REVIEW: An astonishingly re-imagined “West Side Story” for the 21st Century demands to be seen

The cast of “West Side Story”. Photo by Jan Versweyveld

Eight members of The Jets file silently onto the vast, empty stage of the cavernous Broadway Theatre as wisps of fog emanate from the floor, rising in an unpredictable, wind-blown dance before evaporating into thin air.

The Jets stand in stark police line formation, silhouetted, facing the audience.  Then, a shift of body weight with a collective lean to the left.  Preparation for motion.  Something’s coming. 

Something, as it turns out, quite good.

With that single lean, that single shift, an unrelenting tension is established that will churn and teem for the next hour and 45 minute, intermission-less, wholly re-imagined presentation of “West Side Story” under the helm of visionary Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove with new choreography by fellow Belgian Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Leonard Bernstein’s familiar prologue music begins.  But nothing about this “West Side Story” is all that familiar.

Gone is the finger snapping—an invention of choreographer Jerome Robbins—and iconic ballet movement; freshly arrived is a massive video screen covering the entire back wall of the stage, and 25 video cameras strategically placed about the stage or else hand operated by mobile videographers, along with a young and racially diverse cast of 50—33 of whom are making their Broadway debuts. 

It’s 2020.  And this “West Side Story” is set in the present, meant for present-day audiences, and keyed the sensibility of the moment.  

The effect of Mr. van Hove’s vision is nothing short of thrilling, representing everything that a modern revival of a totemic musical theatre classic ought to aspire to and achieve.  Nothing is sacred.  Everything is reexamined. 

In 1957, audiences—and critics—were divided on “West Side Story”.  This violent, realistic (for its time), and tragic musical broke so many rules and pushed so many boundaries it is easy to forget today that it was so divisive because it paved the path for so many innovations to follow—ones we take for granted.

Whether on purpose or by consequence, Mr. van Hove manages to summon that same sense of boundary-pushing realism and violence, but by 2020 standards.  His re-imagined “West Side Story” brings the musical to life for a new generation, free from the authorial control of its creators, ensuring it won’t become an ossified museum piece.  Those looking for a nostalgia trip should look elsewhere.  

Stephen Sondheim, the only living creator of “West Side Story” said, in blessing this radical production, that “what keeps the theatre alive is reinterpretation” and that “each generation brings new ways of looking at a play”.  Of course, he is right. 

“The theatre is a living organism”, Mr. Sondheim offered further, and this “West Side Story” pulses like no other.  It is ecstatically alive.

Dharon E. Jones, Amar Ramasar, and the cast of “West Side Story” perform the Prologue. Photo by Jan Versweyveld

From those first moments, Mr. van Hove and Ms. De Keersmaeker signal that they will consider nothing precious about the “West Side Story” you already know (and likely also love), causing you to lean in and become enveloped in the new world they create together on stage, along with set and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld and video designer Luke Halls.

The “Prologue” proceeds without much dance, in the classic sense, though every single movement is precise and intentional, expressing a vocabulary unique to each of the rival gangs—The Jets and The Sharks—and one that eschews the formalism of ballet for the naturalism and abstraction of modern dance. 

A trademark of her style and process, Ms. De Keersmaeker developed her movement vocabulary for this piece from observations of natural, every day movement—how we shift weight, when we use our arms, when we crouch, etc.—starting with a single phrase for each gang and then building in collaboration with her dancers to discover what felt organic and evocative of their emotions and characters.

Walking in to this production, I was most skeptical that Robbins’ choreography could be replaced, that anyone could ever manage to simultaneously erase the audience’s memory association between the music and the movement while also matching, or exceeding, its effectiveness in equaling the vibrancy of Bernstein’s score and the sheer excitement of its performance. 

On both these points, Ms. De Keersmaeker’s work succeeds, wholly supplanting memory of Robbins and arming her cast of some forty dancers with choreography just as exhilarating and effective at expressing their characters and telling their story.  Her movement is not just about bodies executing beautiful or exciting dance moves—though it is all quite beautiful and exciting—it is, first and foremost, about people, individuals, who together form gangs. 

Photos by Jan Versweyveld

This idea—central to the vision of the production—is captured not just in the movement, but through Mr. van Hove’s employment of live filmmaking, projected on that massive upstage video wall. 

