My Pop Life #262 : America – West Side Story Cast (1961)

America – West Side Story Cast (1961)

Puerto Rico
My heart’s devotion
Let it sink back in the ocean
Always the hurricanes blowing
Always the population growing
And the money owing
And the sunlight streaming
And the natives steaming
I like the island Manhattan (I know you do!)
Smoke on your pipe
And put that in!

Stephen Sondheim passed away 5 days ago and the nation went into mourning. The gay jewish bit did anyway, the artists writers singers and actors, dancers directors and stage managers. Being the bloody-minded twerp that I am though, I was silent for three days and then walked around telling anyone who would listen that I wasn’t really a fan of musical theatre, with the exceptions of Wizard of Oz, Singin’ In The Rain and West Side Story, there was something about the form that didn’t vibe with my spirit. My brother Andrew offered Andrew Lloyd Webber as having ruined the musical for him. Then at Thanksgiving last Thursday at Aaron & Cathy Nottage‘s house up in White Plains, Tony Gerber invited me to the DGA to see Spielberg‘s loving remix of Bernstein and Sondheim (and Arthur Laurents & Jerome Robbins‘) masterpiece. We went last night.

I like to be in America, Okay by me in America, Everything free in America

For a small fee in America

After the seizure in September (see My Pop Life #261 Titanium) everything went weird. Doctors, pain, Aleve, acupuncture (amazing), getting Jenny onto her feet to go back onto Broadway (priority), trying to wake up and unfold before Jenny tells me to straighten up, then suddenly going to the theatre three times a week to see shows that my friends had written (Clyde’s, MJ) directed (Trouble In Mind) or were acting in (The Michaels In Europe, Caroline or Change, Harry Potter & The Cursed Child). And then studying for my citizenship exam which was face-to-face in the Homeland Security Building downtown opposite City Hall. Went through the metal detectors and up the elevator and stood in line and waited and then went into an office with a plastic shield I sat behind and was asked various questions by a tall young probably gay latin fella in uniform. Had I ever sold weapons to a terrorist? Had I ever participated in a revolution? Would I be prepared to fight in the US Military if called upon to do so?

At this last question I said “You do realise I will be 65 on my next birthday don’t you?” To his credit he laughed and said yes sir, but would you be. I said sure but I didn’t mean it. He carried on asking me these Homeland Security-style questions and I answered No to all of them, which soon became No Sir then gradually morphed into an American accent No Sir and by the end of the questions I had quite simply become American. No shit. Then we got into the exam itself. They had set 100 questions which are not secret and I simply learned the answers, which is what you’re supposed to do. I would be asked ten of them, six of which I had to get correct. Question One was

General Eisenhower fought in which War before becoming President?

(I knew it) The Second World War

Where is the Statue of Liberty ?

(are you kidding me?) New York Harbour

What is the capital of the United States?

(ummmmm…) Washington D.C.

The law of the USA is based on what?

(genuinely tricky) The Constitution

Who is The President of The United States?

(this is the same question that the paramedics asked me on the morning of my seizure. I didn’t know that day.)

Joseph Robernick Biden

I don’t remember the sixth question but I gave a correct answer. I know that because he didn’t ask me any more questions. No need. I’d answered them all correctly. I think they get a random selection from the 100 possible questions but I did hit on three of the very easiest ones didn’t I?

And then four weeks later I was invited back to the same building for my Naturalization (with a z) and Oath Ceremony. The September seizure was part of a pattern of my brain becoming perhaps a little undependable – for example one night in August I took Luke Cresswell – here to rehearse Stomp back onto the stage – to see Eddie Palmieri at the Blue Note in the Village and : we were four weeks late. Oh how he laughed, fair dinkum, we got drunk – I was embarrassed and shamed to be frank, but what can you do? Palmieri is 81 and who knows if I’ll get that opportunity again. So then I turned up for my Citizenship Ceremony a day early too.

I was through the metal detector, up the elevator, stood in line reached the desk. Give us your Green Card. What’s your name? Couldn’t find me. Consternation. Some bright spark suggested checking the date. It’s tomorrow sir. Then I went back home.

