Quote of the Day (Rita Moreno, on Jerome Robbins, ‘Tough and Demanding Daddy’ of ‘West Side Story’)

“A lot of the dancers hated him [director-choreographer Jerome Robbins]— but loved him. He would think nothing of making us do one step over and over until we broke down in tears or pulled something. Shin splints for days. He was a tough and demanding daddy, but if you got a smile out of him, you floated on air for days.”—Oscar-winning actress Rita Moreno quoted in Joe McGovern, “Making West Side Story’s ‘America,” Entertainment Weekly, July 7, 2017

Jerome Robbins was born 100 years ago today in Manhattan. I had written a blog post several months ago about his agonized decision to inform on friends during the McCarthy Era, but that was hardly enough to sum up the career of this extraordinary if imperfect artist.

Inevitably, I turn back to West Side Story, even though Robbins’ many accomplishments predated and followed that landmark 1957 musical. It would have been enough that he brought it to fruition on Broadway, but he also was instrumental in its translation to film in 1961, and he was a co-winner for Best Director for his efforts. (Altogether, with 10 Academy Awards, the film would be one of the most honored in Hollywood history.) In a sense, the opportunity to work in Hollywood—and on such a prestigious project—helped motivate his controversial 1953 testimony as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yet the uncompromising nature that enabled him to make West Side Story such a stunning Broadway success also ensured that he would not complete production of the movie. Moreno’s remarks above only hint at what a taskmaster he could be. The location shooting in what would become, in a few years, Lincoln Center took place over a grueling summer. 

“In New York it was, like, 110 degrees,” Russ Tamblyn—who played "Jets" gang leader Riff—recalled in this YouTube clip of his appearance at the 55^th anniversary of the movie. “And we had to do this long dance down the street where we were walking and dancing and we had to do it over and over and over, and they had to keep shooting,,,And finally, [co-director] Robert Wise would say, ‘Well, that’s fine for me….How ‘bout you, Jerry?’ And Jerry would say, ‘Well, I’d just like to do one more, but I’d like all of you dancers to do it on the other foot.’ I don’t know if you know what that means, but instead of stepping out to the left, you step out to the right. You had all of these dancers trying to figure out what to do. So it took a long of time.”

But what short-circuited Robbins' involvement with the project was how he treated his collaborators and studio executives: with dismissive contempt. He rebuffed multiple suggestions from Wise (tasked to direct non-musical sequences) and screenwriter Ernest Lehman on how to translate scenes from the stage to the screen. 

At last, when the film was $300,000 over budget and only one-third of the expected footage was in the can, United Artists decided to fire Robbins--a decision made easier by a clause in his contract that few thought would ever be invoked, that allowed for his termination if the movie wasn't working out. With rumors flying that the film would shut down completely, that was the opening that United Artists needed. 

It says something for Wise’s forbearance that, even when it came to this pass, he still went to bat for his troublesome collaborator.To be fair, though, it also says something for Robbins’ brilliance. In his autobiography, composer, arranger, and musical director Saul Chaplin, for all his criticism of Robbins' cruelty and sadism, still had to acknowledge him as "by far the most exciting choreographer I had ever watched. He seemed to have an endless stream of exciting ideas.”  

Remember that the next time as you watch the movie’s choreography, all of which Robbins managed to complete before his ouster. And the musical numbers he finished—"Prologue," "America," "Cool," and "Something’s Coming"—still bristle with energy and fire, giving viewers a visceral sense of the violent youthful passions that end on New York’s mean streets.

Flashback, September 1957: ‘West Side Story,’ Operatic Musical, Opens

When West Side Story opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater on September 26, 1957, this tale of conflict between Anglos and Puerto Ricans, transplanting Romeo and Juliet from Renaissance Verona to the mean streets of 20^th-century New York, drew on several musical traditions and nourished them in turn. Yet the show’s creators were ambivalent about stressing its affinities with the most enduring form of musical theater: opera.

In a prior post, I wrote about the process by which four outsiders—composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, and librettist Arthur Laurents—created this musical. But West Side Story is a cultural landmark for a reason, and a second post—the one you’re about to read—doesn’t come close to exhausting the discussion of what it all means.

West Side Story certainly lends itself to jazz (listen to Dave Brubeck’s recording of “Maria”), and rock ‘n’ roll, a genre that prides itself on rebellion, has also nodded in the direction of the show (as Todd Rundgren did with his group Utopia on the mid-‘70s album, “Another Live,” with their rendition of  “Something’s Coming”).

