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| 9/26/1957 |
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East & West Side Story
On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater for a run of 732 performances. Jerome Robbins first saw his modern Romeo and Juliet as a Jewish-Catholic conflict fought on New York City's east side; when the switch was made to Puerto Rican-"American" and the west side, Leonard Bernstein said he started to "hear rhythms and pulses" and "feel the form." |
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Review: "Arthur Laurents On Broadway"
Read an review from the July/August 2000 pages of Book Magazine on Original Story By.
"The Laurents of Original Story By cheerfully goes about settling old scores, taking very few prisoners along the way. In his first book-book (as opposed to his theatrical works, like West Side Story and Gypsy), Laurents has penned a vivid, memory-awakening and hugely enjoyable cultural document. ... To run the gamut of those people Laurents jabs with his wit and his recollections, you more or less have to cover all fifteen pages of the index: from director and playwright George Abbott, who didn't think much of West Side Story, to Hollywood executive Darryl Zanuck, who without a how-de-do or an artistic rationale put stuff into and took stuff out of Laurents' script for The Snake Pit...." |  | Review: "From the Mouths of Playwrights"
Find a short review of Laurent's autobiography, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood.
"As Laurents tells it in Original Story By, Streisand came in to audition for I Can Get it For You Wholesale and 'there was no part for her.' The only role still open was a 50-year-old spinster named Miss Marmelstein. Barbra was just 19.
'True, with her bird's nest of scraggly hair and her gawky, disorganized body, she was a poster girl for Spinster Incarnate. Equally true was the debit side: thrift shop clothes which proclaimed eccentricity, behavior which was calculated spontaneity.... When she sang, she was simple; when she sang, she was vulnerable; when she sang, she was moving, funny, mesmerizing, anything she wanted to be. The authors were beaming, the producer wasn't thrilled but if Barbra Streisand's agent could have read my mind, he would have asked a fortune for her to play Miss Marmelstein.'" | | WestSiteStory.com
This official website offers merchandise and information about major theatrical productions and the 1961 film adaptation featuring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, photographs, excerpts from selected letters, and more.
"The New York premiere on September 26, 1957, was not a total triumph. 'The show is, in general, not well sung," wrote Walter Kerr, the man Bernstein most feared, in the Herald Tribune. 'It is rushingly acted. . . . And it is, apart form the spine-tingling velocity of the dances, almost never emotionally affecting. But Kerr led off his review with two much-quote phrases: 'The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning.' He applauded 'the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patters we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons.' All seven morning newspapers were strongly positive; Brooks Atkinson of the Times, the most important of the bunch, called it 'a profoundly moving show . . . as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tended, and forgiving . . . Everything contributes to the total impression of wildness, ecstasy and anguish. This is one of those occasions when theater people, engrossed in and original project, are all in top form. . . . This subject is not beautiful, but what West Side Story draws out of it is beautiful. For it has a searching point of view.'" | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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