Word: bernstein
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Story. Of all the widely accepted masterpieces of the genre, it's the one I have never seen onstage. Nor even - until a few weeks ago, when I finally broke down and rented the DVD - the multiple-Oscar-winning 1961 movie. Of course, I know most of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score; I've seen enough clips to be familiar with the famed Jerome Robbins choreography; and I'd have to be a pretty benighted theatergoer not to know at least the central conceit of the story - Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet transplanted to the street gangs...
...early numbers, I couldn't be entirely certain they were working from the same sheet music. What's more - a heresy to even suggest - I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein's music - "The Jet Song," "America" - are still striking and original. But is there a duller love ballad in any major American musical than "Maria" ("Maria! I've just met a girl named Maria"), or its Muzak-ready twin brother, "Tonight" ("Tonight, tonight/ There's only you tonight")? Who would know that...
...that, in the cash-strapped world of letters, it is more important than ever that the moneys within are channeled to the warm bodies that can produce the next White Whale and not to skeletons that will merely rest in the muck. —Columnist Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu...
...concert was invaluable experience that I got in a very special way,” Gilbert said. The same hands-on, initiative-taking approach that Gilbert exercised in organizing concerts proved valuable in Gilbert’s sophomore year. That year, Harvard was celebrating its 350th anniversary and Leonard Bernstein ’39, who was then conductor of the New York Philharmonic, was tapped to give the keynote address to conclude the festivities. Cognizant of the lengthy parade of speakers before him, Bernstein let the audience vote on whether they wanted to hear his speech; they voted him down...
...woven within the fabric of our social reality. It’s only a matter of us beginning to sew, beginning to mend the distance that we impose all too often between art and society by making our own art, however we can. —Columnist Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu...