Somewhere: the aching sound of West Side Story's plea for utopia
Earlier this month, as UK theatres prepared to shut their doors during the coronavirus pandemic, the Royal Exchange in Manchester assembled its actors for one last day. Rockets and Blue Lights, a new play by Winsome Pinnock that didn’t even enjoy a press opening, gave a final performance for staff. And the cast in rehearsal for West Side Story came together in two of the most enduring numbers: Tonight, that onrush of heady young love, and the aching Somewhere – a dream of a place of safety, a plea for a new and better world. What wouldn’t we give for that utopia now.
West Side Story (1957) was created by a group of artists who were brash and combative, who didn’t readily reveal their vulnerabilities. The lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, distils the story of this Romeo and Juliet reboot, set amid New York’s gang wars: “It’s about a young man who grows up by falling in love, and it kills him.” Yet, nestled at the heart of this bristling, often confrontational work, is a quiet place. A place where gang antagonism, suspicious relationships and the unfeeling indifference of the official culture can
melt away, and love and trust can briefly hold. That place is Somewhere – the yearning ballad accompanied by a fantasy ballet, in which the lovers and their warring friends imagine a place of peace and quiet, of “time together with time to spare”.
The creators of West Side Story were a restless crew – all gay or bisexual, none of them publicly out in the censorious 1950s. For Leonard Bernstein (music), Arthur Laurents (book), Sondheim and Jerome Robbins (director and choreographer), New York’s theatre world provided a community and a place of sanctuary – but the wider culture was hostile. None felt this more keenly than Robbins, who had buckled when called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1953. Terrified that his sexuality might be exposed, he named names, and never forgave himself (Laurents, too, could never forgive him). Late in life, he confessed: “I can’t escape the terrors of that catastrophe.” Reading about his jittery psyche and the tangle of relationships he’d often engineer for himself, it’s hard not to imagine he struggled to find a still point of serenity. No wonder Amanda Vaill chose Somewhere as the title for her biography of the choreographer. The number was, she considers, “arguably his personal vision of paradise”.
Bernstein’s own commitment to social justice was often mocked, most spikily in Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay about “radical chic”. But there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity when he said, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” He often worked with African
American singers, and it’s no surprise that his song of yearning for a better place found some of its most resonant expression from black artists – whether Aretha Franklin, Jessye Norman or, most recently, Cynthia Erivo.
Some people find utopia more challenging: Ivo van Hove’s heralded new Broadway production kept the song but cut the ballet, as he sought to make the musical sting again as “a West Side Story for the 21st century”. Yet the Manchester production by Sarah Frankcom – produced last year and planning to return when overtaken by events – remade the number. Rather than an ethereal but anonymous soprano (Marilyn Horne on Bernstein’s starry operatic recording), Frankcom gave the number to Anybodys (Emily Langham), the Jets’ tomboy hanger-on. In most of the action, she’s jeered at, even by her own gang. She’s an odd body in a world that won’t make space for her. But here, at least for a while, she led the cast. As Susannah Clapp wrote: “A love duet becomes a song for and about everyone.” Like the show’s characters, we may feel the yearning for a new way of living. Someday, somewhere.
niest, and most terrifying villains in fiction – but the commentary’s there if you look for it.
So why did Hollywood continually screw up adaptations of his work? Maybe because Hollywood understands plot a lot better than it understands story. Story is about things that happen, yes, but it’s also about character and tone and mood. It’s as much about the wandering as it is about the arrival. And all who wander, as the saying goes, are not lost. But studio executives don’t like wandering. Wandering freaks them out. Wandering smells like film and studio executives hate film; they barely like movies. (They are huge fans of product, though. Huge.) You can’t enjoy Elmore Leonard unless you enjoy wandering. And if you don’t know the difference between plot and story, you’re probably not going to get what he was doing either.
At his peak, Leonard told better stories than anyone. And those stories were always evangelically focused on character – crazy characters, greedy ones, often sociopathic (even the “hero” cops), sometimes staggeringly stupid or deceptively smart, but resolutely alive. He placed them on the page with a kind of pitiless joy; he never sentimentalised them, but that didn’t make him (or us) love them any less. He was the least moralistic moral writer of our time. When the movies tried to transpose the plot to the screen without giving the characters their full due, they failed. But when they revelled in those characters – in the TV show Justified, in Get Shorty, Jackie Brown or Out of Sight (far and away the greatest Leonard film adaptation) – they unlocked the secret to the man’s work. All Leonard asked of plot was that it be a serviceable vehicle, but the journey and the people who took it, that was everything.
Oh, and those characters? They’d talk on that journey. A lot. Often the talk was the journey. It’s revelatory to reread Leonard and realise how much story is propelled by people talking. After its Miami opening, which covers 12 years in two pages, Get Shorty has exactly four locations in the first 100 pages – Karen’s house,
Harry’s car, Harry’s wonderfully lowrent “production” office, and Karen’s car. Yet, through the conversations that occur in those four locations, we traverse back and forth in time and range all across the country.
Throughout Get Shorty, Leonard plays a very cheeky (and, again, a very meta) game. He makes the story you’re reading a story about making up stories as one goes along. This is what writers do — we make it up as we go. Some of us are more organised than others, some less so, but that’s the crux of the job description. At the end of the first chapter, Chili inadvertently stumbles upon the fact that a dry cleaner has faked his own death. The dry cleaner’s wife tells Chili (but not the reader) “everything that happened”. And then Leonard delivers the kicker: “It was a good story.”
Leonard, the grandmaster of storytelling, is winking at us. He’s pitching us. Like a Hollywood pro. Settle in. The fun’s about to begin. Chili will ultimately end up in Hollywood, pitching Harry Zimm the story of the dry cleaner, which is a story the author himself invented. So Chili is, in essence, pitching an Elmore Leonard story within an Elmore Leonard novel to an Elmore Leonard character (who will ultimately be played by Gene Hackman). This riffing on story, on how it’s created in all its fits and starts and wandering, forms the essence of the novel. Even the ostensible bad guy, the drug dealer Bo Catlett, aspires to make movies and has a terrific sense of story (better than either Chili or Harry Zimm, in point of fact). A scene in which Bo and Chili threaten one another on one hand, while, on the other, they debate the finer points of authenticity and character-as-action in the Mr Lovejoy script they both want to lay their hands on is a pitch-perfect distillation of creative collaboration.
In the end, Get Shorty (a title that is never explained, though “Shorty” has long been rumoured to refer to Dustin Hoffman who supposedly flirted, ad infinitum, with playing the lead in an adaptation of LaBrava) is a celebration of the impulse to tell stories and the corresponding need to hear them. It’s an elegy to all addictive consumers of celluloid myth. And maybe it’s Elmore
Leonard’s love letter, at the close of a deliriously productive creative decade, to writing itself.
Then again, maybe not. Leonard was notoriously unpretentious about his chosen profession. As Harry tells Chili while they drive along Sunset Boulevard looking at the homes of far more famous people, there’s only one type of writing guaranteed to make you a lot of money: ransom notes.
• The Folio Society edition of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, illustrated by Gary Kelley, is availableatfoliosociety.com.
If you don’t know the difference between plot and story, you’re probably not going to get what he was doing