West Side Story
Directed by Arthur Laurents
One of the great cultural disappointments of my life came at the age of 23, when I watched the Academy Award-winning film version of the Broadway musical West Side Story for the first time as an adult. I had seen the movie at least a dozen times on television and loved it beyond measure.
At some point, I had already begun to see a few shortcomings. Like the way Natalie Wood's brown pancake makeup, intended to make her look Hispanic, instead gave her the aspect of a shrunken-headed kewpie doll. Or how the extremely fey Richard Beymer seemed almost physically ill when the script called upon him to kiss Wood, then one of the most beautiful women in the world. But what the hell. It was West Side Story, and who could object?
Then came the nightmare moment, when I journeyed to the American Film Institute's theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington to see West Side Story on the big screen. And it was . . . awful. Draggy scenes. Inappropriately theatrical lighting. And the dialogue! Hep cat blather from the late 1950s, including the peerlessly comic moment when one of the skanky girlfriends of the white gang offers the following words of wisdom: "Ooh . . . ooh . . . oooble-dy ooh."
By the time Natalie Wood cradled the dead Richard Beymer in her arms, I was cradling my head in my hands. The songs were still great, and the dancing too, but everything else about West Side Story seemed overdone,
overcooked, and dreadfully dated--a problem drama about juvenile delinquency and racial strife that might have resonated in the early 1960s but which seemed quaint and silly two decades later.
A new revival of West Side Story has just opened on Broadway, the first in nearly 30 years, and I sat through it last week not with head in hand, but with heart in mouth. The evening was one of the most thrilling I have ever spent in a theater. It turns out that the distance of a half-century from the show's opening has drained it of any specific relevance; no longer ripped from the headlines, West Side Story turns out instead to be a high melodrama. In terms of the emotions it evokes, West Side Story is more akin to opera than any other Broadway musical ever written.
The director, Arthur Laurents, makes this almost explicit with an inspired decision to allow the Puerto Rican characters to speak Spanish to each other for the most part, and (again for the most part) to sing their songs in Spanish as well. The choice works, and works brilliantly, because it makes the characters seem less like ethnic stereotypes and more like recognizable people.
The fact that the lyrics of two songs are entirely in Spanish doesn't prove at all onerous, because the songs in question ("I Feel Pretty," "A Boy Like That") are so familiar that we remember what the words mean. But even if we didn't, like a Verdi aria in the days before opera houses provided supertitles, Leonard Bernstein's remarkable music conveys the emotion. (And to be honest, the lyrics in question are ghastly, as their author, Stephen Sondheim, himself has admitted; the show benefits from our not having to hear "A boy like that, who kill your brother/Forget that boy and find another.")
|