That night Jenny and I went out. It was the opening night of Caroline, or Change starring our friend Sharon D. Clarke in her Broadway debut, playing the lead role of the maid in 1960s Louisiana. She’d been doing the part for years in the UK and won the Olivier award for it – then last March 2020 they got as far as a Broadway dress rehearsal before the pandemic shut the production down. This was a night delayed by eighteen long months and was all the more emotional for it. A magnificent score by Jeanine Tesori and wonderful words by Tony Kushner. They were both present. I don’t think I’ve ever wept like that in a theatre – behind a mask like everyone else – tears rolling down my face. I think I was crying for myself as much as Caroline, and Sharon. Why? I don’t really know to be honest. We went back to her apartment perched over 8th Avenue overlooking the theatre district and the Hudson River and drank gin for a couple of hours with Susie McKenna Sharon’s wife, our friends Heidi Griffiths & Edna Benitez and – familiar folk kept arriving – sweet Ann Yee the choreographer (that Jenny had also worked with on Julius Caesar, the show that took us to New York), Michael Longhurst the show’s director, whose partner Des Kennedy directed Jenny in Harry Potter and who was helping remount the show again. It felt so familiar to be having a first night party, and yet so rare, so precious, so very missed. Most triumphs appear to be about deferred gratification and it was a memorable night. And by the way, everybody congratulated me on becoming an American. I can write that line without feeling anything but it doesn’t seem real to me at all.

The following morning, keeping the hangover at bay with milkthistle, I take the 4 train to City Hall, walk through the metal detector, travel up the elevator, wait on a chair opposite a guy from Guyana and a guy from Kosovo then wait on line and finally get called back to that familiar window from the day before and pow ! I receive a small flag called the Stars and Stripes, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. I took an oath of allegiance, and denied my (non-existent) allegiance to the UK, although I will never abandon the England football team. Don’t test me. I handed in my Green Card. Bye bye Green Card. In return I received a certificate of Citizenship which I had to send away when I applied for a passport earlier this week. Then in eight weeks I’ll get an American Passport. I’ll get to keep my British Passport. I’ll have dual nationality. It means I can travel with freedom back and forth without being asked at JFK or LAX “How long have you been away sir?”

Buying on credit is so nice,

[One look at us and they charge twice]

I have my own washing machine

[What will you have though to keep clean?]

I registered to vote straightaway. I didn’t tick the Democratic box though, stayed independent. I’m allowed to run for office too. If I seriously decide to do that, (you never know) it will have to be on a Democratic ticket, because I guess it’s really hard without some organisation behind you. Jury Service suddenly becomes compulsory. I feel slightly less foreign. I can join the fast track in customs. Hooray. Not that grateful though. I still have my white European entitlement in other words. Hard to tell what everyone else was feeling, truly, in that room.

But my life goes on pretty much as it always did. Kind of. Tony and I go to movies, go to gigs – Angelique Kidjo at Carnegie Hall – she’s an interesting cat by the way. She opened at 8pm singing McCartney’s Mother Nature’s Son accompanied by acoustic guitar, and later sang with guests Phillip Glass, Josh Groban, Andra Day and Cyndi Lauper. Afterwards we walked down to 52nd Street and Tony introduced me to The Vodka Bar where there’s a piano in the corner and folk sing Russian comic songs or Piaf and we sampled the vodka menu. And of course Tony has just produced Takeover – a documentary about the Young Lords, a Nuyorican civil rights group who occupied a hospital in the Bronx for 24 hours in 1969. The doc is getting an Oscar push and will be a drama at some point too. I wrote about it in My Pop Life #260 Pa’lante when we went to see it this summer in Soundview Park in the Bronx. Meanwhile I’ve started a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Ditmas Park about 40 minutes away. I’m at the beginning of The Reckoning. Which started with the pandemic – same as everyone else – then was punctuated severely by the seizure. A wake-up call, literally, as I was waking up, which I don’t remember. Undiagnosed. But stress is the cause. Who knows if I can find out where that came from.

Skyscrapers bloom in America
Cadillacs zoom in America
Industry boom in America
Twelve in a room in America

The immigrant experience is the American experience of course. At Thanksgiving Dinner Lynn wanted to read an acknowledgement of the previous incumbents, the Lenape tribe who lived in this area before Europeans started to seek “Freedom”. And the racism of Old Europe is alive and well in the New World, built by slaves from Africa and serviced by the Spanish-speaking descendants of Cortez the Killer.

