Critics: New BBC documentary celebrates the magic of West Side Story. But it glosses over the cruel methods of the show’s legendary director, Jerome Robbins.
New BBC documentary celebrates the magic of West Side Story. But it glosses over the cruel methods of the show’s legendary director, Jerome Robbins
Since its New York premiere in 1957, nothing has come along that has looked or sounded like West Side Story — and few shows have had an equivalent cultural impact.
In the public mind, the play (and the subsequent 1961 film) are associated with the composer Leonard Bernstein, whose score turned contemporary gangland feuds between Puerto Rican immigrants and territorial white Americans into a heady running battle of competing sounds.
Those who know a bit about Stephen Sondheim — America’s greatest living composer of musicals — will also be aware that the show was a crucial breakthrough for him; at the age of 25, he was brought in as lyricist. And let’s not forget playwright Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, a modern take on Romeo and Juliet.
But the figure who looms skyscraper-tall in West Side Stories ,a new BBC documentary heralding the 60th anniversary next year, is the man who conceived the show, and who directed and choreographed it: Jerome Robbins.
He casts a controversial shadow over this magnum opus. Without him it wouldn’t have happened. But his sadistic personality — which is only hinted at in the documentary — was also a major factor in the blood-sweat-and-tears saga that characterised the show’s arduous genesis, and even potentially jeopardised the whole project.
“Each musical presents its own recipe for problems — but the recipe in this case included the fact that Robbins was such a difficult man,” Jamie Bernstein, the composer’s youngest daughter, tells me. “He made everyone’s life miserable — not just the authors’ but the performers’ as well.”
Nobody denies that Robbins, a former soloist with the classical Ballet Theatre company in New York, was a visionary and a gifted choreographer. The critic Kenneth Tynan was just one of dozens of critics blown away by West Side Story’s combination of balletic grace and cut-and-thrust physicality when it opened on Broadway in September 1957. “Robbins projects the show as a rampaging ballet, with bodies flying through the air as if shot from guns, leaping, shrieking, and somersaulting,” he wrote.
But that level of gritty, street-hardened authenticity was achieved at considerable cost. Original cast members talk in the programme about teeth being knocked out, faces pummelled. But Robbins didn’t just insist on a no-holds-barred physical commitment — his psychological tactics were also bruising in the extreme.
“He was such a tyrant,” remembers Carol Lawrence, who created the role of Maria (the Puerto Rican “Juliet” figure) for the original show. “He loved it if you cried. He never gave you a note privately or in your dressing room, it was always designed to humiliate you in front of the company. He had a great sense of humour but it was very abusive. He had people in tears — always.”
There was a method to his nastiness — he wanted to toughen the company up. He kept the actors playing members of the rival gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, apart in rehearsals, and stoked real-life animosities between them. “He would tell lies,” Lawrence continues. “He would say: ‘So-and-so says you can’t dance anymore, you’re a has-been’, that sort of thing — so when those two actors came into a rumble they were really fighting.”
As a tactic it worked, but he pushed it to the limit. Lawrence recalls Larry Kert, who played Tony (West Side Story’s “Romeo”), coming to her dressing room with his chest taped up.
“He said: ‘I’ve come from the doctor — he said you can’t punch me anymore, you’re loosening my lungs from the rib-cage. Would you tell Jerry? I haven’t the guts to tell him.’ I went in tears to Jerry, who said, without a second’s thought: ‘Well, hit him in the head — that won’t hurt anything.’ ”
The creative team weren’t exempt from Robbins’s bully-boy behaviour — he even drove the non-confrontational Bernstein to drink. At one rehearsal the director told the conductor to cut the opening orchestration of Somewhere. Sondheim was flabbergasted: “I thought: ‘I can’t believe it! He’s changing the orchestration!’ I turned to see what Lenny’s reaction was. He wasn’t there. I had an instinct … I went to the nearest bar and sure enough he had four shots of Scotch lined up in front of him.”
Sondheim got it in the neck too. “He could size you up in an instant and know what you were afraid of,” he says. Both Bernstein and Sondheim worked with Robbins again on the film version of West Side Story . It went on to win 10 Oscars, including a Best Director award for Robbins, but, again, the director’s working practices caused ructions among the cast and crew, so much so that he was taken off the picture before the end of filming.
Six decades on, and 18 years since Robbins’s death, West Side Story remains a landmark achievement. Recalling the wild applause and 17 curtain calls that greeted them on opening night, Lawrence says it was the moment they all knew the agony had been worth it.
“It was everything we dared to hope for. Jerry always knew he was going for broke,” she says. “He was cruel and sadistic but he had a vision. He wanted West Side Story to be hugely important — and it turned out to be the answer to his dreams.”
Each musical presents its own recipe for problems — but the recipe in this case included the fact that Robbins was such a difficult man.” Jamie Bernstein, daughter of composer Leonard Bernstein