2/18/2023 0 Comments West side story composerIn The Turning Point (featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne in the Pas de Deux from Prokofiev’s balletic treatment of R&J) he explores the conflict between marriage and career. Interestingly, in two of his post-WSS screen plays, Laurents subliminally returns to the R&J theme. As a fellow tradesman, I was filled with the deepest admiration." is a triumph of style and model of its genre. That he succeeded, and did so brilliantly, is attested to by his companion-in-arms Alan Jay Lerner: "Arthur Laurent’s book, with its moving re-telling of the Romeo and Juliet tale. the dialogue is my translation of adolescent street talk into theater: it may sound real, but it isn’t." He continues: "In the book (why are the spoken words for a musical show called this?). So Laurents replaces the second half of Shakespeare’s play, which he tells us: "rests on Juliet’s swallowing a magic potion, a device that would not be swallowed in a modern play." But just as Shakespeare transformed Brook’s: " Drunken gossypes, superstitious friers, vnchastitie, the shame of stolne contractes hastyng to more vnhappye deathe," Shakespeare rapturously expanded the soliloquies, and fashioned new personages endowing them with nobility.Īlthough there are many borrowings of plot and content from R&J to WSS, Arthur Laurents, author of the book for the musical, did not verbally borrow from Shakespeare. Shakespeare transcended the question of morality, though he borrowed freely from the earlier poem, and in fact, he replicated Brooke’s actual words in at least three instances. louers, thrilling themselves to vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and aduise of parents and frendes." In more recent times, American folklore had assimilated the myth into the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.īrooke’s description of R&J as an " vnfortunate coople" displays a puritanical streak: ". The theme of two lovers thwarted by circumstances beyond their control, however, had long before been established in Western legend: Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Isolde, to name only two such pairs. Far less well known is the fact that Shakespeare based his play (1594) on other material, particularly a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). It is widely known that West Side Story (WSS) is based directly on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (R&J). Although Bernstein’s music has sometimes been criticized as sounding Aaron Copland-ish, the opening of Copland’s Music for a Great City (which was written later, 1964) resembles the Prologue of West Side Story?Īll rights reserved.Ramin and Kostal also helped Bernstein prepare the Symphonic Dances From West Side Story, and that they performed the same valued function for the composer's opera, A Quiet Place ?.Both the movie and original Broadway cast albums of West Side Story earned Gold Record status, sales of over one million?.Although in the stage version of Cool is sung by Riff, on the screen it was delivered by a newly invented character named Ice - get it?.Not one of the Oscars won by West Side Story included the composer, who was deemed "ineligible" since his music was not written for the film? He did, however, expand the Prologue.West Side Story was not the only musical based on Romeo and Juliet?.The music for One Hand, One Heart was originally earmarked for Bernstein’s Candide, with a whole other set of lyrics? And that it has become almost as popular as Oh, Promise Me in wedding ceremonies? Or that the music in the second movement of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, set to war-like words form Psalm 2, was a rejected Jets’ war-song called Mix?.Marilyn Horne was the voice of Dorothy Dandridge on the film soundtrack of the Bizet-Oscar Hammerstein Carmen Jones, and also on the soundtrack for the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Flower Drum Song ? And also on the 1985 West Side Story recording!.West Side Story has been translated into Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian (in two versions), Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, French, Russian, and not so surprisingly, into Spanish, twice?.Irving Shulman wrote the novelization of Arthur Laurents’ "book" in which he provided family names for the characters: Tony (Anton) Wyzek, Maria (and Bernardo) Nunez, Riff Lorton, Chino Martin, Anita Palacio, and (now it can be told) Glad Hand was "christened" Murray Benowitz!.
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