This week we chat with Steve Norris about which of life's truths can be gleaned from the Romeo and Juliet inspired and Stephen Sondheim’s first lyrical outing - West Side Story!
Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune on September 27, 1957: The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning. Director, choreographer, and idea-man Jerome Robbins has put together, and then blasted apart, the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons .... the show rides with a catastrophic roar over the spider-web fire-escapes, the shadowed trestles, and the plain dirt battlegrounds of a big city feud ... there is fresh excitement in the next debacle, and the next. When a gang leader advises his cohorts to play it "Cool", the intolerable tension between an effort at control and the instinctive drives of these potential killers is stingingly graphic. When the knives come out, and bodies begin to fly wildly through space under buttermilk clouds, the sheer visual excitement is breathtaking .... Mr. Bernstein has permitted himself a few moments of graceful, lingering melody: in a yearning "Maria", in the hushed falling line of "Tonight", in the wistful declaration of "I Have a Love". But for the most part he has served the needs of the onstage threshing machine ... When hero Larry Kert is stomping out the visionary insistence of "Something's Coming" both music and tumultuous story are given their due. Otherwise it's the danced narrative that takes urgent precedence ...
- FURTHER READING -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Story
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/
https://itunes.apple.com/au/movie/west-side-story/id253021356
https://open.spotify.com/album/3knRTstKrILa8wx8IGGqn6
https://westsidestory.com.au/
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Our theme song and interstitial music all by the one and only Benedict Braxton Smith. Find out more about him at www.benedictbraxtonsmith.com
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