck this up rashly,’ reinforcing perhaps both her passion for the project and her financial precarity.³⁵

What the West Side Story creative team didn’t know at the time of Crawford’s withdrawal was that she had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Robbins had already appeared before the committee in 1953 and decided to name names, a decision many of his colleagues credited as motivated by his desire to protect his career and prevent any public revelation of his homosexuality. Crawford, also homosexual, ‘felt vulnerable, dispirited, and betrayed by her government,’ Barranger notes. ‘Not knowing what her legal expenses would be, she had no stomach for the super-expensive show about rival street gangs.’³⁶ Crawford’s lawyer obtained the list of her political activities compiled by FBI and HUAC, and Crawford called the list of letters, lectures, presentations, and sponsorships ‘petty and ridiculous.’³⁷ While the producer had friends and colleagues who were political, she had prioritized her theatre work over any political activity. She requested and received a postponement due to her work on a new play, and the hearing was postponed indefinitely.

Regardless of the HUAC subpoena and lack of capital, Crawford’s dedication to West Side Story in the year she developed the musical undoubtedly helped the creative team to clarify what the show was and was not doing. ‘She was hardly your conventional commercial producer,’ Engel and Kissel suggest. ‘The reason that she was the logical producer for West Side Story was that she had devoted her enormously successful career to producing plays and musicals of merit,’ from Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon to Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus. ‘How many other producers might take on such a serious project?’³⁸ While Crawford’s autobiography includes the chapter ‘Musical Adventures’ that begins with a clear statement of her enthusiasm for them – ‘There’s magic in a good musical’³⁹ – Crawford makes no mention of West Side Story anywhere in the book. Barranger explains that Crawford ‘counted West Side Story among the soaring blunders in a career rich in highs and lows.’⁴⁰ Upon the publication of her autobiography, Crawford wrote in The New York Times about the shows she didn’t produce and that final meeting with the creative team in her office. ‘I will always remember their unbelieving, angry faces as they walked out. Only Jerry stayed to shake my hand. I told Roger I was certain they would work harder than ever to prove me wrong. They sure did.’⁴¹

Leaving Crawford’s office in the spring of 1957, the creative team sought consolation at a hotel bar, and Laurents placed a phone call to Stevens, who was in London and reassured the creative team. Sondheim explains,

Historian Karen Heath concurs with Sondheim and notes ‘As a musical theatre producer, Stevens was hands off; he was not interested in seeking the limelight, and he preferred to work quietly behind the scenes.’⁴³ She suggests Stevens followed a pattern in his career: ‘he was always the man who could be relied on to take a risk and find the money to put on a promising show.’⁴⁴ By 1954 Stevens had doubled his investment in the Empire State Building after just three years of ownership as the leader of a syndicate that had bought the building in 1951.⁴⁵

Stevens had ‘a unique system for raising money,’ The New York Times reported a year after West Side Story opened.⁴⁶ ‘He offers a “package” of several shows to a small group of wealthy investors,’ who may not even know what shows are in the package, but who had already made money in another business thanks to Stevens.⁴⁷ ‘They feel a sense of obligation,’ Stevens noted in the article, and he emphasized none of his money came from auditions or readings.⁴⁸ When Crawford departed West Side Story, Stevens ‘set about arranging financing with the support of several of his real estate associates, plus a substantial investment of his own. The backers became limited partners in the West Side Story Company set up by the show’s producers, Robert E. Griffith and Harold Prince.’⁴⁹ Some assumed they would take a loss on their West Side Story investment, but predicted it would be worth it, ensuring their eligibility to invest in future Harold S. Prince and Robert E. Griffith productions – the competent producers who were the next to join the production.

Harold S. Prince and Robert E. Griffith: Trying Out and Selling Out

In his 1974 memoir, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre, Prince confirms ‘Stevens had financed the formative years of that project. When Miss Crawford bowed out, Stephen Sondheim brought us in.’⁵⁰ The day Crawford withdrew from the production, Sondheim happened to receive a phone call from his friend, Prince, who was in Boston for the tryout of his new musical, New Girl in Town. Sondheim patiently listened to Prince unload his worries about the new show, then Sondheim ‘told him that West Side Story had just gone down the drain and that my life was over.’⁵¹ Prince asked for a copy of the script to consider with his producing partner, Griffith. They were on board after a quick trip back to New York to listen to the West Side Story score. The producing team agreed to take it on but only once New Girl in Town had opened in New York. Crawford surrendered her rights to Prince and Griffiths, and with new full-time producers in place, Stevens retained the billing, ‘By arrangement with Roger L. Stevens.’

