Armando’s Personae

(The links point to Wikipedia entries containing more background on particular persons or topics.)

Background & Creators

Classically-trained choreographer Jerome Robbins had started talking to the accomplished American composer Leonard Bernstein in the mid 1950’s about doing a modern version of Romeo and Juliet in the Broadway musical style. Initially Robbins was thinking about immigrant Jews on the lower East Side, where he was born and raised. Ultimately that changed into a rivalry between American and Puerto Rican gangs—much more in the news at the time—in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, where Lincoln Center would soon be built as part of an urban-renewal project. Playwright Arthur Laurents would write the book (script or libretto) and Bernstein would write the music and lyrics (though Stephen Sondheim got involved later to rescue the lyrics). Robbins would “conceive, direct and choreograph” the whole piece, as he would repeat later with Gypsy (on which he would again work with Laurents and Sondheim) and Fiddler on the Roof, paving the way for other director-choreographers such as Bob Fosse (Pippin, Chicago) and Michael Bennett (Follies, A Chorus Line). Harold (Hal) Prince, an ambitious 29-year-old producer who wanted to get into directing, was lined up to produce the show.

When it opened in 1957, West Side Story was the first Broadway musical to both show and suggest violence onstage. There are choreographed gang fights involving knives, chains and rocks; the suggestion of possible gang rape of Anita; and the death of the major characters rather than a happy ending. This dark element may have been responsible for the lukewarm critical reception the show received; the leading contender for that year’s Best Musical was The Music Man, a traditional, upbeat, happy-ending Broadway musical following proven formulas. 

Lyrics

Bernstein had recently been introduced to 27-year-old Stephen Sondheim at a salon, and was persuaded to take him on as co-lyricist. Sondheim really wanted to write his own music and lyrics, but his mentor and adopted father figure Oscar Hammerstein II (then already working with Richard Rodgers) advised Sondheim to seize the opportunity to work with such accomplished professionals.

In truth, Bernstein’s lyrics were awful. His “purple” writing was reminiscent of bad poetry, and it was Sondheim’s smart, sharp lyrics that gave the songs the energy and character they needed. Although Sondheim publicly beats himself up over some gaffes in the lyrics (such as when Maria, an uneducated Puerto Rican teenager, sings “It’s alarming how charming I feel”), his work so completely transformed the lyrics that Bernstein asked that Sondheim be given sole credit as lyricist—a huge break for a relatively unknown artist.

It’s been said that Sondheim wanted to compose as badly as Hal Prince wanted to direct. Thirteen years after West Side Story, Sondheim and Prince would finally collaborate on the landmark musical Company (1970), the first of a string of collaborations that would completely re-imagine what a musical could be.

[Show before and after of "Tonight" or "Maria"] 

Dance

WSS’s terse book (script) by Arthur Laurents includes startlingly little spoken dialogue. It is left to the music, the singing, and the dancing to make up the difference, and indeed WSS is highly unusual in that the show doesn’t work unless all those elements are present and well executed. The technical difficulty of the music, lyrics and dance, and the need to combine them seamlessly onstage, make WSS one of the most demanding shows to put on.

Robbins’s choreography made the show unique. Following Agnes deMille’s pioneering use of balletic “dance to tell a story” in the Dream Ballet sequence of Oklahoma! (1943), we learn much about the Sharks and Jets from choreography alone. We seem them strutting about their territory, with sweeping arm gestures suggesting their “taking ownership” of the stage and their turf. We see stylized dance-combat sequences that are no less effective for their artistry in suggesting the violence and rivalry between the gangs. And it’s all accompanied by a symphonic, Latin/jazz flavored score that is still unique in the history of musical theater.

Music

Most Broadway scores start out as simple, straightforward songs which are then “embellished” via orchestration. In contrast, not only are the songs in WSS constructed from unusual motivic elements, but the orchestration is itself a central and sophisticated element of the songs, such that you can’t “de-orchestrate” the songs without destroying their character. Bernstein had taken this approach—of letting the orchestra function as a character in the show—in the earlier musical On The Town (1944, with lyrics and book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and which gave us the jazz standard “The Party’s Over”), which captured a 24-hour shore-leave period of soldiers involved in WW2.

Thematically, the key structural element in the whole score is a musical interval (”distance” between two pitches) called a tritone, so called because it is the interval you get if you start on one note, and take three whole-steps up; for example, it’s the interval between the notes C and F# (F-sharp), or between E and B-flat. The tritone recurs throughout the score, both melodically (the opening fanfare, the “Jet Song”, “Cool”, and “Maria”) and harmonically (e.g. in the closing chord of the show).

Musically, the tritone is interesting for two reasons. FIrst, it lies exactly halfway between a note and its octave; that is, the number of steps between C and F# is the same as the number of steps between F# and the next higher C. (See below.) This means that if you “invert” the interval by putting the bottom note on top, it’s still a tritone. No other musical interval has this property. Second, since it’s a dissonant (unstable) interval, your ear “wants” to hear the tritone “resolve” (be followed by a stable, consonant harmony), but unlike other dissonant intervals that suggest a single obvious resolution, the tritone can resolve equally well in two completely different ways, making it aurally ambiguous. The example below shows how the tritone C#-G can resolve in two different ways. In the first, the C# and G behave as the seventh and third (respectively) of an E-flat dominant seventh chord, which naturally resolves to an A-flat major (or minor) tonic chord. In the second, the C# and G exchange roles, behaving as the third and seventh (respectively) of an A dominant seventh chord, which naturally resolves to a D major (or minor) tonic chord. (As expected, the keys to which these two resolutions lead—E-flat and A—are themselves separated by a tritone.) The tritone is so weird in this way that in early music it was considered diabolus in musica (”the Devil in the music”) and was off-limits when arranging liturgical music for a choir.

The very last chord in the score is notable because it juxtaposes a regular C major triad (in the high woodwinds) against an F# in the bass (low strings)—a tritone. It leaves the show on an unsettling note, so to speak, and in my opinion is one of the best show endings ever.