West Side Story is based on Romeo & Juliet but at its heart is racism, voiced in this song, and in the story. The four original auteurs – the four gay jews (as Kushner called them last night) wanted a jewish Tony and a Catholic Maria, and it was set on the East Side before the switch to what we know now. Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner have lifted this angle up and spotlit it for 2021. The Puerto Ricans speak Spanish to each other except when Anita – the amazing Ariana Debose – shouts “Speak English!” because they need to practice

ANITA
Lots of new housing with more space

BERNARDO
Lots of doors slamming in our face

ANITA
I’ll get a terrace apartment

BERNARDO
Better get rid of your accent

But in Spielberg’s re-examination of New York in 1957 (the year of my birth) the Spanish is not subtitled. This is a radical decision and places the Spanish language on the same level as English. Tony – played beautifully by Ansel Elgort – asks his ‘aunty’ Valentina played by Rita Moreno (lovely touch since she played Anita in the 1961 film) – how to say “forever” as he prepares for his date with Maria (Rachel Zegler). “I want to be with you forever”. She looks at him quizzically : “Don’t you want to start with “Shall we go for a coffee somewhere?” then gives him the word he wants – siempre – ‘always‘. Forever. And everyone who sees the movie will know how to say siempre afterwards. Babysteps. I am relearning Spanish and Jenny is joining me. We’ve been to Costa Rica for a week’s break just before the pandemic, seen monkeys on the telephone wires and spoken bad Spanish. The fellas who work for the landlady are from Panama and Ecuador. We’re surrounded by the language in New York – there are over a million Puerto Ricans here for a start – salsa was born here in the 1960s – and West Side Story was very much ahead of its time in this respect and in others.

ANITA
Life can be bright in America

BOYS
If you can fight in America

GIRLS
Life is all right in America

BOYS
If you’re all white in America

It is my favourite song from the show, from the film, I’ve always loved it. It’s not Puerto Rican music, there was no salsa beat in 1957, but there was plena and bomba then and the Cuban music on which much Puerto Rican music is based such as son and bolero, and the country music called jibaro. But there’s little of that. Leonard Bernstein has written a kind of hybrid of Spanish tropes and Mexican ritmo which is completely fantastical and which I find totally irresistible, catchy and thrilling in its rhythmical construction and rhyming couplets – a total dose of energy and an affirmation of life. When the song started last night at the Director’s Guild with the three-two clave beat a shiver went down my neck, then when the girls started singing, pins & needles tingled down my head to my spine, a completely physical reaction. By the end of the song I was weeping.

GIRLS
Here you are free and you have pride

BOYS
Long as you stay on your own side

GIRLS
Free to be anything you choose

BOYS
Free to wait tables and shine shoes

This is still very much the case. Of course there are middle-class latin families and businesses, but the majority are service workers who live an hour out from Manhattan where they can afford it. Our cleaner Claudia is from Guatemala. Taxi drivers, delivery workers in vans or on bikes, construction are almost all latino.

Of the white characters in the film, apart from Tony (a Polack) played by Elgort, and The Jets who are largely racist and open the film throwing paint at a Puerto Rico flag graffiti on a wall, we have the NYPD played by Corey Stoll and others and Officer Krupke played by Brian D’Arcy James who played Quinn Carney in The Ferryman with me on Broadway in 2019 and is here doing sterling work. The cast are actually fantastic, most of them singing, dancing AND acting. Triple threats. The choreography is thrilling as it must be. After the film and the Q&A we walked down to The Vodka Room again. It was calling us.

BERNARDO
Everywhere grime in America
Organized crime in America
Terrible time in America

ANITA
You forget I’m in America

Jenny was in England when I applied for Citizenship, and I couldn’t apply for her. So she’ll go through the system just like I did in a few month’s time. And then we’ll go on holiday to Puerto Rico. Which is part of the United States. Don’t actually need a passport. It just isn’t a State. One day though, it will be.

BERNARDO
I think I’ll go back to San Juan

ANITA
I know a boat you can get on (Bye Bye!)

BERNARDO
Everyone there will give big cheer!

ANITA
Everyone there will have moved here

*

America from West Side Story (1961) :

Trailer for the new film :

My Pop Life #176 : Luck Be A Lady – Ian Charleson

i

Luck Be A Lady  –  Ian Charleson

They call you Lady Luck – but there is room for doubt : at times you have a very un-ladylike way of running out.

