Five - “This Isn't Worth Drei Groschen!”

Summary

While Die Dreigroschenoper and Candide are parodies of eighteenth-century works that draw inspiration from the lightness and transparency of classical form, Street Scene and West Side Story take a cue from the brooding world of late Romanticism. Combining the emotional depth of opera and the immediacy of American musical theater, both works explore thwarted love stories amid social tensions in mid-twentieth-century New York City. The similarity in wording that introduces the respective texts cannot be a coincidence. In the libretto to Weill's “American Opera” (which was billed as a “Dramatic Musical”) “the action takes place on a sidewalk in New York City,” with act 1 set on an evening in June and act 2 the following day. In the book to Bernstein's score, “the action takes place on the West Side of New York City during the last days of summer.”

Weill's male protagonist, Sam, is a Jewish-American hopelessly in love with Rose, a young woman of Irish-Catholic heritage who also dreams of running away with Sam. The tragedy that takes the foreground, however, is the troubled relationship between Rose's parents: Mrs. Maurrant is murdered by her own husband for having an affair. West Side Story tells of a romance amid warring Puerto Rican and Caucasian-American factions (the Sharks and the Jets) but was originally conceived as East Side Story, “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet” in which Juliet would be of Jewish origin and Romeo an Italian- American from Greenwich Village. This indicates the work, in the Bloomian sense, as a tessera in which Bernstein completes the fragmented love story laid out in Street Scene. The unfulfilled longing between Rose and Sam becomes a full-blown tragedy of Shakespearean proportions in the romance of Maria and Tony, who is killed by Chino, one of the Sharks.

As Kowalke has noted, the four protagonists embroiled in the doublelove stories of Street Scene are the only ones to receive overtly operatic numbers. 4 In a similar vein, the slow, confessional numbers of Tony and Maria in West Side Story evoke the emotional world of this tradition, in contrast with the catchy “I Feel Pretty” or “America” (the show's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, wrote that these numbers “served to remind the audience that this was entertainment, not a sociological treatise”).