Taking the Reins

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

First person: West side (teaching) story

A white, midwestern teacher reflects on the lessons he learned from his Latinx students while teaching Romeo and Juliet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1990s. While Romeo and Juliet was an easier sell than he expected, the class had a different reaction to West Side Story.

Justin Peck

Justin Peck, barely thirty, not only is the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet (NYCB) but also is in demand by dance companies throughout the United States and in Europe. He received a Tony Award for his choreography for the 2018 Broadway production of Carousel, and Steven Spielberg hired him to choreograph Spielberg’s new film of West Side Story. This chapter focuses on Everywhere We Go, the spectacular “epic” that Peck and indie composer Sufjan Stevens made for NYCB in 2014, including discussions of Peck’s musicality, his composition of duets and use of sneakers in some dances, and influences he acknowledges from the works of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. At the end is an essay by Peck from 2008, “How to Become an Artist.”

Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture

This chapter examines historical presentational practices of sound film and, specifically, the extra music added to roadshow versions of films between the 1930s and 1960s—including Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It argues that such added music—which included overtures, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music—when combined with controlled theatrical lighting and use of the curtain, might have prompted a number of different cinematic listening experiences among audiences. It suggests that an understanding of these historical presentational practices might call into question comfortable assumptions about the nature of sound-film ontology and the relationship between cinema as “Text” and cinema as “Event”—issues that resonate with the discourse surrounding historically informed performance (HIP) practice in musicology.

La representación de la inmigración latina en el musical estadounidense: West Side Story e In The Heights

In a country founded by European emigrants, where the migratory flux has never stopped since the first settlers arrived in the 17th Century, the immigration coming from far beyond Río Grande has always been considered as invading. Through musicals like West Side Story (1957) and In the Heights (2007), we will analyze the change of paradigm of the Latino immigration as portrait in the American musical.

Development of Empathy of Seventh-graders on the Basis of Musical and Stage Images

The purpose of our study is to identify the developing potential of musical stage images in terms of the development of empathy of seventh-graders. In the course of the study, we elaborated an algorithm for development of empathy of adolescents, in which the main idea is to create conditions for the manifestation of the subjectivity of the position of schoolchildren. This algorithm is based on the theory of gradual assimilation of mental actions by P.Ya. Galperin, where the methods of developing empathy (heuristic conversation, cinquain, stage dialogues and monologue of the hero) are subordinated to its stages (formation of motivation, creation of an indicative basis for action, formation of materialized action, stages of formation of mental actions in external and internal speech, automation of action). The following part of this article presents the results of the experiment, in which 47 seven grade students, ages 13–14, from Irkutsk secondary school No. 65 took part. To determine the initial level of the seventh-graders empathy, we used a standardized test “Diagnosis the level of empathy” by V.V. Boyko, which includes six components (rational, emotional, intuitive channels; attitudes that promote or hinder empathy; penetrating ability; identification). To develop the empathy in the experimental group of students of the 7th grade, 6 lessons were held, where taking into account the students conscious, heartfelt attitude to the topic, ideas and images two musical and dramatic works were used: Glinka's Opera “Ivan Susanin” (“Life for the Tsar”) and L. Bernstein's musical “West side story”. The data obtained in the course of the study indicate the effectiveness of the algorithm for developing empathy of seventh-graders based on musical and stage images, which is confirmed by the method of statistical testing of hypotheses using the Student's t-test.