Harold Prince: They had never seen anything quite like it. They were just thrilled, just excited. It just got right. The blood boils, and it’s exciting, and the Romeo and Juliet story is pretty swell. Arthur Laurents created a language for it, which some people are fond of saying, “What is all that ‘cracko-jacko’ stuff — ‘womb-to-tomb’ stuff?” You had to create a different language, which is probably why, sometimes — you know, you talked to Sondheim and you heard him criticize some of his lyrics. The fact that it is all heightened and people are not real and they are not really saying what they would have said in the words they would have used, I think that would have been an impossible task and inappropriate.