Dartblog

Speaking of superb videos, it’s awfully hard to beat “America,” from West Side Story, 1961 (musical 1957). West Side Story, conceived in the mid-1950’s, is a product of the very pinnacle of the golden age of musical theatre. The music and lyrics are due to Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and the notoriously excellent choreography is of Jerome Robbins.

I should have posted this on the Fourth of July, but it really is better late than never.

One final note: When I studied West Side Story in the fifth grade, my teacher told me that the film’s street scenes were filmed in burned-out lots that became my elementary school’s schoolyard, on the south side of West 70th Street between West End and Amsterdam Avenues, in New York. (A lot of gentrification happens in 50 years.) That’s difficult to verify, but wikipedia says the scenes were filmed at 62nd and Columbus, where the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University now stands—a walk of not more than five minutes. Pretty nifty in either case.

ANITA
Puerto Rico,
My heart’s devotion,
Let it sink back in the ocean.
Always the hurricanes blowing,
Always the population growing,
And the money owing,
And the sunlight streaming,
And the natives steaming,
I like the island Manhattan.
Smoke on your pipe,
And put that in!

ANITA
Everyone there will have moved here.