Beginning with the original production, dancing and singing were always the focus, the centerpiece. Who hasn't seen a production where the dancing or singing or both weren't breathtaking? But who has ever seen a production where the acting was more than passable, let alone good? Why? Because except for Chino and the four adults, the cast was chosen first for their ability as dancers and/or singers, second for their looks, and last, if they could read lines and make some sense. In this production, the ability to act was going to be on a par with the ability to dance and sing, but the emphasis in rehearsal and performance was going to be— heresy!—on acting.
The effect was felt everywhere. I tested the singing of the Jet Song with Cody Green, a brilliant dancer auditioning for Riff, by asking him to sing the lyric, not with fifties musical-comedy charm but with the icy command of a potential killer. He wasn't fazed; there was an actor there. He tried, it worked, and Patrick assured me he could help with the orchestra.
“Krupke” wasn't going to be as easy: comic vaudeville is hard to justify. I had figured out how to get into the song and hoped to work out the rest in rehearsal. “Hope” is the operative word. Staring at the drop of the fence in front of which “Krupke” was going to be performed was the opposite of inspiring. It seemed like musical comedy but I didn't know what it should be and was stymied until David Saint, my associate director, said, “Why don't we lose the drop and play the scene and the song in the main set?” He was referring to the stunning depiction of a harsh and brutal neighborhood, a breeding ground for violence that sets the tone of the production. There was no way “Krupke” could be a vaudeville comedy in that grim world, but half a dozen other ways it could be played came immediately to mind.
Acting gives meaning—to every note and every step as well as to every word. Acting was what made Gypsy so much more than it ever had been. Acting, I hoped, would do the same for West Side Story, even with less opportunity and more obstacles. If the right actors could be found.
The casting demands of West Side Story are greater than those of any musical ever written. Can you dance? Not hip-hop, not just move, but dance, including ballet? Can you sing Bernstein—a range from musical comedy to opera—with a trained voice and vocal cords that weren't abused by the distorted sound and bent notes required for shows like Spring Awakening and Rent and Wicked? (Its disheartening how many talented young singers have abused their vocal cords so badly that unless they get proper training quickly, they probably won't be able to sing at all in a few years.) Can you act? Not indicate, not show and tell what you are feeling, but feel it so strongly inside that the audience will get it? And for this time, are you Latino? Not just dark-haired with high school Spanish but authentically Latino? If not, two sentences into a scene with an authentic Latino reader and a ringer is embarrassingly exposed. Minorities had been misled so many times that when it became clear that we were serious about casting Latinos as Latinos, the word spread throughout the overjoyed Latino community so fast that the casting people were overwhelmed.
I was also determined to get a really young company. The original production hadn't been overly concerned with age. Kenny Leroy, who was an otherwise admirable Bernardo, had to be asked to excise from his program bio that he had been in the original production of Oklahoma! Up close, our Bernardo, George Akram, originally from Venezuela, was a boy, but he had such an intense stillness, so commanding a presence, so quietly burning a sexuality—the girl who read with him kept caressing her chest— that he seemed a man three times his age. But George was not only exceptional, he was an exception. For the leading parts, one after another teenage dancer or singer was unfortunately unbelievable; they not only looked unused as teenagers can but they had no experience in their lives to draw from to play the characters. Their gang-member-in-life equivalents, teenagers though they be, look a used thirty, small wonder with the experience in their brutal lives. “Really young” became a casting casualty; twenty-five and over a necessary compromise.
Matt Cavanaugh is not twenty-five, but if he is a compromise, I'll take one like him every time. Tony is older than the other Jets and Matt looks younger than he is and as good as Tony should look. He is an actor and has a voice that is not only beautiful but an anomaly these days: it's really trained. He also has a depth and passion I suspect he didn't know he had that exploded during rehearsals, exposing his vulnerability and enabling me to make the play what it was always meant to be but never quite was: the story of Tony and Maria.
We had no Maria. Hundreds of girls had been seen but there was only one possibility. She had every quality needed for the role except the one that couldn't be compromised: she wasn't Latino. It was regrettable, especially to me, because she was an exceptionally good actress. Unfortunately, the only thing about her that was Latino was her high school Spanish.
Every city in the country having been combed and still no Maria, the casting calls went out to Spain, Cuba (worry about the State Department later), Mexico, and South America, except Argentina. Argentina was mine; Argentina, which meant Buenos Aires, with its own Broadway for American musicals in Spanish and two schools of musical theatre and F&F. I called them.
As usual, Federico said Tom was taking care of me, and apparently was up to date because F&F did indeed have a Maria. The perfect Maria, according to Federico, at the moment appearing as the beautiful bitch in Hairspray. That didn't strike me as much of a recommendation for West Side Story and Leonard Bernstein—pace Tom—but I was told I could judge for myself: the perfect Maria was on YouTube. YouTube. In 1957, when we couldn't find the perfect Tony or the perfect Maria, there wasn't even the Internet, but in 2008 on YouTube there was a girl named Josefina Scaglione. One viewing, and instinct said she would be our Maria: incredibly beautiful, with an incredibly beautiful voice, and incredibly, beautifully young.
