America (West Side Story song) America (West Side Story song) “America” is a song from the musical "West Side Story". Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics and Leonard Bernstein composed the music. In the original stage version, Anita – the most important female character after Maria and the girlfriend of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks – praises America while a fellow Puerto Rican immigrant, Rosalia, supports Puerto Rico. This version of the song deprecates the island and highlights the positive qualities of American life ("I’ll drive a Buick through San Juan/If there’s a road you can drive on"). The irony of this supposedly pro-American number,
Stephen Sondheim Later, Sondheim wrote and apologized to Guettel for being "not very encouraging" when he was actually trying to be "constructive". Sondheim also mentored a fledgling Jonathan Larson, attending Larson's workshop for his "Superbia" (a musical version of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"). In Larson's musical "Tick, Tick... Boom!", the phone message is played in which Sondheim apologizes for leaving early, says he wants to meet him and is impressed with his work. After Larson's death, Sondheim called him one of the few composers "attempting to blend contemporary pop music with theater music, which doesn't work very well; he was on his way to