I waited for the right time to write about West Side Story but probably the exact right time with never come.. .I know I am not going to do it well enough. How can it be called a “musical comedy”? It’s a musical tragedy, and were it not for the most beautiful music, and the dancing which is like flying, people would not be able to bear to look and see and understand... I was literally frozen with fear. Do you realise there is no laughter in it, no gayety (sic) that comes from delight, from being young? You do, of course, and all of you knew what you were writing about. The immensely funny song, “Please Officer Krupke” (I will get these titles wrong, but near enough), is not laughter, but the most biting, ironic and contemptuous satire. And I felt it to be absolutely accurate – not the perfection of the wit, in music and words – but accurate as describing the state of mind of those young. Again, the Puerto Rican girls’ song, when one longs for the beauty of home and the other mocks [“America”], is not laughter; but the hardness of life, the rock of life, a dream of something softer (softer inside, where it counts) as against the icy measuring rod of modern big city young. The love songs made me cry (they had beforem when I heard the whole show twice in one day, listening to [Irwin] Shaw’s record in Switzerland). But this time, with the visual picture there, and the murderous city outside, and in America, where West Side Story becomes a sociological document turned into art, they made my cry like a sieve, from heartbroken pity. But what stays in my mind, as the very picture of terror, is the scene in the drug store, when the Jets sing a song called “Keep Cool, man”. I think I have never heard or seen anything more frightening. (It goes without saying that I think the music so brilliant I have no words to use for it.) I found that a sort of indicator of madness: the mad obsession with nothing, the nerves insanely and constantly stretched – with no way to rest, no place to go; the emptiness of the undirected minds, whose only occupation could be violence and a terrible and macabre playacting... << less