You’re on this date with me, the pickings have been lush, and yet before this evening is over you might give me the brush

You might forget your manners, you might refuse to stay,   And so the best that I can do is pray….

There are two extremely well-known versions of this song by two extremely famous people, but I choose them not.   Now read on dot dot dot.   This hard-to-find version was the one I sang at auditions in 1982 and 1983, an aspiring thespian with a paper-thin resumé and a hopeful willing heart.  I knew nothing, and very few people were explaining things.  Normal life in other words.   A keen, inexperienced, hungry young soul.  By which I mean that I really don’t feel as if I’ve been here before AT ALL, and thus all my wisdom – such as it is – has been hard-won this time around.   And I had very little aged 24, 25, 26.  Choose me !  I’d probably just about got my Equity Card via Moving Parts Theatre Company and done a cracking John Godber-directed production of A Clockwork Orange at Man In The Moon theatre in the King’s Road which secured me an agent.  Earlier that year my girlfriend Mumtaz and I had been to The National Theatre one night to see Guys and Dolls, the Frank Loesser musical based on Damon Runyon‘s slang-crackling low-life characters, wise guys & lippy girls, gamblers, hustlers, tough guys and dames.  It was a brilliant production, directed by Richard Eyre and a real eye-opener.  Starring Bob Hoskins as Nathan Detroit, Julia McKenzie as Adelaide, Ian Charleson as Sky Masterson, David Healy as Nicely Nicely and Julie Covington as Sister Sarah, and my old friend Jim Carter.  It is without exaggeration one of my best nights out in the theatre ever, and it had a profound effect on me, cementing my desire to be an actor, inspiring me to think song-and-dance, and causing me to realise, finally, that film actors and stage actors can crossover into each other’s arenas and triumph.  It was simply quite exhilarating.

So much so that – gasp – we bought the soundtrack LP in the foyer with these classic tunes on it : Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat, Adelaide’s Lament, Take Back Your Mink, If I Were A Bell, Sue Me and Luck Be  A Lady, the latter sung by Ian Charleson.

What a song.  The show was also my introduction (along with my Billie Holiday LP), to The Great American Songbook, a loose collection of jazz-pop songs usually written for stage musicals and films between 1920 and the early 50s, by the all-time great songwriters Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Rodgers & Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Fields, George & Ira Gershwin and others. Songs like Summertime, The Way You Look Tonight (My Pop Life #162 ), Cheek To Cheek, Fly Me To The Moon, Bye Bye Blackbird, I Get A Kick Out Of You, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Pennies From Heaven, Someone to Watch Over Me and on and on, all covered by all the major singers of the time, and many more since then.

Guys and Dolls premiered on Broadway in 1950, and was a massive hit.  A film adaptation followed in 1955 with Marlon Brando singing Luck Be A Lady poorly and wearing a shit-eating grin to compensate opposite Jean Simmons as Sister Sarah.  Below : the movie trailer fronted by Ed Sullivan reading an autocue with glimpses of the lead characters, including Vivian Blaine from the original Broadway production who UNUSUALLY got to play the same character in the movie (mainly because Marilyn Monroe wasn’t available).

Frank Sinatra played Nathan Detroit in the film but later he made Luck Be A Lady his own signature tune along with Come Fly With Me and Under My Skin.  His version is below too.  It’s brilliant, magnificent even, but it’s not the version that I used to sing at auditions.

My generation was one of the last who had to present a Shakespeare speech and sing a song to get a job.  Not at the same time.  But nearly.  Certainly to get a place at a drama school or work at one of the regional Repertory Theatres.   I think I used to do Richard the 2nd, but I can’t really remember.  I had secured an offer for the Drama Studio in Ealing early in 1982, but I couldn’t get a grant and couldn’t afford the fees.  I’d already had a grant from East Sussex to study for a Batchelor of Law at the LSE, so why should I get a post-grad one year change-of-career hand-out?  My generation were gilded by that grant system, and the accompanying soundtrack of punk, funk, reggae and disco.  But there I was – out the other side, changing horses, wasting my education.  What a rebel!    I was out there on my own, learning Shakespeare speeches and singing Luck Be A Lady along to Ian Charleson in our attic flat in Finsbury Park.  Buying the sheet music, making sure it was in the right key so I could give it to the pianist in the audition.  I guess musical auditions still operate like this – I haven’t done one for over 30 years.  But I’m sure the pianist usually knows the score.

