Free On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide by Ethan Mordden Page A

(a police detective) and Officer Krupke (a beat cop)
    It’s worth noting that Arthur Laurents’ libretto doesn’t simply echo Shakespeare. Laurents adapts him, retaining compelling character information to give the musical color. Consider: Shakespeare’s Mercutio is a professional cynosure, witty and ribald, using words in endless stream-of-consciousness riddles:
O Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open et cetera, thou a pop’rin pear!
    So Laurents’ Riff is the equivalent in high middle bop: “Unwind” and “Easy, freezy” and “I say I want the Jets to be Number One, to sail, to hold the sky!”
    Further, Laurents’ use of the Nurse in his invention of Anita is fascinating, for both characters have, at once, a lot of power and no power at all. The Nurse is in charge of Juliet yet remains a nobody in the Capulet hierarchy; Anita dominates Maria yet is nobody in the “man’s world” of Latin culture. A sharp actress can steal the show in either role. Chita Rivera’s Anita was thought imposing enough for her to replay the part in the first London production, in 1958, and, to look at it from another angle, Edna May Oliver turned down her chance to preserve her Broadway Parthy Ann in the 1936 Show Boat film in order to have a go at the Nurse for MGM’s Romeo , with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer.
    This coming together of Shakespeare and the musical—however artistically ambitious a musical it was—is something of a creative oxymoron, as the performers needed for Elizabethan drama are vastly different from those who populated fifties musicals. Of course, West Side Story is not Elizabethan—but it would not have worked if the cast had not been able to find some modern equivalent of the original’s passion and poetry. The challenge lies in the score as well as the script—in the ecstasy of “Maria,” the helpless tenderness of “Tonight.”
    Thus, Jerome Robbins demanded twice the usual rehearsal time—an unprecedented eight weeks—in order to match the performances to his vision. He broke the actors apart—Jets here, Sharks there, grownups elsewhere altogether—and forbade intermingling. You hate each other. Don’t present it. Live it! Tony Mordente, the original A-Rab, one of the Jets, told Robbins’ biographer Amanda Vail that the notoriously sadistic Robbins was especially abusive with the good-natured Mickey Calin: “It was hard to think of [Calin] as our chief, our button guy, who if he would say, ‘Go kill somebody,’ we’d do it.” So Robbins “pounded [Calin] into dust and molded him back into clay. … And you could see the change happening. More and more, Mickey became the leader of the Jets.” Chita Rivera told Vail that Robbins’ somewhat improvisational staging of the scene in which the Jets attack Anita—again, a development of a much less violent episode in Romeo and Juliet —set loose something rough and primitive in what till then had been guy-next-door chorus boys. Vail thought Rivera was “still shaken” talking about it many years later. Said Rivera, “We were getting in touch with feelings we never knew we had.”
    The posters for the first performances, out of town, billed Sondheim and Bernstein as co-lyricists. But Bernstein, master of so many trades, was adept at only comic verses. He had written some of the words to On the Town ’s “I Can Cook, Too,” a list song made of erotic double meanings (“My gravies just ooze”). And, on Candide , he gave verse to “I Am Easily Assimilated,” a sardonic spoof of the “When in Rome” immigrant. At romantic numbers, however, Bernstein could not tell attar from deodorant, and Sondheim ended up writing so much of West Side Story ’s lyrics that Bernstein let his partner take full billing credit for them. As Steve loves to tell us, Bernstein even offered to give up his royalty percentage, but a grateful Sondheim thought that might be too much to want. One thing Sondheim has never been intent on is money;