Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (60 page)

All these changes reflect societal changes that transpired between the 1590s and the 1950s. For similar reasons, adult authority has been greatly reduced in the adaptation. Juliet’s parents, who play a prominent role throughout the Shakespeare play (and in Laurents’s early libretto drafts), are reduced to offstage voices in the musical; Tony’s parents are represented metaphorically as dummies in the bridal shop where Tony and Maria marry themselves without benefit of clergy. Doc, a druggist who parallels the well-meaning but ineffectual Friar Laurence, serves far less as a catalyst for the plot than as an adult representative who can at least partially sympathize with troubled youth; Officer Krupke, although more abrasive than his counterpart, Prince Escalus, possesses less authority and earns even less respect.
⁵¹

Other departures from Shakespeare’s play were similarly motivated for the resulting accessibility. For example, in
Romeo and Juliet
, no Capulet or Montague can recall a specific cause for their senseless enmity.
⁵²
West Side Story
audiences learn that the Americans (the Jets) fear that the Puerto Ricans (the Sharks) are usurping jobs and territory. In contrast to the long-forgotten causes, the Jets and the Sharks know they are fighting for control over a few city blocks on the West side.

Perhaps the most dramatic departure from Shakespeare also developed because the collaborators of
West Side Story
realized they needed a “believable substitute for the philter.” Laurents speaks of his imaginative solution to this problem with justifiable pride: “The thing I’m proudest of in telling
the story is why she [Anita] can’t get the message through: because of prejudice. I think it’s better than the original story.”
⁵³

Thus, whenever dramatically possible, the youthful characters in
West Side Story
make their own mistakes and generate their own fate. Tony’s form of suicide, his vociferous public invitation for Chino to shoot him, contrasts with Romeo’s quiet decision to take the poison he has purchased for this purpose. In Shakespeare, a tragic coincidence (an outbreak of plague) prevented the news of Juliet’s magic sleep from reaching Romeo; the sleep itself was induced by Friar Laurence’s herbal potions, a well-meaning, albeit imprudent, adult action. A much-provoked Anita sets the stage for Tony’s death with her deliberate lie to the Jets that Maria is dead. By letting Maria live, the creators of
West Side Story
allow her to assume the authority previously delegated to the patriarchal figures of the Capulet and Montague families and to inspire reconciliation between the Sharks and Jets, who then carry Tony’s body off the stage at the final curtain. Significantly, Maria leads the play’s dramatic catharsis in front of adults as well as her peers.

Only the first two of Laurents’s libretto drafts (January and Spring 1956) follow Shakespeare on this crucial dramaturgical point. Maria, thinking Tony dead, returns to the bridal shop and “sings passionately of her not wanting to live in a world without Tonio [at this point Tony was Italian-American], a world that has taken him from her.” The scene description continues: “At the peak of this, she grabs up a pair of dressmaking shears and—with her back to us—plunges them into her stomach.” Moments later Tony (Tonio) arrives and “cradling her in his arms, he starts to sing with her a reprise of their song from the marriage scene.” The orchestra completes their song and after kissing her, Tony opens the door of the shop and cries out, “Come and take me! Come and take me too!”
⁵⁴

By the third draft (March 15, 1956), which also concludes at the bridal shop, Maria “tries to tear the wedding veil with her hands, cannot, picks up sewing shears and is about to cut the veil when a new thought [presumably suicide] enters her mind.”
⁵⁵
In this draft, as in the five others over the next sixteen months, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

Robbins credits Rodgers for realizing how to “solve a problem like Maria” (two years before
The Sound of Music
’s Maria Von Trapp) and for keeping Maria alive: “I remember Richard Rodgers’s contribution. We had a death scene for Maria—she was going to commit suicide or something, as in Shakespeare. He said, ‘She’s dead already, after this all happens to her.’”
⁵⁶
All sources agree that Bernstein’s collaborators wanted to convert Laurents’s prose speech into music for Maria, just as Bernstein and Sondheim
had raided the libretto for “Something’s Coming” and “A Boy Like That.” In the 1985 panel discussion Bernstein recalled that he discarded four or five attempts to create an aria for Maria from Laurents’s dummy lyric that would become Maria’s speech: “It’s not that I didn’t try.” In an interview with Humphrey Burton, Bernstein offered a more detailed account:

“It cries out for music,” Bernstein said himself. “I tried to set it very bitterly, understated, swift. I tried giving all the material to the orchestra and having her sing an
obbligato
throughout. I tried a version that sounds just like a Puccini aria, which we really did not need. I never got past six bars with it. I never had an experience like that. Everything sounded wrong.” So Maria’s words, which Laurents had written merely as a guide to lyricist and composer, became the dramatic text. “I made,” Bernstein confessed, “a difficult, painful but surgically clean decision not to set it at all.”
⁵⁷

Despite these liberties, for the most part the collaborators of
West Side Story
preserve the spirit of the original as well as what is perhaps Shakespeare’s central theme: the triumph of youthful passionate love over youthful passionate hate, even in death. They also incorporate Shakespeare’s literary device of foreshadowing, for similar dramatic and musical purposes, to inform audiences of the inevitable, albeit mostly self-made, destiny facing the young lovers. Tony’s somewhat more optimistic premonition in “Something’s Coming” early in the musical can be seen, for example, as a parallel to Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech: “My mind misgives / Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels and expire the term / Of a despised life, closed in my breast, / By some vile forfeit of untimely death” (act 1, scene 4, lines 112–17).