She taped a DVD for us, singing “Tonight” in English sublimely and acting the first bridal-shop scene in English impressively, particularly considering who was playing Anita behind the camera—Federico Gonzales of F&F. The producers flew her to New York to audition. In person, she was even more perfect: more beautiful, a trained singer, a trained actress, a trained dancer, bilingual, charismatic, could take direction, and was just twenty-one, a girl in this country. But Buenos Aires is a European city; at twenty-one, Josefina was a young woman, not the lemonade girl she looked like, and in touch with her deepest emotions. She could go unexpected places as an actress and she did: in rehearsal she turned out to be an inventive comedienne. Directing her was a joy and a lesson. Since she was fluent in English, I forgot my own experience when I lived in Paris and had been fairly fluent in French (not anymore, alas). Is anyone totally fluent in a second language without living for years where it is the first language? I didn't watch my idioms with Josefina so there were times when she would say: “Arthur, I haven't understood one word you said for the last three minutes.” I had to laugh. The whole company and crew adore her.
With one exception, the show was cast. Joey McKneely, who is meticulous and demanding, auditioned every dancer available until he was satisfied he had the best. But why not? West Side Story is considered a dance show, and at that point I still thought it was. The leading dancing role, Anita, still hadn't been cast. The original Anita, Chita Rivera, had every step she danced choreographed for her by Peter Gennaro, who knew her special talent and exploited it. Anita not only had to dance that strongly in the first act but to sing and act with even more power in the second. Small wonder we were a week from rehearsal with no Anita and seriously worried. Then came a candidate who had to be persuaded to audition.
Karen Olivo dazzled me the first time I saw her, which was Off-Broadway in Lin Miranda's In the Heights. She was a dancer but not of the caliber needed for Anita. She knew Joey McKneely felt that, and was hesitant about auditioning. But she very much wanted to play Anita. When Karen read, I looked at David Saint: this was an actress. But more: you looked at her even if she merely stood there and seemingly did nothing—“seemingly�
� because there was always something felt and true to the character going on inside her. I asked her to make an adjustment to how she was playing the scene. She did, easily. She sang “A Boy Like That” with a voice that matched her fury. She sang in English but she was bilingual and could have sung in Spanish if the lyric had been available. I needed to find out one thing more. I asked her if she would mind singing the song again but this time not angrily, as it had been done originally, as it is always done, but with the pain Anita must be feeling because Bernardo had just been killed. She took a moment, and then sang. By the end of the song, without any vocal or physical histrionic, she was in tears, everyone in the room was close to tears, and I had decided Karen Olivo had to play Anita. Then she danced for Joey.
Joey admired Karen for having the guts to audition for him, knowing what little regard he had for her dancing, and said he would do everything possible to help her dance the role. When Karen read the audition scenes, there wasn't one reading I had ever heard in my head but they were hers and they were right for her Anita. I thought, but didn't say, that if she couldn't dance Anita as choreographed by Peter Gennaro for Chita Rivera, then Joey McKneely would have to rechoreograph it for Karen Olivo—she was that important to the play.
When I looked at “America,” the big dance number in the first act for Anita and the girls, that phrase “Anita and the girls” expressed exactly what I realized “America” was in West Side Story: a musical comedy would-be show-stopper that had nothing to do with Tony and Maria or the play. West Side's dances were credited with moving the story forward. The dances were brilliant as dances, but “America” interrupted the story, it didn't move the story anywhere anymore than the famous prologue did. That was meant to establish the background for the gang war but what it established first was that the show was driven by dance. All the dances, I gradually realized, had to be examined to see if they really did contribute to the story—my goal was a musical play rather than a danced retelling of a legendary tale. If they didn't contribute, something had to be done to draw them into the play. I began with the prologue.
The opening music is threatening, as set originally and always replicated since; so is the tableau of the Jets on which the curtain rises. Then they start to dance, and in one minute the arms get soft and balletic, the emotions general, threat and gangs are gone, we are into dance-in-blue-jeans and there, by and large, we stay. A sequence meant to show the gang exulting in owning its turf may have looked just that in 1957; in 2008, it looks like musical comedy chorus boys stepping out, as they do in the movie. A Shark knocked to the floor by a Jet spits across the whole stage, his saliva hits the offending Jet on the back of his neck, the Jet turns and leaps on the Shark. That bothered me even in 1957; it had to be replaced with something stronger—a knife. A Jet whacking a Shark with a sack of flour now whacks him with a baseball bat. Even before all that, when the curtain rises, what the audience sees is a very different opening to a very different show.
Only the familiar brief, opening musical figure, as the curtain shoots up on that brutal set. Silence as out of the shadows steps Riff, a Cody Green with a cold, insolent look from hooded eyes. He slowly comes down to the edge of the stage, a Pied Piper for his Jets, who follow like rats down fire escapes, out of holes in a broken tenement, following Riff until they are all at the edge of the stage, glaring at the audience as though to say: “This is ours. Cross the line to come here and we'll cut your balls off.”
