Not to speak ill of the dead, but it would have been better if he'd worked out his issues with Jerry Robbins in therapy than on the stage of the Palace Theatre. Please. Feel free. You're among friends.
The truth of the matter is that Arthur mounted the revival as a well-planned act of revenge. He always resented that what made West Side truly unique was the connection between the music and the staging, the collaboration of his old friend, Leonard Bernstein, with his old enemy, Jerome Robbins. It was not the book that made it special. In fact, it was the book that sank it in several places.
So Arthur planned out a revival that would minimize or remove as much of the beautiful interplay between score and staging as he could extricate.
First he had to wait for a few people to die: Jerry, obviously, and Lenny, but also Harry Kraut, Lenny's longtime shark of a business manager, and Floria Lasky, Jerry longtime shark of a lawyer.
With the sharks out of the way, Arthur went in for the kill. He used the truncated ballet the Bernstein organization had approved for the New York City Ballet's West Side Story Suite, which Jerry had used in Jerome Robbins's Broadway. This shortened version omitted the Nightmare section from the end of the ballet, leaving it with no narrative, just pure dance.
Arthur had always hated that the middle of the second act dwelt for so much time in a dance world. To get Jerry's goat he had added a line to Gypsy, in which Tessie says derisively of Mazeppa's dance: "Cut the ballet. It stinks anyway."
Next, Arthur removed the wordless procession from the end of the show, which can be seen in the final moments of the movie. The reason for this was bogus. He said it was not realistic that the police would allow the body to be removed...as if anything else in the show was "realistic" and as if that mattered.
Then he saw an opportunity with the character of Anita, which had always been defined by two dances in the first act and two dramatic scenes in the second. In the Robbins/Bernstein vision, Anita's spectacular dancing in the Dance at the Gym and "America" would bring the audience to its feet in the first act, and then she would seal the deal with dramatic acting in the "Boy Like That" scene and the rape scene. Every woman who ever played the role on Broadway or in a touring production has been a standout triple-threat: Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Barbara Luna, Debbie Allen. The scenes in the second act are near-melodramatic with fever-pitch emotions. No woman who ever played the part failed to score in those scenes. The trick was to find a woman who could do that and also accomplish the difficult and exciting Peter Gennaro choreography for the two first-act numbers.
Arthur realized that if he cast an actress who could sing and dance rather than a dancer who could act and sing, the balance of the show would shift from music/dance to spoken word. And because the two scenes in the second act are so dramatic, she would leave the audience appropriately wowed--and more wowed by his book scenes than by Jerry and Peter's choreography.
But what Arthur did not realize was that by removing those moments of what the French call "frisson" from the first-act dance numbers, he also was making the show exponentially less exciting.
Then he made a casting error, by casting a Tony with the wrong kind of voice. Again, Arthur did not realize that the way his own show is constructed, there are two songs in Act One, almost back-to-back, that provide the audience another kind of frisson: this time the thrill of a strong high male voice, similar to the thrill Italian operas provide with tenor arias.
I don't think he was out to minimize Lenny's score. I think he did this out of ignorance as to how the show worked and a tunnel-vision of focusing primarily on the book scenes and the acting, which he thought he could make better (and "tougher") than any previous production.
So through acts of vindictive artistic vandalism toward Robbins's choreography and staging and acts of neglect toward Bernstein's score, Arthur was what was wrong with the recent West Side Story revival.
May he rest in peace. And may his improvements be removed.
