Three Bernstein New Yorks

Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on stories by Ruth McKenney, My Sister

       Eileen, Biltmore Theatre, New York, opened December 26, 1940.

Joseph Fields (writer) and Alexander Hall (director), My Sister Eileen [film version],

       released 1942.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music), On the

      Town, Adelphi Theater, New York, opened December 28, 1944.

Adolph Green and Betty Comden (writers), Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (directors)

      On the Town [film version] released 1949.

Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov (book), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music), Wonderful Town, Winter Garden, New York, opened February

      26, 1953.

Blake Edwards and Richard Quine (writers), Jule Styne and George Duning (music), Leo

     Robin (lyrics), Richard Quine (director) My Sister Eileen [film version] released 1955.

Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music), West Side

     Story, Winter Garden, New York, opened September 26, 1957.

Ernest Lehman (writer), Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jerome

    Robbins and Robert Wise (d) West Side Story [film version], released 1961.

Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music), Wonderful

    Town (revival), Al Hirschfeld Theatre, New York, 2003. The performance I attended was

    on Saturday, May 8, 2004.

Given a 24-hour shore leave, three sailor friends—Gabey, Ozzie and Chip—are let loose on the city of New York. All want to “see the sites,” particularly Chip, but they are also seeking “romance and danger”: after all, it’s World War II, and the men—evidently—have been long at sea. A helluva town, New York—where the “Bronx is up” (suggesting not only northern-most borough of the city but the vulgar cheer of contempt) and the “Battery’s down” (suggesting both the southern tip of Manhattan and a source of lagging energy), where one must endure an unbearable pace and “seven millions…screaming for space”—is ready and willing to greet them. Indeed the New York of On the Town (which premiered in 1944) is a city in love with strangers, a community that quickly embraces its visitors. No sooner is Ivy Smith named the subway system’s “Miss Turnstiles” of the month, than Gabey falls in love with her poster image.

     Brunhilde Esterhazy (the incomparable Nancy Walker in the original production), a taxi driver, invites Chip “up to her place.” Only after convincing him that the New York he is desperate to see—a city of the Hippodrome, “Tobacco Road,” and the Manhattan Aquarium—no longer exists, does he accept her offer, and is she able to prove that she cannot only make love but can cook!

      Ozzie, in the mean time, has mistakenly visited the Museum of Natural History in search of Gabey’s Ivy (the poster has described her as studying painting at a museum); there he encounters Claire de Loon, a would-be anthropologist in search of a “sub-super-dolicocephalic head”—and any man attached. The two (in the original, the musical’s book and lyric writers Betty Green and Adolph Comden) quickly discover that they are kindred souls, people who easily get “Carried Away,” and, ultimately, as proof of their malady, destroy the museum’s rare dinosaur.

     For a short while, the friendly city is experienced by Gabey, wandering through Central Park, as “A Lonely Town”; but that feeling soon disappears when he discovers his long-sought Ivy at a Carnegie Hall studio, and she, immediately smitten with him, promises to meet him in Times Square at 11 p. m. Due to previous commitments (enforced performances as a cooch dancer on Coney Island to pay for her ballet dancing lesson debts) Ivy is a no-show; but his friends and their dates, (along with a unsuitable substitute date for Gabey, Lucy Schmeeler) head out for a night on the town.

     Once more, Gabey perceives the lively city as a lonely place, but his friends cheer him up with their love and zaniness. When he discovers that Ivy is working on Coney Island, he quickly speeds off (via subway and nightmare ballet) to find her, while the others, recognizing that their 24 hours are almost over, sing Bernstein’s lovely lament to the end of their short-lived romances, “Some Other Time” (“This day was just a token, / Too many  words are still unspoken. / Oh, well, we’ll catch up / Some other time.). Gabey and Ivy are quickly reunited just in time for the all three sailors to return to their ship, replaced by a new trio on their way to see the “wonderful town.”

     I recount this plot, since many readers may have only seen the enjoyable, but less than perfect movie version which not only devotes a great deal of its energies on the characters’ attempts to escape authority, but also deletes the majority of the most charming of the original’s music and lyrics: “Carried Away,” “Lonely Town,” “Lucky to Be Me,” and “Some Other Time.” What I am most interested in conveying about the original is the near absolute excitement about the city itself. On the Town is a valentine to New York, a city presented as, perhaps, vulgar and fast-paced, but also loving, accepting, embracing. As Comden and Green write: New York is “a visitor’s place,” a world which loves outsiders.

     Just short of a decade later, however, in Wonderful Town—based on the 1940 play, My Sister Eileen, by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov—the city is presented as a very different place. Although the musical begins exuberantly enough, again with tourists—these encountering the “sweet,” “pleasant” and “peaceful” Christopher Street—the two new interlopers at the musical’s center quickly regret their having left home. In their caterwauling rendition ( which turns into a wild howl as their apartment is shaken by a dynamite blast for a new subway) of “O—H—I—O,” (“Why, oh why, oh why, oh— / Why did I ever leave Ohio?”), the Sherwood sisters (brilliantly performed in the original by Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair, and in the 2003 revival, which I witnessed, by Donna Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt) express not just their fears of and loneliness in the city, but their absolute distress. Unlike Gabey in On the Town, who may feel temporarily lonely, these women are rejected. The popular and attractive Eileen finds that those qualities get her nowhere with regard to a theater career. Ruth, desiring to be a writer, is literally told by her romantic interest, Robert Baker: “Go home / Go West! / Go back where you came from.” In the operatic-like prelude to that song, the male lead goes so far as to warn her that those coming to New York are “in for a bitter surprise.”