At the same time we can observe an ensemble of bodies dancing downstage, we are also afforded the opportunity to see individuals in IMAX-scale close-up—starting with that first police-line formation at the top of the show—granting them their individuality in juxtaposition to their gang identity, or else focusing the eye on a particular moment or exchange.

Equally as effective, and essential to the success of this production, is the use of pre-recorded video showing members of The Jets and The Sharks around New York City, horse-playing on the street, grabbing grub at a diner, living their lives.  This video cracks open the world of these well-known characters, allowing the audience to witness and explore their lives beyond their immediate action on stage.  It is revelatory.

The book of “West Side Story” by Arthur Laurents is famously terse; Mr. van Hove’s video complements it, filling in the cracks to reveal a greater truth about the characters beyond what can easily be cartoon stock, and giving them a humanity and a dignity that ups the stakes of the drama and the ultimate tragedy of the story.  He masterfully understands how imagery operates on the theatregoer’s subconscious, and that it can be just as powerful as words or dance. 

I will long remember flashes of Anita indulging in a hot bath or snuggling with Bernardo; Riff and his boys clowning around on the street; Maria in her bedroom, dressing to see her new love; and Tony, gliding down the street, smirking, riding the wave of bliss inspired by the “balcony scene” (here performed with no balcony! Nothing. Is. Sacred.).  

In another bold move, Jonathan Tunick provides new orchestrations for a 25 piece orchestra, conducted by music supervisor Alexander Gemignani, which offer fresh and surprising departures from the classic orchestrations by Bernstein himself, as in the “Dance at the Gym”, which feels more contemporary in tempo and Latin in feel.  It is a gift to hear such a lush and gorgeous score performed by a full orchestra, and matched by the vocals of a top-notch cast.

Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel as Tony and Maria. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

About that cast, Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel are the star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria, backed by Dharon E. Jones as Riff, leader of The Jets, Amar Ramasar, leader of The Sharks, and Yesenia Ayala, “Bernardo’s girl”.  The members of The Sharks are, as is customary and written in the text, Puerto Rican, but also joined by actors of other Latinx heritage.

As for The Jets, the script to “West Side Story” describes the gang as being “an anthology of what it means to be American.”  In 1957, that was taken to mean the first generation children of white immigrants from Europe.  In 2020, Mr. van Hove has cast The Jets as being multi-racial and multi-ethnic, reflecting the diverse tapestry of our country, and New York City, in particular—“people you see on the subway”, as he put it at a recent event for the Guggenheim’s “Works and Process” series. 

This choice lays bare the lie at the heart of the story—that The Jets have any more claim to being “American” than their Shark counterparts.  Everyone, but for Native Americans, is an immigrant in America, and, after all, as the lyric famously states: “nobody knows in America, Puerto’s in America.” 

Mr. van Hove, a European, vividly captures the division of this American moment along fault lines of race, national origin, gender, and socio-economic status.  Among his many insights into the work is the notion that these kids—teenagers—are all hurt in some way, suffering alone and together, but isolated and alienated from the hope of the “American Dream”. 

“West Side Story” has always been sad—it is, after all, an adaptation of a classic tragedy—but there is something especially cutting about the way its sadness manifests through the lives of the characters in this production.  It is a sadness that permeates our society, and finds its way on to the stage at the Broadway Theatre.  

Isaac Powell as Tony in Doc’s store. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Mr. van Hove’s realism also extends to scenes performed off-stage or else partially beyond the reach of the audience’s sight, in two rooms cut into the video wall—Doc’s drugstore, and the dress shop where Maria and Anita work, in addition to Maria’s bedroom and apartment stairwell, which are a repurposed dressing room and backstage stairwell stage left. 

These spaces are the only “real” sets of the production, and their introduction into the piece mark a note of reality that cannot be escaped, even as a world of fantasy unfolds in the vacant expanse of the stage.  

A literal thunderstorm, erupting during “The Rumble”, furthers this sense of hyperrealism while evincing the apex of tension that has been boiling up to that point.  It is Mr. van Hove’s nod to the work of Kurosawa, introducing elements of weather as complements to the emotional arc of the story, and it makes for yet another striking image.

There are, of course, some less successful aspects of this production, which also serve to highlight some of the flaws of the show itself. 

Consuming “West Side Story” has always required a healthy suspension of disbelief, entering a world where gang members are proficient ballet dancers with a street patois wholly invented by two white upper middle class Jews.  “Daddy-o” was hipster speak in 1957, more likely to be found in the West Village than the Upper West Side.  So, it was just out place to be spoken by a member of The Jets then as it might be in, say, 2020. 

