On this date, September 26th, in 1957, the musical West Side Story opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was a bold new kind of musical theatre –- a jukebox Manhattan opera, with dances that talked, and staging that moved with the speed of a switchblade knife. The rich, exciting score by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the lean, powerful book by Arthur Laurents, and the iconic, electrifying choreography by Jerome Robbins resulted in West Side Story transforming the Broadway musical forever. Critics wrote that it was “as up-to-the-minute as tomorrow’s headlines.” To this day, West Side Story -- powerful, poignant and timely -- remains the best dance-driven musical ever. Jerome Robbins (in Dance Magazine, August 1957): “What we are trying to do is to make the poetry come alive in twentieth-century terms, through the cadence of Arthur Laurents’ lines and Leonard Bernstein’s music. The story has a hopeful as well as a tragic side. It says that the price of prejudice is too high to pay. Love and peace cannot exist in a world in which there are such hostile forces as now exist. But the show is not preachy or didactic. The theme is arrived at emotionally.” Enjoy this clip of the “Tonight Quintet and Chorus” from the 1980 Broadway revival, featuring Ken Marshall [as Tony], Josie de Guzman [as Maria], Debbie Allen [as Anita], James Mellon [as Riff)] and directed by Jerome Robbins. The performance took place onstage at the Metropolitan Opera House for a TV special called “Gala of Stars.” (Leonard Bernstein and Beverly Sills join the cast for a curtain call.) youtube/watch?v=M15T1plZcLU
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 04:13:59 +0000
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