Sondheim interpreted Prince and Griffith’s commitment to a single project at a time as ‘an indication of what good producers they were.’⁵² What Sondheim overlooks is the seed he had planted a year earlier that played a significant role in securing Prince and Griffith. Sondheim and Prince had established a friendship several years prior and they regularly compared notes as each man progressed in his career in New York. Sondheim joined the West Side Story project as lyricist in 1955 and, at some point in 1956, shared Bernstein’s score with his friend Prince, swearing him to secrecy. Elizabeth Wells explains, ‘Prince had to pretend that he had never heard it before, since Bernstein did not want anyone to hear the music before the show went into production.’⁵³ Prince therefore had an advantage in deciding to rescue the new musical; having secretly fallen in love with the score months earlier, its melodies lingered in his ear, persuading him of their appeal. Primarily a producer of musical comedies, Prince was recruited to Bernstein’s dramatic score and a musical tragedy. He may have concluded that the audience buying tickets to his production of The Pajama Game might be similarly convinced to attend a dramatic musical.

West Side Story was Prince and Griffith’s first venture without their Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955) co-producer Frederick Brisson. They shared years of experience working as assistants and stage managers for producer–director George Abbott. Griffith began his career as an actor, then shifted into stage management in the hope that directing work might follow. Mentoring and working with Prince in Abbott’s office, Griffith thought producing might be fun. Theatre scholar Michael Schwartz suggests Griffith was unlike the many flamboyant or explosive personalities involved in musical theatre. ‘[H]is extensive experience as a stage manager for legendary director George Abbott, his ability to save significant production costs, and his singularly calm demeanour’ set Griffith apart and helped him to succeed.⁵⁴ He was twenty-two years Prince’s senior, and a shy introvert to the young and energetic Prince, but ‘the two men, working out of a small office in Rockefeller Center and backstage, became close collaborators and friends.’⁵⁵

What Prince and Griffith offered West Side Story was a sense of urgency, as Sondheim recalls: ‘When Hal and Bobby came in on it, we all felt we had to make quick decisions and do whatever was required of us. We got very excited. With Cheryl, for all the enthusiasm, there was this feeling that we might not get into rehearsal on time. Suddenly there was this deadline right around the corner, only eight weeks away.’⁵⁶ In August 1957, after years of collaborative creation between Laurents, Robbins, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story headed to Washington DC (see Figure 6.1). Stevens wrote to Robbins following the premiere to congratulate him, ‘on what I think is the greatest choreographical and directorial job that has ever been my pleasure to witness in the theatre.’ Stevens praised him for conceiving the musical and for his success with casting: ‘To me the only gamble in this production has been the problem of picking young people of star quality who would give the play the kind of magnetism it needed. You have solved all the problems admirably.’⁵⁷ He closed by noting, ‘the word of mouth around New York is terrific.’⁵⁸

Figure 6.1 West Side Story in rehearsal: Robert E. Griffith (producer), Hal Prince (producer), Jerome Robbins (director/choreographer), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (composer), Arthur Laurents (book), Gerald Freedman (directorial assistant), Sylvia Drulie (production associate), and Oliver Smith (set design) watching.

(Photo by Martha Swope © The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)

The rave reviews and strong box office start in DC boded well for the next tryout in Philadelphia, where West Side Story was welcomed with a photo spread in the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine. Given the succession of producers and fundraising challenges, a photo of Bernstein featured a somewhat ironic caption suggesting, ‘His West Side music is more straightforward and commercial’ than his commercial failure Candide.⁵⁹ A photograph of Griffith and Prince was also included, trumpeting their track record: ‘As co-producers of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and New Girl in Town, they have never had a flop and from their past musical hits have grossed more than $10 million.’⁶⁰ Washington and Philadelphia were described as ‘smash tryouts’ in Time magazine shortly after the musical opened in New York, where the advance sale was estimated at $700,000.⁶¹

Stevens hosted the opening night party in New York. In a telegram to Bernstein sent that day, Stevens wrote: ‘Thanks for your graciousness in remembering the dim dark days when it looked like everything was off. My faith was simple because with so many remarkable tunes the production just had to work.’⁶² Less than a week later, Oscar Hammerstein sent his best wishes to Stevens, congratulating him ‘on your courage in making the play possible. This is truly a great way to start off a new season.’⁶³ It did not take long for the producers and creative team to turn their focus away from their earlier struggles and the risks they had taken, to the returns they could now anticipate. A month after the opening on Broadway, Sondheim wrote to Bernstein, who was on a conducting tour of Israel, to update him on the state of the production. After reporting on the physical and vocal health of the cast and summarizing magazine critics’ responses to the musical, Sondheim noted the songs from the musical being recorded by Jill Corey, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Lynn.⁶⁴ Beyond the immediate box office revenue, Sondheim recognized the longer-term income he and Bernstein could look forward to earning.

