West Side Story turns
50 years old today. The
show opened on Sept. 26, 1957 at the Winter Garden
Theatre. The musical, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet, was set not in “fair Verona”but
in New York City’s impoverished West Side in
the 1950s. The warring factions were not the
Montagues and Capulets but were instead the Jets and
the Sharks, a gang of native born Americans fighting
against a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants. The
lovers Romeo and Juliet had been replaced by Tony and
Maria. And Shakespeare’s words were supplanted
by Leonard Bernstein’s lush score, Stephen Sondheim’s
adroit lyrics, Arthur Laurents’concise libretto
and Jerome Robbins’imaginative choreography and
direction.
These days the musical is considered,
in a word, a masterpiece. But the show’s
path to success was a circuitous and arduous journey,
and its place
in the upper echelon of musical theatre was not immediately
apparent.
The original idea was first bandied
about by Robbins, Bernstein and Laurents in 1949. At that point
the setting was the East Side and the star-crossed
lovers were to be an Italian, Catholic boy and a Jewish
girl. Bernstein and Laurents worked on a few
pages of the book and score but quickly soured on the
East Side idea and the momentum of the project seeped
away.
Then in 1954, a chance meeting between Bernstein and
Laurents at a Beverly Hills Hotel reignited the idea
of a Romeo and Juliet musical when they noticed
an article in the L.A. Times about gang fights
breaking out in Los Angeles. They contacted Robbins
and the project began to regain it’s momentum.
Originally, Bernstein had planned
on writing the lyrics for the show himself. He
had done the same on Trouble
in Tahiti and was doing it for parts of Candide,
which he was working on at the time. He soon
realized that writing both shows at once was too much
of a burden and looked to bring in a lyricist. His
writing partners from On the Town and Wonderful
Town, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, were tied
up in Hollywood with a film contract so upon the recommendation
of Laurents, the job was offered to Stephen Sondheim. Laurents
had remembered the young Sondheim from an audition
where Sondheim had performed his score for Saturday
Night.
Sondheim’s inclination was to turn the job down
because he didn’t want to write just lyrics. But
after consulting with his mentor Oscar Hammerstein
he accepted the job and the chance to work with the
experienced group of professionals.
The next bump in the road occurred
when producer Cheryl Crawford pulled out of the project
only six weeks before
rehearsals were to begin, saying that, “the book
was terrible and that it would be insane to proceed”. After
a phone call by Sondheim to friend Harold Prince, and
a performance of the score for Prince and his partner
Robert Griffith, the show once again was back on track.
The next challenge was casting
the show. Up
to this point in musical theatre history the dancers
danced, the singers sang and if a fine bit of acting
occurred it was considered a bonus. Robbins needed
legitimate triple threats but he also needed the cast
to be young enough to pull off their roles.
Larry Kert auditioned for the show
several times. He
first auditioned for the chorus, but wasn’t considered
Puerto Rican or American enough. Next he went
in for the part of Bernardo but had no luck. A
stab at the role of Riff was next, and even though
he secretly rehearsed with Jerome Robbins at night,
the dancing presented too much of a challenge for him. Finally
he was brought in for Tony, a role that Bernstein hoped
to cast as a six-foot tall, blonde, Polish tenor. That
was the role that the five-eleven, dark, Jewish baritone
eventually won. The production staff wanted someone
with raw talent and Kert, who had never had a singing
or acting lesson, fit the bill.
The other leads went to relative
newcomers, dancers who had mainly performed in the
chorus and/or small
bit parts of their previous shows. Maria was
played by Carol Lawrence, Mickey Calin played Riff,
Chita Rivera was Anita and Ken Leroy, who had perhaps
the most experience of the bunch with 10 Broadway appearances,
played Bernardo.
Next came the notorious Jerome
Robbins rehearsal process. The
perfectionist demanded a great deal out of his assembled
group of neophytes. He would call them to rehearsals
in their separate groups, the Jets and the Sharks,
and would encourage them not to eat lunch together. By
the middle of rehearsals Lee Becker who played the
outcast in the show, Anybodys, found that no one would
eat with her.
After an out-of-town trial in Washington
D.C. and Philadelphia the show landed at the Winter
Garden on
September 26. It opened to generally good reviews
but this impressionistic yet reality based experiment
also met with some dissent. Walter Kerr in the Herald
Tribune noted, it is “not well sung. It
is rushingly acted, and it is, apart from the spine-tingling
velocity of the dances, almost never emotionally affecting.”
The audiences agreed. After only a couple of
sold-out weeks, the audiences were slow to come and
ticket sales began to dwindle. The tickets for
the show went on discount after a year and the houses
began to pick up again but the show had already been
booked for a national tour and left New York in 1959. The
show was brought back to Broadway in 1960, also under
the discounted pricing plan, and did quite well.
A turning point in West Side’s story
came in 1961 with the release of the movie version
starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer. The
film was a huge hit. It won eleven Academy Awards,
including Picture of the Year. With the movie’s
success, several of the songs from the score began
getting air time on the radio. West Side
Story had finally worked its way into the public’s
consciousness and the rest, as we say 50 years later,
is history.
Interesting
to note:
The original production played
732 performances between 1957 and 1959, and moved
twice. In
March of 1959 the show moved to the Broadway Theatre
to make way for the musical, Juno. Upon Juno’s
demise WSS returned to the Winter Garden
for the remainder of its run.
Arthur Laurents invented the
show’s slang. The
thought was that the show would date too quickly
if the lingo of the day was employed. All I
have to say about that is, “Ooblee-oo”.
West Side Story was
nominated for 6 Tony Awards and won 2. Jerome Robbins won for his
choreography but was not even nominated for his direction. The
category at that time did not delineate between plays
and musicals. Oliver Smith won for Best Scenic
Design. The only acting nomination went to
Carol Lawrence in the Featured Actress category. The
best musical award that year went to The Music
Man.
In its infancy the show was know as East Side
Story. Also considered as a title: Gang
Way.
Future lyricist and director
Martin Charnin was in the original cast. He played the role of “Big
Deal”.
According to The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.
over 250 productions of West Side Story are
licensed to be produced in 2007. The show has
been seen on every continent around the world except
Antarctica. I guess there isn’t much
interest in gang warfare among the penguins.
In 1983 I played Tony in my
high school production of the show and twenty years
later my nephew played
the same role at the same high school. Just
imagine how many other uncles and nephews, mothers
and daughters, cousins and in-laws have been touched
by this timeless classic over the past 50 years.
