senger is trapped by plague restrictions and cannot deliver the
news to Romeo that Juliet is alive. This is reported, not dram-
atized, and the Laurents scene is better. Anita is taunted by the
white gang of Jets for her color and her gender, and the gang
prevents her from reaching Tony with the news she is trying to
bring him from Maria. A mambo is playing on a jukebox. This
is picked up by the orchestra, which sets a dance rhythm, and
the Jets turn the dance rhythm into a savage attack on Anita,
virtually a gang rape. “Stop it!” cries Doc, the druggist, and the
book resumes with Anita’s angry lie: Chino has killed Maria,
tell that to your white friend Tony. This good book writing
could have been handled without the number, for the Jets are
brutal to Anita without dancing about it. The dancing adds a
performance element that shifts the Jets into a different mode
of characterization, however, and in this case the performance
mode is startling. These white boys had seemed sympathetic,
even charming, a few minutes earlier, in “Officer Krupke.”
Now they are ready to be rapists. The numbers turn them now
one way, now another, and the most disturbing thing is that
they are good performers both ways. The dance number car-
ries them beyond the racism and misogyny of the book scene
and makes the violence inherent in both racisim and misogyny
break into what from one viewpoint is a near rape and from
another is brilliant dancing.
Gypsy
Sondheim has tried at times to tighten the connection between
book and number so that the gap of difference would seem to
disappear. His musicals are solidly based on the distinction be-
tween book and number I have been discussing, but the artist
and puzzlemaker at work in these shows loves to create para-
doxes, such as the number that appears to be the book all of a
sudden. The clearest example is “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy,where
Sondheim’s aim was to write a number that did not end at all
in the conventional sense, with the audience’s applause. Rose
would reach her recognition—that she had done everything