West Side Story at the Stratford Festival (a review)

This year's version of the star-cross'd lovers at the Stratford Festival

The Stratford Festival’s 2009 production of West Story Story is superb — sharp, edgy, dramatic, and infinitely more satisfying than the 1961 film, which we have always disliked.

For our money, West Story Story is all about the music, not the characters (cartoonish) or the story (which isn’t not bad for a musical, but is fundamentally improbable and is in any case recycled from Shakespeare). Much of the story flows through the songs and the action, so serious acting chops aren’t really required.

Chilina Kennedy

But the cast at Stratford is first-rate. Fine as Chilina Kennedy was at the Shaw Festival last year in Wonderful Town (see this post), she seemed even finer as Maria this year at Stratford. Ms. Kennedy also gets to show off her exceptional vocal range, as Maria’s songs cover more than two octaves.

Anita (Jennifer Rias) puts on her red dress for Bernardo

Jennifer Rias has plenty of sass and spunk in the part of Anita, Bernardo’s over-sexed girlfriend. (Anita smugly anticipates that Bernardo will be even lustier than usual after the rumble, and she prepares accordingly.) Paul Nolan, as Tony, sings nearly as well as Ms. Kennedy, and they blend nicely on the duets; only for one phrase did we notice that his pitch was flat.

And such music! We liked Leonard Bernstein’s score better than ever, the songs, the incidental music, all of it.  And the dancers!

What must audiences have thought back in 1957 at curtain time when, instead of the usual frothy medley of pleasing tunes for an overture, the show started with dissonant horn blasts and percussion? Was this a Broadway musical, or Mahler’s Sixth? In fact, it was Bernstein’s genius through and through.  (We’re not sure whether a dance sequence is usual during the West Side Story overture, but we were mesmerized.) And has there ever been more sophisticated music composed for a popular musical play? Such glorious songs, including one of the most perfect melodies ever conceived (“Somewhere”).

We only wished that the sound designers for the show hadn’t thought it necessary to crank up the volume quite so much. There were moments with full orchestra and full chorus when the sound was unpleasantly piercing.

If you saw Romeo and Juliet at the Stratford Festival just last year, the plot parallels in West Side Story will be especially striking. This year’s balcony scene was much better than the one last year (which was almost laughably bad, as we reported). Tony and Maria were so endearing and impetuous that their characters very nearly came to life. We were astounded with Mr. Nolan’s strength and agility as he leapt to the balcony and vaulted into Ms. Kennedy’s arms. Acrobatics from a singer! The show is worth seeing for this scene alone.

Still, as much as we appreciated this fine production, West Side Story itself is still far from a favorite of Emsworth’s.

First, no matter how well played, the characters in West Side Story simply aren’t credible. Who can really believe that Tony, Bernardo, Riff, Baby John, and the rest really belong to vicious street gangs? Are we truly to believe that all that gangs like the Sharks and Jets cared about was strutting rights to a few square blocks of Manhattan? Didn’t street gangs in the 1950s run protection schemes and prostitution rackets, fence stolen goods, and sell drugs in their territories (as they do today)? Didn’t these gangs include cold-blooded killers?

No one could imagine that sort of thing from the nice boys and girls in West Side Story.  Crime and vice from Riff and Tony?  No evidence of delinquency whatsoever.  Until the climactic rumble (for which no one in the gangs really seems to have the stomach), these rival gangs don’t seem any more dangerous to society than rival suburban high school cheerleaders at homecoming time.

And these kids are verbally sophisticated beyond belief.   ”I feel stunning — and entrancing,” Maria sings. Really? Fresh off the boat from San Juan and barely conversant in English, Maria thinks of herself as “entrancing”?  The word-play from the boys is even sharper than from the girls’.  Diesel, Action, and A-Rab have such refined senses of irony and theatricality that they can slip comfortably into the role-playing of “Gee, Officer Krupke” to mock the psychiatrists and social workers who try to explain their delinquency in sociological terms.

Can we really believe that a punk like Diesel would have the vocabulary to say “This boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care!/It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.”  Or that someone like Action would be witty enough to utter a line like “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived”?

Ignorant high school dropouts don’t talk this way; the characters in West Side Story are out of character every time they open their mouths.  Arthur Laurents, who conceived the play, apparently recognized the problem himself; in connection with the current Broadway revival of West Side Story, he was quoted recently as saying that “[t]he musical theatre and cultural conventions of 1957 made it next to impossible for the characters to have authenticity.”   Laurents also recognized that the lyrics to “America” and “I Feel Pretty” were so witty as to be out of character for the characters who were singing them. 