Romeo’s bittersweet, sorrowful premonitions in the first eleven lines of act V (“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead”) clearly correspond to the Romantic message most clearly expressed in “Somewhere,” introduced by an anonymous offstage “Girl” (opera stars Reri Grist on Broadway and Marilyn Horne on Bernstein’s 1985 recording, handpicked by the composer) during the dream ballet sequence in act II.
⁵⁸
By the end of Bernstein’s musical counterpart to Shakespeare in the dream sequence, audiences know that the place and time for Tony and Maria will not be a flat on the Upper West Side. Rather, as in the tale of Tristan and Isolde, their passionate love will be fulfilled only after death. With great ingenuity Bernstein manages to discover a convincing musical equivalent to Shakespeare’s foreshadowing of death, a musical transformation from youthful hate to youthful love.

As early as 1949, Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins were consciously striving to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms” and to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap.’” At the same time they—mainly Bernstein as the composer—borrowed freely from the European operatic and symphonic traditions.
⁵⁹
The degree to which Broadway musicals could and should aspire to the condition of nineteenth-century tragic opera remains a controversial issue often vigorously and irreconcilably divided along party lines. Representing one side is Joseph P. Swain, who views Broadway generally as a series of “missed chances and unanswered challenges” that “made tragic drama in the American musical theater into an Olympus, beckoning beyond reach.”
⁶⁰
Not surprisingly for Swain, “Maria’s last speech should indeed have been her biggest aria.”
⁶¹
Similarly, in the
West Side Story
entry in
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
Jon Alan Conrad considers Bernstein’s “failure to find music for Maria’s final scene” one of the work’s “weak points.”
⁶²
Those who interpret the dramaturgy of musicals as a workable alternative, perhaps even a corrective, to opera might conclude with Stephen Banfield that “whatever fears Laurents may have had that it would turn into a ‘goddamned Bernstein opera,’ one of
West Side Story
’s greatest strengths is that it did not.”
⁶³
Accordingly, “Maria’s final speech works perfectly well as dialogue.”
⁶⁴

The analytical remarks that follow will show that Bernstein borrowed from his European predecessors as well as from his American present. The varied score consists of three primary styles: a variant of cool jazz for the Jets; a cornucopia of Latin American dances associated with the Sharks, their girl friends, and Maria; and music that suggests European and American operatic traditions for much of the love music. The jazz can be heard most readily in the Prologue, “Jet Song,” the Blues and Jump music in “The Dance at the Gym,” “Cool,” and The Rumble. Latin music is featured in the Promenade (paso doble), Mambo, and Cha-Cha dances in “The Dance at the Gym,” the tango in “Maria,” the seis and huapango in “America,” and the cachucha in “I Feel Pretty.” Of these song and dance prototypes only the seis can claim any authentic ties with Puerto Rico, which for some makes
West Side Story
about as Puerto Rican as Georges Bizet’s
Carmen
is Spanish (or Cuban). Operatic dialects are most recognizable in “Tonight,” “Somewhere,” and the double duet “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”

Combining techniques and ideologies of nineteenth-century opera and American and Latin vernacular styles, Bernstein forged his own dramatic musical hybrid. While the connections to Latin dance rhythms and cool jazz are immediately apparent and even labeled, the European technical procedures
require more explanation. Although motivic melodic analysis no longer serves as the central analytical paradigm, the crucial role motivic development plays in some musicals, most notably
Show Boat, Porgy and Bess
, and
West Side Story
, is persuasive. More important, the principal motivic transformations are readily perceived (even to inexperienced listeners) and the more intricate melodic connections usually serve a demonstrable dramatic purpose.

Since the most famous exponent of nineteenth-century tragic drama was Wagner (his views were popular especially in the 1950s), it is not surprising that Bernstein, in setting the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, borrowed melodic and harmonic elements most commonly associated with Wagner’s operas (although certainly not limited to these works). The principal melodic technique is the pervasive use of leitmotivs (short themes that represent people, things, or abstract ideas) as source material for thematic transformation and organic unity.
⁶⁵
Harmonically, Bernstein used the deceptive cadence, a sequence of chords in which a dominant fails to resolve to its tonic.
⁶⁶
Also associated with Wagner and adopted by Bernstein is the technique of having the orchestra present an underlying dramatic commentary on the melodic line. Finally, the ensuing analytical discussion will suggest that Bernstein borrowed a central and specific leitmotiv from Wagner and used it for a related dramatic purpose.
⁶⁷

Bernstein’s Wagnerian vision is most profoundly revealed in his use of the song “Somewhere,” a song that, despite its early conception, did not achieve its vocal independence until a relatively late stage in the compositional process. As previously noted, until the production began its rehearsals in June, the piano-vocal score manuscript reveals that this song, eventually intoned by a woman offstage, was to be entirely danced. Only after the “Procession and Nightmare” did Tony and Maria return to sing the final eight measures of “Somewhere.”
⁶⁸

Nearly all of the musical material in the thirty-seven-measure “Somewhere” is based on one of three brief motives:
(a), (b)
, and three versions of (
c
). See
Example 13.4
, which shows A and B of the overall form, A (8), A’ (8), B (8), A” (8), and B” (5). Despite their brevity, each motive contains a distinctive rhythmic or melodic profile. More important, each motive will be purposefully foreshadowed. The first motive (
a
) which opens the song on “There’s a place”—possibly derived from the second movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto or, more likely, from the final measures of Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture on
Romeo and Juliet
—consists of three notes: a rising minor seventh (B up to A) followed by a descending half-step (A down to G
). Bernstein uses this motive in the vocal part to mark the principal statements of the tune on the words “There’s a place” (mm. 1—2 and A’, mm. 25—26) and “There’s a time” (A’, mm. 9—10) that initiate each A section.