First—you dispatch scouts to the enemy leader to arrange a war council. Then—
ACTION
Then you go!
RIFF
We oughta get Tony so we can take a vote.
ACTION
He always does what you say anyway. C’mon!
In this version of the opening scene, the audience has learned the basics of the plot within moments of the curtain’s rise. They know there are two gangs divided along ethnic lines. They know these gangs are engaged in an ongoing battle. They know there is a hierarchy within each gang—Riff is clearly the leader of the Jets—as well as a certain formality: A rumble can’t occur without a meeting of the war council. The audience feels the energy and tension (Crack-O Jack-O!) and they learn about another character, Tony, who seems important. All in all, an effective opening.
Robbins discarded it. Too predictable, he said. Lazy and clichéd. Gangs don’t just fight, they own territory, the same way a dancer owns a stage. The opening number of a musical about immigrants and the energy of New York ought to feel ambitious and dangerous—it needed to make the audience feel the same way Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents had felt when they had come up with this idea. They, the playwrights themselves, were strivers, Robbins told them. They were Jews and outcasts, and this musical was an opportunity to draw on their own experiences of exclusion and ambition and put their own emotions on the stage.
“Robbins could be brutal,” said Amanda Vaill, Robbins’s biographer. “He could sniff out creative complacency and force people to come up with something newer and better than what everyone else settled for.” Robbins was an innovation broker, and he forced everyone around him to become brokers, as well.
This is what appeared onstage—and, later, on movie screens—in what eventually became known as “The West Side Story Prologue.” It is one of the most influential pieces of theater in the last sixty years:
The opening is musical: half-danced, half-mimed. It is primarily a condensation of the growing rivalry between two teenage gangs, THE JETS and THE SHARKS, each of which has its own prideful uniform. THE JETS—sideburned, long-haired—are vital, restless, sardonic; The SHARKS are Puerto Ricans.
The stage opens with THE JETS on an asphalt court, snapping their fingers as the orchestra plays. A handball strikes the fence and the music stops. One of the boys, RIFF, indicates with a nod to return the handball to its frightened owner. RIFF’s subordinate complies and the music restarts.
THE JETS saunter across the court, and as the music swells, they pirouette. They cry “yeah!” and begin a series of ronds de jambe en l’air. They own this asphalt. They are poor and ignored by society, but right now, they own this space.
A TEENAGER, the leader of THE SHARKS, appears. THE JETS stop moving. Other SHARKS appear, and they start snapping, and then whirl in a series of pirouettes of their own. The SHARKS declare their own ownership of the stage.
The two gangs skirmish, contesting territory and dominance, pantomiming threats and apologies, competing but never outright fighting until dozens of SHARKS and JETS are flying across the stage, almost but never touching as they taunt and challenge each other. Then a SHARK trips a JET. The JET pushes his attacker. A cymbal starts chiming and everyone is suddenly atop each other, kicking and punching until a police whistle freezes them and the gangs unite, pretending to be friends in front of OFFICER KRUPKE.
For nine minutes, no dialogue is spoken. Everything is communicated through dance.
The first time West Side Story was performed in 1957, the audience wasn’t certain what to make of it. The actors were dressed in everyday clothes but moved as if in a classical ballet. The dances were as formalized as Swan Lake, but described street fights, an attempted rape, and skirmishes with cops. The music echoed the symphonic tritones of Wagner but also the rhythms of Latin jazz. Throughout the musical, the actors switched between song and dialogue interchangeably.
“The ground rules by which West Side Story is played are laid out in the opening number,” the theater historian Larry Stempel later wrote. “Before an intelligible sentence has had a chance to be uttered, or a single phrase of music sung, dance has conveyed the essential dramatic information.”
When the curtain went down on opening night, there was silence. The audience had just seen a musical about rumbles and murder, songs describing bigotry and prejudice and dances in which hoodlums moved like ballerinas and actors sung slang words with the power of opera stars.
As everyone prepared to take their positions for the curtain call, “we ran to our spaces and faced the audience holding hands. The curtain went up and we looked at the audience, and they looked at us, and we looked at them, and I thought, ‘Oh, dear Lord, it’s a bomb!’?” said Carol Lawrence, who played the original Maria. “And then, as if Jerry had choreographed it, they jumped to their feet. I’d never heard people stamping and yelling, and by that time, Lenny had worked his way backstage, and he came at the final curtain and walked to me, put his arms around me and we wept.”
West Side Story went on to become one of the most popular and influential musicals in history. It succeeded by mixing originality and convention to create something new. It took old ideas and put them in novel settings so gracefully that many people never realized they were watching the familiar become unique. Robbins forced his colleagues to become brokers, to put their own experiences onto the stage. “That was a real achievement,” Robbins later said.
III.
The space assigned to the Frozen team for their daily meetings was large, airy, and comfortable. The walls were covered with sketches of castles and ice caves, friendly-looking reindeer, a snow monster named “Marshmallow,” and dozens of concepts for trolls. Each morning at nine A.M., the director, Chris Buck, and his core team of writers and artists would assemble with their coffee cups and to-do lists. The songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez would videoconference in from their home in Brooklyn. Then everyone would start panicking about how little time was left.
Anxiety was particularly high the morning after the disastrous screening and meeting with the story trust. From the beginning, the Frozen team had known they couldn’t simply retell an old fairy tale. They wanted to make a movie that said something new. “It couldn’t just be that, at the end, a prince gives someone a kiss and that’s the definition of true love,” Buck told me. They wanted the film to say something bigger, about how girls don’t need to be saved by Prince Charming, about how sisters can save themselves. The Frozen team wanted to turn the standard princess formula on its head. But that’s why they were in such trouble now.
“It was a really big ambition,” said Jennifer Lee, who joined the Frozen team as a writer after working on another Disney film, Wreck-It Ralph. “And it was particularly hard because every movie needs tension, but if the tension in Frozen is between the sisters, how do you make them both likable? We tried a jealousy plotline, but it felt petty. We tried a revenge story, but Bobby kept saying we needed an optimistic heroine instead of feuds. The story trust was right: The movie needed to connect emotionally. But we didn’t know how to get there without falling into clichés.”
Everyone in the room was well aware they had only eighteen months to finish the movie. Peter Del Vecho, the producer, asked them all to close their eyes.
“We’ve tried a lot of different things,” he said. “It’s okay that we haven’t found the answers yet. Every movie goes through this, and every wrong step gets us closer to what works.