Theater: New Musical in Manhattan, Oct. 7, 1957

West Side Story (book by Arthur Laurents; music and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) gave the new season what should prove a very popular retelling of Romeo and Juliet—in terms of youthful gang warfare. It also suggests that the salvation of the serious Broadway musical may lie in neither text nor music—which, trying to coalesce, all too often merely collide—but in dancing.

The near success of West Side Story certainly derives from its dancing. If there are special reasons for this—the brilliance of the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, and the choreographic rightness of the material—the point is still worth pondering. For despite much talk about integration and balance in serious musicals, musical drama—unlike musical satire or comedy —must have a master pulse. Hence the one alternative to what must virtually be opera is what will roughly be ballet.

In a career extending from On the Town to The King and I and Peter Pan, Jerome Robbins has provided more high spots and fewer letdowns than almost any other Broadway creator. And in West Side Story he has made the feet that propel the production equally the shoulders on which it rests. A master of patterned action, he has established the tensions, the instinctive hates and induced animosities, the juvenile-delinquent heroics and brooding-outcast rancors of Manhattan’s native-born Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks. His switchblade rumblers jeer and snort, crouch and slither and spring. Beyond vitalizing their gang spirit and varying their modes of warfare, he has managed to dance much of the documentary drabness out of the story, most of the sociological shock into it. He is least successful in a ballet where the ill-fated lovers—a former Jet and the sister of a Shark—dream of a happy, peaceful Unpromised Land. Seeking the brightest possible contrast, the ballet has very little of Robbins and too much sweetness and lighting.

Despite appealing performances by Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence as the lovers, the romance almost everywhere falls short of the gang warfare. Shakespeare’s High-Renaissance ardors and angers do not translate into the barbarism of West Side Story any more than did Greek-tragedy incests and betrayals into the primitivism of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Fire-escape balcony scenes and corner-drugstore Friar Lawrences are not only distracting but tinged with bathos. Similarly, Composer Bernstein does better with his harsh, tingling music for the dancers than with his lyrical duets for the lovers, and Arthur Laurents’ libretto catches rasping, inarticulate hate better than yearning, inarticulate love. When it turns away from what is savage, West Side Story proves more sentimental than touching.

Yet in its attempt to give a topical horror story broad human appeal, the show at worst falls at times into cliché; it does not start with it. Distinguished merit West Side Story lacks; but its distinguishing merit, its putting choreography foremost, may prove a milestone in musical-drama history.

West Side Story hit Broadway after smash tryouts in Washington and Philadelphia, and boasting an advance sale estimated at $700,000. First-nighters—elegant, effusive, conscious of their roles and determined to be delighted—packed the big Winter Garden Theater and turned the opening into the gaudiest night of the new theatrical season.

Afterwards, rooters swarmed over Choreographer Robbins, who could only mutter “Thanks, thanks” as he wandered in a happy daze backstage. The chic mob then swept on to Sardi’s, finally swarmed to a full-blast party given by balding, burly Producer Roger Stevens at Park Avenue’s Ambassador Hotel. There the dark-haired girls and long-sideburned boys of the cast gulped champagne, danced to music from My Fair Lady.

Composer Bernstein strode in, his greying hair dramatically atousle, a navy-blue coat draped cape-style over his shoulders with artful carelessness. Everyone was waiting impatiently for the morning papers. Bernstein brought the news to his table: “They’re all raves except Kerr” (the Herald Tribune’s authoritatively trenchant Walter Kerr). Added Bernstein: “You know, Kerr’s an inverted snob. He’s such an intellectual that he can’t stand a musical unless it’s got a chorus line.”

At one point in the evening, a friend sidled up to Bernstein. “Quite a nice little evening,” commented Oscar (South Pacific) Hammerstein II. Startled, Bernstein stopped talking. Hammerstein hastily added: “No, it was really memorable.” Then the two hugged each other.