Times Square from On the Town

Like his earlier ballet Fancy Free, Bernstein’s 1944 musical On the Town is about three sailors on a day’s shore leave in New York – an opportunity for living it up which they do not intend to waste. At the end of the first act they find themselves in Times Square, where they and many like them are having a “helluva time” dancing in, among other places, a souvenir arcade and the Rosalind Dance Palace. The longest of three dances episodes in the score, Times Square is also the liveliest and, vibrant with Bernstein’s brilliance in the popular idiom of the day, much the most colourful.