the times | Saturday December 4 2021 37
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said that he would feel happier setting the story in
somewhere he knew much better: the Upper West Side
of New York, then bristling with antagonism between
Puerto Rican and white youths.
That’s essentially how West Side Story came about,
but when the show approached first night the
all-controlling Robbins insisted its posters and
programmes all carry a credit-line, boxed to make it
more prominent, that read: “Based on an original
concept by Jerome Robbins”. Bernstein and Laurents
acquiesced, thinking people would understand that
“original concept” meant modernising Shakespeare.
They didn’t. When the creators appeared on a TV
show after West Side Story had opened, the
conversation turned to how the musical had brought a
better understanding of what motivated kids in gangs.
The interviewer said: “The idea of depicting street
gangs was yours, Mr Robbins, wasn’t it?” Robbins
replied: “Yes.”
Half a century later, when I interviewed Laurents, he
was still incandescent about this self-promoting fib.
“Obviously you don’t call your colleague a liar on TV,”
he told me, “but afterwards I said to him, ‘Obviously
people think original concept means something
different from what we thought, so I think that you
should remove that credit line’.”
Robbins refused. “You’re right,” he told Laurents, “but
that credit line is too important to me.”
The astonishing thing is that, despite all these
festering resentments, the show was a sensation.
Bernstein’s music, light years away from the
operetta-ish works of Rodgers and Hammerstein,
kicked the Broadway musical into a new era. The
ambitious young Sondheim, who agreed to do West
Side Story only because it provided a passport on to
Broadway, from where he could launch his own
shows, supplied lyrics that crackled with wit and
energy. Laurents’s script was indeed a sympathetic
picture of restless, disenchanted youth in 1950s
America.
And Robbins? He directed and choreographed as he
always did: brilliantly, radically, and with a
psychopathic disregard for the feelings of those around
him. He even got half the cast to hate the other half,
believing it would add a certain violent verisimilitude
Ariana DeBose
and David
Alvarez in Steven
Spielberg’s
remake of West
Side Story.
Right, Leonard
Bernstein
composing.
Below from left,
Jerome Robbins,
Stephen
Sondheim and
Arthur LaurentsNIKO TAVERNISE/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION; ALAMYThe more success they had, the
more Gilbert and Sullivan clashed,
until they couldn’t work together
“
years after the Beatles’ epoch-defining Sgt. Pepper
album, Lennon released a song, How Do You Sleep?,
apparently with the sole purpose of attacking
McCartney and his most famous tune: “The only thing
you done was yesterday... the sound you make is
Muzak to my ears.”
If anything, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose
voices melded so harmoniously, had an even worse
relationship. No bridge over troubled water for them.
They couldn’t even agree on the final song to put on
the album of that name and each refused to record the
other’s choice. Decades later, when they were briefly
reunited to receive an award, Garfunkel decided to
bury the hatchet and publicly praise Simon’s
songwriting ability. Simon’s response? “Arthur and I
agree about almost nothing but it’s true, I have
enriched his life quite a bit.”
These civil wars within highly successful pop bands
can rage on, it seems, even when those concerned are
siblings. Liam and Noel Gallagher conquered the world
with their brash Oasis anthems, all the while needling
each other to the point where they couldn’t be on the
same continent together. Earlier in pop music history
the same thing happened with the Everly Brothers and
with Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks.
One could formulate a showbiz rule: “Never work
with a sibling.” That might at least have prevented the
National Theatre’s present fiasco, in which Moira
Buffini’s dreadful play Manor is directed by her sister
Fiona. Except that all those battling musical brothers
also produced great songs together.
All of which suggests that mutual contempt isn’t just
a side-effect of big creative personalities working
closely together but absolutely fundamental to the
process of making memorable theatre or music. In
other words, you paradoxically need conflict,
confrontation and sparks to fly if you want to
achieve the ultimate artistic quality. Or as Harry
Lime says in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years
under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror,
murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love,
they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and
what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”to the dance scenes. It did. That it all worked out so
well seems like a miracle. Yet when I ponder the history
of the collaborative arts — particularly opera, musicals,
theatre and pop music, where highly creative and
usually highly strung people have to work in close
proximity for long stretches — I am amazed at how
much stunning work comes out of personal
relationships that are fraught if not openly hostile.
Examples exist through the ages. The partnership of
WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan was the most
successful musical collaboration of the Victorian era,
producing a dozen hit shows on both sides of the
Atlantic. Yet the two were polar opposites: Gilbert
the embittered, anti-authority satirist; Sullivan a
charming, sophisticated socialite and a pillar of the
establishment. The more successful they became
the more they clashed, until neither could work with
the other.
The world of opera has similar examples. Benjamin
Britten changed his librettist with almost every piece,
presumably to ensure he was always top dog in any
relationship. Ronald Duncan, librettist of The Rape of
Lucretia, wrote a memoir describing Britten as “a sadist,
psychologically crippled and bent”.
It’s pop music, however, that most thrives on creative
partners who hate each other. Only this year one of the
longest feuds in music, between Fleetwood Mac’s
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, erupted again.
Buckingham accused Nicks of wanting to shape the
band in her own image, “like Trump and the
Republicans”, to which Nicks responded that being in
the same band as Buckingham was “toxic to my
wellbeing”. Hard to remember that the 50-year
collaboration between the two had produced some of
the 20th century’s most cherished albums.
It was the same story with John Lennon and Paul
McCartney. Their songwriting partnership papered
over their psychological differences for about seven
years, and then... unbridled hatred. In 1971, only four