A place for us
Somehow, someday, somewhere
IWAS privileged to visit the Sydney Opera House this week to watch the classic American stage play West Side Story.
First performed in 1957 on Broadway, the musical is a riot of colour, sound and action.
Composer Leonard Bernstein’s score is a masterpiece, unmistakably American in its brash but sophisticated 20th century precociousness.
The plot is simple: two teen gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, are in conflict on New York City’s streets in the mid-1950s.
Maria, sister of Sharks leader Bernardo, falls in love with Tony, co-founder of the Jets. The scenario is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet, two young lovers in a world of hate that is tearing them apart.
I don’t know whether it was Bernstein’s glorious music, or the sublime voice of Zoe Ioannou as Maria, or that I was overly tired, having barely slept the night before due to the relentless banging of doors and of ladies of the night coming from the hotel room next to mine, but I began to cry.
The tears started in the final scene when Maria cradled the head of her lover, Tony, in her lap. He’d been shot by the Sharks gang. Maria sings the first few lines of the haunting melody of
Somewhere, which she and Tony had earlier sung so sweetly as they planned to wed. “There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us,” she sings to Tony, bloodied and dying. “Peace and quiet and open air wait for us somewhere.
“There’s a time for us, someday a time for us, time together with time to spare, time to look, time to care.
“Someday, somewhere, we’ll find a new way of living, we’ll find there’s a way of forgiving. Somewhere there’s a place for us, a time and place for us.
“Hold my hand and we’re
halfway there. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there.
“Somehow, someday, somewhere.”
The American Dream was being enunciated by a Puerto Rican migrant to NYC in 1957 — a dream of freedom, equality and opportunity, and of escape from “bullets flying” and “money owing” in Maria’s homeland, so emphatically explained in West Side Story’s epic song, America.
“I like the shores of America. Comfort is yours in America. Knobs on doors in America. Wall-to-wall floors in America!”
The promise of freedom, equality and fraternity fuels the flame in the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
A similar dream drove my father’s family in Italy to drop everything and flee to Australia, a lucky country where an honest man could make an honest living and where his sons and daughters were to be awash with opportunity. Other families from my father’s village fled to America.
When West Side Story hit Broadway, the Italian immigrants were there behind the scenes in NYC, washing dishes, throwing punches in and out of the ring, building roads and serving coffee.
As Maria cupped the head of her dead lover at centrestage, it struck me how privileged I was, the son of migrants, to be seated in the hallowed halls of the opera house, a potent symbol of Australia’s striving as a young democracy founded on the Enlightenment values of equality, freedom and fraternity.
It was 62 years since Maria first sang Somewhere on stage, but only days since five people were killed in four separate, unrelated shootings within hours of each other on the streets of NYC.
Thousands are shot dead in America each year. The knives and pistols of the Sharks and Jets have been replaced by military weapons. Mass shootings are more American than apple pie.
President Donald Trump declared the American Dream dead in 2016. The US is closing its borders to those in search of the dream and the dregs of American society are halfway up the barrel, some with university degrees but still no opportunity.
The Land of the Free is divided between the rich, who count in billions, and the poor, who cannot pay rent. On the global stage, it is portrayed as violent, aggressive and selfish.
American pop culture at its zenith produced expressions of the heart, mind and loins as virile as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and all the musings of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Arthur Miller.
But a culture of killing now delivers AR-15 Bushmaster assault rifles to the public, trains them with internet games about the hunting of humans, and soaks their minds in blood with songs idolising guns and cinema classics celebrating the slow-motion splat of a skull after a close range shot from a Glock 29. That’s partly why I cried. I could hear Maria’s words echoing down a generation like a rusty tin can being kicked down a dirt road, more needed now than ever, but just a distant rattle in a war zone.
Wiping away my tears as the curtain drops, I emerge outside the opera house on a glorious 25C day. The famous shells of the architectural wonder reaching to an iridescent blue and cloudless winter sky. Smiling locals and tourists parade the shore.
Sydney Harbour Bridge is spectacular; the cold rigidity of the steel rods and bolts of industrial pragmatism and purpose is slowly, surely, stolidly being softened by time and the wondrous grace that flows so effortlessly from the aesthetic of symmetry.
Ferries cruise the sparkling aquamarine and I’m reminded of Australian Crawl’s classic song Reckless and the line “as the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay”. Throw down your guns indeed.
The harbour is a Ken Done print on a tea towel, comically bright and pregnant with promise and optimism.
Under the naked blaze of an Australian sun, Maria’s dream seems to glisten like an opal just out of easy grasp:
“Hold my hand and we’re halfway there. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there. Somehow, someday, somewhere.”