Articles and Reviews
New York Herald Tribune
27 September 1957
From New York Herald Tribune, 9/27/57
Theater critic Walter Kerr wrote the following review of West Side Story for the New York Herald Tribune on September 27, 1957:
The radioactive fallout from "West Side Story" must still be descending on Broadway this morning.
Director, choreographer, and idea-man Jerome Robbins has put together, and then blasted apart, the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons.
The curtain rises on a silence, and a pause. It is the last silence and the last pause. Against an empty-eyed background of warehouse windows five or six blue-jacketed young delinquents, with the tribal-mark "Jets" scrawled across their taut shoulders, are lounging, waiting for the first faint whisper of violence.
Their impatience comes to life in their fingers. A snapping rhythm begins to tap out a warning of mayhem to come. Knees begin to itch, and move, under the lazy, overcast mid-summer sky in Puerto-Rican New York.
The Sharks--equally young, equally sick with very old hatreds--appear from the alleyways in twos and threes. There is a sneer, a hiss, a tempting and tantalizing thrust of an arm, and then--with a powerhouse downbeat from the orchestra pit--the sorry and meaningless frenzy is on. From this moment the show rides with a catastrophic roar over the spider-web fire-escapes, the shadowed trestles, and the plain dirt battlegrounds of a big city feud.
Mr. Robbins never runs out of his original explosive life-force. Though the essential images are always the same--two spitting groups of people advancing with bared teeth and clawed fists upon one another--there is fresh excitement in the next debacle, and the next. When a gang leader advises his cohorts to play it "Cool," the intolerable tension between and effort at control and the instinctive drives of these potential killers is stingingly graphic. When the knives come out, and bodies begin to fly wildly through space under buttermilk clouds, the sheer visual excitement is breathtaking.
.[Robbins] has almost sacrificially assisted in this macabre and murderous onslaught of movement by composer Leonard Bernstein. Mr. Bernstein has permitted himself a few moments of graceful, lingering melody: in a yearning "Maria," in the hushed falling line of "Tonight," in the wistful declaration of "I Have a Love."
But for the most part he has served the needs of the onstage threshing machine, setting the fierce beat that fuses a gymnasium dance, putting a mocking insistence behind taunts at a policeman, dramatizing the footwork rather than lifting emotions into song. When hero Larry Kert is stomping out the visionary insistence of "Something's Coming" both music and tumultuous story are given their due. Otherwise it's the danced narrative that takes urgent precedence.
Theatre: "West Side Story," The Jungles of the City
By BROOKS ATKINSON
Although the material is horrifying, the workmanship is admirable.
Gang warfare is the material of "West Side Story," which opened at the Winter Garden last evening, and very little of the hideousness has been left out. But the author, composer and ballet designer are creative artists. Pooling imagination and virtuosity, they have written a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.
Arthur Laurents has written the story of two hostile teen-age gangs fighting for supremacy amid the tenement houses, corner stores and bridges of the West Side. The story is a powerful one, partly, no doubt, because Mr. Laurents has deliberately given it the shape of "Romeo and Juliet." In the design of "West Side Story" he has powerful allies. Leonard Bernstein has composed another one of his nervous, flaring scores that capture the shrill beat of life in the streets. And Jerome Robbins, who has directed the production, is also its choreographer.
Since the characters are kids of the streets, their speech is curt and jeering. Mr. Laurents has provided the raw material of a tragedy that occurs because none of the young people involved understands what is happening to them. And his contribution is the essential one. But it is Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Robbins who orchestrate it. Using music and movement they have given Mr. Laurents' story passion and depth and some glimpses of unattainable glory. They have pitched into it with personal conviction as well as the skill of accomplished craftsmen.
In its early scenes of gang skirmishes, "West Side Story" is facile and a little forbidding -- the shrill music and the taut dancing movement being harsh and sinister. But once Tony of the Jets gang sees Maria of the Sharks gang, the magic of an immortal story takes hold. As Tony, Larry Kert is perfectly cast, plain in speech and manner; and as Maria, Carol Lawrence, maidenly soft and glowing, is perfectly cast also. Their balcony scene on the firescape of a dreary tenement is tender and affecting. From that moment on, "West Side Story" is an incandescent piece of work that finds odd bits of beauty amid the rubbish of the streets.
