Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (57 page)

The rich afterlife of “On the Street Where You Live” as an independent song may provide a clue as to why everyone else concerned with the show (other than Lerner) was willing, even eager, to cut this future hit after it failed to register on its opening night audience. Lehman Engel, an astute and sensitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical, writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment anyone can pay is to not be conscious of the songs.”
⁵⁷
The absence of such awareness “indicates that all of the elements worked together so integrally that I was aware only of the total effect.”

Engel’s reaction to
My Fair Lady
expresses the problem clearly:

I had a similar response to
My Fair Lady
the first time [that like
Fiddler on the Roof
, the elements worked integrally], but I did hear “On the Street Where You Live” and I believe this happened for two reasons. In the first place, nothing else was going on when the song was sung; the singing character was simply (and intentionally) stupid—nothing complex about that.
⁵⁸
But secondly I heard the song because I disliked it intensely. (I love everything else in the score. But this song, to me, did not fit.) It was the picture that shoved its way out of the frame with a bang. Suddenly there was a “pop” song that had strayed into a score otherwise brilliant, integrated, with a great sense of the play’s own style and a faithful, uncompromising exposition of characters and situations.

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

W
est 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.

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.