The impetus for West Side Story had come almost a decade earlier when Robbins brought the idea of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet to Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents. The project stalled for several years until an article in the Los Angeles Times about gang violence renewed their interest. Instead of star-crossed lovers of Jewish and Irish Catholic descent, as Robbins had originally suggested, the protagonists became a Polish-American boy and a Puerto Rican girl in New York City. Bernstein brought in the untried Stephen Sondheim to write the lyrics.
"As its choreographer-director," writes Long, "Robbins was indispensable and in absolute control of West Side Story; and under his supervision dance came to have an ever greater and more important role in the musical." Every performer had to be a dancer. He cast dancers Carole Lawrence and Larry Kert over opera-trained singers Anna Maria Alberghetti and Frank Poretta. He rid the choreography of classical ballet and strove to have his cast move and look like street kids. The prologue, a scene that usually would have a song or dialog to introduce the characters, became just dance. "Robbins made the whole show like a long ballet," says choreographer Peter Gennaro. Long writes, "In West Side Story there is no dance portion of the show; it is all dance, all movement."
Robbins expected his cast to live their parts, using only their characters' names during rehearsal and sitting with their fellow gang members for lunch. The character named Anybodys, a girl who was shut out from being a Jet, was forced to eat alone. And Robbins insisted on eight weeks of rehearsal when four was the norm.
"Jerry Robbins is an incredible man, and I'd work with him in a minute," says Kert, "but he is a perfectionist who sees himself in every role, and if you come onstage and don't give him exactly what he's pictured the night before, his tolerance level is too low, so in his own way, he destroys you."
No one was out of Robbins's range, including his dear friends and fellow creators. Carole Lawrence remembers "one morning when we were rehearsing in Washington, Jerry asked Lenny to change something in the Scherzo. . . . We were all sitting on the floor and Lenny brought out the score and played it for us and it was beautiful. And Jerry turned and said: 'That's worse than you had before. Go write it again.'"
Robbins's perfectionist streak ran into trouble when he directed the 1961 film version of West Side Story. He took too much time and went over budget trying to film the scenes on the streets of New York. After he left the project, veteran Hollywood director Robert Wise took over and moved the scenes back into a studio in California. The film ended up winning ten Academy Awards, including one for Robbins as best director.
It seems that Robbins didn't want any materiualism in the process of creating West Side Story; in the sense that every performer had to be a dancer. So instead of picking someone who looked good and training them into beautiful dancers, he wanted the real thing, and that's exactly what he got. I love how he got his ultimate inspiration to do West Side Story, because yes he did want to do a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet, but it wasn't until he was aware of gang violence, that gave him his last piece to his puzzle.
ReplyDeleteRobbins was a perfectionist but for the right reasons. Making his cast sit in there individual groups must have been really hard for them, but it definitely paid off. I think the reason why Robbins took so long and went over budget, was because he wanted it to be real, and not look like it was a studio; however all in all it paid off, and he created a wonderful production.