Word: bernstein
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West Side Story (book by Arthur Laurents; music and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) gave the new season what should prove a very popular retelling of Romeo and Juliet-in terms of youthful gang warfare. It also suggests that the salvation of the serious Broadway musical may lie in neither text nor music-which, trying to coalesce, all too often merely collide-but in dancing...
...translate into the barbarism of West Side Story any more than did Greek-tragedy incests and betrayals into the primitivism of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Fire-escape balcony scenes and corner-drugstore Friar Lawrences are not only distracting but tinged with bathos. Similarly, Composer Bernstein does better with his harsh, tingling music for the dancers than with his lyrical duets for the lovers, and Arthur Laurents' libretto catches rasping, inarticulate hate better than yearning, inarticulate love. When it turns away from what is savage, West Side Story proves more sentimental than touching...
...Composer Bernstein strode in, his greying hair dramatically atousle, a navy-blue coat draped cape-style over his shoulders with artful carelessness. Everyone was waiting impatiently for the morning papers. Bernstein brought the news to his table: "They're all raves except Kerr" (the Herald Tribune's authoritatively trenchant Walter Kerr). Added Bernstein: "You know, Kerr's an inverted snob. He's such an intellectual that he can't stand a musical unless it's got a chorus line...
...point in the evening, a friend sidled up to Bernstein. "Quite a nice little evening," commented Oscar (South Pacific) Hammerstein II. Startled, Bernstein stopped talking. Hammerstein hastily added: "No, it was really memorable." Then the two hugged each other...
...will produce a one-shot on Southeast Asia, and a new series called Wisdom will present filmed portraits of Dr. Vannevar Bush, Jacques Maritain, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and David Ben-Gurion. Wide Wide World returns Sundays to alternate with Omnibus, which promises to bring back Joseph Welch, Leonard Bernstein, and "some bright new faces." Crooner Eddie Fisher will team up with George Gobel in a new variety series, Giselle MacKenzie gets her own show, Jill Corey takes the spotlight on Your Hit Parade. In addition to his Tegular CBS chores, Alfred Hitchcock will produce and direct ten films...