     Everyone in this version of New York seems to have an angle, even the love-stricken soda jerk Frank Lippincott. Sent on a wild goose chase to the Navy pier, Ruth gets ridiculously involved with other visitors—members of a Brazilian navy ship—who tail her back to Greenwich Village and, through an absurd Conga line, resulting in her, Eileen, and nearly everyone else being arrested. So much for New York’s hospitality!

     Of course, this is an old-fashioned musical where all must end well: the publicity surrounding their arrests lands Eileen a night club job and presents Ruth with the possibility of being a news reporter (a long ways, one must admit, from their goals of becoming a stage performer and of writing serious fiction). Robert Baker realizes he has fallen in love with Ruth and Frank Lippincott makes up with Eileen. The last number of the musical—in which the sisters and others sing “Wrong Note Rag”—leaves one, moreover, with a strange feeling that not everything is in proper order, that staying in New York may not be their best solution. Bernstein’s almost blaring atonality combined with the radical syncopation, makes one, at the very least, a bit uneasy.

     By the time of Bernstein’s West Side Story New York has transformed—for both book writer and lyricist (Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim)—to a war zone. Not only are the outsiders, represented by the Puerto Rican Sharks, unloved and unwanted, but the home-boy Jets, are societal rejects, which they brilliantly express in “Gee, Officer Krupke!” (“Our mothers all are junkies, / Our fathers all are drunks. / Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!”). Love may have been difficult for Ruth Sherwood, but it is absolutely unthinkable for Tony and Maria, as the battle breaks out. Authority—represented by Krupke, Doc and a couple of others—is ineffectual; in both the musical and movie (which is, in itself, a masterwork) the city is presented as a world wherein the adults have all but disappeared. Gangs are the only family left to these young people.

     Both sides seek another time, a place apart from the current landscape. For Tony everything lies in the future (“Who knows? / It’s only just out of reach, / Down the block, on a beach, / under a tree. … Something’s coming, something good, / If I can wait!). For the male Sharks it lies in the past of their beloved Puerto Rico. Only their woman love New York and America; but even their paen to their new country is filled with sarcasm (“Ev’rthing free in American / For a small fee in America!”). Certainly New York is no longer the friendly and welcoming city of On the Town. The soldiers in that musical were loved, these soldiers of the street encounter only hate.

     Almost all of the characters in this work desire an out, a world where they may be welcome by being themselves—whether they are simply disenfranchised, racially outcast, or a forbidden couple: “Somewhere a place for us. / Peace and quiet and open air / Wait for us / Somewhere.” Locked in the chasm of New York’s city streets—brilliantly presented in the opening sequences of the motion picture—the denizens of New York’s upper West Side (The rumor is that originally Bernstein intended to locate his characters in the East Side—a war between Jews and Catholics; fortunately, he was dissuaded from that idea.) have no way to escape. Their only hope is to be “cool” enough to “live it up and die in bed.” In this hateful landscape, however, love is not “cool”; Tony is doomed by the very thing that was so openly proffered to Gabey, Ozzie, and Chip.

    Obviously, the shifts I am talking about do not completely exist within the context of Leonard Bernstein’s music. The source materials—the original My Sister Eileen for Wonderful Town and Romeo and Juliet for West Side Story—strongly determined the way New York is presented. The lyricists, moreover, delineated many of the ideas on which I have commented. Yet, it seems interesting to me, nonetheless, that Bernstein devoted his major energies during this period to these three musicals, each representing New York so differently.

     What had happened to the city and the idea of the city through these years 1944 to 1957? How could this idea so utterly change within the span of barely more than a decade? Certainly, by the late 1960s, I recall, the upper West side of the city had begun to look more and more like a bombed-out territory. 42^nd Street was a kind of terrifying gauntlet of porno theaters and hucksters. I recall sharing a taxi with a young woman from Natchez on her way to the theater one night. When we dropped her off at 45^th Street, she recoiled, turning back into the taxi; “Oh no, no,” she proclaimed, clearly horrified of being left alone at this location, “this can’t be the theater district!” The city was no longer seen as a habitable space. 

     Today New York—with its spiffed-up 42^nd Street and conspicuously glistening streets of wealth— seems more welcoming to visitors than it might have been even in 1944. Would three soldiers on the prowl, however, be so readily embraced? I don’t think these are questions that can be easily answered; New York has always been many things to different people. But clearly, it appears as the American concept of the city and the idea of community it represented, as seen through the lens of these three popular entertainments, had changed rapidly over a twelve year period. By the mid-1960s American cities were being set afire by some of their own angry residents. Perhaps Bernstein’s and his collaborators’ three New Yorks might give us a clue to what occurred to make them so behave.

Los Angeles, 3 June 2004

Copyright ©2006 by Douglas Messerli and Green Integer.

Douglas Messerli is a poet, fiction writer, and dramatist. He edits Green Integer and The Green Integer Review.