Times Square (On the Town)

On the Town began as Fancy Free, a ballet Bernstein wrote for Jerome Robbins in 1944, and reached Broadway the same year as a musical about three sailors with twenty-four hours of shore leave. Times Square is the orchestral ballet that closes the first act — the city itself given a number, brass and percussion crowding each other in a manner Bernstein had learned from jazz bands and never unlearned. He was twenty-six.