Pulling Punches: Terry Teachout on the New Broadway Revival of West Side Story

 


 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Worst Side Story
Anyone expecting a standard revival of ‘West Side Story’ is in for a surprise.

By Terry Teachout
Feb. 20, 2020 8:00 pm ET
WSJ

New York

Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the hit parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity. As for Broadway, this fourth revival of “West Side Story” had been in previews since December and is selling out nightly. Nor is anyone buying tickets to see the big names in the cast, because there aren’t any: This is a starless production. No, they’re going to see “West Side Story” because it’s “West Side Story.”

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. Van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’s finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. Van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage. Instead, the upstage wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway Theatre has been replaced with a proscenium-size projection screen on which are alternately shown scenes of the mean streets of New York and giant live-TV images of the cast in action.

All this, Mr. Van Hove has said, is to the end of giving us “a ‘West Side Story’ for the 21st century.” On paper, that’s an obvious but not-unreasonable idea. I’m for cutting and changing the classics when it’s done with taste and imagination—I just reviewed an 85-minute high-concept all-female “Macbeth” that was thrilling from start to finish—and “West Side Story” is similarly overdue for a thoroughgoing spring cleaning. This is especially true of Robbins’s dances. While I love his vibrant, vaulting sketches of teenage passion, I’ve seen them too many times to feel the urgent need to see them again anytime soon. Of the five previous “West Side Story” revivals that I’ve reviewed in this space, all either reproduced Robbins’s steps more or less literally or were strongly influenced by his style. The trouble with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography is not that it’s new but that it’s dull, at once undervitalized (you’ll come away feeling as though the chorus had spent the evening walking, not dancing) and uncomprehending of the electrifying social-dance styles of the ’50s that are at the show’s heart (modern dance, not musical comedy, is her field). It’s not enough merely to get rid of Robbins’s dances: You have to replace them with something equally dramatic, and Ms. De Keersmaeker hasn’t come close to doing so.

[Teachout is trimming his sails here. I can't imagine any good reason for casting only women in MacBeth (is that even legal?), and how would you improve on the greatest choreography in theatrical history with an inferior dance-master? Terry Teachout is supposedly a "conservative," but the men at the Wall Street Journal have been so thoroughly "pussy-whipped"--in the words of an old feminist gilfriend of mine--for over a generation that 20-odd years ago, Journal feminists were circulating petitions demanding that any white man staffer about whom they could sniff any vaguely "conservative" leanings fired.]

As for Mr. Van Hove’s staging, it is, like everything else he’s done on Broadway, a medley of self-regarding minimalist clichés slathered with political sauce. Does he really, truly believe that it’s a smart idea to turn “Gee, Officer Krupke,” one of the most bitterly thought-provoking comic songs ever written, into a ham-fisted critique of the evils of police brutality? (It’s no small feat to perform “Krupke” in such a way that it doesn’t get a single laugh.) Or to accompany every scene in the show with 50-foot-high video projections that dwarf the actors, making it all but impossible to pay attention to what they’re doing on stage? But, then, next to nothing is right about this “West Side Story.” Except for the Maria, Shereen Pimentel, a 21-year-old Juilliard student who is rich with promise, the cast is mostly uninteresting. The singing lacks swing and punch, the stage combat is flabby, the 25-piece pit band is miked in such a way as to sound half its actual size…need I go on?

Above all, Mr. Van Hove’s production is devoid of two things essential to the total effect of the original “West Side Story.” The show that Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim created over six decades ago was sexy—and funny. That’s what makes the tragic ending land with the force of a hydrogen bomb [bad metaphor!]. The original “West Side Story” starts in one place, dramatically speaking, and ends in another, and when the curtain finally comes down, there’s a corpse at center stage. Even if you know the show well, you’re still shocked. Not so Mr. Van Hove’s version, which goes nowhere and telegraphs all its punches. It is its own spoiler.