I know you’re up to your ears in unsolicited praise at this point, but I’ve found myself so full of this project of yours all this week that I need to let your know what I think of it.... We’ve glutted the language with so many words and non-words that by now a term like “fine” has little meaning. But it has meaning for me, and it’s that word which I now find myself stuck with when I think about the way your talent has combined with your material this time. I mistrust my initial impression a little - I really can’t believe that any one thing can be the best of its sort in my memory – all I know is the way I felt on Saturday afternoon was very like the experience of Anne Frank a couple of seasons ago – I kept telling myself afterwards that there must have been something wrong with me for those three hours – something wrong that enabled the play to work on me the way it did. I must have been something like a perfect piece of audience on Saturday because I’ve never known anything in musical theatre to do me in the way West Side Story did. I’m usually a pain in the neck about those things – thinking all the way while, officiously, how it ought to be better done and what I’d see thrown out. But Saturday it just threw around and that’s about the end of it.... I haven’t seen a production which together the way yours does – in which the units of work produced by different people fitted so well into a whole - I don’t know how it really was. I know you must have had your problems – but none of them show up as scars. For me, it has terrific power – terrific unity – excellent individual work, though I think the women are by and large better than the men – I can’t say enough for Carol Lawrence this time – I’ve always liked her – and [Chita] Rivera is beautifully inside the work - which I didn’t think she’d really be – she doesn’t splash out of the production as I figured she might. This probably isn’t going to make her, but it’s great for the show... << less