Romeo: ‘O brawling love …’
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, I. i
I walked down the street apart because I was not in 1960s London but 1950s New York, where people communicated in whistles and finger-clicks, where life was not black and white but red and blue, and where conversation tipped over into song, fight into dance, emotion into grace.
West Side Story was a fire-engine-red album cover with high-rise black lettering propping up a fire escape on which the sharp silhouettes of a man and woman danced (fell? fought?). From the first whistles and clicks, the spasmic strings and brass, it erupts into a drama of such extension and motion that I gave myself up to it. This music has its own architecture, machinery, circulation, boundaries and weather. I got lost and found myself back where I started. I passed places I’d seen earlier. I found dead-ends, alleys, shocking open spaces, blind corners and always the pleasurable sense of something building. A city still building itself – what could be more exciting and alive?
And these characters who spat or sang were neither adult nor child. Until I saw the film, they weren’t characters at all but each a formulation of feeling. I was astounded that they could be talking, quite ordinarily, more than ordinarily, and from there, burst into song. I thought people either stood around talking or stood around singing, but here was a new possibility: you could go about your life and then, when the mood took you, you could dance, you could sing, and everyone around you would know the words and the steps, and just like that the world would be musical.
Here were boys, bristling and strutting and unlike London’s floaty hippies, the end-of-the-pier Teddy Boys or prissy Mods, they were completely boy. They fought, smoked and swore even as they sang and danced. The opening scene in which the Jets strut through their territory, threatening and teasing and showing off, is described in the libretto as ‘half-danced, half-mimed’ as if the whole of it lay in movement.
Song and dance are explosion and interruption, and sometimes the only way to keep up with what’s happening. Midstrut, the boys pause, spin and glide, their arms opening into a port de bras (which means ‘the carriage of the arms’ and it was as if they were carrying arms), parting the air as if to reclaim a space they felt themselves losing. They could sing and dance and then get back to business; they could have feelings, and they could recover from them. In the musical world, everything was elastic. People could fly and fall without hurting themselves and they bounced from one scene of their lives to the next, pinging back into shape as they went.
Leonard Bernstein wrote in his West Side Log in 1956 (by which time he and Arthur Lorenz had been ruminating on the idea of West Side Story for seven years): ‘Chief problem: to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and “just dancing” … The line is there, but it’s very fine, and sometimes takes a lot of peering around to discern it.’ Like the narrowest tenement, West Side Story is built on this fine line which is why it is such a volatile structure, why it keeps falling and rebuilding. The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilising tritone. This is an interval of three tones, or six semitones, which sounds powerfully unsettled. So much so that in the Middle Ages it was known as diabolus in musica. It is the augmented fourth, the diminished fifth. Play middle C and F sharp on the piano and your ear will insist that something has gone wrong or has been stretched too far.
The Jets and the Sharks meet at a dance in the gym. No one speaks but everyone dances through a sequence of ‘Blues-Promenade-Mambo-Cha-Cha’. These dances are expletive, plosive, headline and subtext. This is war and even the girls, who mostly simper and flounce, produce some brutal moves. It wasn’t the girls I identified with, nor was it Tony and Maria, the simpering Romeo and Juliet. I identified with the music.
The architecture of West Side Story, with its use of motif and reprise, taught me the pleasure of finding something familiar in an unfamiliar place, differently lit so that it offered some new aspect of itself, another facet, texture or angle. Here, it was ‘Tonight’, a song we first hear as Tony and Maria’s soppy duet but which returns as the pivot around which everyone’s conflicting interests turn. Tonight there will be a truce, tonight there will be a battle, tonight there will be an escape, tonight there will be a seduction. Everyone is singing to themselves, but the music pulls them together like the spokes of a wheel rolling inexorably towards a final collision as in Homer’s ring of dancers or a circle game.
At the end of West Side Story, the singing gives way and the impetus it provided disappears. No one is able to move forwards from this moment. Perhaps it has something to do with needing to listen. When you are singing, how can you listen, especially to yourself? Leonard Bernstein:
At the denouement, the final dramatic unraveling, the music stops and we talk it. Tony is shot and Maria picks up the gun and makes that incredible speech, ‘How many bullets are left?’ My first thought was that this was to be her biggest aria. I can’t tell you how many tries I made on that aria. I tried once to make it cynical and swift. Another time like a recitative. Another time like a Puccini aria. In every case, after five or six bars, I gave up. It was phony …