Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim is responsible for some of the most unforgettable music that ever made it to stage and screen. Among his many accomplishments is his lyrical contribution to the Leonard Bernstein song “Maria” from the Broadway musical hit West Side Story. The song is performed shortly after Maria, sister of the leader of a Puerto Rican gang called the Sharks, and Tony, a former member of a rival gang called the Jets, meet for the first time at a school dance and fall in love.
“The problem here,” Sondheim writes in Finishing the Hat, “was how to write a love song for two people who have just met. They have exchanged exactly 10 lines, but they have encountered each other in a surreal, dreamlike dance sequence, so that the audience believes that they have an intimate, even mystical, connection. Nevertheless, when the gymnasium set dissolves into the street outside Maria’s house and Tony is back in reality, he has to sing something real.”
Furthermore, the Tony character had originally been envisioned as “a blond Polish Catholic, in order to contrast him as much as possible with the Puerto Ricans,” Sondheim writes. “This gave the name ‘Maria’ a religious resonance, which I pushed with the line ‘Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.’” The original idea for Tony’s background was scrapped, however, leading Sondheim to lament that now, the line “makes little sense and merely contributed a kind of overall wetness to the lyric—a wetness, I regret to say, which persists throughout all the romantic lyrics in the show, but which appealed to my collaborators and which may very well have contributed to the score’s popularity.”
In any case, the lyrics, and the song, remain amongst the most memorable Broadway has ever heard.
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