The Musical as Drama

is the opening of “Somewhere,” an AABA song. Such uprisings
of song out of musical cells are basic to West Side Story, a lesson
that Stephen Sondheim (who wrote most of the lyrics) learned
well, as we will see. Sondheim, like Bernstein, keeps this show
business technique in touch with classical precedents.
Look at the first meeting between Tony and Maria. The
scene is the high school gymnasium, where the Jets and the
Sharks are being forced into social harmony at a gym dance.
Glad-Hand, a clueless social director, has briefly got the boys
and girls from the different gangs to dance with each other.
This is a diegetic number—the gym dance is called for in the
book. The gym dance breaks out into a wild mambo, Jets and
Sharks dancing with their own girls and sharpening their ri-
valry, to the consternation of Glad-Hand. Then Robbins in-
vents a wonderful way for the lovers to meet. Tony and Maria
see each other for the first time during the mambo and are
drawn into a special lighting for their own dance, a cha-cha to
the musical theme that will soon become Tony’s love song,
“Maria.” The orchestra knows that. It is playing a Latin beat
for these lovers, and it knows where the tune will lead. There
is no way to think of the cha-cha as part of the diegetic number
at the gym, for the mambo dancers fade into shadow. There is
also no way to think of the cha-cha as part of the book. Tony
and Maria have lighting of their own, and the book is tied
up with the high school dance, off in the shadows. Tony and
Maria dance to music that cannot be heard in the gym dance.
They have entered an area of formality that can best be real-
ized by an aesthetic structure. (Shakespeare wrote a sonnet for
Romeo and Juliet to share at this point.) The cha-cha is a sus-
pension of the gym dance, a pause that lifts Tony and Maria
into a different range of time, a number-within-the-number.
There is dialogue between the two. Where is this dialogue
happening? In the book? In the number? The dialogue is both
book and number by virtue of being neither exactly. Tony and
Maria speak with each other as easily as they dance: “You’re
not thinking I’m someone else? / I know you are not. / Or that
we’ve met before? / I know we have not....My hands are so
cold. / Yours, too. / So warm. / Yours, too. / But of course.

144 CHAPTER SIX