The Jets have been set up as potential killers and that's how they dance. When Bernardo and the Sharks arrive to test whether they can cross the line safely, the menace increases and keeps increasing. The Shark no longer spits, he throws a knife across the stage, missing the Jet who now really leaps on the Jet to kill. When A-rab's ear is pierced, the dance moment when all the Sharks turn melodramatically away from A-rab to raise their arms, reaching for God-knows-what, is now all of them raising their fists to beat A-rab to a pulp. The steps are the steps danced over fifty years ago but there is no soft line, only hard angles, and the purpose and the meaning of the steps have been changed by the attitude of the angry, vicious gang members dancing them. The prologue now establishes the brutal world of the story.
“America” was altered more radically, but that change stemmed from a discovery about the lyric. Early in the play, in her first scene with Maria in the bridal shop, Anita's refusal to speak Spanish is set up along with her ability to intimidate other Puerto Ricans into speaking English. This sets up “America” being sung in English— as it has to be for all the jokes to work. The pattern of the song is that Rosalia, who wants to retun to Puerto Rico, sings a verse about something she misses there and is put down by Anita with the tag line. Then Anita sings of what she likes about America and sings the tag line herself.
Seeking a way to make “America” more than a number and pull it into the play, I examined the lyric and immediately saw something that had made sense when “America” was just a dance number. No, as a song in a play, it contradicted itself. If Anita really liked America, as she sang in each verse, why did she end the verse knocking America? Her first verse, for example, praises “everything free in America” but then adds “for a small fee in America.” When I asked Steve Sondheim what he intended Anita's attitude to be when she sang this contradiction, his half-laughing, half-embarrassed answer exemplified what can happen in musicals over time when proper attention has not been paid. In rehearsal, “America” had been set by Peter Gennaro for Anita and Bernardo and the Shark boys and girls. Jerry took Bernardo and the boys out of the number. The tag lines like “for a small fee in America” had been Bernardo's retort to Anita. They were simply transferred to Anita and since Chita's dancing was the purpose of the number, she wasn't singing as a character. A joke was a joke and on to higher kicks.
The way to make “America” part of the play was now clear. It was an aspect of the inner conflict among Latinos, a friendly, comic battle between pro-American Anita, supported by her girlfriends, and pro—Puerto Rican Rosalia, supported by one cousin. The song and the dance were now done by people, characters in the play, not by performers in a number. Joey McKneely was adept at saving much of the choreography while at the same time adding enough to bring the dance into the story and suit Karen's Anita. But he wasn't satisfied. With style and simplicity, he justified the dancing as part of a musical scene which also allowed Karen to use more of her individual dazzle.
Joey's real triumph was with the second-act ballet that had never satisfied Jerry Robbins himself. Every day of the out-of-town tryout, Jerry had changed the ballet, often ordering new backdrops. (One looked like the Jersey swamps.) Joey re-created the ballet beautifully, it couldn't have been better danced, not even by the New York City Ballet, which regularly performs a West Side Story Suite, a popular success as ballet world, a pallid facsimile as theatre. It wasn't easy not to say anything with the company waiting after Joey showed me his version. I took him and Lori into another room and said it: “Joey, it's a dance concert. It has nothing to do with this West Side Story.”
We had talked earlier of what he considered his responsibility— to be faithful to Jerry's choreography—and what I considered mine—to be as faithful as I could to the original everything but to change what I felt was essential to give this West Side Story a reason for living. That had already been done with two problematic songs. The conversion of the opening “Jet Song” from a fifties musical-comedy number to the credo of a vicious gang had begun with Cody Green at his audition; it was comparatively easily completed in rehearsal. “Gee, Officer Krupke” was an obstacle course I could only blame on myself. I had insisted on a comedy number in the second act to relieve the tension, invoking Shakespeare and his porter scenes to convince the others. In the uncinematic, mangled, and also anti—Puerto Rican movie, its position was shifted to the first act, which turned the gang even more into musical comedy chorus boys. Steve, who had advocated the switch, switched himself, saying it belonged back in the second act. But it didn
't belong in this second act as the smack-out vaudeville red-nosed clown comedy-show stopper it was in the original. In this second act, the murder of two friends was deeply felt and acknowledged. How could “Krupke” be sung without ignoring that? By the attitude of the first singer—Action, the angriest member of the gang. He's already been to the police station and made fools of the police. His singing is delighted defiance, which disgusts A-rab. He and his cohort, Big Deal, use Baby John as a puppet as they do the song. Nothing is a vaudeville turn, everything is an over-the-top put-down of everything society upholds. There is no choreography; it's a musical scene where the gang members explode with black humor, which finally draws even A-rab in.
As difficult as “Krupke” had been to make part of the play, the second-act ballet was much more so. When I detailed to Joey what I thought might make the ballet not a ballet, he moved fast, too fast at first, but always on the right track. Incorporating specifics like having a grubby street kid sing “Somewhere” and ending the song and what was the ballet with Tony and Maria, turned out to be the key to what was and is Joey's triumph. Jerry's ballet steps are still there but they now have a purpose and an emotional center. Call it the second-act ballet, call it “Somewhere,” call it whatever you will, but it now has meaning, it's moving, it belongs in the play, and for the first time it's part of the love story.
Mainly on Directing Page 17