Word: ganging
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...high school had no team, so Lew-or "Froggy" as the kids nicknamed him after his voice began to change-filled in his days holding a cue at the Idle Hour Pool Room or heaving rocks through windows. "One night," recalled an old chum in Nitro last week, "a gang of us were knocking out windows in the Nazarene Church. Lew was half a block behind us, standing in a creek, and hitting them as regularly as any of us. The police-nabbed us boys up close to the church, put us in jail for a scare, but they never...
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...
...master of patterned action, he has established the tensions, the instinctive hates and induced animosities, the juvenile-delinquent heroics and brooding-outcast rancors of Manhattan's native-born Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks. His switchblade rumblers jeer and snort, crouch and slither and spring. Beyond vitalizing their gang spirit and varying their modes of warfare, he has managed to dance much of the documentary drabness out of the story, most of the sociological shock into it. He is least successful in a ballet where the ill-fated lovers-a former Jet and the sister of a Shark-dream...
Despite appealing performances by Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence as the lovers, the romance almost everywhere falls short of the gang warfare. Shakespeare's High-Renaissance ardors and angers do not 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...
Successful Failure. Robert LaFayette Cox has been on the run for the better part of his life. A couple of his slower-footed friends in the grade-school gang he ran with in Los Angeles wound up in reform school. When he was 14, he ran away from home, worked at odd jobs along the West Coast for a few months before he took a crack at education again in Washington's Walla Walla High School...