Cool (West Side Story song)

"Cool" is a song from the 1957 musical West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein composed the music and Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics. This song is known for its fugal treatment of a jazz figure, described by one writer as "possibly the most complex instrumental music heard on Broadway to date".[1]

In 2011, actor Harry Shum Jr. performed the song, as his character Mike Chang from TV series Glee, in the third episode of season 3, "Asian F" (aired on October 4).[2]

An episode of Animaniacs features a parody version as "Coo Bird" sung by Bobby of The Goodfeathers. The song is also parodied in the Flight of the Conchords episode The Tough Brets with the song "Stay Cool, Bret".

The Castle episode "Cool Boys" has Richard Castle and Detective Slaughter sing it to distract some criminals holding them at gunpoint.

British sketch show Horrible Histories parodied this song as a song about the English Civil War.

In Season three, episode ten of “The West Wing” (H-CON 172), White House Press Secretary CJ Cregg uses the opening bars and lyrics of “Cool” to stop Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn during a tirade about an ex employee.

gollark: There is *zero* risk of SQL injection because you're not blindly interpolating user input into the querys.
gollark: Any sane database library lets you just pass in parameters like this: `database.execute("INSERT INTO reminders (remind_timestamp, created_timestamp, reminder, expired, extra) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)", (time.timestamp(), timestamp(), reminder, 0, json.dumps(extra_data)))`.
gollark: It's really easy to, well, not have those.
gollark: Oh, I see.
gollark: I made all of the possibly-long-running stuff like SQLite access asynchronous, and it works fine.

References
  1. Nigel Simeone, Leonard Bernstein, West Side story (Ashgate Publishing, 2009), ISBN 978-0754664840, pp. 84, 102. Excerpts available at Google Books.
  2. Stephens, Samantha (October 4, 2011). "'Glee': Mike Chang's 'Asian F' earns an A+". The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts). Retrieved 23 February 2017.
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