Snuff That Cool Boy

Early in Act II of Urinetown we find Hope Cladwell taken hostage by our band of revolutionaries, and an internal debate is had on whether or not to take her life as retribution for Cladwell's betrayal. Hot Blades Harry and Little Becky Two-Shoes lead the murderous faction, as Little Sally urges more humane restraint.  Harry and Becky make their case most fervently in the song Snuff That Girl, which owes its historical context to a song first performed in West Side Story in 1957.

In West Side Story, we see another band of hotheads (in this case a street gang called the Jets, made up of antsy white boys) who are itching for a fight with the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang whose territory adjoins their own.  Riff, the leader of the Jets, plays the Little Sally role here, telling his fellow bangers to keep their cool, at least for the moment. But the underlying need to knock heads keeps bubbling up through the Jets' outwardly "cool" exterior - resulting, naturally, in a ballet-like dance number, but one with periodic bursts of violent energy and intimidating finger-snapping.

Harry Hot Blades leads the dance break in Snuff That Girl, but unlike Riff, this hothead is for all-out warfare.  Compare the finger-snapping, and the barely-restrained undercurrents of violence in both of these songs, and it's impossible to miss the intended parody.  I've included "Cool" from the movie version of West Side Story below.  The crouching dance move you see at 2:52 (performed directly at the camera) was copied exactly in the dance break of Snuff That Girl by John Carrafa, the choreographer of Broadway's Urinetown, which always got a huge laugh (from people who were old enough to know West Side Story, anyway):



The gang-style ballet dancing in West Side Story, while ground-breaking and powerful in the early 60s, has not aged well; it's hard to imagine current-day gang bangers pulling off a pirouette in an intimidating way.  So this choreography style has come in for a fair amount of parody, even without Urinetown's help:



And the Jets and Sharks would be somewhat chagrined, I think, to learn that their moves were being used now to sell clothes from the Gap (and lots of other stuff):



West Side Story was originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins, but Snuff That Girl, as originally choreographed, mostly paid homage to Bob Fosse, choreographer of such standards as Chicago, Sweet Charity, and Cabaret; but as this post is already getting overly long, we'll leave our discussion of Bob for another day.