It’s true — and it’s still jarring.  The show hasn’t become dated (as some folks we talked to at Stratford thought, even though they loved the Stratford presentation); it was riddled with incongruity from the beginning.

The gang who put together West Side Story, back in the day: Stephen Sondheim on the left; Arthur Laurents, second from left; Leonard Bernstein, second from right

Our second general objection to West Side Story is, of course, its anti-Americanism. The lesson of West Side Story is as crude as the other leftist propaganda of the forties and the fifties: that the land of opportunity that the materialistic Anita sings about in “America” is a myth; that the very essence of America is racism; and that its civic institutions (represented by Officer Krupke and the precinct police) will always be enemies of people of color and the working classes.

The comparison we think Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein were implicitly inviting us to draw, of course, was to the “socialist paradises” in Russia and eastern Europe, where racism was supposedly unknown.  That was a lie, and one might think these lies have done enough damage over the last eighty years that they shouldn’t be rubbed in our faces yet again.

In this Stratford production, however, director Gary Griffin has actually chosen to reinforce the anti-American overtones of Laurents’s and Bernstein’s show; he inserted a new character into the play, a young black boy, who appears silently at various points during the play as a sort of moral rebuke to people like Emsworth who might not yet be sufficiently ashamed of having been born white American males. 

And a large American flag is unfurled on the stage at just the point when the racism becomes ugliest. We are apparently supposed to take the lesson that the anti-Puerto Rican prejudice in the play is nothing compared to the racism against all people of color that has always been the essence of America. (The young actor is also assigned the singing of “Somewhere.”)

A final note: our antennae went up when we heard Maria sing, “I feel pretty, and witty, and bright!”  Wasn’t the lyric “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay”? We thought perhaps the gay rights forces had so co-opted the word “gay” that the politically correct management at the Stratford Festival felt compelled to change the lyrics of the Bernstein/Sondheim song.

Post-play research on Rhapsody disclosed, however, that just this once we were wrong. True, in the 1961 movie version of West Side Story, Maria sang the word “gay.” But in the original Broadway production, Carol Lawrence (as Maria) was indeed “pretty, and witty, and bright!” The phrase rhymes with Maria’s next line: “And I pity/Any girl who isn’t me tonight.”

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

Wonderful Town at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Chilina Kennedy and Lisa Horner in "Wonderful Town"

(June 30, 2008) One of the great American musicals, Wonderful Town, is playing at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), and it is pure pleasure. This musical has an intelligent, heartfelt script and genuinely appealing characters, and it is perfectly suited for a repertory company whose members act as well as they sing and dance.

Emsworth previews the shows on the 2009 Shaw Festival playbill at this post.

Wonderful Town takes us to Greenwich Village, 1935, where Ruth Sherwood and her younger sister Eileen have just arrived from small-town Ohio to seek their fortunes — Ruth as a writer, Eileen as a singer and actress. Fresh off the train, they wander into lively, colorful Christopher Street, take a noisy basement apartment (a new subway is being blasted down below), meet the neighbors, and start looking for work.

Lisa Horner

Will the clever Ruth (Lisa Horner) learn how to write in her own voice? Will she ever sell her stories? Will Ruth (dateless back in Ohio) find love in Manhattan? If I had any quarrel with the casting of Wonderful Town, it would be with the director’s futile attempt to pass off the appealing, long-legged Lisa Horner as an old maid. Her sassy number “One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man” is one of the many highlights of this show.

And will anyone ever give Ruth’s pretty, talented sister Eileen (Chilina Kennedy) a job? Will the girls be able to pay the rent? What if they fall for the same young man? Will anything in this bohemia ever shock these small-town girls? We never worry for long.

I was hooked from the opening scene, with its athletic, big-production number “Christopher Street.” One could see the show a dozen times without catching all the clever business concocted by director Roger Hodgman and choreographer Jane Johanson.

Leonard Bernstein

I had not seen Wonderful Town before, and I wasn’t aware of all the treasures in its score. Leonard Bernstein’s songs (with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) are superb, even if they are not as well known as those in some of the other great Broadway musicals. The songs of Wonderful Town are nicely integrated into the storyline, especially Ruth and Eileen’s hilarious, deadpan duet, “Ohio” (the voices of the homesick sisters blend beautifully), and the riotous “My Darling Eileen,” set in the Village’s police station and sung by an barbershop quartet of Irish cops that is led by the Shaw Festival’s rubber-limbed William Vickers as Officer Lonigan.

