There's a Place for Us

"With the advent of West Side Story, the danger was still hard to identify, because it was disguised as a glittering cluster of some of the catchiest numbers Broadway had ever produced. Leonard Bernstein, the composer, knew everything about how to make a melody memorable. He could put the word America on four notes so that it became a mini-anthem, a kind of musical flag, and then vary the notes so that the flags turned into a carnival. And the words were put together by a frighteningly young man who had not only learned from Hammerstein about how to grow a song out of the plot, he had learned from the previous tradition about how to be clever. He was a precocious master of the complete heritage, but the heritage was still bolted firmly to a precept that until then had been so unquestionable it didn’t even need to be formulated, except as a wisecrack. Somebody had once said that nobody ever went home whistling the set. It was a neat way of saying that the song comes first. There has to be something to sing, and the chief danger presented by the new musical—the danger that there wouldn’t be—was already there in West Side Story. The danger’s name was Stephen Sondheim."

Clive James in The Atlantic reviews Larry Stempel's Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater.