motif, a descending A-major triad ending on a D-sharp, that
will have consequences in later numbers, but we don’t know
that yet. Who are these finger-snapping kids? They are dancers
and they seem to own the place, but the place they own is off
beat in the orchestra, and where is the tune?
Then for sixteen measures a new dancer is taunted to omi-
nous drum-taps and a rising three-note motif (C, F, B), before
the first gang leaves and the newcomer is joined by two others,
the trio dancing to twenty-seven measures of fuller 6/8 orches-
tral playing. Putting this into words is nearly impossible. After
133 measures, the meter changes to 2/4, and two gangs of male
dancers close in on each other, then veer away, until one boy is
caught and something violent is done to him. The two motifs I
have mentioned, the descending major triad ending on a tri-
tone and the rising three-note motif, run through the orches-
tral playing, sometimes taking new permutations. This danc-
ing is electrifying theatre, and when it is interrupted by book
dialogue—with the Jets talking to one another in something
like the street language of the 1950s and the orchestra silent—
one feels the letdown. The dancing is more interesting than
the slangy talk. This is the basic principle of the musical assert-
ing itself, the difference between book and number, only the
usual order is being reversed. Traditionally the musical moves
the other way, from dialogue in the book to the heightened
formality of song or dance. Jerome Robbins and Arthur Lau-
rents moved dance up front and made the book follow after.^8
What they were showing is that words are not basic to musi-
cal theatre. They are good to have, words, people talking back
and forth, a plot taking shape in book time, but dance creates
an immediacy of action that words can impede. I am taking my
lead from Jerome Robbins himself, who heard it from Balan-
chine. Balanchine once told Robbins that the choreographer
gets his fingertips into the land where there are no names for
anything. He was describing the core of dance, which does not
140 CHAPTER SIX
(^8) The Prologue was originally a song for the Jets, with each character asso-
ciated with a specific musical instrument. Sondheim says it was Arthur Lau-
rents who saw that wordless dance would be the best opening (Secrest, Stephen
Sondheim, pp. 118–19).