Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Although much of My Fair Lady departs from Shaw’s play, its Cinderella slant nevertheless constitutes an extraordinarily faithful adaptation to Pascal’s filmed revision of Shaw’s original screenplay. Moreover, the music of My Fair Lady for the most part accurately serves most of Shaw’s textual ideas. Additionally, the songs themselves, which are carefully prepared and advance the action in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, convey the dramatic meaning that underlies this action.

  One critical quandary remains. Just as Higgins neglects to consider the question of what is to become of Eliza, Lerner and Loewe’s popular adaptation of My Fair Lady poses the problem of what is to become of Shaw’s Pygmalion, a play that noted literary critics, including Harold Bloom, consider to be the playwright’s masterpiece.59 The relative decline of Shaw’s Pygmalion in the wake of My Fair Lady seems especially lamentable.60

  But even measured by Shavian standards, Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical is by no means overshadowed on artistic grounds. Readers of Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love with anyone under forty-five.”61 Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be unthinkable. It is the ultimate achievement of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady that the unthinkable has become the probable.

  Two years after My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe completed Gigi, the Academy Award–winning film adaptation of a Colette novella. Not wishing to argue with success, Gigi, like My Fair Lady, tells the story of a young woman who ends up with an older man—Cinderella revisited. The final Broadway collaboration appeared two years later, Camelot (1960), a partially successful attempt to recycle a production team (director Hart and Julie Andrews as Guenevere, as well as a new, acclaimed, non-singing actor in the Harrison tradition, Richard Burton, as King Arthur). The box office magic of the My Fair Lady “team” and a long televised segment on the Ed Sullivan Show helped Camelot—the positive associations with President Kennedy came later—to survive its extraordinarily bad critical press, growing tensions between Lerner and Loewe, and Lerner’s hospitalization for bleeding ulcers. Perhaps the most devastating blow of all was Hart’s sudden heart attack and hospitalization, which forced the director to assume the unaccustomed role of patient rather than that of play doctor, a role he had performed so irreplaceably on My Fair Lady.

  Even those who feel that Eliza should have gone off into the sunset (or the fog) with Freddy rather than the misogynist Higgins might have second thoughts about Guenevere’s decision to abandon her likable and desirable husband Arthur for the younger but boorish and egotistical Lancelot. As Engel writes: “It is not lack of fidelity that makes for our dissatisfaction but an unmotivated, rather arbitrary choice that seemed to make no sense.”62

  After Camelot, Lerner and Loewe would adapt Gigi for Broadway in 1973 (it ran for only three months). One year later they would work together on new material for the last time in the film The Little Prince. With the exceptions of these brief returns, Loewe, who had collaborated exclusively with Lerner ever since What’s Up? in 1943, retired on his laurels and died quietly in 1988. The more restless Lerner, who as early as the 1940s had teamed up with Weill on Love Life one year after Brigadoon, would collaborate with Burton Lane within five years after Camelot to create the modestly successful On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

  For his last twenty years, Lerner without Loewe—and, in some respects equally unfortunately, without Moss Hart, who died in 1961—would produce one failure after another. Not even the star quality of Katharine Hepburn in Coco (1970) could help this show with music by André Previn to run more than a year. A potentially promising collaboration with the brilliant Leonard Bernstein in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) closed within a week. Other short-lived post-Camelot musicals included Lolita, My Love (1972), Carmelina (1979), and Dance a Little Closer (1983) with music composed by John Barry, Lane, and Charles Strouse, respectively. At the time of his death in 1986, the indefatigable librettist-lyricist had drafted much of a libretto and several lyrics for yet another musical, this time based on the classic 1936 film comedy, My Man Godfrey.63

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WEST SIDE STORY

  The Very Model of a Major Musical

  West Side Story, a collaboration of four extraordinary individuals—Jerome Robbins (choreographer and director), Arthur Laurents (librettist), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Stephen Sondheim (lyricist)—premiered on Broadway on September 26, 1957, and ran for 734 performances.1 After a national tour that lasted a year, it returned to Broadway for an additional 249 performances. A bona fide hit but not a megahit like Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady, West Side Story eventually logged in as the twelfth longest running show of the 1950s (see “Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920s–2000s” in the online website).2

  In its initial run West Side Story received mostly favorable and respectful notices from our by-now familiar cast of critics. John McClain was the only critic who assessed the show as “the most exciting thing that has come to town since ‘My Fair Lady.’”3 Walter Kerr focused his attentions on the dancing, “the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been exposed to in a dozen seasons,” to the near exclusion of everything else, and concluded his review with a tribute to Robbins: “This is the show that could have danced all night, and nearly did. But the dancing is it. Don’t look for laughter or—for that matter—tears.”4 Brooks Atkinson praised the blend and unity of the work and production and the authors for “pooling imagination and virtuosity” to create “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”5 Robert Coleman and John McClain predicted that the show would be a hit, and, in what was perhaps the most laudatory critical response, John Chapman opened his review in the Daily News by exclaiming that “the American theatre took a venturesome forward step” to present “a bold new kind of musical theatre.”6 Nevertheless, it was not until 1961, with the release of the Academy Award–winning film starring the glamorous box-office draw Natalie Wood (her singing dubbed by the ubiquitous Marni Nixon), that West Side Story finally became a certified blockbuster, with a soundtrack that Stephen Banfield reports “remains the longest ever number 1 on Billboard’s album charts.”7

