to the country. No one else has ever thought this a problem—
only Sondheim, who seems worried over the consistency of her
character in this song. But characters always go into a different
register of expression when they sing. Numbers call for charac-
ters to express themselves in new ranges of voice and lyric. None
of Sondheim’s characters in any of his shows could “really”
speak in the brilliant rhymes he gives his singing characters.^3
Maria’s musical high point occurs in the love duet “To-
night,” which is West Side Story’s version of Shakespeare’s bal-
cony scene. “Tonight” seems to be an outpouring of sponta-
neous passion, the sort of expressive ability we are prepared to
believe real young people have at their disposal. They don’t,
but this is another peak moment in the musical, where Maria
passes beyond stage convention to the point of requiring a
nontheatrical word, so we call upon “real.” Yet the tune she
and Tony are singing turns out to be a standard format AABA
song, with the same overall structure as thousands of other
popular songs. Bernstein and Sondheim have disguised the pop
song format with an inventive introduction and with a change
of key on each section of the tune. The key changes give the
impression of young people being carried away by passion, yet
the standard thirty-two-bar structure of repeats and rhymes
lies behind the key changes, and the attraction of the song
comes from the way the rhymes lace up the repeats of A,
bringing the piece to a close on the word with which it began,
“tonight,” sung seven times in Maria’s chorus:
A
Tonight, tonight,
It all began tonight,
I saw you and the world went away.56 CHAPTER THREE
(^3) See Sondheim’s comments in Guernsey, ed., Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers
on Theatre, pp. 84–85. At other times Sondheim has belittled the characters in
West Side Story, saying they were “one-dimensional” and fit only for a “melo-
drama” (Secrest, Stephen Sondheim, p. 117). Yet Sondheim writes the occasional
melodrama himself. The characters in Sweeney Toddare worth taking seriously,
and so are the characters in West Side Story. In neither case are they to be taken as
“real” without thinking about what the term means in musical drama.