We expected things to be hard and we liked it that way. We desperately wanted to please our choreographer – that’s how dancers should think. You’re dancing at the same time so it’s hard, but it’s your job to make it seem easy. You had to put air through certain consonants and hit the “k” in “like” very hard.
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We were taught how to sing America so every word could be heard clearly. The Sharks and the Jets weren't allowed to socialise in order to make things much more tense when they meet on stage Chita Rivera I got letters from Puerto Rican people who had totally misunderstood it – they thought that I really meant it was an “ugly island” and didn’t realise that Anita was joking to make a point. Stephen’s lyrics for that song are so biting and comical. America was tremendous fun to perform because of the tempo, the Latin rhythm. We had a whole cast of young, excited dancers and all that energy in a room feeds off itself. I loved playing Anita: she’s a mother image to Maria, protective of her, but also saucy and passionate, very much in love with Bernardo. He was either thinking, she has a lot of guts or she’s pretty stupid. Lenny chuckled when he asked me to do it again. I decided to perform My Man’s Gone Now from Porgy and Bess, which is usually sung soprano but I’m sort of bass baritone. ‘We desperately wanted to please our choreographer’ … Chita Rivera, centre, with Jerome Robbins to her left. I don’t know what a Puerto Rican street girl is doing singing a line like that. I mean, “It’s alarming how charming I feel”? That wouldn’t be unwelcome in Noël Coward’s living room. It’s just too elegant for a girl like Maria to sing. It would have been betraying the characters if they’d rhymed too well. They’re almost all day and may, go and show. You know something? There aren’t any fantastic rhymes in West Side Story. The reviews were great but the danger is always: don’t get complacent. They forgot they were at a musical until the girls came on and did some fancy dancing and shook their skirts for America. By the time we got to New York the audience had heard the show was a “work of art” and sat as if at church. I looked and found: “yuh-duh-duh yuh-duh-duh durr-durr-durr.” Lenny had made up this entire story to make it seem more spontaneous, then just pulled out an old tune that he liked. Someone at the Library of Congress sent it to me and said turn to page 17. I found out, years later, that he’d written the tune in his teens for an unproduced ballet called Conch Town. It’s a very crowded lyric: some of it works and some of it doesn’t. Lenny went on vacation to Puerto Rico and said: “I’ve been listening to this wonderful musical form called huapango.” He played this very fast tune and I said, boy it’s going to be hard to shoehorn lyrics into that but I’ll try. We knew we were going to write a number about America for the Sharks and their girls.
It’s just too elegant for a girl like Maria to sing Stephen Sondheim The record couldn’t have been shipped over the state line if I’d used an obscenity. I did but the line became “krup you” instead. I wanted to be the first guy to use a four-letter word in a musical. The simplest songs, like Maria, were the hardest to write. It’s a sort of Alice in Wonderland language that doesn’t date. So he made up a lot of language and has the guys say things like “riga tiga tum tum”. He said the trouble with street slang is that it dates. There’s a lot of plot in West Side Story but its scenes are probably the shortest of any book musical that’s ever existed. You came out scarred, but you came out with good work. He’s the only genius I’ve ever met but he was demanding and easily offended. Jerome Robbins was a taskmaster, as choreographers are. I learned, as a composer, to be less square – that you don’t always have to write in four-bar phrases. When you’re young, you want to take chances but you get discouraged by failure. He was always jumping off the top of the ladder. It’s too allusive, that’s not what you want.
Poetry makes, generally, very poor lyrics unless you’re dealing with a certain kind of show. It screamed: “Look at me! I’m being poetic!” I’d learned from Oscar Hammerstein, my mentor, that the whole point is to underwrite not overwrite because music is so rich an art itself.
When we worked together, Lenny would sketch out something that was purple prose not poetry.
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