Gil Hates Everything

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m hopelessly biased in favour of this show. Ooooh, there are so many good things about it. But let me open with an anecdote, which some of you have heard before. When I was a kid there was a British TV show called “Record Breakers” hosted by the excellent Roy Castle and the McWhirter brothers. It was basically a big ongoing ad for the Guinness Book of Records, in the days before we realized that kind of thing was bad. They’d have records, attempts at breaking records – and a segment each week about American record-breakers. And this segment was introduced by an eight-bar piece of music that went “dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-America, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-America…” It was awesome. The music was absolutely perfect. No idea where it came from, of course. Cut to ten years later and I’m lying around in bed one morning, rather sleepy, listening to the radio. And, drifting in and out of sleep, on comes a feature about a revival of some musical, and they play this song, and forget about the eight bars of the chorus, it goes on forever, with chord changes and lyrics and women shrieking “ay! ay! ay!” and and and… oh, it was truly magical, one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had in my life, to learn that this addictive little snippet from “Record Breakers” was in fact a song, a song so great and so clever at capturing the strangeness and appeal of America. I had to find out more. I may have watched movie musicals before then, but this was when I realized that there was such a thing as Broadway.

This show was a perfect storm, a quincunx of book, music, lyrics, dance, and timeliness. Try to imagine it without the infinite cool of the finger-snapping stylized dance, or without the genius of Leonard Bernstein’s experienced little touches, like the electricity of the strings behind “the air is humming”, or the immense drums of the mambo, or the polyrhythms at the start of “America” itself… or without the Jets’ teen sneers (and remember, in 1950, everyone knew what “motherloving” really meant). This is angst and the I Hate Myself And I Want To Die ideation turned up to maximum poetic heat and stylized to fuck. Bad enough that the adults fear and misunderstand them; the kids can’t even get on with one another. Romeo and Juliet got a proper updating here; think of this as a classic song being masterfully covered, and thus stolen, by a band with a plan and an attitude.

It’s also quite difficult to sing: you may have hummed along here and there, but the moment it’s on you to sing “Something’s Coming” or “Tonight” you realize that they’re a tempo-shifting frenzy, and it’s an indication of Bernstein’s skill that this music sounded so exciting to an audience and didn’t come across as a modernist nightmare. I can’t think where Sondheim picked up some of his compositional ideas.

In 2010: with my inner teenager scowling at me, I would admit that parts of the music sound dated – that tense reverberating jazz got overused in the sixties and could arguably be labelled “best before the invention of hip-hop” – and the daddi-o hip makes you laugh because you’ve seen it neutered by a bunch of trashy films and the gang from “Top Cat”. This show is fifty-six years old and when done with energy it still works. But I agree you’d be entirely within your rights to say (as I have with “Guys And Dolls”) that you’ve seen it enough times to cope quite happily without seeing it again.

Rating this is a tricky one because giving it ten would be overvaluing it now, but giving it less would be insulting it then. Still, I ought to be honest about the effects of devouring time which blunts all lions’ forepaws. So Random Panda awards “West Side Story” seven out of ten pieces of bamboo. But you know in your heart this was the first ever “best musical ever”.

(originally posted 2009)