What great notes to wake up to this morning. There really is nothing quite like the subject of West Side Story to get the blood circulating. And I am now officially jealous that I could not see that high school production. I hope someone will upload some excerpts to YouTube.
The couple I have seen, including the one I played in, do not even deserve to be mentioned on the same page. Yes, all failures must be laid at the feet of the directors and music directors. There is no excuse for the butcherings I have witnessed. I'd actually blocked this from my memory till now, but the one I played in not only cut the Somewhere Ballet, they omitted the Cool dance! Why even do the show??? The orchestra played out of tune throughout, and the audiences were just as described in the notes. A horror. But I digress.
I believe I could read and hear people's stories of how the film entered (and, for many, changed) their lives without ever growing weary of it. There was no event like it. And I always wonder what it would have been like to be one of those for whom the original (or perhaps other) stage production entered their lives first, instead of the film. But I experienced the film life-changing event similarly, with the exception of not being able to see the roadshow engagements due to a combination of my age (two years younger than BK, I think?) and where we were living at the time. No theater in Fort Lauderdale ran roadshows -- you drove to Miami or Miami Beach for that. Which was not a bad thing, as it made them even more of an event, and I have a few wonderful memories of those (My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Mad World) we later made the (pre-I-95) "trip" for.
But I was at the first local showing of the post-roadshow engagement (the first few of which preserved the intermission), and I remember that night like it was last week. I drove family and friends NUTS with West Side Story for the next year or more.