Domestic and International Tours

Beyond Broadway revenue and covers of the musical’s songs, national and international tours were also profitable. West Side Story toured to the United Kingdom with an all-American cast, opening in Manchester then London in late 1958. An American cast, including a young Michael Bennett as Baby John, also toured Europe. The national tour launched in Denver on 1 July 1959, four days after the Broadway production closed. Given the importance of Bernstein’s music and its orchestration, Variety reported on plans for seven musicians to tour with the show and twenty additional musicians to be hired locally. The conductor and seven-member pit ‘will be flown ahead of the company on each jump for longer rehearsals with the pickup musicians than would be permitted if they travelled by rail.’⁶⁵

After a two-week tryout in Denver, the tour moved to Los Angeles for five weeks, San Francisco for six weeks, then on to Chicago where an extended run was anticipated. Undoubtedly aware of The Music Man’s eight-month head start in Chicago, Prince and Griffith splashed out on a colour ad in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, to announce the opening of the Erlanger Theatre box office.⁶⁶ Robbins visited Chicago to rehearse the touring company before the opening. Despite the advertising push and the director’s check-up visit, West Side Story managed just a fraction of Music Man’s run in Chicago, running fourteen weeks. Six more stops throughout the Midwest and East coast in 1960 brought the tour back to Broadway where it ran through to the end of the year.

The groundbreaking musical’s run of 732 performances, with a return engagement of 249 performances following a national tour, did not compare with one of the greatest commercial hits of the late 1950s, My Fair Lady, which had a record-breaking run of 2,717 performances. In hindsight Prince suggests he and his producing partners made a mistake with their treatment of the musical while it was still on Broadway. ‘We calculated we had run out of our audience, so in a last-ditch effort to keep going until the road tour started, we lowered prices and initiated a two-for-the-price-of-one policy. Immediately we sold out; we had run out of one audience and into another. Ticket prices were too high even then for a substantial segment of our audience which indeed is interested in going to the theatre.’⁶⁷ Ticket pricing, he believes, must demonstrate an awareness of a show’s different audiences in order to sustain longer runs, and the producing team had provided limited opportunities for lower income ticket buyers to experience West Side Story on stage prior to the more affordable film adaptation.

Conclusion

Reviewing One Touch of Venus, critic Ward Morehouse might have predicted Crawford’s impact on West Side Story, more than a decade later: ‘Cheryl Crawford has performed Broadway a service in bringing along a musical show that breaks sharply away from pattern and accepted routine.’⁶⁸ The backers’ auditions Crawford and her collaborators had suffered were being scrutinized just a year after West Side Story opened, another routine the industry could break from. It is impossible for nonprofessionals to judge a musical’s prospects from such auditions, journalist Murray Schumach suggested, and, ‘the vast proportion of those who attend auditions have no intention of investing.’⁶⁹ Prince and Griffith produced West Side Story after producing three consecutive hit shows; Crawford’s development of the musical had been preceded by multiple flop plays, and five years had passed since her modest success with the musical Paint Your Wagon (1951). Success does not always breed success in musical theatre, but Griffith and Prince’s wealth from their trio of prior hits⁷⁰ insulated them against failure and attracted future investors.

Robbins, Laurents, and Sondheim reunited to work on Gypsy (1959), produced by David Merrick and Leland Hayward. Crawford and Robbins also reunited, when she recruited him to direct and co-produce with her the short-lived Broadway premiere of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1963). Jennie (1963), a vehicle for Mary Martin, and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s Celebration in 1969, were Crawford’s final musicals. Despite their brief runs, she admitted in her autobiography, ‘Down deep I am still addicted.’⁷¹ Stevens continued to dabble in musical theatre producing, rescuing Bernstein in 1976 to produce 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He hosted the musical’s Washington tryout, as Chairman of the Kennedy Center, hoping for the hit the floundering Center needed, but the new musical was a flop. A year later, ‘The nostalgia-driven Annie (1977) served to redeem both Stevens’s reputation and the Kennedy Center’s finances,’ Heath explains.⁷²

Griffith and Prince produced Fiorello! (1959) and Tenderloin (1960), followed by a flop play, A Call on Kuprin (1961). Griffith died suddenly of a heart attack two weeks after the play opened. Prince earned his first directing credit the following year on A Family Affair and gradually added more directing to his producing agenda. He partnered with Robbins again, producing Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and sustained a long, productive relationship directing and/or producing many of Sondheim’s musicals. Speaking to industry stakeholders at a conference organized by Broadway Across America in 2016, Prince insisted on a division between investors and producers and emphasized the impact of careful budgeting and the subsidy from 175 investors on his hit shows. He reported that West Side Story had to date returned 1,521 percent on its original investment.⁷³