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

by Block, Geoffrey

  West Side Story (1961)

  Writers on West Side Story seldom neglect to mention that it was the film rather than the stage version that catapulted the show into universal popular consciousness. Indeed, the film, produced by Mirisch Pictures, won ten out of its eleven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Direction (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). The other awards were for Best Supporting Actor and Actress (George Chakiris as Bernardo and Rita Moreno as Anita), Best Art Direction, Cinematography, Costumes, Film Editing, Scoring, and Sound Mixing.22 With graceful irony, the Academy even presented a Special Award to Robbins, who had been fired from the film after directing the Prologue for falling behind the production schedule. The only nomination that did not result in an award was Ernest Lehman’s for Best Screenplay. Lehman did, however, receive an equivalent award from the Writers Guild of America.

  West Side Story, 1961 film. Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood) meet at the Gym and fall in love at first sight.

  In the early 1960s, most movie theaters continued the then-common practice of offering two films for one admission price, a feature presentation and a B-movie. Longer films appeared as a single feature with an intermission, a break in the action that presented an opportunity for audiences to purchase refreshments. At 152 minutes, West Side Story merited an intermission. Theoretically, it was possible to divide the film at the end of act I directly after the Rumble and begin the second act with “I Feel Pretty.” Instead, director Robert Wise revamped the scenario and moved the Rumble closer to the end of the story where it was followed rather than preceded by “Cool.”

  Despite such adjustments, in marked contrast to the pillaged film version of Bernstein’s On the Town and even such relatively faithful film adaptations as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, all the West Side Story songs are present and accounted for. This may be a first (to be followed by My Fair Lady’s film adaptation three years later). Also in marked contrast to On the Town and numerous other Hollywood adaptations from the 1930s and 1940s, no songs were added by studio composers on contract or even by Bernstein, although Sondheim was called upon to add and rework his lyrics for “America” in response to the new gender mix. The film also reinstated an overture, which had been deleted from the stage version. It can be heard under the static abstract graphic design with changing colors that will metamorphose into an overhead realistic cinematic view of the southern tip of Manhattan before the camera makes its leisurely way to the West side, where it zooms in on the Jets protecting their little corner of the island. After diligently observing the musical order from the Prologue to “Maria” (Prologue, “Jet Song,” “Something’s Coming,” “The Dance at the Gym,” and “Maria”), however, the film made changes both large and small to the order of the next nine songs before returning to the stage order for the final songs, “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love,” “Taunting,” and Finale (see the online website for a list of the songs in the stage version).

  It might seem strange at first to dwell on the ordering of songs. But consider how important the steps in a story’s telling can be, even a story we know well like Romeo and Juliet. Try telling a friend the story in your own words, then compare its impact to Shakespeare’s language. Similarly, the collaborators on the film version of West Side Story made a variety of creative decisions about how to re-tell the musical/dramatic story of the show, with the many differences between live theater and film techniques always in mind. Even though the film includes all the songs from the stage version, the sequence in which those songs are presented exerts a strong effect on how we understand the show.

  We left off with “Maria.” Onstage, after singing the song based on the name of his new love, Tony continues to call her name until he finds her on her tenement balcony. They then converse and sing “Tonight.” The film follows “Maria” with a scene in Maria’s apartment between Maria, Bernardo, and Anita, during which they move to the rooftop to join the rest of the Shark men and women for “America.” In the film version of this song, the men, absent from the stage version, contrast the women’s positive view of their newly adopted country with sarcastic new lyrics. Only after “America” does Tony reappear in the film and the lovers sing “Tonight.”

  More radically, “Cool,” the song that follows “America” in the stage version, is replaced by “Gee, Officer Krupke” and will not be heard until late in the movie, where it directly follows the much-delayed Rumble. Since Riff led the “Cool” song onstage, his absence, as he is dead by this point in the show, necessitated the elevation of Ice (the character Diesel onstage) to lead both the Jets and the song. In the remarks about the show’s genesis we pointed out that in its position in the film, “Gee, Officer Krupke” no longer functions as comic relief after the tragic events of the Rumble, a brief respite between the “Procession and Nightmare” that concludes the Ballet Sequence and the dramatically intense “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”

  The next change in song order occurs with the earlier appearance of “I Feel Pretty” in the film—in fact, right after “Gee, Officer Krupke!” Onstage, this song, which in the story occurs almost at the same moment as the Rumble that ended act I (but presented consecutively rather than simultaneously to avoid modernist chaos), opens the second act with a moment of deeply ironic levity. By placing “I Feel Pretty” before the Rumble, the irony is lost. In its new position, the song serves as a prelude to the mock, but non-ironic, wedding depicted in the next song in the film, “One Hand, One Heart,” which onstage had occurred after “Cool.” “I Feel Pretty” is notable for the energy of its fast waltz tempo and Maria’s lilting words full of inner rhymes (“it’s alarming how charming I feel”). At every opportunity Sondheim has expressed his dissatisfaction with these lyrics and relates how he tried to remove the inner rhymes but was outvoted. From then until now he has criticized Maria’s lyric as too urbane for a gritty inner-city character.23 There is some truth to this. But in its new position, “I Feel Pretty” is arguably more in character than it was onstage. The following grim confrontations of the Rumble scene are perhaps more dramatic (or perhaps more cinematic) as a result—even if the complex irony of the stage version is lost.

