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Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! in Bilingual
‘West Side’
More than 50 years after the musical “West Side Story” had its original
Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier,
bilingual revival, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.
In an element that its director, Arthur
Laurents, said would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much
of the dialogue — both spoken and sung — will be in Spanish.
“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a
telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would
be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting
because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray
to the translation.”
Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for “West Side Story” and the director
of the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” whose book he also wrote, has vowed
to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a
teenage-gang-romance musical modeled after “Romeo and Juliet” and set on the
West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. With music by Leonard
Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen
Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in
1957. Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly
moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and
forgiving.”
After playing for 732 performances, “West Side Story” was turned into a film
starring Natalie
Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961, and later revived in 1964 and 1980.
Mr. Laurents still rankles at the mention of the 1980 revival, which he
called bland, and the film version, about which he said: “Bogus accents, bogus
dialect, bogus costumes. I think it’s also terribly acted.”
Earlier interpretations left the teenage characters appearing too innocent,
Mr. Laurents said. “You don’t treat these kids as little darlings, but as what
they are,” he said. “They’re all killers, Jets and Sharks. And the piece is
really about how love is destroyed by a world of violence and bigotry.”
The idea for a 21st-century revival first came up nearly five years ago, said
Kevin McCollum, a producer along with Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander,
but after several discussions, it was set aside. “It just wasn’t the right
timing,” he said.
Then two years ago Mr. Laurents called. “He got me to the apartment and said,
‘I’ve got it,’ ” Mr. McCollum said. “He really wanted to play with the idea of
authenticating the language, and that got us really excited.” (Mr. McCollum and
Mr. Seller also produced “In the Heights,” a musical set in Washington Heights
and peppered with Spanish phrases.)
Mr. Laurents, who turned 91 on Monday, traced the origin of the new revival
to his companion of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.
Mr. Hatcher was a fluent Spanish speaker, and on a visit to Bogotá, Colombia,
saw a staging of “West Side Story” in Spanish.
In that version, Mr. Hatcher reported back to Mr. Laurents, the language had
transformed the show: the Sharks were the heroes and the Jets were the
villains.
That sparked the idea of incorporating Spanish into a modern revival. “I
thought it would be terrific if we could equalize the two gangs somehow,” Mr.
Laurents said. “But I had a lot of trouble because I was depending on Tom, who
is fluent. And then he died.”
Not long afterward, two of Mr. Laurents’s friends in Buenos Aires told him
that they had a “West Side Story” script entirely in Spanish, on which Mr.
Hatcher had made handwritten notations. “It was like he was telling me, ‘You
must do it,’ ” Mr. Laurents said.
So with the help of a translator, Mr. Laurents began adding Spanish to the
original script.
The result is what he calls “bilingual sexual spats” between the characters
Anita and Bernardo, and some of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics translated into
Spanish. Other elements, like the original choreography by Jerome
Robbins, remain unchanged.
Casting for the show has begun and should be completed by mid-September, Mr.
McCollum said. The show will play for a four-week engagement at the National
Theater in Washington beginning in December.
Mr. Laurents said he intended to cast Hispanic actors in the roles of the
Puerto Rican Sharks and particularly the lead role of Maria.
“I’m not about to go slap some dark makeup on her,” Mr. Laurents said. “I
think it’s important to have a Latina in the role for a very simple reason — I
think they know what it feels like to be an outsider. If they’ve got Puerto
Rican blood, they know what prejudice is. If they’ve got any kind of Hispanic
blood, they know what prejudice is.”