As Eileen, Ms. Kennedy gives an expressive rendition of the show’s graceful romantic standard, “A Little Bit in Love.” My own favorite is the edgy and infectious “The Wrong Note Rag,” a piece whose music is even wittier than its lyrics.

Many will feel differently, but I prefer Wonderful Town to the show that Bernstein composed about four years later with Stephen Sondheim as lyricist. Of course, the music of West Side Story is peerless, with standards like “Tonight,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Maria” and “Somewhere.” But the good humor and real-life dilemmas of Wonderful Town speak to me more than the cartoonish characters and dramatic posturing of West Side Story.

This slice of Americana reminds us of when we were young and free to take chances and take on madcap adventures and go on wild-goose chases. The inhabitants of Christopher Street are old friends. Ruth and Eileen weren’t strangers to me; in them I recognized my own bright, clear-eyed, generous, independent-minded old-maid aunt and her devoted younger sister. The younger sister was my mother, who left Kansas in the throes of the Depression to try her luck in the east. Like Eileen, my mother found first a career, and then a husband, in the big city. My aunt never did marry.

Wonderful Town was based on the autobiographical best-seller My Sister Eileen, a collection of stories by Ruth McKenney, from the humor genre that included books like Clarence Day’s Life With Father, Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth’s Cheaper by the Dozen, and William Saroyan’s timeless The Human Comedy.

See Emsworth’s reviews of other shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, including An Inspector Calls, Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married, and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

The Shaw Festival’s 2008 production of Terence Rattigan’s outstanding 1939 play After the Dance is reviewed in this post.

Left-wing playwrights at the Shaw Festival (comment on The Little Foxes)

Four plays down for Emsworth so far in the 2008 season of the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), and each one the work of a deeply committed leftist! Consider:

J. B. PRIESTLEY, playwright for An Inspector Calls. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) One of England’s leading radical socialists from the 1930s through the 1950s, a politician as well as a writer. A founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. Favored permanent wage controls, nationalization of industry, and public ownership of land.

LILLIAN HELLMAN, playwright for The Little Foxes. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) More than a mere “fellow traveler.” Openly admired Stalin and his methods; indifferent to the efficient brutality with which he eliminated opponents; approved the Soviet occupations of Finland and Poland. Traveled to Russia in the late 1930s while Stalin was intentionally starving millions of Ukranians; found nothing in the U.S.S.R. to criticize and much to admire.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, playwright for Getting Married. (See the Emsworth review in this post.) Britain’s leading socialist thinker from 1890 until his death in 1950. Admired Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini; praised the U.S.S.R. Opposed Britain’s involvement in both world wars. Not only promoted radical socialism, but used his plays to attack the cultural and economic institutions that held England together: the Christian religion, the institution of marriage, private ownership of property, the free enterprise system.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN, composer for Wonderful Town. The epitome of ‘60s radical chic. Notorious as an uncritical supporter of left-wing causes during the 1960s; his high-society parties to raise money for the Black Panthers were lampooned by Tom Wolfe in his essay “These Radical Chic Evenings.”

Bernstein gets a pass, since the script and the lyrics to the songs in Wonderful Town were written by others, since the music is glorious, and since it’s hard to find anything ideological in this wonderful American musical (the Shaw’s production of which I enthusiastically recommend; see my review).

But the Priestley, Hellman, and Shaw plays positively burst with leftist cant. And Shaw’s anti-capitalist Mrs. Warren’s Profession is yet to come in the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season!

If I took account of a playwright’s principles in deciding whether to see a play, I might have given The Little Foxes a pass. But the play had a high reputation, and we had enjoyed Hellman’s The Autumn Garden at the Shaw a couple of years ago.

But my, how that woman hated our country! The Little Foxes is disguised as a character study in greed and selfishness and a portrait of a dysfunctional family; in fact, it is a rant against American capitalism and a barely disguised call for violent revolution.

In The Little Foxes, the already wealthy Hubbard family (Southern merchants and bankers) are trying to round up capital to build a cotton mill in their town.

But the Hubbard brothers and their sister, we learn, are every bit as rapacious and corrupt as the French aristocracy before the French Revolution, or the Russian nobility before the October Revolution of 1917. Hellman wants us to feel that the Hubbards, and the world of American business and finance for which they stand in the play, deserve the same fates as those French and Russian aristocrats.