Everything in "West Side Story," is of a piece. Everything contributes to the total impression of wildness, ecstasy and anguish. The astringent score has moments of tranquility and rapture, and occasionally a touch of sardonic humor. And the ballets convey the things that Mr. Laurents is inhibited from saying because the characters are so inarticulate. The hostility and suspicion between the gangs, the glory of the nuptials, the terror of the rumble, the devastating climax -- Mr. Robbins has found the patterns of movement that express these parts of the story.
Most of the characters, in fact, are dancers with some images of personality lifted out of the whirlwind -- characters sketched on the wing. Like everything also in "West Side Story," they are admirable. Chita Rivera in a part equivalent to the nurse in the Shakespeare play; Ken Le Roy as leader of The Sharks; Mickey Calin as leader of The Jets; Lee Becker as a hobbledehoy girl in one gang -- give terse and vigorous performances.
Everything in "West Side Story" blends -- the scenery by Oliver Smith, the costumes by Irene Sharaff, the lighting by Jean Rosenthal. For this is one of those occasions when theatre people, engrossed in an original project, are all in top form. The subject is not beautiful. But what "West Side Story" draws out of it is beautiful. For it has a searching point of view.
(Originally published by the Daily News on September 27, 1957. This story was written by John Chapman.)
‘West Side Story’ premieres on Broadway in 1957
BY JOHN CHAPMAN
The American theatre took a venturesome forward step when the firm of Griffith & Prince presented "West Side Story" at the Winter Garden last evening.
This is a bold new kind of musical theatre - a juke-box Manhattan opera. It is, to me, extraordinarily exciting. In it, the various fine skills of show business are put to new tests, and as a result a different kind of musical has emerged.
The story is, roughly, Shakespeare's recounting of the love and deaths of Romeo and Juliet. But the setting is today's Manhattan, and the manner of telling the story is a provocative and artful blend of music, dance and plot - and the music and the dancing are superb.
Superb Score
In this present-day version of the theatre's greatest romance, the Montagus and Capulets become young New York gangs, one white, the other Puerto Rican. The Romeo is a white boy, the Juliet a Puerto Rican girl. In the big fight switch-blade knives are used instead of swords. The apothecary who gave Romeo his fateful potion now is a mild druggist who mans his soda fountain and wonders what the younger generation is coming to. And the younger generation, even if it does indulge in one rumble which results in murder, is not nearly as blackhearted as current news stories might make us believe.
The music of "West Side Story" is by Leonard Bernstein, and it is superb - and splendidly played by an orchestra directed by Max Goberman. In it there is the drive, the bounce, the restlessness and the sweetness of our town. It takes up the American musical idiom where it was left when George Gershwin died. It is fascinatingly tricky and melodically beguiling, and it marks the progression of admirable composer.
The story, about the fundamentally innocent hoodlums of our town, is by Arthur Laurents, and it is a lovely and moving one. But Laurents is not alone in telling this story, for his collaborator is Jerome Robbins, the choreographer. Robbins and his superb young dancers carry the plot as much as the spoken words and lyrics do.
The lyrics, by Stephen Sondheim, have simple grace, and there is a lovely tribute by the sidewalk Romeo to his dusky girl, Maria. There is a really beautiful scene in which the boy and the girl go through a make believe wedding in a shop for bridal clothing. And there is an uproariously funny one in which a so-called juvenile delinquent gets a going-over by all the authorities whose problem he is - the cop, the judge, the social worker and the psychiatrist. This young hoodlum manages to make his elders look pretty silly.
Wonderful Cast
The cast of "West Side Story" is, next to the music, the best part of the production. It is composed of young people of whom few have been heard. Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert carry the love story with effortless simplicity, and they sing beautifully. There are other engaging performances by Chita Rivera, Mickey Calin, Ken Le Roy and Art Smith (the druggist). But the company itself is the star of the show. These boys and girls sing, dance and act with such skill and sincerity that they bring the audience out of its seats and up on the stage with them - and the stage is not a stage but this fascinating and fearful town of Manhattan.
And the settings by Oliver Smith and the costumes by Irene Sharaff are a perfect part of a perfect production.