Jets and Sharks al Fresco

On the stage West Side Story was one of the more compelling figments of that dream-life of the Liberal imagination which is the Broadway theater. It exercised a large, young, talented cast; and, in addition to a coolly achieved pace and fluency that most Broadway shows visibly sweat for, it had an abstract unity of design, which meant, as these things are likely to mean on Broadway, that its book, music, staging and sets were shrewdly opportunistic in about equal measure. Its starting point was a parody of Romeo and Juliet, but its model was The Threepenny Opera without the heavy dialectic, which it didn’t need since you could read it any day in the New York Post. On film (Panavision and Technicolor) little is left but the opportunism. The cast is not as impressive, and the running time, which is about the same as that of the stage show, seems twice as long even allowing for the intermission. Most of that time is spent groping for an over-all cinematic style.

Theater people (and surprisingly, many movie people) think that movies are “real.” Therefore, when they’ve trundled all the stage furniture out into the open air, they try to make it look more real by making it look more “movie”—either more documentary or more materially filmic.

AC

About the Author

Arlene Croce

Featured Tags

On the stage West Side Story was one of the more compelling figments of that dream-life of the Liberal imagination which is the Broadway theater. It exercised a large, young, talented cast; and, in addition to a coolly achieved pace and fluency that most Broadway shows visibly sweat for, it had an abstract unity of design, which meant, as these things are likely to mean on Broadway, that its book, music, staging and sets were shrewdly opportunistic in about equal measure. Its starting point was a parody of Romeo and Juliet, but its model was The Threepenny Opera without the heavy dialectic, which it didn’t need since you could read it any day in the New York Post. On film (Panavision and Technicolor) little is left but the opportunism. The cast is not as impressive, and the running time, which is about the same as that of the stage show, seems twice as long even allowing for the intermission. Most of that time is spent groping for an over-all cinematic style.

Theater people (and surprisingly, many movie people) think that movies are “real.” Therefore, when they’ve trundled all the stage furniture out into the open air, they try to make it look more real by making it look more “movie”—either more documentary or more materially filmic.