But in thinking about all of this, my mind followed back to a whole novel on the Romeo and Juliet theme, Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, in which his love-obsessed narrator rhapsodizes to his long-lost teenage love, Jade, that he is stepping out one last time “to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end.” And I thought of Bruce Springsteen’s magnificent “Jungleland,” which amid lyrics replete with references to the musical’s “rumble” (“The midnight gang’s assembled/And picked their rendezvous for the night”), refers to another genre: “Man, there’s an opera out on the turnpike.”

Aria…opera…Spencer and Springsteen are referring to heightened emotions, over-the-top emotions, the sense that the whole world is riding on any single moment, no matter how seemingly mundane to those outside the circle of love. The same kind of emotions contained in West Side Story.

In short, their treatment is operatic.

Observing how Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd are increasingly being taken up by opera companies, cultural critic Terry Teachout has raised the question of “whether they might really have been, all along, modern operas in disguise.”

The same question might be raised, even more so, about his first Broadway hit, West Side Story. One person who raised it—and just as quickly dismissed it, perhaps fearful of where the inquiry might lead—was Sondheim’s collaborator, Leonard Bernstein. In 1949, when Bernstein and Laurents were still thinking of their lovers as a Jewish girl and Italian guy, the composer voiced a desire to make “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical comedy terms . . . never falling into the ‘operatic’ trap."

Bernstein and the other creators of the show might simply have been concerned about the association of elitism that clung to opera, as well as the big voices required by the latter form that might make audiences forget that they were watching, in essence, kids.

But Bernstein himself, as much as he loved jazz, could not resist the siren call of opera, delving into the form with Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and Candide (1956). Moreover, he took the tritone—the so-called “Devil’s Interval” spanning three whole tones—a form of dissonance used in Richard Wagner’s Gotterdammerung—to introduce an unresolved tone that will be critical throughout West Side Story.

One of the few striking plot departures between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story is the absence of parents. This leaves the teenagers, if anything, even more uprooted than before. The tritone drives this quality home subliminally, again and again. All that tension can have only one point of release: in shocking, senseless violence that flows out of love, only to turn into hate. Or, as Friar Laurence warns in Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

By 1985, with West Side Story well established within the repertoire of American musical theater, Bernstein felt confident enough to conduct a recording featuring famous opera stars. As with opera, this recording required more than a small suspension of disbelief. Nobody would confuse Kiri Te Kanawa, Tatiana Troyanos, Marilyn Horne or Jose Carreras as teenagers. (Nor did Kanawa and Carreras, as Maria and Tony, suggest their Puerto Rican or Anglo characters, for that matter.)

The release sparked more than a little belated hubbub about whether West Side Story was, at heart, a musical or an opera—the same question that has, in one form or another, dogged Porgy and Bess, The Most Happy Fella, and Street Scene, among others. In a way, the question may be academic. There is hardly any building given over to music, whether a theater given over to musicals or a conventional opera house, that can hold the teeming emotions given voice by West Side Story. More than half a century after its opening, it has the feel of being Bernstein’s most enduring work.

Song Lyric of the Day (Elvis Presley, Pleading “Love Me Tender”)

“Love me tender,
Love me true,
All my dreams fulfilled.”—“Love Me Tender,” words and music credited to Vera Matson and Elvis Presley, actually written by Ken Darby, performed by Presley (1956)

Fifty-five years ago on this date, Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender premiered at New York’s Paramount Theater, where thousands of fans lined up to see the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in his first movie appearance. This was originally supposed to be a nonsinging role, but the film’s producers decided, given the King’s popularity, to add four songs.

Here was the moment when the mold was cast for Presley’s movie career. He wanted to be the next James Dean, and to that end had even seen Rebel Without a Cause 44 times.

But it was not to be. Hollywood, with its studio system entering decline, and the star’s manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, decided to play it safe. They were thrilled to death by the immediate results--the movie made back its costs within days--and ignored the long-term cost to The King.

Presley’s screen test for producer Hal Wallis was actually pretty good, and his co-stars, then and later, testified to his professionalism. Yet even Elvis--make that especially Elvis--understood what had happened on his introduction to Hollywood. “That first one almost finished me off in the business…They rushed me in the thing to get my name, you know, on the marquee. And the picture wasn’t all that good."

Before long, he was stuck in one formulaic movie after another. He invariably played a highly self-confident but not too brash guy, whose principal preoccupation was reflected in one Sixties film title: Girls! Girls! Girls! Critics guffawed about his lack of range (he could play everything from a singing motorcycle driver to a singing doctor, they joked).

If you’re like me, you gnash your teeth at the lack of foresight--the sheet stupidity--shown by Parker when he rejected an offer for his client to star in the 1961 film adaptation of the Bernstein-Sondheim Broadway musical, West Side Story.