  In another departure of major significance, the offstage voice singing “Somewhere” in the second act Ballet Sequence is replaced in the film by a more realistic and conventional “Somewhere” duet between Tony and Maria. The removal of a dream ballet is typical of other transfers from stage to screen in the early 1960s, where audience expectations called for more apparent realism. Balancing the deletion of this major dance section, several other dances, including the Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, and the now mixed gendered “America” (in the film men as well as women sing and dance this number) are extended.

  Realism as a vital component of the Hollywood film aesthetic and the likely motive for removing the surrealistic Ballet Sequence, is considerably challenged, however, by the presence of gang toughs snapping their fingers (painfully with their thumbs and first fingers at Robbins’s insistence) and their balletic and acrobatic dancing up and down a real Manhattan. To better prepare film audiences for this incongruity, Robbins greatly expanded the Prologue, which itself followed an overture in contrast to the stage version. After the abstract drawing of Manhattan seen throughout the overture metamorphoses into realistic aerial footage that ends up on a West side playground and surrounding tenements, the lengthened Prologue allows the Jets to ease more naturally into dance through a series of incremental movements from natural to stylized movements, much in the same way spoken dialogue moves into a talky song verse before emerging as a great tune. Here, as at the Ascot races, a stage convention—the autonomy of dance as an expressive art form—is valued over conventional filmic naturalism. Shot on location in New York City using the fastest color film stocks and most advanced compact sound and camera equipment of the day, artistically executed mostly by New Yorkers, West Side Story was both grittier and artier than almost any contemporary Hollywood fil
m made in beautiful sunny California.

  In his eloquent memoir Original Story By, Laurents, writing about the stage version of West Side Story, concludes without false modesty, that this show was richer in content and quality than innovation:

  As for those inflated claims, if West Side Story influenced the musical theatre, it was in content, not form. Serious subjects—bigotry, race, rape, murder, death—were dealt with for the first time in a musical and as seriously as they would be in a play. That was innovative; style and technique were not. They had all been used piecemeal in one way or another before…. The music for the dances is extraordinarily exciting; that music and the basic story are the lasting strengths of the show. The difference between the music of West Side Story and other shows, however, is in quality, not in purpose…. What we really did stylistically with West Side Story was take every musical theatre technique as far as it could be taken. Scene, song and dance were integrated seamlessly; we did it all better than anyone ever had before. We were not the innovators we were called but what we did achieve was more than enough to be proud of.24

  While the musical and dramatic techniques of West Side Story may have been nothing new, the thought, complexity, and seriousness with which they were employed were exceptional. It was in the domain of overall quality that the show was innovative—it raised the bar (and the barre) for what a musical could be, beyond even the ambitious standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s collaborations of the 1940s and early ’50s. Their new post–West Side Story shows such as Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music began to look a little artificial in comparison to Wise’s film version of West Side Story in 1961 (but not the film version of The Sound of Music, which Wise also directed).

  Although the movie may exert less appeal today in the context of the similarly accomplished and even grittier Chicago and Sweeney Todd adaptations, Wise’s (and Robbins’s) West Side Story—with its contemporary urban setting, ubiquitous and stunning dancing, and careful use of recurring sung and orchestral musical motives creatively augmented by location photography on the streets of New York—remains still something of a rarity in musical films where control over the soundtrack was typically facilitated by working on indoor stage sets. Anyone who has seen the opening of the film, with its unforgettable bird’s-eye view of Manhattan office towers and slums, brings that memory with them to even the best staged revival of the show. Wise brought taste and sophistication to his direction. Although he changed the show quite a bit, he brought it enduring fame and introduced the realistic, contemporary musical to a much broader audience, first across the United States, then around the globe. On September 3, 2006, the American Film Institute placed West Side Story behind only Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as the Greatest Film Musical of all time.25

  EPILOGUE: THE AGE OF SONDHEIM AND LLOYD WEBBER

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SWEENEY TODD AND SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

  Happily Ever After West Side Story with Sondheim

  Sondheim and His Mentors

  Within two years after creating the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) to music by Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, who wanted to be a Broadway composer-lyricist, reluctantly but again successfully wrote the lyrics only for a show to Jule Styne’s music for the canonic Gypsy (1959), also directed by Jerome Robbins. Sondheim’s second foray into Broadway lyric writing brought him into direct contact for the first time with a major star, Ethel Merman, and Sondheim contributed greatly to the creation of her character, Rose. Merman’s role in Gypsy capped a long career studded with star vehicles dating back to Girl Crazy (1930).1 Sondheim’s next show, the wacky but well-crafted farce, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), marked his long-awaited Broadway debut as a lyricist and composer at the age of thirty-two. Forum won the Tony Award for best musical, and at 964 performances enjoyed a longer run (200 performances longer) than any future Sondheim show. Even during these early associations with acclaim and popularity, Sondheim was generally relegated to the background, barely mentioned in the reviews of West Side Story and Gypsy and bypassed as a nominee for his work on Forum.