Consider all the sins and vices Hellman inflicts upon the characters in her play:

The Hubbards were the children of slave-owners, just as many of the Russian aristocracy murdered by the communists in 1917 had owned Russian serfs. Hellman has Ben Hubbard make the offensive comment that he’d put his aging cook out to pasture “if we hadn’t owned her mother.”

The Hubbard brothers got rich by cheating black people on staple goods and by charging them usurious interest. The Hubbards plan to use their political muscle, probably through bribes, to get water rights for the new mill for practically nothing.

Illustrating the Marxist propaganda point that capitalists grind the faces of the poor by turning them against each other, the Hubbard brothers brag that they’ll be able to keep wages low at a new cotton mill by playing the poor whites off against the poor blacks. They assure their new business partner from Chicago that no labor union will ever be allowed to get a foothold in a cotton mill in their town.

An exquisite touch borrowed from Les Miserables: Just as the French aristocrats famously used to put mantraps in their forests to maim peasants who hunted small game to feed their starving families, Oscar Hubbard goes out hunting every morning in his large, privately owned spread and leaves his dead game to rot, even though malnourished townspeople haven’t had meat in months. He promises to have the law against trespassers.

Reinforcing the link to the doomed French and Russian monarchy, Hellman names the sister “Regina.” Preoccupied with fashion and spending money, like Marie Antoinette, she is both the strongest-willed and the most heartless of the siblings. Regina doesn’t hesitate to blackmail her own brothers to get a larger interest in the new cotton mill.

In one of the play’s crudest scenes, Oscar Hubbard encourages his own son, Leo, to steal a packet of valuable bonds from a safe deposit box.

Reminding us again of those inbred monarchical families: the Hubbard brothers and Regina connive to marry Leo to his 17-year-old first cousin, Alexandra. Fortunately, Alexandra despises Leo because of his cruelty to animals, among other reasons.

When Oscar’s wife, Birdie, warns the girl of the matchmaking plot (“don’t you see, they’ll make you marry him, Zan”), Oscar strikes his wife – perhaps the most shocking moment in the play.

Who would defend such people? Wife-beaters, corrupters of children, animal-abusers, cheats, thieves, swindlers, and usurers, bribers, blackmailers, oppressors of the poor, enemies of the working man!

True to Marxist stereotype, Hellman takes care that the only characters in the play with any moral sense are the “oppressed” characters. Oscar’s ill-usage of his wife Birdie has beaten her down and driven her to drink, but she still has enough spirit to become indignant over the way her in-laws “made their money charging awful interest to poor ignorant n***s and cheating them on what they bought.” The Hubbards’ black servant Addie lays out the moral justification for a class-based revolution:

Well , there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.

At the end of Hellman’s play, the spunky Alexandra remembers Addie’s remark, flexes her youthful muscles, and sets off to mount the barricades:

Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it. And Uncle Ben said the same thing. (Tensely) Well, tell him for me, Mama, I’m not going to stand around and watch you do it. Tell him I’ll fighting as hard as he’ll be fighting some place where people don’t just stand around and watch.

Hellman wants us to understand that the Hubbards are not just small-town characters, but are cut out of the same cloth as the wealthy, despised industrialist tycoons of the day. Driving home the connection, she has Ben Hubbard invoke Henry Frick, the steel magnate (also a noted art collector), in a toast to the success of the cotton mill venture:

It was Henry Frick who said, “Railroads are the Rembrandts of investments.” Well, I say, “Southern cotton mills will be the Rembrandts of investment.”

The Little Foxes lacks integrity. There has always been sharp practice in business, but merchants succeed in the main by being honest, by living up to their contracts, and by giving customers what they promise. The industries founded by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Henry Ford dramatically improved the lives of all Americans, and as philanthropists they gave much of their fortunes back to the public – which can still view Henry Frick’s Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Van Dycks at the art museum (The Frick Collection) he built on Fifth Avenue.

Hellman could have given us an fair picture of a representative slice of the business world, even a sour slice (we think of Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, produced at the Shaw a few years ago, among many examples). But that never would have served her purpose. She knew that revolution would never come in America unless Americans came to view all capitalists, from Andrew Mellon down to the local cotton merchant, as useless leeches, irredeemably corrupt. She wanted us as fellow revolutionaries.

In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards never get their just deserts; in Hellman’s worldview, justice is not possible in a capitalist society. Her play ends, instead, with the little foxes still on the loose. She leaves the task of bringing them to bay, and setting on the dogs to tear them to pieces, to us.