One of my favorite DJs, Vin Scelsa of WFUV, has noted that West Side Story, though not the first rock ‘n’ roll musical, is the first musical with a rock ‘n’ roll attitude. It’s all about sex, danger, and the sense that everything is riding on this moment. Who better to play its male lead, Tony, than Presley himself? His early TV appearances had certainly threatened the adult establishment, but he also could play tender--and unlike the actor eventually cast in the role, Richard Beymer, his voice wouldn’t require dubbing. And unlike the bland Beymer, he radiated charisma.

Yet Parker, more comfortable with tame fare that reflected the films that he liked to see, rejected the offer out of hand. A juvenile delinquent was not the type of role his client would play, he announced.

Lost was not only the chance for Elvis to appear in that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, but also redirect his career after his Army stint. We can only rue the squandered opportunity.

What we are left with is a title song seeking a film to match its greatness. It’s simple but enduring, as you might expect from a melody harking back to the Civil War ballad “Aura Lee.” Adding new lyrics was probably just another job for Ken Darby, who gave his wife partial credit on the tune.

Elvis got his only songwriting credit on the song, even though, as with virtually all his other songs, he had little if any involvement with composing it. It was all part of the price of dealing with The Colonel.

Still, I suppose you can say, borrowing a concept from film critics, that Elvis was the song’s auteur--adding a style so indelible that other artists could cover the song, but never hope to match his version.

By the way, you can read an informative and entertaining account of the creation and reception of the film and its song here, in a post from the "Elvis-History" blog.

This Day in Theater History (Bernstein & Co. Change Direction on “West Side Story”)

August 25, 1955—At a poolside meeting in Beverly Hills on his 37th birthday, Leonard Bernstein (in the image accompanying this post) and creative partners Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents shelved their previous idea for a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet—a clash of Catholics and Jews—in favor of a different set of characters: Anglos and Mexicans in Los Angeles. 

The switch was a pivotal transition point along the way to the violent “rumble” between native Anglo and immigrant Puerto Rican gangs that formed the crux of the landmark musical West Side Story.

Before the musical opened on Broadway in September 1957, it spent eight years being brought to life. In January 1949, director-choreographer Robbins proposed, as Bernstein noted in his diary, “a noble idea—a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations….It all fits…but can it succeed?” 

Several years later, by their own admission, the answer was no. Librettist Laurents identified the problem eventually: the premise for what was then called East Side Story was simply a rehash of the 1920s comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, except without the laughs. 

(Two decades later, TV was more shameless about reworking an old idea, bringing to life Bridget Loves Bernie, with eventual husband-and-wife Meredith Baxter and David Birney.) 

So here Bernstein and Laurents were, soaking up the sun, when the composer suggested: “What about doing it about the Chicanos?” (That very day, in fact, the Los Angeles Times had a headline about gang warfare.) Excited, the two men called Robbins, who agreed. 

Before long, the concept did a transcontinental flip, partly because Laurents felt more comfortable with New York-based Hispanics than those in California, so that now it was about Anglos and Puerto Ricans on the West Side of Manhattan. 

Running like a thread through the whole thing, from start to finish, was the idea Bernstein had scrawled on the title page of his annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet in the early going: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” 

Some years ago, I remember hearing longtime New York deejay Vin Scelsa call West Side Story the first rock ‘n’ roll musical—or rather, he quickly qualified it, not so much the first musical with rock ‘n’ roll music but the first musical born of the spirit of rebellion that animates rock ‘n’ roll.

He was onto something: rock ‘n’ rollers did see something of themselves in the great musical tragedy. Todd Rundgren, for instance, did a live version of “Something’s Coming,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” features a teenage clash with inevitable echoes of the musical. 

But more basic to the musical than the idea of the rebel is that of the outsider. If they could move so easily from Jews to Mexicans to Puerto Ricans as the out-group, the quartet that created West Side Story—Bernstein, Laurents, Robbins, and, joining them that fall, the young lyricist Stephen Sondheim—were not just outsiders, but double outsiders.

All four were not just Jews—a group all too painfully aware, from the events of the previous decade, of their precarious nature in the world—but homosexuals. However well-known their sexual orientation might have been to entertainment professionals, it was a more closely guarded secret to the world at large. 

(In fact, Bernstein had married a woman, at least partially in the unsuccessful hope that by doing so he would sublimate his attraction to men.) 

In this context, the most heartfelt song for the quartet might have been “Somewhere.” Sondheim’s plaintive words and Bernstein’s soaring melody summon “a place for us,” where “We’ll find a new way of living/We’ll find there’s a way of forgiving”—a vision they must have felt still elusive in that age.