  Perhaps the major achievement of his next musical, Anyone Can Whistle (1964), again with a libretto by West Side Story and Gypsy author Arthur Laurents, was that despite the show’s disappointing run of nine performances, Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records had the foresight to produce a commercial original cast recording. One year later Sondheim completed his trilogy of collaborations with composer legends begun with Bernstein and Styne when, against his better judgment, he wrote the lyrics for Richard Rodger’s Do I Hear a Waltz? (the fourth and probably final Laurents libretto that Sondheim set), an unpleasant and increasingly acrimonious experience for all concerned. The result was a quickly forgotten and subsequently neglected musical that despite its troubled genesis deserves to be heard and seen more often.2

  Stephen Sondheim in 2007.

  After two hits (as a lyricist), one hit as a composer-lyricist, a flop, a disappointing run, and five fallow years Sondheim, in tandem with Harold Prince, erupted on Broadway between 1970 and 1973 with a creative explosion: Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973). From this trilogy Company has been most frequently singled out for its historic and artistic significance as a pioneering exponent of the so-called concept musical. Not atypical is the assessment by Thomas P. Adler in the Journal of Popular Culture that Company was “every bit as much a landmark musical as Oklahoma!”3 Eugene K. Bristow and J. Kevin Butler conclude their essay on Company in American Music with a similar epiphany: “As Oklahoma! was the landmark, model, and inspiration for almost all musicals during the three decades that followed its opening, Company became the vantage point, prototype, and stimulus for new directions in musical theater of the seventies and eighties.”4

  By 1973 Sondheim, now forty-three, had composed the lyrics to two of the most critically acclaimed shows of Broadway’s Golden Age and music and lyrics for another five shows, including a trilogy that inaugurated a new age. Over the next twenty years Sondheim’s next seven shows (three with director Prince, three with librettist-director James Lapine, and one with director Jerry Zaks) would provide Broadway with some of the most compelling, innovative, thought-provoking, and often emotionally affecting musicals of their, or any, time. Sondheim, although arguably a central figure in these collaborations, was not entirely responsible for all the remarkable qualities audiences and critics appreciate in these shows. In fact, the only show he initiated himself was Sweeney Todd.

  Sondheim’s shows have lacked in immediately popular appeal, but they are everywhere lavished with deep and lasting critical praise. In the long run, most of his works have acquired a consequential audience of lovers and aesthetes, year after year. The relatively short initial runs of even his most successful shows as composer-lyricist or their revivals therefore do not accurately reflect the influence and popularity of his work within the musical theater community. Here are the first performance runs of the twelve shows between 1962 and 1994 for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, in numerical rather than chronological order:

  Forum (1962)

  964

  Into the Woods (1987)

  764

  Company (1970)

  706

  Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

  604

  A Little Night Music (1973)

  601

  Sweeney Todd (1979)

  558

  Follies (1971)

  522

  Passion (1994)

  280

  Pacific Overtures (1976)

  193

  Assassins (Off-Off Broadway) (1991)

  72

  Merrily We Roll Along (1981)

  16

  Anyone Can Whistle (1964)

  9

  Obviously, Sondheim’s towering reputation must be based on other factors, including critical esteem and widely available excellent audio and video recordings. Despite these relatively modest, and sometimes ev
en less than modest runs, with the exception of Passion and the two-month workshop of Bounce (formerly Gold and Wise Guys) in 1999 and its brief return for a two-month New York Off-Broadway engagement in 2008 as Road Show, every Sondheim show has also received a major New York revival of some sort—Broadway, Off-Broadway, Staged Reading, New York City Opera—and innumerable productions in regional and community theaters, colleges, and high schools throughout the United States, and in opera houses throughout the world. After a popular Forum revival in 1996 (715 performances) starring Nathan Lane, then Whoopi Goldberg as the slave Pseudolus, the short twenty-first century has already witnessed a Sondheim Broadway revival nearly every year: Follies (2001), Into the Woods (2002), Assassins (2004), Sweeney Todd (2005), Company (2006), and Sunday in the Park with George (2008), and as a lyricist Gypsy (2003 and 2008) and West Side Story (2009). Sondheim’s work, while lacking in initial popularity, appears to be gaining longevity and ubiquity.