I hardly can believe I'm real

The New Yorker favorably notes the revival of West Side Story, pointing out that certain parts of the libretto have been vastly improved:

Fifty years on, in a multicultural America, this decision makes the production feel fresh; it also allows the show to dispense with some of Sondheim’s rookie mistakes. In “I Feel Pretty,” for instance, he had Maria, an uneducated Puerto Rican teen-ager, only a month in New York, singing with such showy internal rhymes as “It’s alarming how charming I feel.” (“When rhyme goes against character, out it should go,” Sondheim said in 1974, with the wisdom of years.)

Indeed, nothing jerks me out of the gritty cinéma vérité of your typical Broadway Musical than does a bit of overly florid prose or the far too convenient (or clever) rhyme. Why can't those eggheads just let me be gripped by the you-are-there horror of exquisitely choreographed gang wars-of-the-dance and the ever present (and shockingly hardcore) street lingo...any small children may need to leave the web:

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
They won't give me a puff.
They didn't wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!

So thank the maker we are prevented from hearing so much as one internal rhyme that defeats the inherent and inexhaustable believability of Maria. And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.