Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Block, Geoffrey (good story books to read .TXT) 📕

years later). Also in marked contrast to On the Town and numerous other Hollywood adaptations from the 1930s and 1940s, no songs were added by studio composers on contract or even by Bernstein, although Sondheim was called upon to add and rework his lyrics for “America” in response to the new gender mix. The film also reinstated an overture, which had been deleted from the stage version. It can be heard under the static abstract graphic design with changing colors that will metamorphose into an overhead realistic cinematic view of the southern tip of Manhattan before the camera makes its leisurely way to the West side, where it zooms in on the Jets protecting their little corner of the island. After diligently observing the musical order from the Prologue to “Maria” (Prologue, “Jet Song,” “Something’s Coming,” “The Dance at the Gym,” and “Maria”), however, the film made changes both large and small to the order of the next nine songs before returning to the stage order for the final songs, “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love,” “Taunting,” and Finale (see the online website for a list of the songs in the stage version).

It might seem strange at first to dwell on the ordering of songs. But consider how important the steps in a story’s telling can be, even a story we know well like Romeo and Juliet. Try telling a friend the story in your own words, then compare its impact to Shakespeare’s language. Similarly, the collaborators on the film version of West Side Story made a variety of creative decisions about how to re-tell the musical/dramatic story of the show, with the many differences between live theater and film techniques always in mind. Even though the film includes all the songs from the stage version, the sequence in which those songs are presented exerts a strong effect on how we understand the show.

We left off with “Maria.” Onstage, after singing the song based on the name of his new love, Tony continues to call her name until he finds her on her tenement balcony. They then converse and sing “Tonight.” The film follows “Maria” with a scene in Maria’s apartment between Maria, Bernardo, and Anita, during which they move to the rooftop to join the rest of the Shark men and women for “America.” In the film version of this song, the men, absent from the stage version, contrast the women’s positive view of their newly adopted country with sarcastic new lyrics. Only after “America” does Tony reappear in the film and the lovers sing “Tonight.”

More radically, “Cool,” the song that follows “America” in the stage version, is replaced by “Gee, Officer Krupke” and will not be heard until late in the movie, where it directly follows the much-delayed Rumble. Since Riff led the “Cool” song onstage, his absence, as he is dead by this point in the show, necessitated the elevation of Ice (the character Diesel onstage) to lead both the Jets and the song. In the remarks about the show’s genesis we pointed out that in its position in the film, “Gee, Officer Krupke” no longer functions as comic relief after the tragic events of the Rumble, a brief respite between the “Procession and Nightmare” that concludes the Ballet Sequence and the dramatically intense “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”

The next change in song order occurs with the earlier appearance of “I Feel Pretty” in the film—in fact, right after “Gee, Officer Krupke!” Onstage, this song, which in the story occurs almost at the same moment as the Rumble that ended act I (but presented consecutively rather than simultaneously to avoid modernist chaos), opens the second act with a moment of deeply ironic levity. By placing “I Feel Pretty” before the Rumble, the irony is lost. In its new position, the song serves as a prelude to the mock, but non-ironic, wedding depicted in the next song in the film, “One Hand, One Heart,” which onstage had occurred after “Cool.” “I Feel Pretty” is notable for the energy of its fast waltz tempo and Maria’s lilting words full of inner rhymes (“it’s alarming how charming I feel”). At every opportunity Sondheim has expressed his dissatisfaction with these lyrics and relates how he tried to remove the inner rhymes but was outvoted. From then until now he has criticized Maria’s lyric as too urbane for a gritty inner-city character.23 There is some truth to this. But in its new position, “I Feel Pretty” is arguably more in character than it was onstage. The following grim confrontations of the Rumble scene are perhaps more dramatic (or perhaps more cinematic) as a result—even if the complex irony of the stage version is lost.

In another departure of major significance, the offstage voice singing “Somewhere” in the second act Ballet Sequence is replaced in the film by a more realistic and conventional “Somewhere” duet between Tony and Maria. The removal of a dream ballet is typical of other transfers from stage to screen in the early 1960s, where audience expectations called for more apparent realism. Balancing the deletion of this major dance section, several other dances, including the Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, and the now mixed gendered “America” (in the film men as well as women sing and dance this number) are extended.

Realism as a vital component of the Hollywood film aesthetic and the likely motive for removing the surrealistic Ballet Sequence, is considerably challenged, however, by the presence of gang toughs snapping their fingers (painfully with their thumbs and first fingers at Robbins’s insistence) and their balletic and acrobatic dancing up and down a real Manhattan. To better prepare film audiences for this incongruity, Robbins greatly expanded the Prologue, which itself followed an overture in contrast to the stage version. After the abstract drawing of Manhattan seen throughout the overture metamorphoses into realistic aerial footage that ends up on a West side playground and surrounding tenements, the lengthened Prologue allows the Jets to