Tag: West Side Story

The Lydster, Part 114: Anita

She went online and got the lyrics to ‘America’, her first favorite song, and then “A Boy Like That.’

I mentioned that the family saw an Albany High School production of West Side Story this spring. Since then, the Daughter has been listening to the movie soundtrack, which pleases me, since it was #2 on my favorite albums of the 1960s.

More specifically, I burned her a copy of my CD so that, if she loses it, I’ll still have it. I’ve done this with some 1959 rock ‘n’ roll compilation and the Beatles’ albums A Hard day’s Night and Help. She’s been playing WSS before she goes to sleep quite often of late.

The Daughter has been particularly enthralled by the character of Anita, the leading Shark girl. In the program, we saw Bryana Greer play Anita, and she was the best performer, we all thought, in a quite good cast.

So she went online and got the lyrics to ‘America’, her first favorite song, and then “A Boy Like That.’ She hasn’t yet figured out the “I Have A Love’ duet that Anita has with Maria, but give it time.

And she HAS been asked to be called Anita, not all the time, but when she’s “in character.”

I have NO idea where she gets this music/theater interest.

Getting the Schmuck Out of “West Side Story”

Sondheim wanted “F@#$ YOU”; interesting how the F-word rhymes with the SCHM-word, and means about the same.

One Yiddish word I liked to use quite a bit when I was in my twenties was schmuck, meaning “an obnoxious, contemptible person; one who is stupid, foolish, or detestable.” I did not know until recently that, in some Jewish homes, the word had been “regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo”. The non-religious Jews I knew certainly used it often enough. The word’s derivation comes from the word representing that which beleaguered Congressman Anthony Weiner tweeted recently.

In his book Finishing the Hat, lyricist Stephen Sondheim talks about the evolution of the words to the song GEE, OFFICER KRUPKE from West Side Story.

Initially, they were:

Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schumck.

But the producer of the Broadway cast album told him that the word schmuck would have to be changed. “I confessed that I had no idea the word was obscene. I thought it was simply a vulgarity…, not an obscenity that could prevent the recording from being distributed.”

An hour later, he came up with:

Dear kindly social worker,
They say go make some dough.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means I’ll be a schmo!

Now, schmo is derived from the same root as schmuck but evidently not as charged.

For the movie, he changed it again:

Dear kindly social worker
They tell me get a job
Like be a soda jerker
Which means I’d be a slob

Another lyric change involved the last two words of the song. Sondheim wanted “F@#$ YOU”; interesting how the F-word rhymes with the SCHM-word, and apparently mean about the same. But for the same commercial reasons, this as scrapped in favor of the Leonard Bernstein suggestion of “KRUP YOU!” It conveyed the same message without actually saying it, and Sondheim believes that it “may be the best lyric line in the show.”

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