  In the years since the film, West Side Story has appeared in revivals both at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater in 1968 (89 performances), on Broadway in 1980 (333 performances) and 2009, and in innumerable productions outside of New York. West Side Story has also acquired serious respect and attention from both theater and music historians and critics. While it shares with some of the other musicals in this survey a complex score rich in organicism and motivic and other musical techniques associated with the nineteenth-century European operatic ideal, as well as some songs that eventually became standards, it surpasses its European and Broadway predecessors in its reliance on dance and movement to depict dramatic action. The creators of West Side Story also managed to take a canonic and extremely well-loved Shakespeare play and adapt it for 1950s audiences while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. Most significantly, the adaptation both provides dramatically credible and audible musical equivalents of Shakespeare’s literary techniques and captures his central themes.

  Musicals prior to West Side Story featured dance to advance the plot (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes); to convey deeper psychological truths in dreams, in fantasies, or through mime (Oklahoma!, and Carousel); or to establish an ambiance at the beginning of the show (Guys and Dolls). Thanks to the choreographic vision of Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), the ability of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) to conceive extended dance music, and the willingness of Arthur Laurents (b. 1918) to let dance and music speak for a thousand words (his libretto is widely considered to be the shortest of any full-length Broadway show), West Side Story went beyond these early landmarks in expressing essential dramatic action through the medium of dance. At least four major moments in act I are told exclusively or nearly exclusively in dance (
Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, the “Cool” Fugue, and The Rumble); act II features a dream ballet based on “Somewhere” and a violent Taunting ballet. Dances even figure prominently in most of the songs, especially “America.”

  West Side Story is also notable for increasing the tragic dimensions of a musical Jud Frye falls on his knife and dies in a fight with Curley in Oklahoma! Billy Bigelow takes his own life in act II in Carousel. Cable is killed on his military mission near the end of South Pacific, and the King dies at the end of The King and I. In West Side Story two principal characters, Riff and Bernardo, the respective leaders of the Jets and Sharks, are killed in a knife battle before the end of act I. Tony is shot and killed by Chino near the end of act II. In adapting what is arguably the most famous love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story presented a level of youthful violence, hatred, and death unprecedented in a Broadway musical.

  The Making of a Masterpiece

  Prior to its 1957 premiere, only Sondheim (b. 1930) among the principal creators of West Side Story had yet to distinguish himself on Broadway (Sondheim’s career will be surveyed in chapter 15). More than a decade earlier librettist Laurents had written the critically lauded Home of the Brave (1945). Between Robbins’s 1949 initial conception of a Romeo and Juliet musical with lots of dance and its working out, Laurents wrote his most successful play, The Time of the Cuckoo (1952).

  In 1944 Robbins collaborated with Bernstein on both the ballet Fancy Free (as featured dancer and choreographer) and its inspired Broadway offspring later that same year, On the Town. Beginning with High Button Shoes in 1947 (lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jule Styne), Robbins choreographed a quartet of musical comedies, mostly hits: Hugh Martin’s Look Ma, I’m Dancin’ (1948), Berlin’s Miss Liberty (1949) and Call Me Madam (1950), and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951), with its innovative narrated ballet-pantomime “Small House of Uncle Thomas.” As co-director with Abbott, Robbins helped to create Adler and Ross’s The Pajama Game (1954); as director-choreographer he brought to life two shows with lyrics by Comden and Green and music by Styne, Peter Pan (1954) and Bells Are Ringing (1956), the latter one year before West Side Story.

  Bernstein, like Gershwin, came to the piano at a relatively late age, in Bernstein’s case, ten. He followed his undergraduate years as music major at Harvard (class of 1939) with studies in orchestration, piano, and conducting at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In 1941 he began his private studies with Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky. While an assistant to Artur Rodzinski (then conductor of the New York Philharmonic), Bernstein gained instant (and permanent) recognition when he filled in for ailing guest conductor Bruno Walter and conducted the orchestra on a national broadcast in November 1943.

  Within the next three months Bernstein’s first “serious” classical works were performed in New York: the song cycle I Hate Music, the “Jeremiah” Symphony, the ballet Fancy Free, and, by the end of 1944, when the composer was twenty-six, his first Broadway hit, On the Town. Between On the Town and West Side Story the phenomenally eclectic composer, conductor, pianist, and educator composed three major theater works of enduring interest: Trouble in Tahiti (1952; with his own libretto and lyrics), Wonderful Town (1953; book by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov and lyrics by Comden and Green), and Candide (1956; book by Lillian Hellman, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Hellman, and Bernstein).

