Transcript for the Piece Audio version of WNYC's Fishko Files: West Side Story

West Side Story

I was 10 or 11 years old, and I’d been swept off my feet: I'd just seen West Side Story. I practically flew downstairs to talk to a neighbor of ours, a filmmaker who was an old family friend. “Terrible,” he said. “I hated all of it.” I was stunned. The music? “Tacky, sentimental stuff,” he said. Even the dancing? He laughed – “ESPECIALLY the dancing.” I turned this over in my mind for years after. Later I learned that the neighbor I’d talked to that day was one of around 10 people named as Communist by Jerome Robbins, creator and choreographer of West Side Story, and former Communist Party member, in his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Robbins was a homosexual in the closet, like so many gays at that time -- and some believed he’d been threatened with exposure and had buckled under the pressure. Others thought he was just ambitious and wanted to make sure the blacklist wouldn’t get in his way.

That’s the 50’s for you. There was always a lot going on under the surface.

[“West Side Story” music]

It was Robbins who dominated the production of “West Side Story”, which had been written in the mid-fifties by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and a new kid called Stephen Sondheim.

“West Side Story” is 1957, we were really just coming out of the McCarthy era...

Gregg Lawrence’s book "Dance with Demons" is a biography of Jerome Robbins...

He was one of those who was terrorized...and named names and it really shaped him for the rest of his life.

[music, Maria and Tony sing...]

It had been Robbins who had come up with the original idea of a modern, urban Romeo and Juliet; Bernstein and Arthur Laurents had added the idea of warring street gangs in place of Shakespeare’s feuding families.... in the play a Puerto-Rican girl, Maria, whose brother is in ONE gang, loves Tony, who’s in the opposing, ‘American’ gang.

That kind of bigotry and prejudice was very much in the air.

Writer Arthur Laurents, one of the creators of West Side Story…

It’s really... how can love survive in a world, violent world of prejudice? That’s what its about.

There were strong undercurrents in rehearsal...

So many people who I spoke with described the production itself as a gang
war (Greg Lawrence)

Jerry had declared that first day that the stage was a battleground...

Carol Lawrence was the original Maria on Broadway in 1957..

You were never allowed to walk on that stage except at his request;

[music, Jets and Sharks]

he was absolute dictator...

(Greg L) He brought this method acting technique into the show, where he deliberately tried to foment animosity, antagonism, between the two opposing gangs both on stage and off stage! They weren’t allowed to eat together; they were not supposed to socialize...

And in the ‘50’s, that tension was real...

I lived on West 80th Street when West Side Story was happening...

Grover Dale was the original Snowboy, one of the Jets, in the production...

There were gangs right there and I walked past guys that were doing the catcalls that I was delivering on stage, where d’you think I learned how to do that?

And on 84th St, is where the rumbles were happening...

West Side Story brought that tension inside, even within the constraints of a more repressive time...

(Laurents)There are no 4 letter words in it....you couldn’t use ‘em in those days...

A scene that I wrote ended with “Hey Officer Krupke, Krup You!”

And they said ‘brass ass.’ Well that was considered shocking and daring...

[Officer Krupke, ‘social disease’ verse]

It must have been 20 years later, I think, before they used 4 letter-words so freely...

[Music: “Gee Officer Krupke, Krup You!”]

[WSStory Ballet music]

The idea was to do something good; I think we were all in love with musical theatre. I don’t think any one of us thought of the commercial possibilities of the show...I thought it would last, if we were lucky, 3 months...

Consider this: it was ardently, feverishly heterosexual musical theatre, created by 4 gay men. At a time when it was even less acceptable to be gay than it was to be leftist! But Arthur Laurents thinks that’s beside the point:

(Arthur) It’s four Jews – there’s a big difference. It’s true! I think being part of a minority – I know gays were a minority but gays didn’t figure much in the 50’s. Jews figured then, now and always. But I think that was more of what we had in common, what drove it...drove the feeling of injustice, at any rate.

But the 64 dollar question is: how did Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents, both of them blacklisted for their left-wing activities, find a way to work with Jerome Robbins? After all, it was only a few years after Robbins had cooperated with the right-wing forces RESPONSIBLE for the blacklist....

Since then, looking back, I’m not very proud of myself for ignoring the fact that Jerry informed, because...that validated him. And I had to face that. I can
explain what I did, I don’t condone it. We were all so involved in the making of the piece, that extra-curricular affairs, as it were, didn’t enter into it; there were no fingers pointed. It was not a good time. Anybody who went through it, it still comes up almost every day, and it’s us, and it’s them...

[WSStory end music]

And how did a 1957 audience greet the spectacle of West Side Story?

I think the innovation was having death, attempted rape, murder in a musical..in musical theatre. The subject matter. And bigotry and violence and prejudice...and that people would pay money to see that with an orchestra!

(Carol) The opening night in Washington DC when the curtain went up for our curtain calls, and they had just seen Tony’s body taken over and the strain of ‘Somewhere’ and just a bell tolling – still breaks me up – we ran to our spaces and faced the audience holding hands, and the curtain went up and we looked at the audience, and they looked at us...and we looked at them and I thought, Oh dear Lord, it’s a bomb!

(Arthur) we thought the thing was going down the drain, oh it was awful!

(Carol).. and then as if Jerry had choreographed it, they jumped to their feet; I’d never heard people stamping and yelling...and by that time Lenny had worked his way backstage and he came at the final curtain and walked to me, put his arms around me and we wept.

(Greg) Walter Kerr writing for the Herald Tribune opened his review and it became very classic and much repeated: “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning...”

There’s that ‘50’s imagery...though neither on stage, nor in life did West Side Story have a ‘50’s, Ozzie and Harriet ending....

(Arthur) I never said anything to Jerry until the show was frozen in Philadelphia. And then I told him I thought he was an immoral, indecent man. I don’t know how much it mattered to him...

From The Fishko Files, I’m Sara Fishko

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