WEST SIDE STORY at 50 From The London Times

[BroadwayBulldog]

Posted: 7/28/07 at 6:55pm

WEST SIDE STORY at 50

[wickedrentq]

Posted: 7/29/07 at 12:02am

"Not many musicals make musical history. Once the template is set – the hoofing, the ballads, the knees-up at the end – you know the score, and instant familiarity beats innovation.

But the 1957 production that unleashed Bernstein’s fizzing West Side Story on an unprepared Broadway audience threw out the old formulas. And it wasn’t just a flashy composer’s triumph: the great strength of West Side Story lay in its totality: a show where all the artistic elements blended to produce something that Broadway audiences genuinely couldn’t classify"

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"The thinking is sound: in a kaleidoscopic score, Bernstein does range magpie-like over musical styles from pop to jazz to opera. And the result doesn’t just require immensely versatile singers, but a pit band that can carry out his exacting demands. Conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic on the new recording, Nick Ingman certainly nails it. “Bernstein came from a classical place, not a show place,” he says. “In fact, at the first band call of the opening Broadway show, the orchestra walked out because it was so horrendously difficult.”

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"As a Broadway stage show, West Side Story did follow a few fundamentals of the Gershwin or the Rodgers and Hammerstein mould. But with Robbins’s rigid insistence on building the dance throughout the music and the drama, this was a production that took on the challenge of Laurents’s gritty scenario and met it head-on. “No longer did you just bring on the dancers for set-pieces” says Freedman, “the leading roles also had to do the dancing.” It was an enormous innovation that bound together the two disciplines of dancing and singing for the first time."

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'The truth was that unlike any other musical before – and possibly since – this depended as much on the director’s stage images as on Bernstein’s score. When reawakened 50 years on, the result can veer towards the museum piece; in the last major London production, there was carping from critics who wondered why we were getting a “reproduction” production, still credited to Robbins, instead of something refreshed. “But you wouldn’t change Bernstein’s melodies, would you?” asks a sceptical Freedman. “The same is true of the body movement.”

No matter. The West Side Story that remains seems unlikely ever to fade away. Its enduring strength is its blazing, brazen life force. Or, as Rivera says, “It has everything – it makes you laugh, cry and it makes you hope.” It’s a tonic to Bernstein’s own maudlin sentiment, voiced at the end of his life: “You know what makes me really distraught? I am only going to be remembered as the man who wrote West Side Story.” Many would settle for a lot less."

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Wow, thank you so much for finding this article! I actually never heard the story about the band walking out because the music was too difficult. WOW.

Sheds some important light, I think, on the argument why Robbins' choroegraphy should remain untouched. I love how focused the article is on Bernstein. And Laurents was definitely half-right. There was an article in the Times that year when WSS came out, about how Bernstein's score lies somewhere between musical and opera.

Kind of curious about this new recording. The singers worry me, but I really hope the orchestra plays the full score, I would definitely at least have to give it a listen if that were the case.