  Several published personal remembrances help sort out the complicated genesis of West Side Story. The first recollection was recorded in 1949 in “Excerpts from a West Side Story Log,” the year Robbins introduced his concept to two of his future collaborators, Laurents and Bernstein. Bernstein’s log, which originally appeared in the West Side Story Playbill, identifies major events and ideological turning points between Robbins’s initial idea and the opening night tryout in August 1957.8 Nearly thirty years later the foursome (Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim) met in 1985 as a panel to discuss their creation before an audience of the Dramatists Guild.9 Valuable information on the genesis of West Side Story can also be found in excerpts from published interviews with those involved in the original production, a number of which appear in Craig Zadan’s Sondheim & Co.10 Other important sources on the compositional process are contained in Bernstein’s letters to his wife, Felicia, who was visiting her family in Santiago, Chile, during the rehearsals and Washington tryouts; Sondheim’s “Anecdote” published in the song book Bernstein on Broadway; and a Bernstein interview with theater critic Mel Gussow published shortly after the composer’s death in 1990.11

  Despite some minor discrepancies in their 1985 recollection of West Side Story’s genesis, the four collaborators shed a great deal of light on the evolution of their masterpiece.12 Moreover, their memory of compositional changes is almost invariably vindicated by the eight libretto drafts and various lyric sheets housed among the Sondheim papers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The first of the libretto drafts is dated January 1956, two months after Sondheim joined the entourage, and the last was completed on July 19, 1957, approximately midway through the unprecedentedly long eight-week rehearsal schedule (twice the usual length).13 Earlier versions of Bernstein’s holograph piano-vocal scores are also available both in Wisconsin and in the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

  From Bernstein’s log we learn that Robbins’s original “noble idea” in January 1949 was “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebration.”14 Over the next four months Laurents drafted four scenes, and the original trio of collaborators discussed the direction of what was then known as East Side Story. Bernstein recorded that their goal was to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musicalcomedy terms … never falling into the ‘operatic’ trap,” a show that would not “depend on stars” but must “live or die by the success of its collaborations.”

  The next log entries appear six years later when Robbins-Laurents-Bernstein returned to their dormant idea. On June 7, 1955, Bernstein reported that the group remained excited and hypothesized that “maybe I can plan to give this year to Romeo—if Candide gets in on time.” By August 25 the trio had “abandoned the whole Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh,” replacing Jews and Catholics with rival gangs, the newly arrived Puerto Ricans (the future Sharks) and the “self-styled ‘Americans’” (the Jets). East Side Story had metamorphosed into West Side Story.

  Since Robbins’s balletic conception entailed an unusually extensive musical score, Bernstein, who until then thought he could handle the lyrics himself, decided that he needed a lyricist after all. On November 14 he wrote that they had found “a young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim,” and described him as “ideal for this project.”15 In the 1985 symposium Sondheim added that when he was signed on as “co-lyricist” (in an unspecified month in 1955) Laurents “had a three-page outline.”16

  In the sole entry of 1956 (March 17) Bernstein announced that Romeo would be “postponed for a year” to make way for Candide.17 Not unlike Candide’s Professor Pangloss, Bernstein tried to put the best possible face on this delay. He then described the “chief problem” of the new “problematical work”: “To tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and ‘just dancing,’ abstract and representational,” and to “avoid being ‘messagy.’”18

  On February 1, 1957, Bernstein noted briefly that with Candide “on and gone … nothing shall disturb the project.” In the next entry (July 8), shortly after rehearsals had begun, Bernstein confirmed the wisdom of 1949 in not casting “‘singers,’” since “anything that sounded more professional would inevitably sound more experienced, and then the ‘kid’ quality would be gone.” On August 20, one day after the opening-night tryout in Washington, Bernstein made his final entry. With great enthusiasm and pride he assessed the successful artistic collaboration (“all writing the same show”). Together, the quartet had created a work that possessed a “the
me as profound as love versus hate, with all the theatrical risks of death and racial issues and young performers and ‘serious’ music and complicated balletics.”19

  Shortly before his death Bernstein revealed that the melody of “America,” portions of “Mambo” from “The Dance at the Gym” (both derived from a never-completed Cuban ballet called Conch Town begun in 1941), and the centrally important “Somewhere” and “Maria” were among the first musical ideas conceived.20 Regarding the origins of “Somewhere” Bernstein explained: “‘Somewhere’ was a tune I had around and had never finished. I loved it. I remember Marc Blitzstein loved it very much and wrote a lyric to it just for fun. It was called ‘There Goes What’s His Name.’”21 Larry Kert (the original Tony) placed Bernstein’s recollection about “Somewhere” more precisely when he remembered that “Somewhere” was “written about the time of On the Town” (1944), which would make this song the earliest musical antecedent of the future West Side Story.22 Of equal importance is Bernstein’s recollection that at the time the musical was still East Side Story he “had already jotted down a sketch for a song called ‘Maria,’ which was operable in Italian or Spanish.”23 Not only did Bernstein’s sketch have a “dummy lyric,” it “had those notes … the three notes of ‘Maria’ [that] pervade the whole piece—inverted, done backward.”24

  Stephen Sondheim (at piano) and Leonard Bernstein rehearsing West Side Story (1957). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.