#201
Posted: 2/27/09 at 10:03am
Without the Nightmare, Tony and Maria make love because they have a utopian vision of everyone getting along.
The Nightmare was created by Robbins to undercut the sentimentality of the ballet and to bring Tony and Maria back to the reality in which they are forced to live. The reprise of "Somewhere" that follows the end of the ballet is designed to have them clutching each other, desperately, wishing that somewhere, sometime, somehow there MIGHT be a place for them, but knowing that is still impossible.
By cutting the nightmare, Arthur Laurents ensures that people seeing Jerome Robbins's ballet for the first time--like marknyc's bf below--will think of it as a pretty but undramatic interlude that disrupts the drama.
There was always a point at the end of the Nightmare that Robbins could have the dancers and the music as a "button" for applause. Each time he put it in, Bernstein and Laurents would howl at him the applause would disrupt the drama, and each time he would "kill" the applause. It was one of their biggest ongoing battles, like the Overture (which Robbins sometimes wanted) and "One Hand, One Heart" (which Robbins thought was boring).
But Jerry Robbins set this particular trap himself by removing the Nightmare to shorten the ballet for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, where of course, it didn't matter that it was "just pretty." With the death last year of Floria Lasky, Robbins's barracuda of a lawyer, there is no one to protect his work artistically. Arthur could swoop in, like Tessie Tura, and say, "Cut the ballet. It stinks anyway."
This truly is Arthur's revenge.
The Nightmare was created by Robbins to undercut the sentimentality of the ballet and to bring Tony and Maria back to the reality in which they are forced to live. The reprise of "Somewhere" that follows the end of the ballet is designed to have them clutching each other, desperately, wishing that somewhere, sometime, somehow there MIGHT be a place for them, but knowing that is still impossible.
By cutting the nightmare, Arthur Laurents ensures that people seeing Jerome Robbins's ballet for the first time--like marknyc's bf below--will think of it as a pretty but undramatic interlude that disrupts the drama.
There was always a point at the end of the Nightmare that Robbins could have the dancers and the music as a "button" for applause. Each time he put it in, Bernstein and Laurents would howl at him the applause would disrupt the drama, and each time he would "kill" the applause. It was one of their biggest ongoing battles, like the Overture (which Robbins sometimes wanted) and "One Hand, One Heart" (which Robbins thought was boring).
But Jerry Robbins set this particular trap himself by removing the Nightmare to shorten the ballet for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, where of course, it didn't matter that it was "just pretty." With the death last year of Floria Lasky, Robbins's barracuda of a lawyer, there is no one to protect his work artistically. Arthur could swoop in, like Tessie Tura, and say, "Cut the ballet. It stinks anyway."
This truly is Arthur's revenge.
