“West Side Story” And Our Morale Crisis
As soon as the new Broadway production of “West Side Story” was announced last fall, which feels like another epoch, we got preview tickets, unable and unwilling to wait for critics’ judgments. As a teenager who lived on the West Side, I remember the original 1957 production and I certainly saw the 1961 film. The original cast recording and the movie soundtrack have indelible places in my musical library.
And then, a few weeks ago, we saw the production. It was before the impact of the current chaos and the theater was packed. We knew from the start this was not just an updated version of the original show. It had been overhauled to make it contemporary. The simplest way to summarize the change was that they took out Maria’s “I Feel Pretty” solo. “West Side Story” had become “A Clockwork Orange.”
The goal of the “avant-garde” director and choreographer had been to make the classic version appropriate for today’s tastes, which is to say it was physically disturbing and to my eyes, ugly. The cast was decorated with tattoos on just about every visible body space. The choreography was generally more violent than balletic. And behind it all was a huge video screen in which action was portrayed, rendering what was happening on the stage at times to doll-size.
The New York Times, (link), the New Yorker (link) and the Wall Street Journal (link) reflected our reaction to the show. The Washington Post liked it better (link). As for theatergoers, I suspect the majority of the audiences that grew up with Tony and Maria, the Sharks and the Jets as imagined by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins were dumbfounded at what seemed like the desecration of an old friend.
But for a younger crowd — assuming they could afford the tickets for hundreds of dollars each — the new version of the production may have fulfilled their expectations. There was even an timely controversy over a cast member who had been briefly fired from The New York City Ballet for sharing “sexually explicit” photos of his girlfriend. He had been rehired. At performance end, some in the audience stood to applaud.
What follows is not a theater review. It is a consideration of how this new staging of “West Side Story” reflects the mood, preferences and expectations of our increasingly fraught and stressed culture.
Broadway has gone dark and the new production of “West Side Story” has been halted indefinitely. The pandemic happening now is a scenario that has played out in popular films and fiction for a very long time. These depict scenes of endgames, Armageddon and dystopia, usually with an act of heroism at the last possible moment. They are extremely noisy, especially as special effects have become more sophisticated. Oddly, the reality so far has been publicly, at least, strikingly quiet. Daily life is heavily proscribed, and societies are holding their collective breath. There may yet be serious trouble as days turn into months.
The modern era probably started with the assassination of JFK, MLK and RFK in the 1960s, and then the urban riots, the lost war in Vietnam, Watergate, 9/11, the endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the deceptive calm of the Obama presidency and the breathtaking effronteries of the Trump years. All of this has left the country especially vulnerable to the themes of national decline and divisiveness that doubtless has had a corrosive effect on peoples’ morale and belief in the future. We are hammered with events and entertainment intended to provoke fear and, from the news, indignation, whatever your politics.
A quick look at the home page headlines of the Times on Friday, March 13 included these: U.S. Airstrikes Kill…Three Men Sentenced in Drowning…Philadelphia Police Officer Killed…Trendy Baby Formula May Pose Health Danger…Going to Work, Maybe Death, Every Day. These do not include the vivid COVID-19 coverage.
It is fair to say to say that every one of these headlines reflect age-old problems. So, what is different now?
1-The visibility of everything on social media and 24-hour news. War, crime, corruption and sexual scandal have always been a part of human nature. But never more accessible than now, especially on film and in the media. We are inundated with violent imagery and sex, either real or by innuendo. Sports has always been a form of competition and combat, but in the age of free-agency, the monies paid out has grown enormously — along with the personal scrutiny that comes with those riches. Privacy is assaulted in every way.
2-The click culture. People now, as never before, make their own choices about to watch and read. So, the edgier a story, the more likely you are to look at it. The attractions of the provocative is nothing new. Classic art and opera are replete with graphic imagery. These were intended to be beautiful as well as compelling. The world in which the original “West Side Story” was created was hardly a paradise. And of course, “West Side Story” is derived from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” But in today’s world all eternal themes are deemed to be grim. The revival of “West Side Story” was designed to be discordant and ultimately, ugly.
I’ve been looking at on-line clips of Stephen Spielberg’s “West Side Story” a film scheduled to come out later this year. It looks to be very different from the current staging. Spielberg knows how to make meaningful entertainment out of difficult subjects, think of “Schindler’s List” or “Munich” about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics. These are not designed to appeal to prurience, but to illustrate life in all its dimensions — not just those that are meant to drag us down, when as now, so many of us already are so troubled.