Mr. van Hove and co. have not revised a single word of text, re-imagining only through omission.  And so, the invented 1950s street vernacular of The Jets and The Sharks rings false as spoken by teens in 2020, frustrating our sense of the present.  Likewise, when images and video become literalized manifestations of lyrics, most notably in “Gee, Officer Krupke”, their heavy-handedness and overuse diminish their effectiveness at tone setting and scene-rounding.

The placement of “Gee, Officer Krupke” in the stage version of this musical has always been dramatically unsound. 

Dharon E. Jones as Riff, and members of The Jets. Photo by Jan Versweyveld

Members of The Jets witness two murders in a violent rumble—a traumatic incident that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.  While comedy is often a defense mechanism and weapon of self-preservation, this light-hearted song was likely meant more to relieve the discomfort of 1950s audiences sitting with a dark and tragic situation for too long, rather than appropriately articulating the headspace of these teens, in this moment of the story. 

Regardless, today it feels out of place.  Mr. van Hove attempts to solve for this structural flaw by turning the song upside down, playing it straight, and using it as a window into making a political statement about police violence.  The thought is both blunt and underdeveloped, largely because it is constrained by the bounds of the pre-existing text.

Likewise, in order to focus the story, and move the action along swiftly, Mr. van Hove has cut “I Feel Pretty”—one of the few light-hearted moments and the only solo song for Maria (a cut, by the way, that goes unnoticed)—along with dialogue involving several female characters, resulting in a severe imbalance in the gender perspective of the piece. 

In fact, one of the few scenes in the show where two female characters interact—Anita and Maria during “A Boy Like That” and “I Have a Love”—is upstaged by video of Tony running through the street.  This “West Side Story” has an unescapably male perspective.

And then there is the unfortunate shadow of a casting controversy that has loomed over this production.  Amar Ramasar, who plays Bernardo, was fired from the New York City Ballet then reinstated following charges of sending explicit texts and pictures of fellow company members without their knowledge or approval—acts constituting sexual assault that have since been criminalized in New York State.

Weekly protests have been staged outside the Broadway Theatre in opposition to his casting.  Mr. Ramasar is an incredible dancer—in fact, I could not take my eyes off him any time he moved on stage—and the lawsuit against him remains unsettled.  Still, his presence taints the production, which is, as I stated in the former paragraph, unfortunate.

These criticism aside, nearly every moment of this production offers a gesture or an image worthy of its own essay.  Some exceedingly successful; others falling short.  While in Mr. van Hove’s work some see an auteur lazily employing his usual tricks, I see a genuine artist of the theatre working at the top of his game.  

Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel as Tony and Maria.

Photos by Jan Versweyveld

One striking way in which this production of “West Side Story” succeeds where no prior iteration I have ever encountered (including the 1961 film) does is that it makes me believe in the power of the love between Tony and Maria, and it removes soft-glow romanticization to present, starkly, the reality of a story in which violence breaks out, three young men are murdered, and a young woman is sexually assaulted.

As with Shakespeare, no one production of a musical, or play, for that matter, should ever be considered definitive, otherwise, why ever revive anything?  The non-Hal Prince revivals of every Sondheim-Prince collaboration are evidence that even the greatest productions are worth revisiting.  

In granting Mr. van Hove the freedom to re-imagine “West Side Story”, the estates of Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Leonard Bernstein—along with Stephen Sondheim—have taken a large step to ensure that this work will endure, for it is only through reinterpretation—both big and small—that any piece of theatre can remain relevant. 

For now, with this story, in this time, in this way, with these artists, “West Side Story” retains its status as being one the greatest musicals ever written or performed, and this production demands to be seen, marking a true summit of achievement in theatre-making and a highlight in a lifetime of theatergoing.

Bottom Line: Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove presents a reimagined version of “West Side Story” for the 21st Century; employing his signature style of theatremaking, this production is thrilling and revelatory, breathing new life into a beloved classic with new choreography, precision cuts to the text, new orchestrations, a superb ensemble cast, and groundbreaking use of video and live filmmaking. The result marks a true summit of achievement in theatre-making and a highlight in a lifetime of theatergoing.  It demands to be seen.

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“West Side Story”
Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway
New York, NY  10019

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (one intermission)
Opening Night: February 20, 2020
Tickets