This cover features Allyn Ann McLerie, the talented Canadian singer-dancer-actress whose Broadway credits include appearances in One Touch of Venus, On the Town, Miss Liberty, Where’s Charley?, and Redhead. She was also seen in the film version of Where’s Charley? as well as Words and Music, The Desert Song and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? as well as in many American television shows. At the moment in time captured here, Ms McLerie is playing Anita, a role she secured while the show was working its way across the United States on the first National Tour, and one she would continue to play as the company concluded its tour and began a very unusual second shot with Broadway audiences, the 1960 Return Engagement of West Side Story. An astute observation comes from Carol Lawrence, commenting that her opening-night nervousness was justified, because "this time everyone knew what to expect, and we had to be better than ever, to live up to the show’s greatness." Otherwise the article is a standard gossip-flavored fashion-conscious and celebrity-alert account of that exciting and triumphant night in April 1960, clearly a first-class red-carpet event, attended by such luminaries as Vera Zorina, Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green, Eileen Heckart, Mike Nichols, Eva Gabor, Chita Rivera (ducking into the post-performance party from her current Bye Bye Birdie, Tom Bosley (ditto: Fiorello!), and ultimately the great showman himself Leonard Bernstein, who, as it is reported, made a splashy entrance down the aisle (black tie, evening cape, and all) as he proceeded to the podium to conduct the Overture. The evening was unmistakably the highlight of the spring season.
From the Department of Happy Coincidence comes the news that the particular copy of this issue that is in the library of this site and whose cover image is reproduced here was originally mailed by subscription to a gentleman connected with the National Theatre in Washington DC. Thus the magazine flew full circle—reporting the last leg of the exciting first production of West Side Story and serendipitously sending the news back to the very theater where the musical had its world premiere some three years earlier.
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