The song has a dramatic opening, in common with many American Songbook pieces – Stardust for example (see My Pop Life #100) – a whole section in a different key which sets the song up.  This one really appealed to me.  You’re walking into a gambling salon in your finest threads talking to your dice.  I had no idea what those dice did – not blackjack which I had played with my Grandad, but ‘craps’ which still baffles me to this day.  On my Las Vegas trips I have always concentrated on roulette, and occasionally the other type of blackjack (the card game) but not dice.  But that didn’t put me off the song, where Sky is singing to Lady Luck, and imagining that she is an actual dame.  A hackneyed yet brilliant conceit :

A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice 

*

Frank Loesser..

..had a classical upbringing in New York, but he broke away from his parents’ ambitions to write for Tin Pan Alley  – and he struggled for years before getting published. Probably his best known song is the peerless Baby, It’s Cold Outside which he used to sing with his wife Lynn Garland at supper club parties to end the evening, then irritated her by selling the song to MGM.  It won him a best song Oscar and was subsequently covered by every famous duet partnership you can think of, most brilliantly I think by Ray Charles & Betty Carter in 1960.   Loesser also wrote, among 700 others, Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition during the 2nd World War,  Let’s Get Lost, Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling and the lyrics to Hoagy Carmichael’s Two Sleepy People and Heart & Soul.

Weirdly, the musical Guys and Dolls cropped up again that year of 1982 on Elvis Costello‘s brilliant Imperial Bedroom sessions (see My Pop Life #124) in the exquisite song Heathen Town (which inexplicably ended up on a later B-side rather than on the album), where, instead of singing

and the devil won’t drag you under by the sharp lapels of your chequered coat – sit down sit down sit down sit down, sit down you’re rockin’ the boat

which is from the Guys and Dolls musical, Elvis sings

cos the devil will drag you under by the sharp tailfin of your chequered cab – and I can’t sit down I’m going overboard in this heathen town

which is both a brilliant twist on the original lyric (Runyon’s sinners in the Sally Army praising the Lord) and a confession that New York City (the heathen town) is swallowing him alive and he’s loving it.    They used to call it Sin City now it’s gone way past that…  Honestly someone could do a phD thesis on Elvis Costello’s lyrical and musical quotations so rich and varied they are.   Don’t look at me !  I’m doing broad church brushstrokes, not digging down into one particular speciality.  Butterfly mind moves on.  Anyway, maybe Costello went to the NT show too, not so mysterious…

I never was in Guys and Dolls or any other big musical.  No no, please don’t pity me, it’s a whole other type of person who usually does that kind of thing.  I’m a camera actor. Usually.  Bob Hoskins bless him was a collector’s item and showed me that it could be done.  It’s more usual in the USA for actors to sing and dance on camera and onstage (the triple threat) and even write and direct too.  They encourage it in fact.  In the UK we are encouraged to specialise, not to dilute the craft by trying to do it all.  The narrow approach.  The suspicious approach of anyone who steps outside of their box.

Bob Hoskins & Ian Charleson onstage in Guys & Dolls

Ian Charleson was a Scottish actor who trod the boards playing Shakespeare including Hamlet twice, before famously portraying Eric Liddell in Chariots Of Fire and Charlie Andrews in Gandhi in 1981 and 82.  Despite both films winning Oscars, he didn’t move to Lala Land but rather his next move was appearing onstage in the National Theatre’s production of Guys & Dolls as Sky Masterson and he got glowing reviews.  In 1986 he was diagnosed with AIDS and he died in 1990 aged 40.   I have heard better performances of this great Frank Loesser song than his, but not many.   Sinatra’s is better – it’s jazz.  But Brando’s isn’t, it’s just terrible, lacking drama, energy or feeling, so un-Brando.   Alex Harvey could’ve sung it.  Fee Waybill.  David Bowie.  Rufus Wainwright.  Or me, maybe.

Ian Charleson NY OST : 

https://archive.org/details/luckBeALadyianCharlesonOntc

for contrast, Brando’s strange weak delicate take on it :